A hat. Isn't she wonderful? No, I don't give a crap. Please move on. If it doesn't advance the engagement between the brand and the buyer, it's not signal, it's noise. Mmm. That's good. And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew. And I'm your host Brett Dyson. Really quickly, just subscribe to this podcast, all your favorite podcasting apps, and leave a review. It always helps. But this week we're gonna be talking about marketing.
But we'll probably go into the crisis part of marketing because as my guest G has shared with me before this that there is issues brewing within marketing realm that maybe some of you may know or may not know. It's going to be probably a spicy but interesting conversation with him. But a little bit about him is that he's, he's been marketing since the dial up Internet age, which I am very well familiar with since my actual intro to this podcast.
Most of the time is the dial up modem with the coffee as well. So I understand the AOL old age of cds and buying from that. But he's had award winning actual marketing agency called. Was it Koenix? Did I say that right? Yeah, casino and over the all right. Over the past 16 years he's helped over 400 startups and small businesses in over 20 countries grown awareness, reputation, trust and sales. He's also a a fellow chartered. Of the Chartered Institute of Mar. Thanks very much, Brett.
I'm delighted to be invited. The first question is all my guest is are you coffee or tea drinker? Now this depends on. It depends on the day of the week, Brett. Okay, so if it's a weekend, I am quite partial to a decent cup of coffee. But during the week I am very much a tea person. I start the day off with a matcha japanese tea. I've got the full, all the accoutrements, the bits and pieces and the brush and all the rest of it. And then I stick with green for most of the day. During the week.
During a weekend, I am quite partial to a decent cup of coffee. I like the idea of all of the theater around the making of an artisanal cup of coffee. Okay. It reminds me a lot of people who listen to vinyl, so I like the idea, but I don't go that far, to be honest. Once I reach a cup of coffee which has the right taste and it's good enough, it doesn't get gooder than good. Do you know what I mean? Good enough.
And going above and beyond that where you're counting the beans and putting it in a little micro scale and then spritzing a little bit of water, and you've got that funny spiky thing to distribute all of that sort of stuff. I like the idea of it, but I just don't think I'd have the patience after about two or three tries. So I'd end up using like Nespresso or something, which is probably sacrilege to someone like you. Oh, no, I'm.
Even though I was a former barista, I'll do a keurig during the week, I have no shame. And then I maybe sound like I'm actually a pretty snob, but really, if there's a Starbucks anywhere and I need coffee, I'm like, you know what, forget it. I know it's bad coffee, but I need something. If I go Starbucks, I have to have a tea. I cannot drink the liquid tar that they call coffee. Sorry, it cannot be done there. Just won't go there. But for tea, different matter.
And in the past we've worked with a lot of, not a lot, but a few clients who've been looking at the artisanal green tea manufacturer and selling. And so I've learned a lot about green tea, black tea, even a thing called white tea, which I didn't even know existed. That's why I'm more of a tea person than a coffee person. And of course, on a Friday evening, that tea would probably be a Long island iced tea. But that's a different. That's a different podcast, I think, isn't it? Very true.
But I gave a brief summary of your expertise. Can you hear our listeners a little bit more about what you do? What do I do? What do we do? We are a small business, marketing, branding and media production agency. We've been, for the past 16 years, we've worked with, as you mentioned, over about 400 startups and small businesses to help them increase their awareness, reputation, and most importantly, britt sales. Because sales is the name of the game, right?
If it doesn't move the needle, it's not marketing, it's fluff, it's nonsense, it's noise that's corrupting the signal. Customer wise, we work primarily with b, two b businesses, generally between about 3,000,020 5 million in revenue. The startups we work with are usually externally funded, either from private shareholders, startup accelerators, VC's, whatever.
We're based in Europe, yet 80% of our clients are based in the US, while our team is based in nine countries, US, various european countries, South Africa, Japan and Australia. Profile wise, the people that we like to work with are people who aren't afraid to admit they don't know what they don't know and are prepared to trust in the process and the people and have the time and the interest to be an active participant along the way.
We don't want self diagnosis, if I'm sure you're familiar with the term self diagnosis, but it's one of my soapbox subjects, which maybe we'll go into later on. In terms of what we do. We help startups and small businesses across all industries with things like branding, strategy, design, website development, print, SEO, copywriting, pr, social media, all the tactical stuff, which is great. I think what's more important is really the buying experience, right?
