Ana Mourão: Spotlight on the expert

Our “Spotlight on the expert” series digs deeper into the stories of our expert contributors. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Stanley Black & Decker is a truly iconic brand, around for more than 180 years, with a global market and its name practically synonymous with power tools. For more than six years, MarTech contributor Ana Mourão has been a leader in digital engagement, data architecture, CRM and CDP at the brand. She is currently global customer CRM senior manager and CDP advisor.

Q: You studied in São Paulo. Is that where you are from?

A: Yes, I am Brazilian, correct.

Q: You did a bachelor’s in economics and then — fashion marketing?

A: I never really liked economics in itself. I like more the communication and the data part of it, so I ended up being really interested in digital marketing because it really had a lot of data you could leverage. That really piqued my interest. When I was finishing up college I had the opportunity to do an internship at a project that was funded by the Brazilian government. Its objective was to increase the exportation of Brazilian software to the U.S., Europe and Asia. They had an office here in South Florida so I had the opportunity to come and work in digital marketing, so that’s how I got started. I ended up meeting my husband here and staying and developing my career.

Because I loved the data part of digital marketing so much, I ended up going towards marketing technology, CRM and customer data. That’s it in a nutshell.

Q: Although you’ve spent most of your career in Florida, you also worked as a digital marketing manager at 3M in Brazil for some time.

A: Yes, I stayed 13 years here; worked for Charles Schwab, Starwood Hotels and Resorts (now part of Marriott). I had my daughter here. Then we moved back to Brazil and spent five years in Brazil so that she could be closer to family and grandparents. While we were in Brazil, I worked for 3M. My role there was digital marketing and ecommerce, even though the ecommerce piece was a very limited presence because 3M is a B2B company — but they had some products that were more geared to the end user that we could have in our little Brazilian ecommerce store.

Q: And just before that, some time at Univision, the major U.S. Hispanic television network?

A: Yes, right after I left Starwood and before returning to Brazil.

Dig deeper: MarTech Spotlight interviews

Q: How did you come to join Stanley Black & Decker?

A: I joined them six years ago and I joined what they used to call “global emerging markets,” including Latin America, Asia, Middle East and Africa. Even though Stanley Black & Decker is very much a B2B company, it understands that it can generate demand on behalf of its distributors and retailers. In order to do that, we need to know the end user who goes into the Home Depots, or wherever, and buys our tools. That was the effort I was hired to do, so we put in place a marketing technology stack to make sure that our different teams in different markets could have access to their piece of the database (and only their piece) so that they could leverage digital activation.

All that was put in place first; after we started collecting the data, we brought the CDP to the center of the marketing technology stack. We’re now bringing the large regions into the CDP; we’ve brought North America, and this year we’re going to bring Europe.

Q: So Stanley Black & Decker is not direct-to-consumer. You’re selling to distributors or retailers, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have marketing initiatives directed at stimulating demand among consumers.

A: That’s exactly the point. We can not only understand end users, but also tap into them to do product innovation. We work closely with our customer insights team and other commercial teams inside Stanley Black & Decker.

Q: The CDP, then, collects data about consumers rather than the businesses you’re selling to?

A: Yes. We realized we wanted to have this data over time; we wanted to have a 360-degree view of the data. In order to have this view over time, the CDP was the best choice.

Q: Many businesses use a CDP to try to activate messages for customers, almost in real time. But from your perspective, you’re more interested in the customer’s behavior over a period of time. You’re not trying to reach them immediately.

A: Exactly. For the most part, our use cases are more about knowing that an end user is really interested in woodworking and then matching that interest with our content. It is more valuable for us to have that information, unified, and then serve that customization to you than it is for real-time use cases — I know that fits in a lot of other companies, but it’s not representative of our use cases.

Q: Are you, then, creating content to deliver to the customers?

A: Yes. This is something else that may differentiate us from other companies. We work very closely with business stakeholders to develop our data template. Whenever we have discussion about collecting data for a new data field, we ask ourselves, “Do we have content against it?” If you tell me you’re a woodworker, do I have content to serve you as a woodworker? Otherwise, why would I collect this data point? Everything we collect, we want to make sure we have content or are on track to develop content.

Q: What are the other important elements of your martech stack?

A: In addition to the CDP, Treasure Data, we have the omnichannel platform, Iterable. Those are the two main pieces. In addition to that, we have a platform to leverage landing pages.

Q: What catches your eye most in marketing technology today?

A: Making sure that companies match marketing technology to the processes because I think this is sometimes disconnected, especially because the business users think technology will solve everything (it won’t) and IT thinks the business users don’t know what they want. That’s something I’ve been writing for MarTech — that the usage of marketing technology is decreasing over time, which is crazy. Now you have smaller teams and smaller budgets and an expectation that the output is going to remain the same or improve.

How to do that, in my experience, is to manage the marketing technology with the processes in a way that it can improve the processes.

Q: What interests do you have outside of marketing technology?

A: I like photography. I used to have my own lab and everything. I also like baking. Sweet treats.

Q: And do you get back to Brazil often?

A: Yes, every year-and-a-half to two years to see family; and they come to visit as well.