Here is a transcript generated by otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with Martijn van Eerde, senior director of marketing for EMEA and APAC regions at Maui Jim, on how to stand out from the competition:

Shaheen Samavati 0:12
Hi everyone. I’m Shaheen from The Content Mix and I’m excited to be here with Martijn Van Eerde, senior director of marketing for EMEA and APAC regions for eyewear maker Maui Jim. Thanks so much for joining us.

Martijn Van Eerde 0:25
Thanks for the invite. Nice to meet you.

Shaheen Samavati 0:28
Nice to meet you as well, it’s great to have you on the podcast. So being from the Netherlands, how did you end up working for a Hawaiian eyewear brand out of Madrid?

Martijn Van Eerde 0:36
It was a bit of a journey. So for a good chunk of my life, I worked more in logistic transportation in different countries, for a couple multinationals. Eventually I ended up in Spain and at some point working on the logistics of eyewear. To make a long story short, that’s how I got in touch with Maui Jim and their people, then I joined the family, the team.

Shaheen Samavati 1:03
So you’ve been there a while now, can you tell us a bit about your role and what the company does as well?

Martijn Van Eerde 1:09
Yeah, so we’re an eye wear company. The people that know us, know us because of our sunglasses predominantly, even though we also now make ophthalmic products so we’re an eyewear company. We’re from Hawaii, an American company but we are multinational. We have offices throughout the world, we sell in many countries and I look after the marketing for them in Europe and APAC.

Shaheen Samavati 1:42
So what led you to live and work in so many different countries throughout your career?

Martijn Van Eerde 1:48
My mom tells me that pretty much from the moment I could walk and talk, I started talking about having to leave the country. I still don’t really know why, but I always wanted to live in different countries. So when I started looking for more serious jobs, I went to seek out a company that had an international presence and were internationally moving, where transitions and promotions would be possible and encouraged. So I made it happen.

Shaheen Samavati 2:20
Yeah, very cool. So your first roles were actually in sales, right? So I was curious, how did how does your background in sales help you now in your marketing role?

Martijn Van Eerde 2:30
Yeah, sales was more of an accident, in a sense. I didn’t go out to look for a sales role. I was looking for international companies and I came across the job for an international courier company which was looking for somebody in sales. So I ended up doing that quite a bit. Even though I studied marketing, I didn’t really work into pure marketing until many years later. So for the first year, it was sales, from indoor sales, sales repping, sales management and the more wider management roles, but always sort of around the commercial aspect of the business, generally speaking.

Shaheen Samavati 3:07
Okay. So was it like a natural transition to go from sales to marketing?

Martijn Van Eerde 3:13
I would think so, yes. As a matter of fact, back in the day, initially marketing hardly existed. That’s how old I am. So marketing didn’t really exist in companies, then it was sort of the guy who made the brochures, then I think a lot of multinationals for years had the position of sales and marketing manager, or the vice president of sales and marketing. So that was sort of hand in hand. At some point that split, so I think it’s a very natural fit. I think people in marketing should know about sales and vice versa. Marketing of course supports the sales organisation in many companies and knowing what they need, knowing what their clients need, knowing the struggles that they have, I feel is super important because selling is typically a pretty tough job. Take the times we’re living in now, it’s very hard for somebody in sales to distinguish themselves from the competition and I think marketing has a very important role to play there. So yeah, sales and marketing from me is always very close together.

Shaheen Samavati 4:20
Absolutely. I was curious if your experience in sales and travelling or being on the phone or dealing directly with customers, if that influences your approach to marketing now?

Martijn Van Eerde 4:35
Yeah, that’s a good question, subconsciously it probably does. It just started by the first job I did, which I think was still one of the toughest, in indoor telesales. So to actually make appointments, and for a product that nobody knew, for a company that not many people knew, that’s really tough. To call decision makers in companies, trying to get through the filters of switchboard, secretary and so on. Then trying to get an appointment for a colleague, so in a way that has to do with marketing you have to start to be really conscious of what people say, what they need, what makes them tick. What can help them. So you really start asking yourself the same questions you can now do in a more broader scale of marketing.

Shaheen Samavati 5:19
So could you tell us a bit about the brand story of Maui Jim? What’s the story behind the name?

