• by Nina Lentini , Staff Writer @Nina_Lentini, July 28, 2020

The role of most marketers today is around performance. Boards want to see ROI. But there are some marketers out there who are questioning some of those assumptions and Rich Lesperance, CMO at Tecovas, is one of them.

"We don't do a lot of promo codes," he told MediaPost's Brand Insider D2C Summit Tuesday via Zoom. "If we did have a promotion, the old me would expect be targeting certain people, intervening surgically. But the way we look at it at Tecovas, if one person hears the day after the sale that they missed it, they're going to be unhappy and our Net Promoter Score would go down. We're not gimmicky, we play no games. 

"Marketers got too far ahead of ourselves with spreadsheets. We were losing our humanity." Now, he says, many are tuning in to customers to find out who they are and what they want.

Tecovas is a five-year-old digital-first, highly curated brand of cowboy boots that mostly relies on organic traffic and word-of-mouth referrals. Its media plan is "surprisingly robust offline," Lesperance said. Because potential buyers want to touch the product and feel it, it does have eight retail stores and is expanding that footprint. Video like the screenshot here and storytelling do the job online and Tecovas also does TV "and everything in between."

He showed a magazine ad with the word "Horsesh*t" in large type in the middle of the page with very little other messaging. "I love the white space," he said, advising "get out of the way when the product is awesome." Tecovas has two important messages. One is that the boots don't need breaking in. "It's like putting on a pair of slippers and that's what everybody talks about." The other is that the boots give people confidence. "I get to be over six feet tall when I wear my Tecovas boots," he said.