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🌱 "How do things end?" - Joe Macleod about the role ends play in sustainability
42 Plays2 months ago
Joe Macleod designs ends. He is the Founder of the worlds first customer ending business. Joe is a veteran of the product development industry with decades of experience across service, digital and product sectors. His Clients include, Volvo, Logitech, EY, Fairphone, Spotify, and Microsoft. He is a keynote speaker and author of two books on endings which we will talk about a little bit later.
If you want to read Joe's books he gifted us some 25% discount codes for his exciting and insightful books: "Ends!" book - code: EB55V // "Endineering" book - code: RN25W // And if you want to take his course - here is a 25% discount for that: 25offendscohort
About the FutureStrategist podcast and Florian:
Hi, my name is Florian Schleicher I am a marketing strategist focussed on sustainability. Having worked with big corporates, NGOs, start-ups and agencies for over 15 years, I know my way around a lot of challenges. Let me help solve your challenges with my know-how and my Marketing Studio FutureS.
Also: If you enjoy reading, be sure to check out my FutureStrategies newsletter. I write about marketing, strategies and sustainability available every three weeks and I am sure you will find a lot of exciting and helpful insights there.
And if you have a challenge that keeps you and your company from doing your best work and this challenge is about marketing, strategies or sustainability, then I’d love to get to know you and your projects!
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Most companies have spent so much money building, marketing, branding, experience and engagement with the consumer. They throw it away so easily and quickly at the end of product life. You've got to have some sort of relationship with the consumer in that. And endings is that type of thing where you can say, we're investing in this, but we want to make sure the consumer comes along very much with us.
00:00:27
Speaker
Welcome to the Future Strategies podcast. My name is Florian Schleicher. I'm a marketing strategist focused on sustainability and I'm your host here. Every two weeks you can listen to my interviews with international experts and together we will explore where marketing strategies and sustainability intersect with great examples, insightful stories, and a look behind the scenes of some amazing brands. If you are curious how to apply all of that for your own business, I do this for my clients from all around the world through inspiring workshops, guiding mentoring, and an exciting on online academy. But more on that at the end of this episode. Now let's jump into today's interview. My guest today is Joe Mcleod. He designs and
00:01:13
Speaker
He's the founder of the world's first customer ending business. Joe is a veteran of the product development industry with decades of experience across service, digital, and product sectors. His clients include Volvo, Logitech, EY, Fairphone, Spotify, and Microsoft. He's a keynote speaker and author of two books on endings, which we will talk about a little bit later.
00:01:39
Speaker
So without further ado, welcome to today's show, Joe. Thanks very much. Delighted to be here. Great to hear that. So let's begin with endings. How did you end up designing ends? Well, it wasn't something I just jumped out of bed one day and thought I must design endings. It's been actually a very long journey for me. Way back, sort of 2005, I guess, I was um working as ah as a part-time lecturer at design school and I set some projects around waste and rubbish in the world. and All the designers went off a couple of weeks and then came back and um what we designed was more stuff to communicate the issue of waste and rubbish in the world. and At the time, I thought this was wrong, deeply wrong, but I just didn't know why.
00:02:31
Speaker
and And it took me years to sort of build up a sort of a deeper philosophy around what that act of creation means and why we've got this so wrong in terms of endings, in terms of responsibility. So ah after that time, I've done some short projects around closure experiences, which is sort of different. The emotional experience of closure, although certainly related,
00:02:57
Speaker
And then I went off, I paused that for well, a few years, good few years, a decade or so. And then I was sort of doing it in the background while I was doing my career in design. So I went off and done.
00:03:08
Speaker
work for big companies, small companies across service digital product sectors. And then around 2015, I returned to the issue and I thought I should dig into it a little bit deeper. And I started with death and the and attaching that to the witnessing and the philosophy of experience around endings and how that's around consumption. And this whole thing sort of really blew up in my mind and I I felt I really had to tell people about this in a deeper, bigger way. yeah I was going to write a medium article or do a conference speech about it. but
00:03:48
Speaker
Then I thought, I've got to write a book and i I'm really dyslexic. So I really wasn't keen on writing a book. And then so I wrote the first book and that came out in 2017 called Ends. I then started doing talks all around the world, having conversations, started doing training. And then the pandemic late allowed me a period of time to sort of um dig into and the following book, Endoneering. And that sort of laid the groundwork really for sort of genre of design really, where with pretty much focused on designing endings. And yeah now I train people, I do a public training program online every quarter, which I can give you ah you and your listeners a discount on. And then I also work with lots of companies on helping them train there.