Today's customer buying experiences are set by some of the biggest brands in the world. And it's these guys who are defining expectation levels for everyone else. Regardless of what you're selling or who you're selling to, your business is being judged by the way your customers experience brands such as Apple, Nike or Zappos.
So smaller companies needs access to similar levels of expertise, tool sets and services that big companies take for granted due to the increasing importance of the customer relationship. And that's where we come in. The team consists of 19 people across nine countries. Like I said, 80% of our clients are in the US. The rest are supposed spread across Europe, South Korea, Japan and Australia. We operate under a distributed, remote working model and we've done that since day one.
So I know it's pretty commonplace now, but back in 2008, which is when we started, we were one of a very small number of agencies that worked remotely, as I like to say, we've been, we've been working from home before it was fashionable. Yep, that is quite true, but we talked a little bit offline. But what are the biggest crises hitting marketing now? Because like you said, you have opinions, I have opinions about it.
I think marketing has gone into basically a more of a political ideology type of thing, where they don't market their product, but they market a political ideology pretending to be a product. And I'm like, we really should just really market the product because everybody's your customer. Everybody could potentially be your customer regardless of political ideologies. I think it's even more ingrained than that, Britt.
I think market is in crisis for two reasons that are quite different in themselves, but are nonetheless connected. So firstly, marketing is in crisis in my opinion. Not because it doesn't work, because clearly it does, but because marketing as a core business function within an organization is ideologically disliked in the high echelons of business, resulting in effective marketing being sidelined in favor of efficient marketing. What do I mean by that?
What I mean by that is that the people who are employing people who call themselves marketers, I don't call them marketers because they're not marketers, okay? They do. They. They insult the job title of marketing by calling themselves marketers. The people who are employing people who call themselves marketers don't know what marketing is. They think marketing is promotions or communications or social media or podcasts or whatever, and nobody.
And because the people who are employing these marketers don't know what marketing actually is, they're employing the wrong profile of person. Okay? And why they're employing the wrong profile of person because when they were less higher up on that corporate ladder, what they saw in their existing company or the previous company that they worked for, what they saw coming out of the marketing department was the 10% that's above the waterline. They didn't see the 90% below the waterline.
So they saw the tangibles, which were stress balls, tote bags, brochures, and organizing events. They didn't see any of the research, the targeting, the segmentation, the messaging, all of the homework that you need to do before you get into tactical execution right now. It's not their fault. There's no reason why they should even know about this stuff because I'm sure if they employed a new finance director, they wouldn't know the ins and outs of all that finance terminology, right?
But the difference is between employing a qualified finance person and somebody who actually understands marketing, that there's a barrier to entry. If you want to be a CFO or a finance manager, there are courses that you need to go on. There are exams you need to pass, right? If you want to be a CPA, you've got to pass an exam. If you want to fly a plane, you've got to get a pilot's licence.
If you want to be a surgeon, no one's going to let you anywhere near a scalpel before you spent seven years at medical school. Yet any idiot with money to buy a MacBook Pro and a canva or creative suite license can call themselves a marketer. And unfortunately, at this particular moment in time, the industry is full of them and full of it. I'll let you think about what that it could be.
So this is the, this is the problem from the business side, from the hiring side, from the other side of the table, these people who call themselves marketers don't know what they don't know. They think marketing is comms, is promotion, is posting crap on social media, which nobody listens to, which nobody engages with, but needs to be there for brand awareness. I'm sorry, brand awareness is not what pays our bills. Likes don't pay our bills. Comments don't pay our bills.
Forwards don't pay our bills. You know what? Pay our bills. Sales. Sales pay our bills. If it isn't moving the needle to a positive, tangible revenue position, it's not marketing. It's fluff, it's nonsense. It's adding to the noise instead of the signal. And yet we're in this bubble where we have people who don't know what marketing is employing people who don't know what marketing is.
And this is where, one of the reasons why we're in this nonsense, this catastrophe that we're in at the moment, okay? And I can understand it from a business perspective, from the C suite, from the senior management perspective, okay? Because if you look at the profile, if you look at the education history of most C suite executives, CEO's, coos, CFO's, whatever, right? They've got to where they have from a particular thread of education, okay?