Martijn Van Eerde 5:24
So it’s actually from Maui, one of the Hawaiian Islands. So that’s where our company was born, we are still incorporated there. Our sunglasses still get designed there, our products still get designed there. We started off with sunglasses on islands and it has grown from there. But we still keep the Hawaiian heritage very close. It’s embedded in our brand DNA. Have you ever been to Hawaii yourself?

Shaheen Samavati 5:52
No, actually, I haven’t.

Martijn Van Eerde 5:54
Okay, well, I hope you can make it there one day, there are many beautiful things to discover there. What I would highlight is what they call the aloha spirit, which is actually part of the law in Hawaii. It’s a long story to explain what it is and you can certainly Google it. A loose translation many people use is treat others like how you want to be treated yourself. That really is a red line throughout our company, even to things like repairs and customer service. We try to treat people, whether it’s our retailers, our direct clients or indirectly consumers, we treat them as we like to be treated ourselves. So not only do we make a very good product we also give excellent service all the way through.

Shaheen Samavati 6:44
I guess that’s related to my next question about how is the company being independently owned? How does that influence your approach to marketing and approach to business in general?

Martijn Van Eerde 6:55
That’s a good question. I think it may be very different from what we learn in marketing school, I remember marketing school, the case studies were typically pretty large scale, I vividly remember having a director or vice president of Heineken beer teaching us. Obviously, that was all like, mega zillion budgets and conquering continents with big TV campaigns in a public company. If you move over to a private company, things can be very different. So it’s a lot of fun but it can also be tough, because you don’t have the same budget that a public company has, but you do have more freedom, you don’t have so much red tape to go through. So I like the dynamics, the lines are really short. We have a very flat organisation, despite that we’re pretty big by now. We have to compete with some very large companies and the companies we compete with are typically multi brand, multi billion dollar companies. Most of them are multiple of our size. So it’s challenging, I’m not gonna lie. It also means sometimes you have to say no to things you might like to do, like big multi million dollar proposals for sponsorships or advertising. But it’s fun, I like the challenge and it’s cool to be able to do more with less.

Shaheen Samavati 8:18
Yeah, so I mean despite the huge amount of competition in the industry, the brand seems to be doing pretty well. So what’s the secret to your success? I also wanted to ask what your most important marketing channels are, if you can’t do those million dollar campaigns, how are you able to reach your audiences?

Martijn Van Eerde 8:39
Our main asset is the quality of the product now, which is quite unique. So we don’t have to sell a lot. Unfortunately right now, it’s a little hard but normally you and I would be maybe in a studio having this conversation, I would just get out one of our sunglasses and wouldn’t even talk, I would just ask you to look outside and compare them to whatever other sunglasses you have in your purse and then make up your own mind. So having people try on our product is very important, sampling is what maybe some people call it in marketing. Unfortunately, we cannot be like Red Bull, stand on the corner and give out cans of soft drinks. But we go to events, quite big events or sponsorships or places where people can try it out themselves. Trade marketing is very important. In Europe alone, we are in about 50,000 points of sale. So we spend a lot of time training the people in the stores to know a lot about our product and be able to explain it as good as possible to consumers. We try to do everything possible to get a consumer to try on our product. Now brand awareness is important as well because even though sunglasses quite often is an impulse purchase, it’s not something that people plan weeks ahead, to go out and buy a pair of sunglasses. But as we know, impulse purchase still gets helped a lot if there’s some brand awareness and consideration. So in Europe we have an ATP tennis, a partnership with a global partner of the ATP, we’re the partner of the European tour in golf, we’re a sponsor of Manchester United. So instead of just doing pure advertising, we’d rather look for platforms where we can tell our story a little bit and have people endorse it with at least some brief explanation or demonstration of what our product stands for.

Shaheen Samavati 10:42
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So in your 14 years at Maui Jim, how have you seen the marketing industry and sector evolve? And how has marketing changed within the company as well?