00:04:36
Speaker
employees and helping them create endings. That's my last 10 years of my life, very short time, but that's how I ended up here. It it wasn't it took me a long time to get the the mindset and the vocabulary and the philosophy.
00:04:53
Speaker
Yeah. Right to talk about this thing. And I also think it would have been weird if you would have told me, yeah, ever since I was a child, my dream was thinking about endings. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So this came about, yeah, just taking the world. So what I find really interesting is that humans have always had a very complex relationship with endings. I mean, at the beginning, it was all about death.
00:05:19
Speaker
Different cultures had varied attitudes towards endings, and they also had rituals surrounding death. I think there are still some cultures in Southeast Asia where they dig out their death, their people, and celebrate with them.
00:05:39
Speaker
their life and their job. Whereas we we hide our dead people in graveyards and we visit them maybe once a year, maybe not even then. And I think this can also be linked to like, we are afraid of the unknown. We don't know what happens afterwards. Coming back to engineering also,
00:06:02
Speaker
Why do you think do companies have such a big problem with thinking about endings? Is it because of our culture or is it something else? I think it's that's the key issue really, is that and I think about this a lot. if and You mentioning the experiencing, witnessing of of um death or endings in different cultures is a different experience.
00:06:28
Speaker
and um For example, I think if the Industrial Revolution happened in Japan and we create the consumer boom in Japan, I think we would have a different relationship with death because they have a thing called animism and then they respect and do sort of funerals for objects and products. However, that isn't how history works. so we so created and started the Industrial Revolution in Northern Europe. Northern Europe had the Protestants and previous to that the Catholics in a dominant position to lay out the foundations of that society. though there's some Those groups, and I talk about this a lot in the in the first book, the the relationship with consumption and and the relationship with heaven and death and
00:07:13
Speaker
that they can then link into a different type of relationship with the with the experience of endings in in products. For example, if the difference between moving towards death in the Catholic religion, you can correct path in terms of renouncing sins and correcting before you get to to to to death and therefore getting into heaven. So you're super correcting all the way. So you're always thinking about the end. But in the Protestant religion, you don't get those as opportunities. So it pushes the the any decision or control ah of an ending into the into the distance. and And I think those sort of deep foundational relationships change a lot of things as well.
00:08:00
Speaker
I mean, just as an aside, I think three of the key aspects of of the Protestant religion is things like jobs, the relationship we have with jobs. There was three good jobs in the Catholic religion, and but in the Protestant religion, any job done well with care and thought was considered a good job in the eyes of God. And therefore we created a purpose to a lot of people, and we still have that today. I mean, people think a lot about their career past, think that's about education, and but actually it's a lot to do with the Protestants. Then borrowing was changed in the Protestants when they they came to power. And probably most importantly, a relationship with fasting. if um And if you again, to to your point,
00:08:46
Speaker
Different societies around the world have a different relationship with fasting. Fasting is an opportunity in the religious spiritual calendar to remove yourself from the abundance of life and then reflect upon how lucky you are. and mean Martin Luther removed that very early on in the Protestant uprising and the years and decades after that.
00:09:09
Speaker
And we lost that skill. So we haven't got this, this muscle memory of reflection about the abundance of life and group, group reflection upon it. I mean, these are really big picture things, which are pre-industrial revolution, but these things laid a big, deep foundation to frame consumption. Yeah. Very interesting. Moving on from the historical and the philosophical part. Sure.
00:09:37
Speaker
what what What is the problem even? like Why is it so important to think about endings also when we think about sustainability? Sure. And not bringing it right down to a practical level, the opportunity space at the end just hasn't been investigated in terms of business direction. In many businesses, we look at the onboarding and usage periods as the place to really lay down meaning, purpose, engage with the consumer, build great products. Brilliant. We've been doing that for you know decades, centuries.