And whatever it is, whether it's economics, whether it's finance, whether it's engineering, much, much of what passes for business today is founded under what I'll call an engineering model, okay? Most management consultants, for example, come from an engineering background. You could argue that economics is based on an engineering model because it looks at economies and markets as though they operate under the rules of newtonian physics, right? One plus one is always two, okay?
And can't be anything else. But the problem with thinking in that way and trying to apply those theories to marketing is where the whole thing breaks down. Now, if you're in manufacturing, or even arguably, in R and D, this sequential rational logic, one plus one equals, always equals two. Totally makes sense, right? And an efficiency driven model is exactly where you need to go, right? The object of the exercise is to reduce the costs of the system so that the output is more efficient, right?
So you can increase the efficiency by automation or resources or AI or whatever it may be. Now, that's all well and good. The problem comes, of course, when we come to marketing, because marketing as a core business function doesn't operate in the same way as manufacturing or pretty much any of the other disparate business units within the organization.
Because what we're dealing with as output considerations are human beings and human beings, as I don't need to tell you, are anything but rational or logical. We don't. Do you know the way that we buy, how we buy, what we influenced by, when we buy are hugely influenced by context, right? Which requires experimentation, which requires segmentation of audience, which requires targeting, messaging, depending on the context of presenting our value articulation to the potential buyer.
All of these variables are not cast in stone because they're contextual. Unlike in manufacturing engineering land, where, like I said, it's like a newtonian physics model, right? Two plus two is always four. But the thing is, when we're trying to influence a buying decision, we're dealing with contextual behaviors which are anything but rational, logical, and quantifiable. Let me give you an example, right?
In manufacturing, we're dealing with units of time, of weight, of temperature, of mass, okay? But in marketing, there's no such thing as an SI unit of fear, of regret, of anger, of frustration. Yet these are all influences which contribute to the efficacy of a buying decision. See where I'm going with this? So this is why this kind of thinking scares the C suite to death.
Because what they're looking for is a standard physical model which they can copy and paste and use independently of research resources, process rigor, in exactly the same way that they can for every other area of the business. But you can't do that with marketing, because we're dealing with human beings, and human beings are not logical, rational entities, as we all know.
So this is one of the main reasons why I think we're in a bad place when we try to rationalize and use efficiency metrics around marketing, whereas what we should be doing is using effectiveness metrics around marketing. So where does the problem stem? Is it because of colleges? Not really. Most of them not actually teaching the building blocks of marketing. Is it because, like you said, the efficiency model is, hey, can I get this done as quickly as possible without much effort?
Is it like, the PR side of it? Because PR is all about a brand awareness and trying to. All those things you said about, like, just posting social media posts and saying, hey, look how cool I am. It's a popularity contest. I have a pr degree, but I know it's a popularity contest. So, of course, here's a picture of. Yvonne wearing a hat. Isn't she wonderful? No, I don't give a crap. Please move on.
If it doesn't advance the engagement between the brand and the buyer, it's not signal, it's noise, right? If you're going into a social media engagement plan, looking at saying, you know what? We need to create x amount of posts this month. If you're going in with that mentality, you've already lost because you're already going to fail. This is what people don't understand. The reason why we're in this mess is because of efficiency versus effectiveness, okay?
Because businesses are trying to segue marketing, which is based around an effectiveness series of metrics, measurements, into efficiency, which is what pretty much every other core area of the business is used to. The thing is, in the old days, marketing used to be primarily about persuading people right to influence their behavior in order to deliver a commercial result.
Now, because of that, the best marketers of the day were familiar with concepts such as human behavior, human insight, psychology, call it what you will. Today, I have the feeling that 99% of the marketing that we see as consumers, especially actually in online, has been created to be more concerned with efficiency than effectiveness. It's as though marketing is seen by these companies as like a brand of logistics or something, which to me is like absolute madness.
Now, before I go into a major diatribe about all of this, I think it's probably worth clarifying what I mean by efficiency and what I mean by effectiveness, just to make sure that we're all on the same page, right? So, effectiveness, to my mind, is about how well you're doing in achieving a particular goal, right? How successful you are in delivering on what you set out to do, right. Efficiency, in contrast, is a ratio.