Martijn Van Eerde 10:58
A lot. Almost nothing is the same. Bear in mind, if you go back 14 years, the internet did exist of course, and e-commerce, I think there were some things you could buy online. But most of us didn’t, we were maybe just about buying our tickets, airline tickets online. A lot of other stuff we didn’t. We didn’t have an iPhone, as a matter of fact we didn’t have a blackberry yet. I think that came a little later. We sure didn’t have Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or YouTube. Could you imagine marketing without that right now? We didn’t have Zoom, we didn’t have Teams, a lot of these things we didn’t have. You’d almost think how did we get by? Back then we printed stuff, we had very different tools. The bottom line probably hasn’t changed, we’re still trying to achieve the same thing. It’s just how we reach consumers and how we convey a story has changed 100%.

Shaheen Samavati 12:04
So how have you adapted to the digital marketing landscape and also content marketing in paticular, that’s our focus at The Content Mix. So how does that play into your marketing mix?

Martijn Van Eerde 12:14
Adapting to it is tough. I’m not gonna lie. When you’re 18 years old, it’s easier to adapt to these developments than when you’re 45 or more, right? So it’s not easy to keep up with that. But luckily, today as a company, the moment you start having a bit of a budget, you can tap into agencies and consultants and people that can help you. In your company, you recruit people that either are already very affluent, in these apps, or technologies, whatever it is, or at the very least people who can pick that up really quickly. Internally, you want to encourage your people to stay up to date, to give them in their job description or workload, give them time to spend on learning, on exploring, finance training, indoor or external, to just keep up with it because it’s going to go faster and faster, of course.

Shaheen Samavati 13:21
Could you share an example of a campaign or a project that worked really well for you, and why you think that was?

Martijn Van Eerde 13:28
A very recent one, the campaign overall was sort of semi-global, mostly in Europe, we called it “you deserve this”, we started looking at that at the very beginning of the pandemic. A lot of our retailers were shutting down or at least not operating at any significant speed. Many companies and a lot of people inside of companies had to be in crisis management mode. Marketing, I think we were the few people who could think a little bit about the future. So we started to imagine what is this going to look like when we get out of this lockdown? How will consumer behaviour be, how will consumer spending be? So we made a couple of assumptions and we designed this campaign, we called it “you deserve this”, banking on the fact that coming out of this, some of us would probably not be so harmed, we’d still have some disposable income, be doing okay. No big party time, we probably wouldn’t buy that new car we had planned, we wouldn’t do a big new kitchen at home, maybe not take that great trip to Bali, but we did want something for ourselves. We’ve been locked down which is harder for some than for others, but for everybody it has been a sacrifice in one way or another. So you deserve something and by “you deserve this”, we wanted to bank on that emotion. So we unleashed this at retail, at about 1300 retailers across Europe. But then we also pasted it over to Manchester United. So from the digi boards around the field, their social channels, homepage, takeovers, and so on and that component particularly was very, very successful as well, not only reaching millions of people, but having a very high level of participation in the different sweepstakes and things that we do.

Shaheen Samavati 15:22
Cool. You’re responsible for EMEA & APAC regions, so that means you are working with your distributors across all those regions. How do you make your marketing campaigns resonate in those diverse markets?

Martijn Van Eerde 15:40
We have our own offices and our own people, that’s a huge advantage in the sense that we have direct control. Of course, it’s a bit more expensive to operate that way and it also slows down international expansion because it costs money to open up an office and put people in there. So we actually still have many countries where we’re not present because we have chosen not to work with distributors. But the countries where we are present, we have our own people. So we have a direct line to our retailers, so there’s only one step of separation between us and the consumer in those cases. So you can stay really close to the market, react pretty quickly and it’s a lot of fun.

Shaheen Samavati 16:22
Do you localise your campaigns to the different markets? Do you produce campaigns at the local level or is it more global?

Martijn Van Eerde 16:31
It depends what we define as a campaign. So obviously our corporate identity, etc, is the same everywhere you go in the world. Our layouts, and how we use assets is basically the same everywhere but then when it goes to the content, then we localise. It could be imagery, certain imagery in the Middle East you cannot use, it’s better to use something else. Of course there’s language, language is something you need to change. But also there are things you do or do not do in a certain country, not everything that works well on one side of the planet works well on the other. Sometimes even from one country to another or within a country you can encounter differences. So we do try to, as much as possible, adapt to local needs and do in a specific market what would makes you most successful there.

Shaheen Samavati 17:27
I forgot to ask you the question about the day to day in your role, but what is your typical day? What’s your responsibilities?