00:10:11
Speaker
The off-boarding, now we're looking into things like circularity, extended producer responsibility, and and also in terms of adding meaning and purpose at the end in terms of retaining brand equity. The drop in the communication, the relationship, the bonding between provider and consumer drops off a cliff at the end. And there's a massive lack of engagement there.
00:10:39
Speaker
I mean, if you look at circularity, for example, I end up speaking and going to a lot of circularity conferences, I am amazed how little we talk about the consumer experience. yet Yet, the consumer experiences everything about consumption. If you talk to somebody about a product that has no interest in consumer experience, that's a product that's going to fail. And we are passionate in terms of product development about the consumer experience. Yet at the end, it's almost like we're not talking about the same thing at all. yeah and And things that we buy just end up on these massive landfills. yeah like There is images of clothes that are just being thrown away. I can also remember the packages from Amazon that are lost and that are just thrown away than our electronics that we have.
00:11:32
Speaker
What happens to them? What happens to the cars? There's just so much waste that we generate, not as a first stage waste. We don't produce it wasted. But in the end, after I have used my phone, I need to get rid of it. Absolutely. And and what I find fascinating is There's a thing called the peak end rule introduced by Daniel Kahneman, a great ah psychologist. And this rule, it suggests that people judge an experience largely on how it felt at the most intense point yep and at its end. yeah And so what we associate with things is not so much the total sum of everything or the average usage period, but like the first big moment.
00:12:22
Speaker
And then the end. And still, a lot of companies don't think about this. No, it's amazing, isn't it? We've got this very... ah Lots of scientific data around a particular behavior like that. Yes, it's absolutely amazing that we don't consider any aspect of of of that that part of the experience. And I think building on that, the if you look at the type of experience that we're familiar with as consumers, and and pretty much everyone alive has grown up with this model. I love buying stuff, I love owning stuff, and I'm comfortable just throwing things away.
00:12:59
Speaker
And now we've got to a point where we're far more reflective about the damage that's doing, as you pointed out. And if you look at the sophistication of what we're doing in psychology, at the onboarding in terms of triggering people by their very demographic and encouraging them, empowering them, it empowerment is an incredible, powerful tool, and it's so celebratory of individualism.
00:13:28
Speaker
And what we end up doing at the end of the consumer lifecycle in terms of psychological stuff is using the most oldest types of psychological triggers that are things like guilt and shame. I mean, talking about religion, many religions use that for thousands of years. so The trouble with those experiences and emotions at the end, they're very unactionable, where you can very much control onboarding in terms of, I buy this, I measure for this, I pick, I choose, I do this. like But at the end, like and do you were talking about electronics or textiles,
00:14:05
Speaker
yeah We have very little control or engagement and or actionable engagement really. It's about making choices at the end and I feel abandoned by the consider by the provider of the product. I feel guilty or shameful about my consumption and like and I feel unable to really control or do anything at the end. and so I think these types of things, this so opportunity space that I'm talking about at the end, it's so barren at the moment that we can put so much in there and um really, I think, improve consumers and far more. Yeah, definitely. Let's go a little bit deeper on the practicalities. Yeah, sure. Are there some companies out there who are already doing a good job when it comes to managing ends? And if so, what are they doing?
00:14:56
Speaker
Yeah, so there's there' a few companies, I talk about them in the engineering book. So let's look at different sectors. One of the sectors I think is interesting is banking in terms of credit cards. There's a credit card company called Deconomy, and what they do is a credit card based on your carbon allowance. You set a carbon allowance, and then you go out, buy things with this credit card, and you load you load it up with money, for example, as normal credit cards.
00:15:25
Speaker
But it will stop you when you get to your assessed carbon allowance, let's say 20 kilograms of carbon a week or a month or something. And then once you get there, you're not topped out in terms of, I can't spend anymore. It's a matter of like, I can't exposed and i can't buy anymore.
00:15:43
Speaker
I can't consume any more carbon." And what that does is changes the mindset entirely, not from a individualistic consumer indulgence. It changes it to a reflective, long-term impact mindset. And that's partly the problem space that we're in, is that We create these incredibly powerful individualistic behaviors are onboarding and in usage. And at the end, we ask people as individuals to do good for society. And these are in almost polar opposite experiences.