It's not about how much input you make, it's about reducing the input while delivering a particular output. Right? So by chasing efficiency metrics, what happens is that businesses end up looking and saying the same thing, because the creativity element of the equation has had to be exorcised out, because it can't be quantified. We can't say, okay, for this campaign, we're going to put $32.50 worth of creativity into it. Can't do that, right. Creativity is what creativity is. Right. Right.
It could take an hour to do, it could take a week to do it could take six months to do. And that uncertainty is not something that the finance people will tolerate.
So they'll say, okay, what's far better is that we list a bunch of bullet points, we come up with 25 headlines, 25 descriptions, 25 insipid, non engaging, generic, royalty free images, and we throw it into a machine, which we mix up, or we do a little cocktail special and we vomit it out of across any number of digital channels, and we see which one works best. And that, essentially, is what marketing has turned out to be. We're throwing darts at a dartboard.
We have no idea where the dartboard is. So even, and the thing is, what's ridiculous about all of this, Brett, is even if you speak to people like Google and Meta Facebook, okay, these are companies which make their gazillions by serving crappy ads to people who know know better, right? Even these guys will tell you, and there's plenty of documented evidence about this. Even these guys will tell you that the single biggest determinant factor to success of any particular campaign is the creative.
And if these guys are saying it, what? Why on earth aren't we listening to them? But what we'd rather do instead is throw a hundred royalty free images into a canva template and throw it out online and see which one generates the 0.1% better return. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not slagging. I'm not slagging off royalty free images. I'm not slagging off AI images. Certainly not slagging off canva, right? But what I'm saying is, it's not about the tool.
What I'm saying is that I could spend $1,000 on a set of japanese chef's knives, but it doesn't make me Gordon Ramsay, does it? Right? I could spend 20 grand on a professional camera. It doesn't make me Annie Leibovitz. I could spend 200 grand on a Ferrari. It doesn't make me name you the best race car driver that you admire most. It's not about the tool. It's not about understanding. How does this technology work? How does this tool work? How does this. How does this technology work?
It's not about that. What it's about is how do customers work? How do buyers work? We need to get in between here, in between their ears into that grey matter, and understand what influences a buying decision and how we can craft and present our content in a way that creates salience, which is another word for mental availability, marketing speak for if I'm in a position to buy x, one of the possible choices I have to buy is your brand, which is all we can do as marketers.
All we can do is that when a buyer is ready to buy, we are one of the in that consideration set. That's all we can do. But instead of that, we're doing, hey, Yvonne's wearing a hat. Isn't it funny? It's not. We don't care. We really do not give a fly and I think the advent of AI, for example, is going to fuel the backlash against automation and get us to a place where we need to be creatively.
And I don't think it was meant to be, but I think it's a natural consequence because if you think about it from a, if you look at the marketing industry from an advertising perspective, if you do digital advertising for any length of time, okay, all of this machine learning stuff, AI is just software.
It's got a good name, but at the end of the day, it's just got a great brand, okay, it's a bit of software, okay, it's got a huge list of information that they can tap in from, but at the end of the day, it's a bit of software. We've had large learning models within the marketing space for at least ten years, probably longer, right?
In terms of similar customer profiles, in terms of remarketing tags, in terms of programmatic advertising, we've had this stuff for a long time, yet the effectiveness of digital marketing continues to go down. So why isn't anybody asking themselves, why is that? If we've got all of this tech, if we like to think that we're pretty darn on the ball about how this stuff works, why do we suck so badly at our jobs? And it's because we've exorcised the creativity out of the equation.
We think that people are always going to react in a certain way within a certain context, which is not only insulting to our ultimate customer, but it means we're not doing our jobs properly. So I think the way forward for all of this, and AI being AI is great because we have a new bar to entry, a new barrier to entry, which is higher than it's been before. If you can't write or produce something better than AI can do, you're out of a job.
And that's a good thing because we've got enough idiots in this industry, we don't need any more, right? So this is all of those people that you see on various websites of which I will not mention, who say, I'll give you a 500 word article for $20, which is going to be SEO up the wazoo. All of those guys are instantly out of a job because most of them can't do a better job than AI, which is great. It is darwinian, right?
They are going to go the way of the dinosaurs and we want that to happen, which is great. But what's going to happen is that we're going to hit a ceiling where the effectiveness of what we're doing doesn't translate into sales. And the reason why we're doing any of this is for that s word. I'm sorry, but if you're in marketing, you are in sales.
