[music]

00:15 Chris Ronan: Hello there! Welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ. This is our podcast from HQ in Seattle. My name is Chris Ronan. My username is Rock Chalk. Thank you for tuning into our podcast. Today, we will hear from Tom Phillips, the Vice President for merchandising and marketing at HQ and one of the nicest human beings you could ever hope to meet. Hopefully you will enjoy this conversation that we have. This is our first episode of 2020 and we’ve had some people at times ask me what our schedule is for these podcasts. And the truth is, we don’t have a schedule. We, I don’t know, just kind of try to put something out there when there is either a project that we think will be interesting to know a lot more about or if there’s just a time to talk to a lackey that you might be interested in hearing from.

01:14 CR: So, early this year, at least for the first couple of months around the company, people have been heads down working on stuff, and there have been some things that have come out. For instance, the public profile when you look at it on the website, it now displays total favorite points that you have received as a cash owner, which is a neat thing. And then also on the website, the “date placed” filter is now on the search page. So if you are for instance trying to search for a certain cache that will help you qualify for a Jasmer challenge or something like that, you can use that new “date placed” filter. So a couple of neat new features that have come out, but not necessarily something that fills up an entire podcast episode. So that’s why it’s been a little bit since we have had a podcast here from HQ.

02:07 CR: However, there are a number of other Geocaching podcasts that have had lackey appearances in recent weeks, in particular Bryan Roth, one of the co-founders here at HQ and the company president. He has been on PodCacher. They had a big anniversary episode recently, he was on there. He was also on GeoGearheads and he was on Geocache Talk. So, some opportunities to hear from Brian if you haven’t checked out those podcasts, I encourage you to do so. But back to our show, Tom Phillips, again, is today’s guest. We actually recorded this conversation twice. The first time we’ve ever done that, but Tom is such a nice guy that I didn’t mind so much. He just kind of felt like the first time we talked that he could have had more information to share, and so he wanted to do it again.

03:00 CR: Originally I had said, “Let me just try to see how the first one went,” but then I thought, “You know, I like talking to Tom let’s do it again.” So here we go, me and Tom Phillips.

[music]

03:16 CR: Okay, are we ready?

03:17 Tom Phillips: I think we’re ready this time.

03:18 CR: We’re ready this time.

03:19 TP: I’m doing my best. Take two.

03:21 CR: Once again, you’re unique. You’re the first that we’ve done this twice with. And I’m just being honest with people, I’m putting it out there. I’m not gonna try to hide that this is our second conversation. I’m not gonna try to pretend.

03:32 TP: Hey, authenticity is a value of this organization.

03:36 CR: It is a value.

03:37 TP: And transparency, absolutely right. And the first take, the failed take of this endeavor, had nothing to do with your skills as an interviewer.

03:47 CR: Well…

03:47 TP: It had everything to do with, just the mood you were in that day, I think. [laughter]

03:51 CR: That’s exactly…

03:51 TP: ‘Cause I’m sure it had nothing to do with me.

03:55 CR: Of course not. No.

03:55 TP: No, no, no.

03:56 CR: Apparently you didn’t like the line of questioning. You felt like I was…

04:01 TP: It felt personal. It felt aggressive. [laughter] Which is often the way we interact, so I think that’s fair.

04:06 CR: And you felt like I was gonna take it easier on you this time, but I assure you…

04:12 TP: It’s not out of your system?

04:14 CR: I assure you, I am even more aggressive-feeling now than I was the first time around. [chuckle] I don’t know what you expected, but here we go.

04:24 TP: I wanted this. I wanted the real you. I wanted to release the real you.

04:24 CR: Okay.

04:28 TP: Released.

04:30 CR: So what do you do here, exactly?

[chuckle]

04:33 TP: And why do I show up everyday.

04:36 CR: Why are you here? Why are you here everyday?

04:36 TP: And just walk around and why do I whistle in the hallways?

04:36 CR: Every day are you here. Why are you so nice to people and why are you here? Those are the two main questions, then we can get out of here.

[laughter]

04:45 CR: What is your title and what does is mean? Let’s start with the basics.

04:47 TP: Excellent. So I actually have been here for 11 years and I am currently the Vice President of Marketing here at Geocaching HQ. So I get the opportunity to work with the merchandising teams, to work with our marketing and communications teams here at Geocaching HQ, the Creative Studio which is all the visual language we use and put together and then also our API partnerships to make sure that we are all working effectively together to support the community around the world.

05:17 CR: So it’s a pretty wide range of stuff. And you said 11 years you’ve been here, what originally brought you to HQ?

05:23 TP: I began my career down in Portland, Oregan. And I was born and raised in the North West. Ended up having a 20-year-life cycle with Nike down in Portland.

