Day with a Pro: Michelle Farabaugh, VP of marketing, West Marine

As senior vice president of marketing and strategic planning for West Marine, Michelle Farabaugh is one fast moving target. Her day begins with a 40-minute a.m. commute, during which she returns a entire voice mailbox of calls. In charge of creating and executing sales and marketing strategies for the Watson, CA-based company’s online, catalog, retail and wholesale sales channels, she typically works a 12-hour day, not including her morning drive.

Farabaugh’s mission is to create new programs that drive profits and increase customer loyalty. As a young senior vice president, she subscribes to the motto that to succeed, you need “wrinkles or results.” Having worked at only a handful of catalogs, including Catalog Ventures and PETsMART Direct, Farabaugh already has quite a record of success. In her first year at West Marine she increased profits by 50 percent and recharged the online store for a 500-percent increase in sales.

Getting Things Done

Most of her job is communicating with her marketing team, other departments, vendors and customers. She attends as many as 30 meetings a week, handles customer complaint calls, visits stores and pores over customer e-mails.

Farabaugh begins her day walking around the company offices. Here she catches up with employees from many departments.

“I learn more about what is going on and what issues may be brewing from these informal or coffee pot meetings than I do in structured meetings,” says Farabaugh. “The front-line associates always have the best pulse on what our customers think of our marketing efforts and how they are being executed. They offer an invaluable insight into the business.”

She and her 36-member team review West Marine’s marketing programs on a weekly and daily basis, delineating what is working and what is not. Then, they toss around ideas about how to improve.

“We put together very comprehensive reports monthly to look at our business on a different level,” she says. “We review sales by catalog and by store. We also review in-depth catalog and flier results every time we put together a new catalog or flier, which is about once a month.”

Farabaugh likes to draw on as many people as possible to execute a marketing or sales idea. Her job crosses the lines of merchandising, visual merchandising, Internet and operations call center teams and store operations. Uniting all the departments and channels is one of her most challenging job requirements, she says.

She finds the merchandise to sell, determines how it will be offered, optimizes the products’ marketing plan, identifies to whom the offer should be made and then how and through which media outlet the offers will be presented. Every catalog, sale flier, loyalty plan, incentive or discount must coincide with the overall strategy for the company, which includes fitting the effort in question into each of West Marine’s sales channels.

Much of Farabaugh’s job is dictated by an annual strategic plan. Ideas are generated for the catalogs and fliers, as well as for corporate sponsorship, public relations, boat shows and advertising. The comprehensive plan allows Farabaugh to focus the marketing department and balance budget dollars.

“I don’t think we could have executed as targeted of a marketing program throughout the year without this framework and initiative plan,” comments Farabaugh. “Our framework has six critical success factors that we believe are required for us to achieve our overall vision of being the customer’s first choice. If our marketing ideas do not fit into supporting one of these critical success factors and will not drive our strategic marketing targets that we measure, we simply can’t justify putting the program into the plan and into action. It is that simple.”

Customer Care

Being the customer’s first choice is important to Farabaugh. She strives to create and deliver programs that bring value, like West Marine’s recently launched loyalty rewards program.

“Most importantly, I spend time with our customers. I listen in on the phone, call customers that have problems and spend time in our retail stores. I learn more talking directly to our customers about our products and offerings than I ever will sitting in my office,” Farabaugh says.

She adds, “One of the main reasons to launch this loyalty program was to gain a better understanding of who our customer is and how they are responding to our marketing efforts.”

Farabaugh has a windowless office in the heart of the marketing department. Constantly trying to stay on top of the office situation, she rarely closes her door.

“If I am not on a conference call or working on something that has to go out in the next 10 minutes and I can’t be interrupted, my door doesn’t close. That’s my rule,” says Farabaugh. “I want to be really approachable for everyone on my team and in the company. That is how you build a strong team. I am usually in the office from 7 a.m. until 6 or 7 p.m. I get most of my work done really early in the morning and late at night when everyone else is gone. During the day, I work for my team.”

Favorite Campaign

Her diligent work toward understanding the customer was tested from the beginning. In 1996, West Marine began versioning its 890-page master catalog, known as the marine “bible,” to address certain customers and maximize sales. In her three years with the company this has been her favorite project.

“We developed the Company Master, which included our entire product line and was great to support our stores, customers with both power and sail, as well as some of our very best catalog customers. We also developed a Sail Master, Power Master and Trailerboat Master catalog,” says Farabaugh. “Each catalog took a lot of analysis to determine what product should be carried in each of the versions, who the version should be mailed to, what the sales loss may be for substantially [fewer] pages and what the incremental increase in contribution would be.

“We also had to do a lot of work on our database. It had never really mattered before what boat type or length a customer owned. Now it was critical that we know,” she says.

To properly target the different catalog versions, Farabaugh explains that West Marine overlaid its database with as much information as possible, asked customers for product affinity information and created a predictive model based on consumer purchasing history to generate customers profiles.

“It wasn’t perfect, but we had very few phone calls from customers that received the wrong book,” she says about the effectiveness of database marketing.

In addition to her work on the catalogs, Farabaugh had to manage the changes internally. She had to educate and convince employees and management that this was the right direction.

“It took us several months to complete the analysis and several more months to create the pagination for each product, but the results were terrific,” Farabaugh reports. “We did see a decrease of 10 percent in sales, just as our analysis indicated, but we saw a 20-percent increase in [revenue] contribution due to the savings in paper and postage of unwanted products.”

Love of the Challenge

“I don’t want to work for a company that is status quo. I want to work for a company [where] I can leave my thumb print, and I have been doing that here. I also like to learn. As soon as I stop learning, I get bored and switch jobs. Every time I come close to being bored at West Marine, they give me something new and challenging to work on.”

Adds Farabaugh, “Did I mention I got to sail from San Francisco to Hawaii on the company’s Santa Cruz 40? Now that is more fun than a person should have in 15 days!”