And if you have a problem with that, get out and go and work for a bank, or go and flip burgers, or go and do something else, but make way for somebody else who actually realizes what their job is. So if we're in sales, if we're looking about influencing a buyer's experience, then at a certain point in time, we're going to realize that automation, AI, efficiency based metrics won't cut it anymore. I get what you're saying.
So what if someone is in the industry and they're starting to figure out that this really isn't working anymore? How do they convince their bosses? Or maybe even figure out how to be more effective with the creativity? Because if you're a one man team or a small team, that creativity drain can be pretty massive. Because if you're trying to think of everything by yourself, eventually you just feel tired all the time. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
The great thing about all of this, Brett, is that even if you're a one man team, you're not on your own. Because the people, there are people out there who not only will help you, they will fall over themselves to help you. And those are your existing customers. Your existing customers want you to do well because they've invested in you as a brand.
60% of people with a marketing with the title, with the word marketing in their title haven't spoken to a customer in the last six months, which is scandalous as far as I'm concerned. All of the questions that you need to know to be able to shape your value proposition, to generate resonance and salience in the minds of your new buyers, is in the hands of your existing customers, who will love to tell you because they want you to do well.
They want you to be better, because they want to know from an ego perspective. They want everybody to know that they back the right horse. Right. They want you to do well. But there's so many people with marketing in their job title who are afraid, who are frightened to pick up the phone. Oh, okay. Yeah, let's ask our customers. I'll put a survey together. No, you don't want to put a survey together. You don't need to do a. No, you pick up the phone and you call them old school.
You speak to them person to person like we did in the old days. The channel communication can change. Right? It doesn't have to be a phone. You can use Zoom, you can use various other things and record the conversation and use AI to highlight the salient points from the conference. All of that stuff, all good stuff.
But the point is, it's not up to you to sit there scratching your head, looking at the ceiling, thinking, what do I need to come up with creatively that's going to resonate with my target bias? Because you have people who know that it's called market orientation. Market orientation is the act of being humble enough as a marketer to realize that you don't have all the answers. You don't even have all the questions.
The instant that you become a seller instead of a buyer, any possible inkling or perception of the value exchange automatically becomes null and void because you're a vendor. So you cannot be trusted. The hardest thing that I have to do is to tell clients, often founder, CEO's, because they think they know more than others, you are not your target market anymore.
The instant that you became a vendor, your point of view has become irrelevant because you can't be on both sides of the table at the same time. You can't do it. You need to be market orientation. There's a whole branch of marketing just called market orientation, of which there are various protocols to follow to get to the result. I won't go into them at the moment because we'll be talking for another hour.
But that whole part of marketing exists for a reason, and the reason is the fact that we are marketers. We need to admit that we don't have all the answers. And that's a good thing because it reduces the amount of testing that we're doing, because we're not waving a wet finger in the air.
We're basing our creative and our executional decisions based upon feedback from living and breathing people who've actually put their hands in their pockets and bought whatever it is that we're selling, which has to be better than somebody living in some ivory towel within the organization saying, oh, I think the reason why people buy is because of x guarantee. You're wrong. So let's just say that someone does. Finally, the marketer company admits, I don't know everything.
Isn't there that type of stigma? If you tell your boss, I don't know everything, it looks really bad. And I'm not saying that it's terrible because we don't know everything. And that's just a, that's just a general, good way of thinking, we don't know everything. We are humans. We learn a whole bunch, and we always have to keep on learning. So how, how do you go about that saying, look, I don't know everything, but I think we need to talk to customers.
What do you think is, should they approach that with their boss? Because eventually you're going to have to approach that saying, look at our sales are down. How about we talk to the customers? What? You can either proactively engage that conversation or you can be reactively on the other end of that conversation. There's a reason why the tenure of a chief marketing officer in an organization is less than 14 months today. Because what we're doing today doesn't friggin work.
As marketers, we've been employed to affect change based upon a business turnaround calendar on quarters. Businesses have to report back to their shareholders, board, whatever, in three months. And the targets which are being set by marketers are set according to that. There is absolutely no way on earth that you can affect tangible change within a single calendar quarter.
Because it's not about what you do specifically as a marketer or what you do specifically as a marketing department, whether it's a department of one or whether it's a department of 50. Because marketing isn't the, marketing isn't the responsibility of the marketing department. Right. Marketing is responsible of the entire organization from the CEO downwards.
So unless you have that conversation with your boss and proactively drive that conversation to say, look, this isn't working, the way that we're going isn't working the way I think it's going to work better is if we actually go to the people who've shown their faith in us over the last weeks, years, months, whatever, by speaking to people who've put their hands in their pockets, so that we can come back with qualitative analysis, which we can then follow up with quantitative analysis before we
can then build a strategy, and then look at the segmentation, the targeting, positioning. This is all marketing 101, which 99% of people with marketing and their job titles don't even touch. They jump straight into tactical execution, which is the reason why it doesn't work. It's not rocket science. But if you don't do your homework, if you don't do your basics, because all of this stuff is multiplicative, what do I mean by that?
But if you screw up the diagnosis and or your strategy, your tactics are going to fail. And it's not down to you or your efforts or your willingness to work, it's because you're working with flawed information. Further upstream, you need to get the information from the rep, from representatives of your target audience, and then base this data on founding those insights. It's not about data. It's about interpreting that data to create insights that drive decisions. It's not data driven.
Marketing is a total misnomer. It's not about data driven. It's about being able to take the data to drive insights. And based on those insights, you can form creditable, educated decisions on what you need to do moving forward. So it's almost like you need, marketers need to have more discernment on what to do. And what I mean by discernment is like being wise about it, understanding the data, but also figuring out the right course of path.
Maybe you don't know the right course of path, so you talk to the customers or something like that, but you have that discernment of going. Look at it. I don't really know what's going on. Maybe we just need to talk to our customers to figure out the right course of path. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's not about numbers on their own, we have to interpret those numbers with what those customer behavioral drivers are. For instance, we worked with a client a few years ago.
Now, the client was selling a frozen dessert, ice cream, frozen yogurt, that sort of thing. Okay. And what they found was that as temperatures, the average temperatures went up into the low seventies, early eighties, mid eighties, high eighties, that sales of their product increased. Not a surprise, right? I think most people would have, would be quite unsurprised by that sort of statistic. Right.
But what was interesting is that as averaged daytime temperatures in that particular area continued to increase into the high eighties, into the early nineties, even to the mid nineties, you could see that sales of their product flatlined and actually started to reduce. Okay, so most people would look and say, what's going on here? People aren't buying our product, even though the weather's great, and this should be a good signal for purchase. So what do we do?
We spoke to customers, and the reason why people didn't buy the particular product when it got really hot is because it would melt. By the time they got it home, it was too hot. Right. So we advised the client to develop another kind of packaging where there was additional insulation, keeping the product cold for longer.
And then once we put together messaging and marketing campaigns to educate the customers about the existence of this new packaging and the effectiveness of this new packaging, sales started to rise again. Now, if we didn't interpret that data to come up with insights, where would we be? Would we still try to flog the same, the same, I won't call it dessert, but the same product and wondering why the sales weren't increasing.
If anything, the client would probably have fired us because they would say, hang on, we've taken you on board to increase sales and you've done a great job up until now. But now we're in the late July, middle of August, assuming we're in the north hemisphere, of course, and sales are going down.
So we probably need to have a new marketing agency or maybe a new ad agency, and the client will then be jumping from one agency to another trying to chase this efficiency maximum, which doesn't exist because the root reason as to the lack of efficacy of sales is not being sufficiently communicated. Like, for example, for me, I used to work at like a marketing, I used to be a marketer for a peripheral company for it was internal computer parts, it was keyboards.
They were well known for their internal cooling system for computers. And there were some times where I was saying like, hey, look, this isn't working. I would test it out. I would break some of their cooling stuff, like the brackets, and I would say, look at, this is a problem. It keeps on. I tested four of them. Three of them broke. Every time. Every time I took it off, I placed it on, took it off. I was like, you need to have metal on it. You need to have some type of reinforcement.
Because I'm a computer builder, if I'm building my computer and this thing breaks and it's 200, $200 to $200, I'm going to be upset because I have to buy a new one. And there's like a few other things about that. So could the marketer be their own customer sometimes, or to a certain extent, because I always try to do that.
When I was doing a tutorial for their software, I was like imagining myself as a first time customer going through this thing and I would map out how to do it and theyre like, this is the best tutorial ive ever seen. Im like, yes, because I pretended to be a customer that didnt know what the hell I was doing. And can it be just the higher ups that dont want to do actual marketing? And I have many stories about this company.
One time the guy in a meeting said that in 2018, 2019, oh, word of mouth is king now. And I was like, no, it's always been king. It's never been not king. And there was just some weird things, like they were going to do this product and it was going to use Windows Cortana when Windows ten was new, and I raised my hand being like, why are we using number three and dead last number three out of the other two that we should be using, which is Alexa and Google Assistant at the time.
And he didn't really have an answer for me and I was like, there's no point with this product. So can the marketer be the customer and still be effective at it, but still talk to the customer? But can the marketer be the customer at the same time as well? Absolutely. This is part of this fight between marketing and senior management, because there's more than one right answer, right, in marketing. In engineering, two plus two is always four. In marketing, there can be other right answers.
It doesn't just have to be one right answer. So, yeah, doing that customer centricity stuff, doing the stuff where you're doing the market orientation and putting your, putting yourself in the shoes of the customer and then validating that position with an actual customer. Absolutely. Of course you can do it. Of course you can do it. And I think it's easier to do it the smaller the department, right.
Because the larger the marketing department, the more sort of levels of bureaucracy you need to navigate before being able to do that and prove its efficacy. But absolutely, there's a hundred different ways. A lot of it depends on the product or service that you're selling, the industry that you're selling into, the category that you're selling into, the expectations of the client, and obviously the internal political environment of the organization that you're working within.
But absolutely, it can be done. It doesn't have to be all externally customer driven from day one. You can use that as a validation feedback loop once you've put that initial premise together yourself. And so how do we get back to that? I guess traditional marketing, I guess the best way of saying how do we get back to that part about it? Because I know schools teach it, to a certain extent, the traditional side, but how do we actually get back to good or effective marketing?
Because if there's 90, if you say 90% or a good majority of people are quote unquote marketers, then we have an issue with where do we find the good ones and how do we weed out those. Maybe bosses are trying to figure that out. Maybe marketing directors are trying to find out, maybe cmos are trying to figure out who's going to be effective marketing and who is just saying a bunch of crap.
I think it's something that marketers need to lead with before marketers with the brain in their heads get exercised out of the equation. The reality is marketing as a primary core business function is about growth. Growth is our job. It's the only job. Okay? Marketing isn't just marketing anymore. Marketing is sales. Marketing is operations. Marketing is customer support. Marketing is finance. And it's time for all of those disparate business units to rally around that new mental model.
What are the implications of this shift? Let's make it really practical. Number one, marketers need to be able to speak the language of the boardroom, the language of finance, right? And I think it's increasingly important for marketing to continue to have the skills that the business needs. We need to abandon all this marketing geek speak, all the vernacular that we love and we understand amongst ourselves and that we really start to communicate the way the business communicates.
Why are there so few marketers at board level positions? And the ones that are, why is their tenure so short? One of the reasons, I maintain, is that as marketers, we don't speak bored. Right. Marketing 101, what is it? It's being able to communicate, to influence a decision and communicate in a language which is understandable by your target audience.
Yet we go into a boardroom and we use all of this marketing terminology that we love to use, which scares all these logic driven, rational, process engineering geek bean counters. Scares them to death. We'll go in there and start talking about salience and excess share of voice and mental availability, and all of a sudden an Roi. Because the way we think of ROI, you say that to a finance person, they'll laugh you out the room, right?
We'll use all of these terms and these engineering economic finance types will think, oh, this is like some, this is some scary west coast tie dyed believing the power of the crystal, hippy dippy stuff, right? And so we're our own worst enemies.
If we can reframe the way that we talk about what we're doing in terms that the finance people can understand, that the CEO, the COO can understand and talk about tangible revenue generation in business terms, will automatically have the support of various members within the board because they'll understand what we're trying to do, even if they don't agree with it, even if they are still a bit scared about the process because it's not repeatable, regardless of example.
But they'll get what we're about. Instead we say, oh, yes, but look, we did this wonderful campaign and we got 2000 email addresses from this gated content and we got 100 likes and 2000 forwards and 27 comments. Great. Where's the money? Where's revenue? Where the sales, that's all that matters. Like I said at the beginning of our conversation, right, if it doesn't sell, it's not marketing. It's fluff. It's a waste of energy. Oh, brand awareness. This, that and the other.