00:16:22
Speaker
Another one I like to use is Kaya Cars. I think they do a really good example with with the seven year warranty. So the seven year warranty came out like 15 years ago, but what's interesting when they came to market is it disrupted that marketplace from a lot of other warranties were shorter by then, but seven years was quite a disruptive thing.
00:16:43
Speaker
But the interesting thing is seven years is a void. Like humans can think up to five years fairly accurately, but it becomes really foggy after five years. So seven years is like this void. And putting their products into that marketplace, there since doing that, they're their global market share doubled, their customers are some of the most satisfied in the industry, and their so and their customers are happier with the seven-year warranty and every other aspect of the product offering. So if you've said to someone, I'm going to create a car company based on ah a warranty period of somebody coming back to the funeral of the product, people would think you're crazy, but that can be a market, you know, im a market winner.
00:17:25
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And ah one company where we both have a friend, which is Verena from Fairphone, who I also had on the show, they also give out this warranty.
00:17:36
Speaker
that the phone will still be usable after, I think, what what do they say, like, software updates for 10 years or something like that? Yeah. One company that I also saw doing this is Le Crecy. So, they're producing pans, that's where they're coming from, and they give out a 40-year warranty.
00:17:56
Speaker
budy their pants are really, really ro robust. Yes. And I recently bought two of them. It's always been my dream. I love cooking. Yeah. And they they stood for just the highest quality for me, but I wasn't aware of the warranty thing. And then I got those two pants and I said also to my girlfriend, okay, we have to be really careful with those pants.
00:18:18
Speaker
And then looking at the packaging, opening it, and there was a flyer in there where it said, okay, this product is good for the next 40 years. I was so impressed because it gives so much confidence and trust into this brand that I know, okay, they're going to take care of of everything.
00:18:37
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that projection is really important. So often we buy without acknowledging the end of the product lifecycle at all. So certainly, fast fashion is very redundant in terms of its longevity. You're going to buy it for maybe a few, like the the worst of fast fashion, maybe a ah few and cycles of wearing it and washing it.
00:18:56
Speaker
And also it may be thinking it's just the season that if we that fashion seasonal turnover is mind boggling. But we also have got it in tech as endless improvements to technology, which sometimes aren't really required by the or asked for by the consumer, which is pushing, pushing, pushing. And um these are big, big problem spaces, I think. Yeah.
00:19:22
Speaker
And coming back to Fairphone, such as Inspiring Company, I've done work with them and they've all become engineers. They went through a lot of the programs. So, yeah, um' I'm really proud of them as having them as a client.
00:19:35
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. And one example that was also in your book that struck me was Netflix, a company that you might not associate with being good at endings, but what they say is they are proud of a no-hustle online cons cancellation and members can leave when they want and come back when they want, which is basically saying, here's the door. It's open whenever you want to leave.
00:19:59
Speaker
But it also transmits such a confidence as a brand. And then coming to marketing where brands can use this is saying, hey, we're so confident that our product is good and great that you will come back and you don't want to leave us. Whereas other companies, they bind you to these contracts where they say, okay, can't leave us for next two years, which is the opposite approach.
00:20:23
Speaker
Absolutely. ah when you so I go through doing projects for companies and looking at their ending experience for the consumer. and So many, when you put it down and and spread out the customer lifecycle, at the beginning, it's like, welcome in, we're really delighted to have you.
00:20:40
Speaker
And then after usage, it's like, go away. a but It's not our problem. That's your local municipal groups problem. It's society's problem. It's the then the environment's problem, obviously. But it's just so clear to sort of see this redundancy. And it's not just the redundancy of the the product because it's physically not capable anymore.
00:21:02
Speaker
i I find the real shocking thing is that the redundancy of that relationship that most companies have spent so much money building, marketing, branding, experience and engagement with the consumer. They throw it away so easily and quickly at the end of product life.
00:21:20
Speaker
Yeah. there's There's recently been a study, I think, where the outcome was that consumers are willing more to switch to a new device if they feel that their transition will be smoother and respectful of their previous loyalty. So I think it's it's such a no-brainer to have this.
00:21:41
Speaker
But if if now there is someone, we know that there are lots of marketing managers and heads of marketing listening, what would be your suggestion to them how they can integrate the approach of engineering into their products, but also into their marketing outreach then?