05:35 CR: Small shoe company of… And they sell other stuff.

05:35 TP: Have you heard of them?

05:37 CR: Shoes and some other stuff.

05:39 TP: Cute little group. So after our kids were born we decided to move up to Seattle and my wife’s family is from up here. And so that put me into the world of new and interesting groups that were working on new ideas up here in Seattle. One of those groups happen to be the three founders at Geocaching HQ. So I got introduced to them back in 2004, was fascinated with what this community was doing around the world, how it was working together, the creativity involved, the collaboration and really trying to do something that hadn’t been done before. So for me, there wasn’t a role at the time, but I just became a huge fan of what collectively this group was doing and said if there’s ever a reason that I could get involved and bring some of my experience to bear, I wanted to make sure I was staying close and just seeing what was going on.

06:31 TP: So in 2009 Bryan Roth picked up the phone, gave me a call and said, “Hey, we’re really interested in trying to figure out how we can support the community around the world with physical products that support the game. That made a lot of sense with… That’s in essence what I had been doing with Nike, creating products for athletes. This was the goal, to make sure that geocachers anywhere in the world had the physical products they needed to create and share and play this game.

07:00 CR: And so people now are familiar, if they go to Shop Geocaching there’s this wide range of different stuff you can buy. What was it like 11 years ago and what has happened over the years?

07:10 TP: I think one of the key things for me, and again, this was one of the things that just really got me hooked on how this community was different than so many other things that were going on in the world and that are going on in the world. This is a group of individuals all around the world that have come together as this community and work together to try to solve problems with each other and creatively think about the possibilities for this game. So even in the world of merchandising it was not a question of can Geocaching HQ come in and open a store that can sell products to geocachers all around the world, it was, how can we look at what’s going on in the world? There were segments of the community and individuals in Europe, in Germany, in the US, in Canada, they had all created these shops that were creating, finding, sharing products that the geocaching community needed, were inspirational to people and really excited to see if they could find that in their market as well. So for us, it was an opportunity to come in, collaborate with that community of retailers to say “What can we do, what are the things that we can provide that help support your business? And also sort of hook us together as a network that can really support geocachers in a more effective way.

08:36 TP: A lot of those really simple examples where things like if we took the amount of inventory we were gonna buy on an item, we could a lot of times, drive the price of something down and then be able to extend that pricing to retail partners around the world so it would be less expensive for them to try and create the same product themselves but just with a much smaller number. So, it was absolutely a network of cooperation and creativity and really recognizing that each one of these individuals around the world that were supporting their segment of the community with merchandise understood that community in a way that we never could over here in Seattle. So really respecting the knowledge they had, the passion they had, and then collectively trying to figure out, again, what is the best overall solution we could come up with for everybody.

09:32 CR: You also mentioned API being part of what you do overseeing that program. That’s something that certainly touches the entire geocaching community as well. For people that aren’t familiar with that, what does that entail?

09:49 TP: We completely understand that, with all of the ability we have to work on a limited amount of products, there are things people need that go beyond what we’re able to provide. So the API partnership becomes a wonderful way for us to invite other creative developers out there into this overall collective community and make sure we can get the right products and services and features into the hands of geocachers that need them.

10:16 CR: And then marketing is the other thing. And I think sometimes people hear marketing, and they immediately think, “Oh, well, it’s all about how much money can you make.” Is that what it is?

[laughter]

10:26 TP: See, you asked me why I woke up every day.

10:30 CR: Here’s the tough question here.

10:33 TP: All too often, people sort of reduce marketing to the idea that it’s about packaging and selling things to people. And there certainly is an aspect of that to the term marketing, but the idea of marketing extends much, much further than that simple element. Marketing, in it’s truest sense, is really trying to understand an audience, a community, a customer group. To really understand what it is they need and then turn around and say, in really understanding this authentic need of the community, is there anything we can do as an organization to provide that product, that service, that feature back to them? So once you have that solution in place, yes, you wanna make people aware that that exists, you wanna tell people how to use it, you wanna make sure people understand that it’s there, but really it is this end-to-end process that starts with a genuine understanding of what is it people need and trying to figure out how we might be able to provide that.

11:38 TP: For me, a really simple example of that, when you think about geocaching, is at the very beginning of geocaching.com, Jeremy Irish was very much in a marketing process. When he became part of the community, he started to get involved with what individual geocachers were doing, from Dave Ulmer on out, and really stepped back and said, “What this activity needs that it doesn’t currently have, is it really needs a place where people can connect with each other, a place where people can list things that they’ve created so people know where they can go find what’s been hidden and get the information to go figure out if they can go out into the world and try to find it and log it.” So the true sense of that was understanding what the community needed at that time, and then going back to say, “What can I do, as somebody who develops websites,” being Jeremy. To sit there and say, “Hey, I could create a community website that could help grow and build this.”

