The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Everything You Definitely Don’t Know About Marketing (But Should), From 4 World Leading Experts!
Fri, 06 Dec 2024
Why is marketing so important for businesses? In this episode, we've picked the highlights from our conversations with Josh Kaufman, Scott Galloway, Rory Sutherland, Whitney Wolf Herd to bring you the TL;DR on how to succeed at marketing your business. Head to https://www.linkedin.com/doac24 to claim your credit. Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Josh: https://joshkaufman.net/ Scott: https://www.profgalloway.com/ Rory: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/rorysutherland Whitney: https://www.instagram.com/accounts/login/?next=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.instagram.com%2Fwhitney%2F%3Fhl%3Den&is_from_rle Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why is marketing crucial for businesses?
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Chapter 2: How can LinkedIn Ads help reach decision makers?
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Marketing is just who might be interested in this thing. And... A lot of it is the fundamental thing is if no one knows you exist, no one's going to be able to buy your thing. And so marketing is the process of attracting the attention of people who might be interested in the value that you're creating.
Chapter 3: What distinguishes marketing from sales?
And in an ideal world, making them curious, wanting to learn more, asking for additional information, engaging with what it is that you have. a lot of people conflate marketing and sales. To me, they're distinct processes. So marketing is the attracting attention and generating interest. And then sales is the process of convincing someone to buy and then getting them set up as a customer.
And a lot of marketing comes down to What is it exactly that you're trying to gather attention for? And where do those people generally hang out? What are they curious about? What are they already paying attention to?
What can you take advantage of or dovetail into in order to attract someone's attention at the right moment, at the right time, and make them aware that you have something that could benefit their life? Here's what it is. Here's how you can benefit from it.
Because people, many companies see it as like an annoyance. Like I've sold you the fucking thing. Why are you emailing me? And they treat you like you're a nuisance.
Yeah. Yeah. And that's a shame. Because really like those happy repeat customers are not just like your high lifetime value customers, the customers that will stick with you, keep spending money with you. They're also a primary source of marketing. Like word of mouth marketing is all happy customers telling other people who might benefit from your product that, hey, here's this wonderful thing.
You should probably check it out. And so, yeah, like things like post-sale support, sometimes customer reactivation. So like to your point earlier, it's a very straightforward marketing technique called reactivation. If you can contact Jack and say, hey, you bought candles from us last year. Would you like to buy candles from us this year? And get him to pick up just a couple more candles.
The cost of that promotion is potentially very small. You already know he exists. You already know that he's purchased. Can you just get him to do that again? Those are some of the most effective marketing sales campaigns that you can possibly run. But it also requires that they had a good experience with whatever it is that you're offering in the first place.
How has the lance of advertising and a brand building a reputation changed in your lifetime? And what is the most important thing for brands to understand now or some of the important things for brands to understand now if they are to be successful?
Yeah, so my first job in business school, I started a company called Profit Brand Strategy. That's now about 500 people. Now it's just called Profit. And the basic notion was, it was based on the principles of my professor my second year, David Ocker, who's considered the father of modern branding.
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Chapter 4: How has branding evolved in the digital age?
So the traditional metrics of branding, the traditional vehicles for branding, a brand identity and broadcast advertising that I've been preaching in brand strategy, the sun has passed midday.
If you look at my curriculum and the majority of curriculums and marketing departments, you could argue that we're just training people to go to work at Unilever or General Mills and be laid off 24 months later. branding has become much more about innovation and actual product quality. Now that extends into how you discover the product, how you absorb the product, the community around it.
But Tesla is a better product. Apple used to be an underpowered product with a great brand. Now it's a great brand with a superior product. So Airbnb is a much better product. Google is 10X better than what was there before it.
So supply chain, design, the way you absorb the product, its ease of use, it's moved from kind of what you call a brand economy to lack of a better term, an innovation economy. So rather than taking classes on advertising, I say take classes on supply chain or analytics or really understand industrial design. There was a general feeling that all product quality had maxed out.
Chapter 5: Why is customer experience vital for repeat purchases?
And then the internet came along and unlocked all this product innovation. So cars, they felt it hit kind of a peak in terms of product quality. And then all of a sudden with the internet and GPS, you could tune a car up wirelessly. You can unlock the doors. There was all kinds of crazy things you could do with it in addition to EV.
I mean, there's just been so much actual innovation around the product. And what are the most valuable companies in the world have in common? They either spend no money on advertising or they're spending less. Apple's the strongest brand in the world, at least a consumer brand.
I would argue the strongest brands in the world universities, but it's reallocated six or $7 billion out of broadcast advertising into its channel, into stores. It built 550 templates to the brand. And I think of that as almost part of the product. My 12 year old and I were bored yesterday, so we went to the Apple store. So that's kind of consuming the product. And I ended up buying
screensavers and new cases that I'm sure are 90 points of gross margin that I could find to FNAC or Best Buy or someone for less money. But we wanna be in that store and in that environment. So it's moving out of pre-purchase broadcast advertising into the distribution channel and into innovation. But the traditional norms of marketing or branding as I taught it, that shit's over.
Don Draper has been drawn and quartered. If you're watching a lot of advertising, it means your life hasn't worked out. The majority of people who are technically literate or wealthy can avoid 80, 90% of advertising now. They watch Netflix, they subscribe to Spotify, they live in cities where they have local officials that demand you can't see a billboard from a park.
So the advertising is a tax on the poor and the technologically illiterate. So it's moved to more distribution and innovation. But for God's sakes, you know, avoid falling into the trap of thinking that the masters of the universe are branders or advertisers.