00:22:00
Speaker
I think the first thing you've got to do is really ask yourself what's happening at the end for our product. So many companies have no idea. I asked one company once, and I ah knew roughly what the how their product ended. And I asked people in the inside the company who were creating the product, and they had unbelievably little knowledge about how their product ended. And it was so way off the reality. they weren't even defo So in the course that I do,
00:22:31
Speaker
and the teachings, i e there's broadly eight types of endings consumers experience. And I find it really interesting in terms of defining endings, the companies haven't even, they don't even know what is their most common ending for their customers. So for example, a timeout ending, if you package products, they have some sort of timeout ending. For example, food does, food will expire over a period of time.
00:22:56
Speaker
And then you get like credit out endings when the the amount of money is gone, for example. And there's eight different types of those. And when you go into a company and they don't need even understand the the customer relationship enough to see why and how that product ends and what sort of definition their particular product ends,
00:23:17
Speaker
the The ignorance is pretty shocking, to be honest. this So the first thing you need to do is go and ask and go and look and and start asking the question. In fact, the the one thing I would recommend to anyone listening to this thing is in your next product meeting, just ask the question, how does this end and see how disruptive that very simple question is.
00:23:41
Speaker
That's a good question. Do you know any companies that are like the beacons of endings? One company that always comes to mind when when thinking about sustainability, of course, is Patagonia, where they have this worn wear initiative. We can say, okay, I can contribute. I can give it back to someone and repair it, reuse it, recycle it in a way. Any other companies that come to your mind?
00:24:11
Speaker
Well i think it's only going is just still on that one for a moment but if if you are if i look at other companies. They pull away from engagement at the end and i cut off the relationship.
00:24:25
Speaker
And where onboarding, if any marketing people are listening, you know you've got way more engagements with the consumer onboarding than just one single route in. yeah You know, you'll be crazy just to have shops, you would have a social media account, you would have press, you would have ah emails and newsletters, and you'll be out there doing all sorts of things. now um Now reflect that to the end of the consumer experience and imagine you pull away to being absolutely silent.
00:24:54
Speaker
And so what Patagonia have done is they're building a vocabulary and an engagement at the end. So one one part of that is is mending. So they've offered up a capability to for the individual to extend the product relationship. We're going to mend this for you so you can live with it longer. And so that's a whole thing there, a whole background there.
00:25:19
Speaker
They've then said, like we can take this off you and resell it and mend it ourselves. So that's a whole other type of engagement. And then like they will also take that and if they can't mend it, they'll shred it and put it into other parts of their business where they remake things from from and core materials. But the fact is they're there, they've got all of these vehicles to capture the engagement, capture the, capture the conversation and inspire the consumer that the consumer doesn't walk away from their relationship ever going, I feel shame, I feel guilt, I don't know what to do. So thinking about it in terms of a mirror image of like, you've got so many engagements on boarding, you need to sort of mirror those off boarding.
00:26:05
Speaker
and I'd say Fairphone does the same. like They are engaged in making sure you extend your product life. i mean Arguably, Fairphone is a lot more complicated because it's a technical product, but they've also got and a another aspect of their off-boarding in the mirror world. is the They've built up a community that are really engaged in keeping their product um ah extend it so There's a very active community with Fairphone who are digging into the tech, making versions of the Android operating system that pushes the boundaries of even what Fairphone understand of their capability.
00:26:43
Speaker
And they're all helping at the end. It's active. The end is community orientated. And then Fairphone are also supplying materials for those people, instructions for those people, which um and and ah and then they're also taking products back and and doing other things with them. So think about in terms of what are you doing at the end in terms of those engagements and how you might mirror your marketing engagements with off-boarding engagements.
00:27:12
Speaker
So let me play devil's advocate here a little bit. Sure. This all sounds amazing. But as both you and I know, for many companies, it's all about making profit. And in the end, they will say, first, I have the KPIs that I'm measured by, which is probably get more people to use it, yeah yeah keep the users. Yeah.
00:27:35
Speaker
And the second thing is there needs to be a return on investment for everything nowadays. Now, we know that focusing just on profit and not considering people and the planet is what's part of the problem, but how can we convince those managers who are looking for an ah ROI for endings?
