How I Built Belonging: with Nikki Neuburger
Sandra Cariglio in conversation with Nikki Neuburger, Chief Brand Officer at lululemon
Nikki Neuburger is the Chief Brand Officer at lululemon athletica inc., a global athletic apparel company. Nikki joined lululemon in 2020 to drive the company’s global brand and storytelling initiatives and lead its marketing, creative, communications, sustainability, and social impact functions. Prior to lululemon, Nikki served as Global Head of Marketing for Uber Eats, where she led the introduction and expansion of the brand across five regions in 36 countries. She previously built her career over a 14-year period at Nike, where she ultimately served as Global Vice President of Nike Running. Here, as part of our How I Built Belonging interview series, she speaks to ReD partner Sandra Cariglio about building community from the ground-up, the importance of two-way dialogue to foster belonging both internally and among consumers, and navigating an increasingly polarised cultural landscape.
Sandra Cariglio lululemon is often cited as a best practice for building belonging. Why do you think you’ve been so successful over the years and built such a strong sense of community around the brand, especially when so many other forms of community are in decline?
Nikki Neuburger I would attribute lululemon’s success to three things. The first is product. We have a different approach to activewear than others – we offer an alternative option for consumers to choose from. We started as an apparel company, so we have always had great, high-quality products to work with. Second, we’ve always advocated for taking care of yourself and taking care of your community. It’s not been about a culture centred on competitive sports and winning, which is where a lot of the industry plays; that works for them. We are instead a brand focused on fitness and well-being through the lens of health and happiness. Thirdly, we’re a brand that has always been focused on community. lululemon was a little ahead of its time – we arrived when women didn’t necessarily feel comfortable walking around in their fitness gear or being sweaty. Mindfulness, meditation, and even yoga was still a little niche and inaccessible. With everything that’s happened over the last 20 years, I now feel like other brands are going, “Oh to be healthy and happy is what’s on trend – it’s not necessarily about winning, winning, winning.” But we’ve maintained that same path this whole time; our brand purpose is to elevate human potential by helping people feel their best. That’s the foundation we’re built upon.
Sandra To go further into that, what have some of the mechanisms been behind creating such a strong sense of community that have come from these foundations?
Nikki Everything the brand has done from the beginning has been very grassroots. For example, the product was designed based on going into studios, seeing what people were wearing and understanding what unmet needs they had – this is a phrase we use a lot, and has become core to our product design philosophy. Early on, if you went into a yoga studio at that time, you would not have seen leggings – they didn’t exist yet. It’s hard to believe now but people were wearing sweatpants, T-shirts, and shorts and we felt like there was a better solution. On the community-building side, it was the same thing. The folks that work in our stores (we call them “educators”), have the most important role in the company as they’re on the frontlines listening to our guests and building relationships. They know what’s trending in fitness; they know who the influential studios and instructors are. And it is from this place, that our community and our ambassador roster was built. Our ambassador programme really started from the ground up versus the top down. We weren’t signing people and putting them on TV. It was very much neighbourhood by neighbourhood attached to where we had a physical store footprint. Since then, we’ve opened more and more stores, and you can see that credibility and community connection scaling over time. To maintain this grassroots connection, we have a benefit for all employees that we call “sweaty pursuits”. This benefit enables and encourages every employee to “sweat” in their community, to try all the new studios, to meet instructors, and to generally participate in the lifestyle and the culture that we’re a part of daily through a monthly stipend. We get really valuable insight from our teams this way.
“It’s not been about a culture centred on competitive sports and winning … We are instead a brand focused on fitness and well-being through the lens of health and happiness.”
Sandra So they’re also social antennas for the brand. How do you then capture those insights at the scale you’re operating at?
Nikki A myriad of ways. The meeting I’ve been in all morning is an example of what we call our “listening sessions”. We just spent three hours with twelve Paris store managers where they shared with us everything that they want to feed back. We always have questions we want to ask, but really, we just see where the conversation takes us: what are they seeing from a product perspective? What products are people asking for that we don’t have? What products do people want more of? What’s going on in the community? What types of activities are people really gravitating towards? Another example is “voice of the guest”, a process by which we track feedback we hear directly from guests via our call centres, product reviews, and store feedback. These inputs are then analysed, discussed, and actioned.
Sandra What challenges have you faced as you’ve moved away from being a relatively niche brand for predominantly women in North America doing yoga, and expanded into an international brand that’s now also very much for men and not just yoga, but any activity? Has that transformation had any impact on people’s sense of belonging?