Martijn Van Eerde 17:35
My typical day for the last 8 months is like a keyboard and a mouse with a cup of coffee. It’s quite different from what it was before. Before, there was no typical day, our marketing is a huge variety of things, to set trade marketing, to sponsorships, to key account management marketing and so on. So every day was different, it’s highly dynamic and that makes it a lot of fun. It still is, even though that now it’s with, you know, a computer and a webcam. But every hour, the topic tends to be something completely different. So luckily, that mentally keeps it nicely challenging and it’s not monotone at all. Every day is completely different from the other. The only differences is now it’s always done in the same location, whereas a year ago it was very intensive on the travel side.

Shaheen Samavati 18:30
So earlier in your career, you had been living all over the world. Recently, you’ve been based in Madrid, but you still did a lot of travel within the region it sounds like?

Martijn Van Eerde 18:41
Yes. So our company specifically, were based on relationships. Even though marketing is important for us, the relationship we have with our retailers, and just internally with our colleagues, our suppliers, people that help us make that technology that sets us apart, those relationships are key. Those relationships, ideally, are established and nurtured and maintained with regular face to face interaction, ideally. But you know, as a human being, we adapt, right? So, we make it work, look at everybody now, within a short period of time whether it’s professionally working or children studying from home, human beings have this amazing ability to adapt. But yeah, travel is normally a very key component of day to day life and international business.

Shaheen Samavati 19:43
Absolutely. So what has been your biggest professional challenge to date and what did you learn from it?

Martijn Van Eerde 19:51
The easy answer would be now. I think for many people, the current situation is probably professionally the most challenging one. For starters, maybe because we can’t look back. We’ve seen crisis before but even with a crisis, you could look back at another crisis or even to the war, you know the Gulf war, I was old enough to remember the first Gulf War and the crisis we had around us. So not that it was apples to apples comparison but the current situation is completely new. But that would maybe be a bit too easy to answer. I think what for me was still extremely challenging and just really hard was to move to a country where you don’t speak the language. Having to work there, not as a tourist just, you know, joking around ordering a beer and taking some pictures, actually trying to make a living and solve some issues. That was a massive challenge.

Shaheen Samavati 20:54
Where did you have to do that?

That was in Mexico. Back then I basically did not speak Spanish and I moved to Mexico, which was great but we didn’t have an office there. I didn’t have a single colleague in the whole country. It was interesting, it’s one of those things where you look back and you’re glad you did it. You’re proud of what you’ve achieved and you cherish the experience that you learnt there, but you wouldn’t want to necessarily go back to every day that you’ve lived.

You figured it out on your own in the end?

Martijn Van Eerde 21:31
You have to. Again, as human beings it’s amazing how we can adapt to difficult circumstances.

Shaheen Samavati 21:45
What’s your takeaway from that experience? What have you learned from it?

Martijn Van Eerde 21:50
That’s a good question. Not like guru style, like, here’s a magical learning, but it makes a lot of other things suddenly seem a lot easier. You maybe become a bit more courageous, in terms of taking on a challenge. Not as easily will you say, oh, that’s not gonna work, or that’s going to be a massive task, that’s going to be really difficult. You’re a bit more like, you know what, we might be able to figure that one out and overcome that hurdle.

Shaheen Samavati 22:26
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so I’m gonna go to the recommendations part of the interview. So what’s your favourite app at the moment?

Martijn Van Eerde 22:34
A good question. If it would be favourite then it would not be a work app. But workwise and productivity wise, I think you hinted to Microsoft Teams, not just the app, but more the ecosystem around teams has helped me specifically in this pandemic to keep productivity at a high level. We had actually embraced it about a good year before the pandemic and we really immersed ourselves. So internally in our team, we did away with email, we did away with WhatsApp and text messages, we banned that completely, like between me and my team we’re not even allowed to email each other. We only use teams and it works remarkably well. When the pandemic started, we were already like, at least a year working with it. So for us it was a blessing.

Shaheen Samavati 23:32
So whenever you have the urge to email, you just call each other through Teams?

Martijn Van Eerde 23:37
No, Teams is actually so much more than video conferencing.

Shaheen Samavati 23:41
Okay. I’m a Google ecosystem person so I don’t know anything about Teams.