Yeah. Okay. Once you're Coca Cola or Adidas or Nike or McDonald's, come back to me about brand awareness. For everybody else, it's about sales. It's about moving the needle, because it's the customer that pays all our wages. And technically, isn't sales part of brand awareness? Because if you're selling to somebody and they buy it, then they're aware of you. So it depends. If you're selling a commodity, I don't care what brand of socks I buy, washing powder, soap, I don't care.
I don't know, maybe you care a brand of coffee, I'm sure you care. Right? But we have to look at it not in isolation, but in context and within the framework of the direct and indirect competitors that we have within the business. We can't look at ourselves in isolation because that's not how customers look at us.
They look at us within a consideration space not only of competitors that we know of and identify as being competitors, but other businesses, other alternative positions, which maybe are nothing. Direct competitors with us. To use ice cream is another example. Supposing I'm an ice cream seller, okay, at the end of a long, hard day, maybe a customer wants to buy an ice cream. So you would think my only competitors are other ice cream sellers.
But that's not true, because maybe the customer wants a snow cone. Maybe the customer wants an ice cool glass of beer. Right? Now, you wouldn't think that those are direct competition to our ice cream, but actually they are, depending on the context. Yeah. Going back to what you said about marketers like understanding board speak, finance speak, would you almost say that work like the bridge or facilitator for all these other things as well?
Because if in the business, marketing is the business, basically. So to take a little bit from the Bible, we're basically the peacemakers of all these different types of departments, if we're good marketers, is what I'm hearing. I think you're right. Yeah, Brett, I think you're right. I think that's our potential potentially. Marketing is there, and if we're looking at the senior management or board level, right. Marketing is there to bring the voice of the customer to the board.
That's what we're there to do. And to do that, to be able to do that effectively. Certainly, we need to talk the talk, and we need to walk the walk if we're going to have any respect and weight in terms of our contribution to the conversations which are happening at that sort of level. And I think many times people with marketing and their job title fail to realize the responsibility that they have. With great power comes great responsibility. Right?
And so people listen to this episode, they're like, man, I want to know more about what you say. Where can people find you online? They can find me in all sorts of dark and dirty and murky places. Brett. No, I'm joking. The best and easiest way to get hold of me is to go and find me on LinkedIn. That's where I spend most of my time. Obviously, the website kexino.com, comma k dash I n o, gives you an outline of who we are, what we do, and why we think we're different.
But in terms of having a chat, taking these sort of conversations offline and going into more detail, I'm always available for people to have that chat, to agree with me, to disagree with me, to find out more about these sorts of basic ideas, because a rising tide lifts all boats, right?
And I think if we, as an industry, can be better, to be able to serve our clients better, I can't tell you how many times, at least once a week, I'm speaking to small business owners who've been screwed by people who call themselves marketing marketers, who've who've conned these small business out of not insubstantial amounts of money, which makes it doubly hard for people like me to be able to re instill that level of trust, but then also to pick up the pieces and build something tangible and
sustainable for that business after they've had their fingers burnt. So I think the more people who can be a greater awareness of the responsibility that we have as marketers for clients or within our own, the businesses that we're working for 24/7 not 24/7 but days a week, six days a week, it can only be a good thing. So find me on LinkedIn. Thankfully, there's only one G. Ranasena on LinkedIn. It's not exactly the. It's not exactly John Smith, is it?
You can find me, reach out to me, and I'll be happy to convince. All right, any final thoughts for listeners? Don't believe the B's. Don't believe the marketing bros crouching in front of lamborghinis, throwing gang signs because they haven't got a freaking clue what they're talking about. Don't go down that road, please. We've got enough idiots in this industry we don't need anymore.
On that note, thank you g, for joining digital coffee marketing beer and sharing your knowledge on marketing and how to be effective marketers. You're very welcome, Brett. Thanks again for having me on. And thank you as always. Please subscribe to this podcast and all your favorite podcasting apps. Even five star review really does help. And join us next week as we talk to a great butler in the PR industry. Alright guys, stay safe. Get to understand understanding how to be effective.
Talk to your customers because they probably really want to talk to you and see you next week. Later.