Nikki Most of the choices we’ve made have been because our guests have invited us in as opposed to us necessarily identifying a business opportunity to go chase. Of course, when we get invited into a new space, we will size the prize and figure out if it’s worth the resources to invest. But she is who said you need to make things for them. We’re still nimble enough as a brand to build in that way. But we’re not losing our authentic connection with the community because our lululemon guests were always participating in multiple activities. I would say, our broad community is built on shared values and then the more directly connected groups rally around a shared activity (like running, training, or yoga).
Sandra How do you think about building community differently in physical and digital spaces?
Nikki If there was a silver lining to Covid-19, it was that we had to figure out how to support communities digitally, and at scale because we didn’t have the luxury of gathering. How you achieve intimacy digitally with large groups of people is really through how you communicate and show up on social media. If you look at lululemon’s social channels, it’s a conversation, it’s two-way. It’s not the brand just shouting messages and then not hearing back. Being in relationship and dialogue with our community is really important. We celebrate but we also take feedback. When we make a mistake, we’ll apologise, or when we’re going to make a change, we’ll let people know in advance. We’ll engage the community in helping us to make decisions. That has historically been an approach unique to lululemon but now consumers are demanding that from all brands. Initially, I was very worried about the fallout from acknowledging mistakes, but I’ve learned it generates a lot of trust and intimacy, to say, “Hey, I made this choice, it was the wrong choice and I’m going to do something different in the future.” That’s all anybody really wants: transparency, growth, and honesty. That’s what we’ve been able to do digitally with a lot more people than we could ever do in person.
Sandra We are currently seeing that brands are being pulled into all sorts of polarising cultural conversations and as a consequence, increasingly judged on the politics and morals of the moment. How have you navigated that terrain?
Nikki Brands have to declare the lane that they’re in. Nobody will know what to come to you for if you haven’t said, “Here’s where we are and what we stand for.” Once people are clear on this, they know if they want to join in. With regards to certain things happening in the world, as a company we first start with these questions: “Do we have an authentic position in this conversation that makes what we have to say valuable? Does anybody need to hear from us on this topic? Or is our role here to provide a platform for people to talk and share with each other?” Through our listening sessions, we tend to have more internal conversations around what’s going on in the world than we do within our channels. We will communicate externally if we have value to add in the conversation. Other times, nobody needs to hear from the brand, but we may make space for our people to talk with one another. This what our people networks are born out of: we have a Black people network, an Asian people network, a South Asian people network, a Jewish people network, a Women in Tech people network, and many more. Our people networks are safe spaces to gather, connect, and restore based on shared identity – and they’re self-organised so if you want to be part of a network that doesn’t yet exist, you can create one. When we started the initiative, most were groups based on racial identity, but we’ve now started to move into other categories. And of course, there’s intersectionality too. Someone may belong to the LGBTQ+ network, the Black people network, and the Women in Tech network – no person is just one thing in one box. What has been most interesting is seeing the people networks get together and finding that they have a lot in common. There are obviously very unique issues that each of them face and want to talk about, but there’s also lots of shared needs, opportunities, feelings, and emotions. These groups have identified shared initiatives and goals that contribute to a sense of belonging and inclusivity.
“Brands have to declare the lane that they’re in. Nobody will know what to come to you for if you haven’t said, ‘Here’s where we are and what we stand for’.”
Sandra You’ve mentioned these educators play such a pivotal role in shaping a healthy culture and anticipating what may come next from a cultural perspective. How do you find the right profiles and how do they change depending on the community you’re talking to?
Nikki The clearer we can be about who we are, the easier it is for us to attract people with shared values. I talked about us being out in the community – a lot of folks are just attracted to people that they meet. Now, that can be tricky because that can also create bias where you’re just attracting people like you. That is why we have made a conscious effort to identify communities or areas where we don’t have a presence and work to understand who the community leaders are, build relationships with them, and support them in their goals. Once we have those relationships, we prioritise, empower, support, and invest in our educators and in our community leaders in different ways than other retailers. For example, the store manager is empowered beyond running the day-to-day business of their store. They’re responsible for representing their local community, supporting their ambassadors, and feeding insights and needs back into the company. We have specific learning and development programmes so that we can provide them with support in identifying their own personal goals, even if those goals are to not work at lululemon in the future and instead to start their own business or to start a family. This gets to the heart of the company’s DNA; we believe that if you’re fulfilled in your life, you will be more fulfilled in your work. We’ve got educators who’ve been educators for 15, 20 years. We also have senior leaders who started as educators – there’s a pathway to grow in your career if you want to stay at lululemon. All these things contribute to us attracting really special people who are there because they believe in the brand’s purpose. They don’t believe in black stretchy pants, but they believe in what black stretchy pants enable you to do, which is to live an active, healthy lifestyle, to be an active member in your community, and to identify and work towards your purpose. This can be extremely fulfilling for people – and they stick around.
Sandra Cariglio is a partner at ReD.