Martijn Van Eerde 23:48
Microsoft Teams is like Slack. Slack and Microsoft Teams are competitors. You could talk forever about the differences, they’re probably not that big. But Teams sits within the Microsoft ecosystem so its interface with things like Excel or Outlook is very transparent.

Shaheen Samavati 24:13
Yeah it’s an internal chat tool, I got it. On the personal side? What’s your favorite app? I’m just wondering what you had in mind there?

Martijn Van Eerde 24:26
I would probably say Spotify. That’s definitely the app I use most, if you look at my phone screen where’s the most finger grease and it’s probably on the Spotify button, in the kitchen or in the gym or in the car. The old days on the plane, just walking around an airport, that’s what I will use all the time, Spotify.

Shaheen Samavati 24:50
I actually just got on the Spotify bandwagon recently. I was using YouTube to listen to music for ages and finally I got Spotify. It’s a good one. Well on the topic of productivity, what’s your best productivity hack, besides Teams?

Martijn Van Eerde 25:11
In terms of a hack, I can’t say I really have a hack. When you talk about productivity and really getting stuff done i’d say, push yourself. I say okay, you know what, within the next three hours I’m just gonna work my butt off. I’ve got a lot of emails scheduled, I’ll just keep on cracking, don’t get distracted, don’t get lazy, just get on with it. Just take what I say massive action, just get it behind you. That’s my productivity hack in terms of getting through work. I feel like for many people now with the pandemic there seems to be more work, even though sometimes it leads to less. But you know, there’s a lot of things to be done, so just get on with it. Stop whining, just get your head down and just do it.

Shaheen Samavati 26:01
Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great point. That’s the end all productivity hack, just do it, right? So do you recommend any marketing related group or publication?

Martijn Van Eerde 26:15
I can’t say I would have no, I am terrible in that sense. I don’t really keep up with marketing groups or books. What I like to do is just see what other companies do. I really like things like consumer electronics, and gadgets and things. So there’s this one called Engadget, which is really in tune with product launches. I really like to see how companies communicate, how they launch a product, how in just a couple lines of text, they highlight their USBs, or features and benefits and get a message across. So instead of listening to other marketing people, quite often I just tried to observe other companies and other marketeers, but more in a practical sense.

Shaheen Samavati 26:58
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. My other question was about any learning resources or how you keep your skills up to date?

Martijn Van Eerde 27:06
Pretty much the same answer really, depending on the topic. Marketing is pretty broad these days, so I keep my eye on a couple of things around events and sponsorships. You know, what are the different websites you can follow. Of course, in the digital side there’s different resources you can keep an eye on, like how to be successful on Facebook or how to stay relevant on Instagram, these types of things. So I think it’s good to tap into different things to keep up to date on the different aspects of a marketing role.

Shaheen Samavati 27:40
Yeah, absolutely. There’s so much content out there now so it’s good to hear recommendations from others. We’re reaching the end of the interview, so I just wanted to give you the chance to share any final takeaways or any parting advice for other marketers in Europe.

Martijn Van Eerde 27:59
I mean, definitely no words of wisdom, maybe words of encouragement. There’s so much negative news, you and I we’re living in Madrid, right? So you know that if we open up a news site, in the morning, you could get suicidal but life in Madrid, for example, is pretty normal. You know, this weekend, I’ve been out to lunch, I’ve been out to dinner, I had some drinks, I went shopping in different places, I went to the gym, I had a pretty normal life and also by doing that, you know, I kept a bit of the economy going which is very important. So I would say, I would recommend people do that. Also for marketeers not to lose hope and to just keep working on that future. Keep working on coming out of this lockdown and if there’s going to be a third wave, there’ll be a third time coming out of a lockdown too, which is an opportunity. So just keep going.

Shaheen Samavati 28:52
Yeah, one day at a time, right. Absolutely. Well, that’s a great message. Well, thank you so much for for being on the podcast today.

Martijn Van Eerde 29:00
Thanks a lot for your time. Really appreciate it.

Shaheen Samavati 29:03
All right, and thanks to everybody for listening in. For more perspectives on the content marketing industry in Europe, check out TheContentMix.com and keep tuning into the podcast for daily interviews with content experts. See you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai