Jill Cress, chief marketing and experience officer at H&R Block, strives to give hard working Americans help and confidence in the tax moment.
“This is a category where everyone has to take action,” reflects Cress. “It’s really important to understand how we can meet that consumer through a very connected experience that starts with awareness and consideration to how we convert them into our product experience or services in our retail locations. We are very focused on that end-to-end journey.”
The brand has a lot of credibility in the space, having established the category almost 70 years ago. The company counts 9,000 offices, with locations within five miles of most Americans and also offers virtual sessions with tax pros. “We have an office in every congressional district,” says Cress. “The brand is highly recognized. We have really great levels of awareness. At the same time, sometimes our legacy and heritage works against us. Most Americans don’t realize that we have many more ways to file.”
Part of the challenge is to get the word out about the company’s self-preparation tax tools and dot-com experience. The brand is often looking for ways to connect with consumers by offering services like H&R Block Maximum Refund Guarantee and FundHerFuture, a grant for women-owned small businesses. The key time for marketing the brand is in the tax season from January 2 until April 15th.
“We live in a very intense and seasonal business,” says Cress. “Taking advantage of that short window of time, we have to welcome returning customers or try to convert a prospect by creating a delightful end-to-end experience to drive more client growth.”
Prior to joining H&R Block, Cress spent more than two decades at MasterCard and led digital transformation at National Geographic. Brand Innovators caught up with Cress from her office in Kansas City, MO to discuss tax season, Minecraft & Gen Z as taxpayers.
How is your brand showing up in the culture?
We always start with the customer and who they are, specifically. What is their life stage? What are their demographics? What are the jobs that need to be done around this very important moment? For most Americans, the tax moment is the most important financial moment of their year. 75% of Americans will get a refund. The importance of what that means to their financial wellness and financial stability is really important. What challenges can we help them solve?
How can we really serve them in a way that meets their needs, whether it’s a level of expertise that they have or to meet with them to meet their expectations on speed or efficiency. We really show up when tax season kicks off in January to put ourselves into the cultural conversation. We try to start with a bang and we work to ensure that we’re reintroducing the topic because it is a topic that most people dread.
We seek to launch tax season in a way that allows us to have that short 105 days of the tax season to capture our fair share of the available market, which is 150 million Americans who pay their taxes every year. It is one of the few categories where the addressable audience has to take an action. We treat that opportunity with a lot of energy and excitement. We’re really focused on how we can continue to insert ourselves in the culture.
How are you thinking about Gen Z?
The biggest opportunity there is Gen Z as they start to become regular taxpayers. We created a branded entertainment micro series. It was called Responsibility Island and it was a comedic parody on the well-known and loved genre of reality TV dating shows. We did a bit of a spoof. We had a group of young adults who believed that they were going on a reality dating show only to discover that they were there to conquer the ultimate adulting task, which is to file their own taxes. The only way that they could get off this island, which was far from a dating island, was to take that task on and file their taxes themselves.
It’s important because it’s very hard to meet Gen Z through traditional channels. So finding them across social and presenting content to them that doesn’t interrupt their viewing experience, but actually draws them in. It aired as a piece of standalone content on Roku and then we also aired it on hrblock.com and YouTube. It was bold. It was definitely off-brand for traditional brand expectations for H&R Block. We had a 31% increase in brand awareness and a 15-point lift in brand consideration with Gen Z. Roku, who was a great partner in helping us understand how to position this and drive traditional television tune-in, got some great feedback from those who engaged with the content. Some of the comments that we really loved to see were comments like, “it makes me think that H&R Block is really keeping up with the times” and “it makes me want to do my taxes.”
Can you talk about your Minecraft integration?
Last year, we created a custom integration with the Minecraft competitive league game. We live streamed a creator tournament, which featured top gamers from across the country battling for a prize of $100,000. We had community events that played out every Saturday for 12 weeks to support it. We introduced a branded playable character who was called Sir Block, who represented what it means to be “Better with Block.” We know our audience is very actively engaged with gaming platforms and Minecraft specifically. By investing in those platforms where our consumer audience is engaged, it allows us to be more efficient in reaching them.
We reached over 730,000 unique viewers and drove a pretty significant increase in website traffic to H&Rblock.com. When you think about all of the exposures and the virtual billboards that exist within Minecraft, we reached 40 million impressions, which is 10% above their industry benchmark for what they’re able to achieve with integrations. The H&R Block exposure within everything we did resulted in over 668 million logo exposures. It’s a much more efficient way for us to reach an audience of consumers during that really important period. We’ve got to punch above our weight with our media dollars.
Can you talk about how your past experiences have helped you in your current role?
For the entirety of my career, I’ve been passionate about understanding the consumer and building products that are relevant for the customer. I spent over 20 years working at MasterCard as the world was becoming more and more digital. There was a big push to think about how to engage with consumers more directly beyond mass advertising by leveraging digital platforms. I actually raised my hand to say, I would like to work for the head of consumer marketing and learn that craft. A lot of people at MasterCard thought I was crazy because it was a lateral move. But I wouldn’t be having this conversation with you today about being the chief marketing and experience officer of H&R Block if I hadn’t made that bold decision and been thoughtful about that gap that I had in my career.
I also had an incredible growth opportunity at National Geographic where we were also in a period of transformation and looking at how to take a very traditional iconic brand that was known for more of an antiquated print product and recreate that content across digital platforms. While I was there, we achieved 100 million+ followers on Instagram, which allowed us to connect with our audiences in really authentic ways. We partnered with brands to create really interesting branded content to meet the consumers that brands wanted to connect with on our social platforms.
What trends do you expect to see in marketing during the back end of 2024?
H&R Block releases an annual report – The Outlook on American Life – about the American taxpayer to see trends and attitudes around jobs, where they’re working, where migration is happening in the way of people moving to new geographies and things like that. We found Gen Z, who are emerging earners, are going to be future big earners in the economy.
They’re much more optimistic about their financial situation than the raw tax data suggests that they should be. They’re aware that their earnings and the growth of their earnings is actually outpacing inflation, which gives them a sense of optimism. This is good for all those brands that are gearing up for the holiday shopping season and trying to win with Gen Z. There’s a level of confidence there that we were excited to see.
The other thing that continues to present itself is that the gig economy is expanding three times faster than the total US workforce. Over 50% of the US workforce is likely to participate in the gig economy by 2027. This means we have a big opportunity to rethink when and how we are reaching this audience. Where do we reach those people who are embracing the side hustle?
What is your approach to AI?
We’re very bullish on AI. It plays a huge role in how we think about marketing and our ability to optimize creative. We’re testing, learning and figuring out how it can help us not only be more efficient, but really more effective in reaching our audience. We’ve really embedded it into our product experience. Last tax season, we built an AI experience into our online tax platform. We had AI tax assist, which was a way to streamline the tax prep process leveraging large language models to answer some of the most asked questions.
Consumers file their taxes at every hour of the 24 hours in a day, particularly when it gets to the end of season. We do not have human help available at 2am. Building a Gen AI tool into our online experience so that consumers could get access to our expertise when it was convenient to them drove a lot of client engagement and satisfaction last year.