12:48 TP: So there wasn’t anything about that process where he was turning around trying to say, “How do I sell people this website?” He basically was trying to understand what this needed, is there a way he could provide it and then, as soon as it was available, how can I tell more people about it?

13:08 CR: And so today, how does the marketing team go about finding out what people want and listening to people and coming up with useful information to go on to say, “Okay, here’s what they want, here’s what they’re asking for and here’s how we’ll go about giving it to them.”

13:27 TP: Well, a big piece, and especially if you see any of us out in the community at events, traveling, anything else, is just being connected to the community. Ideally, we’d love people to come up, talk to us, introduce themselves. We do the same. And what we are most interested in is what are the things about this activity that you would love to see more of? What are the things you wish were there that aren’t, potentially. And one of the big elements of our job is often to start to understand where do geocachers even get their information. One of the simplest things was we spend a lot of time and energy every week putting a newsletter out to this global audience of geocachers. And over time, one of the things we discovered is we were sending this newsletter out in a language, being English, that not everybody could deal with.

14:26 TP: And so, really simple, to take that learning and say, “Oh, people like what we’re doing, but it’s just not accessible to them ’cause it’s in the wrong language. So how can we start to think differently?” And now that newsletter goes out to premium members in the language of their choice. So we don’t have every language, but everything goes out the door in English, in German, in Dutch and French. And we wanna make sure as much as possible that we’re able to have this conversation with people in the language that it’s easiest to communicate.

14:58 CR: You talked about when you first met Bryan and you thought this sounded like a really interesting game and you became a fan of it. I wonder, from a marketer’s standpoint, approaching something like geocaching, how does it differ from… You spent 20 years at Nike, this massive organization. Huge product lines and all that stuff. And massive, I would imagine, budgets, compared to a place like Geocaching HQ. What are the differences, what are the… I don’t know, the unique challenges here or the opportunities here, compared to maybe what you were used to in those many years that you spent at a company like that?

15:40 TP: There are two really significant differences that are as energizing as they are interesting, and one of those is that this, like I mentioned before, this truly is a collaboration. So this isn’t a company that is looking to, in a very one-directional way, say, “How do I get a community insight and create something that you will want to buy?” But this really is a collaborative conversation that oftentimes leads to, here is something the community needs overall. And the solution may be something that Geocaching HQ steps up and is able to do. Lots of times it might absolutely be something the community already has in place and they just need to know what exists and they need to share that idea with more people.

16:25 TP: So this idea that not everything needs to flow through us, we are not the people that need to try to come up with all the solutions. It’s really important for us to stay very focused on what are the things the community is doing that really are innovative, powerful, effective solutions and can we help more people understand what they are, where they are and how they might be able to model something like that themselves. So again, this collective spirit is very different than a traditional company would look at a marketplace, and I think secondarily, a lot of times you hear Geocaching HQ described as an organization, as a bootstrap business. So it’s a business that doesn’t take outside investment and never has in the 20 years it’s been around, which has a good side and a challenging side to it.

17:23 TP: So, the challenging side is that this organization might not have the financial resources that a big publicly traded company would have. So oftentimes we have to try to figure things out as cost effectively as possible. So that’s the challenging energizing side of it. The really positive side of it is that without any outside investors, we have the opportunity to stay completely focused on our original mission, which is Geocaching HQ wasn’t created as something to make money. Geocaching HQ is something that is here to make sure we’re supporting the sustainable growth of this activity around the world. Yeah, revenue is a part of that, but it’s not the goal of it. Revenue is something that helps us hire the right people, invest in the tools that we’re trying to create. It keeps everything moving forward, but the goal is to keep this activity growing, to keep this activity expanding, and to make sure the community has what it needs to stay actively engaged and involved.

18:32 CR: This is obviously a big year with the big anniversary, the 20th anniversary and the big party in Seattle in August and it’s kind of a time to look back and celebrate things that have happened in the past, but also to look forward. For you, as someone who’s worked here now for 11 years, and one of the more longer tenured people here at HQ, are there things that you especially… Memories, there are projects that you’ve enjoyed in the past or moments in the last 11 years that come to mind for you and also are there things that you’re especially looking forward to either this year or in the near future?

19:09 TP: It actually is a really fun moment for me in that it sort of bookends my current experience here at Geocaching HQ. When I first joined, I mentioned it was back in 2009, and one of the things we were doing as an organization was getting ready for the 10-year anniversary. That was the very first time we ever threw an official event from Geocaching HQ. It was hosted in Seattle and it was sort of partnered next to GeoWoodstock, which was happening the day before. And then what we had called our Lost and Found event was happening that next day. So it was a big weekend, super exciting, and I think overall we got 2000 people, 3000 people, something like that. So now, to be here in this moment, looking towards August 15th this summer, hosting the 20-year anniversary in Seattle with GeoWoodstock just north of the border the weekend after, we’re expecting a whole lot more in terms of friends and family coming in to celebrate with us, which is great. So we’ll probably be somewhere between 5000 people and 20,000 people. We don’t know, but it’s super exciting to be in this moment.

20:23 TP: One of the things that we’ve done in planning towards it, is really adopted this theme of, it is fun to look back and think about the really great moments that have happened in the last 20 years and it’s also really exciting to look forward and think about the possibilities of this game in front of us. When I think of the things that are most exciting about the game going forward right now, there are three that absolutely come to mind, especially when you think about the possibility of this game in the future. So this game has always been about how can we take what’s available out in the world and really put it in the hands of creators to do new and interesting things and challenge the community overall. So some of those new and interesting things that are being worked on, we got a tease of it last summer with Mystery at the Museum. But one of those elements is how do we actually put Digital Treasures back into the world’s largest treasure hunting game. So Digital Treasures becomes something that, hopefully you’ll see the next version of that that we’re working on towards this summer, but it’s a really exciting way to add more and more delight into the caches that you will find in the future.

21:44 TP: Secondarily, everyone I think is pretty aware of a new platform out there called Adventure Lab. And Adventure Lab really is an exciting opportunity to take some of the things we’ve experienced along the way, whether that’s Wherigo cartridges or virtuals, other elements, and put them into a platform where some of those moments are available to creators again. You can now create an experience that’s packaged for people. It can be linear and storytelling, it can have multimedia elements to it. Much simpler to create and play than sort of the challenges of Whereigo in the past, but it’s really exciting to see new tools coming into the hands of creators and I think much in the spirit that this organization has always lived by, it’s not about us trying to dream up what we would do with it here in Seattle, it’s very much putting it in the hands of geocachers to see what they would do with it. And do they find value and do they find interest to keep driving a platform like this forward?

22:53 TP: So Adventure Lab is a really exciting theme that is making its way forward in 2020. And then finally, there’s one that’s out there that it’s a little bit more of a tease than a solution right now. But you saw us begin last year, start playing with augmented reality within the game. And so there’s a big appetite of people saying, “How could we bring elements like that into the game in a way that feels really energizing and available and excited to people?” So those are really three things that I’m most excited about Digital Treasures, Adventure Lab and the possibilities of AR going forward.

23:32 CR: Well, I feel pretty good about this conversation. I think we covered it again.

[laughter]

23:40 TP: Does it feel like déjà vu?

[overlapping conversation]

23:42 CR: I don’t know, I’ll have to go back and play these side by side and see, but do you feel good about everything?

23:47 TP: I do as long as you do.

23:49 CR: I felt good the first time.

[laughter]

23:52 CR: So I want you to feel good.

23:54 TP: So, I feel even better then.

23:55 CR: You feel? Oh good. So okay, so one other question. If people come for the 2020 celebration where are they most likely to find you if they’re going caching. What kind of a cacher are you and what kind of caches do you enjoy? If they’re gonna go out looking for Tom, what caches should they go searching for?

24:12 TP: There are two ways to find me. One would be go to the merchandise booth and I’ll probably be behind the counter, sort of helping people and being there and welcoming people into the event. But when we’re out caching and I’ve been able to sort of hand those responsibilities off to somebody else in the merchandise tent, for me, when geocaching is at its best, it really is inviting me into new experiences that feel like I’ve never done that before. So if it’s a cache container that is a really creative gadget. If it’s a mystery that isn’t too hard to solve. [chuckle] If it’s a location that I am just delighted because I’ve never, ever contemplated that that spot was there. Those are all moments that just delight me within this game. I am not, and you can tell by my geocaching name on my stats, it is not all about the numbers for me. So you won’t find me on a power trail, you won’t find me trying to gather as many caches as possible in 24 hours, but I will likely ask you what was the coolest thing you found that day, and that might be the one thing I go do.

25:28 CR: That was Tom Phillips, Vice President for merchandising and marketing at Geocaching HQ. If you come to the 20th Anniversary Celebration in Seattle on August 15th you should definitely seek him out and say hello. And if you would like to hear about something here on the HQ podcast, if there’s a good topic or if there’s a specific lackey that you would like to hear from, please send me an email. Podcast@geocaching.com is the address. That is: Podcast@geocaching.com. I always really appreciate your ideas and any other feedback that you might have about Inside Geocaching HQ. From me and from all the other lackeys at HQ, happy caching!