00:27:57
Speaker
I'd say any business that's got as far as thinking, what's our circularity approach? What's our ethical approach? What's our extended producer responsibility approach? You've obviously got to a point where we've put money into that part of the business.
00:28:12
Speaker
you're going to be standing there thinking we've done all of the material stuff, we've done all the efficiency stuff, we've done all the circularity stuff. What have we done for our consumers in this experience? So if you look at that, all of the initiatives around those ending experiences that we're being asked to do as businesses for saving the planet, environmental concerns, sustainability, circularity, ESG, all of these things,
00:28:38
Speaker
you've got to have some sort of relationship with the consumer in that. And endings is that type of thing where you can say, we're investing in this, but we want to make sure the consumer comes along very much with us in this. it's not and And I think Greenwashing is a good example of how that fails, that we've got so many businesses who who tell us in marketing that they're sustainable, they're green, they're doing circularity stuff. No one's experiencing that because they're still, in a consumer experience sense, failing to do an ending. So they're still doing the consumer experience, drop it off a cliff at the end. the So that cradle to grave thing isn't just a conversation about material matter, it's got to is got to move up into an experience about the consumer lifecycle.
00:29:28
Speaker
and A good thing I like to mention to to people when I'm talking about this stuff is Coca-Cola invented the 2-liter fully recyclable plastic bottle.
00:29:42
Speaker
Mm-hmm. When did they do that? I know the answer because I remember from our first conversation. So it's like this. This would have been, and that's what I told you last time was maybe like 10 years ago. It's like the 1970s. Yeah.
00:29:57
Speaker
and so we we've been We've succeeded in lots of these etc these some these issues by creating the technology there, and we just haven't created a consumer experience to go along with it.
00:30:13
Speaker
so If you want to throw your money away in circularity, extended producer responsibility, ECG targets, material investment, i don't know new product recycling techniques, fine. But if you don't do a consumer experience with it, you're going to be at the end of that consumer lifecycle with your circularity targets and other efficiencies with your trousers around your ankles without consumers along there with you. Instead, you can have your consumers at the end who will champion you, will be loyal, and they'll and they'll also be experiencing something which isn't shame. Yeah. I think that's such a powerful message because in the end, trust is important. And if I can trust a company that they will take care of me, the things that I buy, this is also something to do, I think, with the sunk cost fallacy.
00:31:05
Speaker
Because if I buy something and then I regret it, and if I then say, yes, but you might have bought this, but it will get to be used again, we will take care of it. I think that that's such a powerful message. ah so And that partnership, but I mean, we spend such a lot of time feeling like we're you know ah within within a partnership with a company and it is powerful, isn't it? And and you feel abandoned when it does when it goes wrong at the end.
00:31:33
Speaker
Yeah, before we go to the three final or end questions, yeah do you have a question for me? When you look in the landscape, maybe of like what you're doing and talking to marketeers and especially around sustainability, which I think is your target, how do marketeers feel? because i I think, and this is what I experienced on the course a lot, is that you train for years and then all of a sudden you feel very trapped and feeling like you're doing the wrong thing all the time. You feel like you've got blood on your hands and I think many designers feel like that.
00:32:08
Speaker
And when people go through the course that have been marketers and working with brand, they're so relieved because they feel like they can get into something in the sort of reflection world. So how are marketers feeling in this in this world? And I guess emotionally, yeah, um emotionally probably more than anything.
00:32:30
Speaker
That's a very tough question. How to tap into the psychology of marketeers? I can tell you from my experience what I felt working so for some big brands. I worked for McDonald's, for example, and I loved working there. I learned a lot. It's an amazing company on how they integrate marketing there. But at the end of a lot of days, I felt like, okay, so I created a billboard.
00:32:56
Speaker
I created a new burger with new ingredients. What did I really do? And this is something that I think a lot of marketeers also feel like I'm just thinking about things. I'm not doing anything with my hands anymore. like That's the reason why I like gardening, for example. I can get my hands dirty. I can do something. and Also becoming an entrepreneur and having my own business now.
00:33:22
Speaker
I get to make my hands dirty in a different way than just managing stuff. and I think a lot of marketeers, they are overwhelmed. They are overworked. They have to take care of so many things. Technology is evolving so fast. Consumer behavior is changing.