Having worked in the advertising industry, this is a conversation we have all the time with clients, which is that you'll meet a certain type of client who's very, who's religious about the bottom of the funnel. If I can't track it and I don't know exactly- I won't do it. I won't do it. Then you'll sometimes meet the opposite, which is someone who just loves to spend on brand. They're both wrong.
I mean, Mark Ritz, very good marketing professor, always talks about the importance of both-ism. And he says, it's vitally important that when I actually speak about the importance of brand marketing, that you do not interpret this as denigrating digital marketing. In fact, I go a bit further and say the bottom of the funnel in many respects is the thing you have to optimise first.
Because there's no point in actually, if there's a bottleneck at the bottom of the funnel, if there's some constraint or a problem or a failing, you know, if you have very poor conversion, okay, there's no point in spending money on advertising because you'll just introduce more people to a disappointing experience.
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Chapter 6: What is the balance between brand and performance marketing?
Because if the answer to that is hardly anybody, then okay, you don't know the exact shape of the S curve, but you know the growth is going to be pretty spectacular. And so the thing to understand, I think, in a market is to what extent does your product actually convert someone to something. And then the lifetime value.
And so you'd start with repeat purchase, then you go to conversion, and then you'd work your way up. But what tends to happen is that when people are obsessed with quantification of everything, okay, It's worth noting, by the way, that all big data comes from the same place, the past. All right?
So there's a limit to how much big data, particularly if you've had some major event like a pandemic in between, how much big data can actually tell you about the future in any case. As David Ogilvy famously said, you're not advertising to a standing army, you're advertising to a moving parade. People are coming in and out of market all the time. And so you're absolutely right.
You get some people who are just fame junkies. And by the way, I suppose there are brand categories where that's appropriate. If it's sold through retailers, you know, in other words, if it's mostly sold in the physical space... You might argue to an extent, you know, for, let's say, a Burger King or a McDonald's, that's not a totally crazy position.
Although it is now because suddenly they've got to think about delivery and whether people order through the app or order through an intermediary because it has a major bearing on their business.
But at the same time, yeah, I mean, the tragedy is this idea, this false dichotomy between brand advertising and what you might call performance or digital marketing, as if you have to be in one camp or the other. Where is the balance, though, and how does one go about it?
Is it just intuitive?
There are figures on this. So if you look at the work of Les Burnett, for example, and Peter Field, The ratio shifts a little bit, but generally they'll stipulate a figure around about the 60-40 mark in favour of what you might call brand mass media targets. expenditure. Because they have a mutually beneficial relationship.
The first 20 years of my life was spent in direct marketing and actually, you know, because direct marketing was unfashionable, we spent a lot of time denigrating advertising spend because they got much bigger budgets than us, not necessarily rightly, but they were also, you know, much more indulged than we were because they didn't have to prove effectiveness down to the same sort of level of statistical significance.
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Chapter 7: How has personal branding changed in modern marketing?
When you sell something, the counterfactual is that you assume that you wouldn't have sold it otherwise. But if you sell something for a high price... You can't in fact determine that without your advertising, you wouldn't have sold it for that premium price. So it's to some extent, this quest for perfect measurement to reduce marketing to a kind of Newtonian physics is a bit of a false God.
fame you talked about fame there fame can also be applied in the topic of personal branding as well obviously social media has allowed us all now to build our personal brands you've got the gary vaynerchuks of the world who have built you know you know their companies are famous because they've they've branded a person at ogilvy and within your sort of your marketing what kind of shift have you seen in the desire for people to become brands themselves and how valuable do you think that is
I think advertising always had those personal brands. And if anything, it's slightly diminished actually. Really? Campaign Magazine always did a very good job of, you know, making sure there were 30 or 40 sort of famous names within the business. That just happens in a different medium now, right? It happens on LinkedIn. Yes, I agree.
I mean, you know, so, I mean, one of the greatest things, for example, there's a wonderful, wonderful guy who now must be, I don't want to name his age, but, you know, he's, you know, past retirement age called Dave Trott. You probably know him. Yeah, I know Dave Trott. Okay. He'd be a brilliant interviewee, by the way, on the show. Absolutely fantastic.
But what has been absolutely fantastic is that, you know, he's a... glorious advertising mind. I mean, just an absolute ornament to the industry. And he, through Twitter and through blogging, has had a completely new lease of life and influence to a completely new generation of people. And has been hugely valuable as a teacher.
And what's interesting about that actually is that of course, he does that unpaid. And one of the things that is complicated about this new world, the most valuable thing I often do in the course of a working week is either to give something away or to put somebody in touch with something else.
Neither of which, you know, that kind of barter, neither of those things is in any way monetizable, is it? Well, reciprocity would say otherwise. No, I suppose you've just got to rely on a high degree of reciprocity in some respect. I mean, it always bothers me about this, which is that we're in a business advertising which is paid by the hour, which is a terrible way to pay for ideas.
Because the value of something has no relation to the time devoted to its inception. And it is genuine. I mean, I always joke about this. The most valuable thing I probably did was almost accidentally my working life, which was to go to the government's behavioral insights team.
And as a sort of fanatical vapor, I'd been a longtime smoker and had been able to quit for the first time successfully by switching to vaping. It took me a little while, but once I'd made the switch, I'd never gone back. Yeah. And I went to the government's behavioral insights team and I said, look, these things are coming over from both Japan and the United States. They're electronic cigarettes.
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