00:33:39
Speaker
and There are so many things they need to consider at any given point in time that when they might listen to this conversation and they say, yes, ah super interesting conversation, but I already have so much on my plate. I can't think about endings now because I just need to manage all the projects that I have.
00:34:00
Speaker
So I think there's a lot of overwhelming border lining, maybe even sometimes on burnout for some people where they say, yeah this is not sustainable. And it definitely has something to do with the way companies operate.
00:34:16
Speaker
jumping and hustling from one quarter of a result to the next, yeah measuring success in hard KPIs, yeah marketing. When I started, the internet was new. Now I feel really old and it was not as fast as it is nowadays. And I think endings and ends have this final thing that they think about maybe before going to bed. I i i do i totally understand. i I think there's a lot of people, and I totally agree with the aspect of business, the model, the broader model of sales quarters hasn't changed. And
00:35:03
Speaker
it is That's, I think, quite worrying that we haven't changed a lot the fundamentals we see. It feels like we're pushing the same stuff ah around all the time. I remember chatting to somebody. I used to do a ah talk about, I think it was it was a big cable company.
00:35:22
Speaker
the And they used to do, if you wanted to leave that company, you had to endure a one hour sales interview with a customer service, a professional salesperson. And so can you imagine like the misselling which goes on in that one hour, the bullying, the manipulation and and just out of sheer sort of accident. I was at a conference and I bumped into the guy who was head of head of that department and who used to run a lot of those things. Weirdly, he ended up ah working for a funeral company after that, so we were talking about endings on lots of levels. But he said a big part of the problem was every month, at the end of the month, he'd have senior management come to him and tell him they've got to close all these sales and do all of these figures.
00:36:14
Speaker
and It was just they couldn't have ah had didn't have any other route out to um fulfill their monthly targets or their quarterly targets or any of these other things. and yeah It's easy you from a distance to make these judgments about these businesses, but the fundamentals, like you say, unless we do some of those big things, then it's going to become just speak and talk and fodder.
00:36:39
Speaker
yeah Okay, Joe, the final three questions. Sure. So first is, what is good marketing to you in three words? Following the user. Nice. I like that. What is the future of marketing?
00:36:57
Speaker
i I've got to say endings, haven't I? I think it's we've got so much hanging on that last quadrant of the consumer lifecycle in terms of controlling waste and reclaiming and recycling. We've got to get the consumer in um and marketing a meaning in there. Meaning is everything, that emotional attachment to meaning, and it's barren at that point, part of the consumer lifecycle. Yeah.
00:37:22
Speaker
Final question, what book would you like to recommend here? Wow. so oh So many really, but there was one called it came out a couple of years ago, and it's called Ministry of the Future. Have you heard of that? Yeah, I've heard of it, yes. And that is, it's a fiction, a science, sort of a science fiction book, I guess. It's not very science fiction-y, it's very factual, actually, but and it tells the story of how we solve climate change. And it is, when you go into the book, I mean, it's a massive tomb, but it has the most hooky
00:37:57
Speaker
scary first chapter about a heat event and thereafter it's just it's a roller coaster but we get there at the end of these 800 pages or something you get there but you've got to read it soon because it's going to become irrelevant we if you don't just start reading it soon. It definitely goes on my list I just wrote it down. So Joe now you have to tell me is this a good ending already or do we need to do something else?
00:38:24
Speaker
I think this is a good ending. we sort of come to We've wrapped up a few things. We've done the conversation. if if I think one of the best sort of emotional endings is a nice restaurant. and so If you metaphorically look at, sort of see what's going on emotionally with us beneath the surface subconsciously, we've had some interesting conversations. We've had some discussions. We've now asked those sort of three questions that you do at the end. and Those, sort of for me, are the sort of more fat, the more punctuated endings, like you might get when you go call for the bill, go through a process of sort of factual things. And then we can ah we're going to get up, say goodbye, and then leave the restaurant. That sounds like a happy ending. Thank you so much, Joe. Thank you very, very much. Thank you for coming on the show. And I look forward to our next conversation already. Brilliant. Me too.
00:39:20
Speaker
And that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening. If you've enjoyed this episode, please forward it to a friend or colleague. This would mean the world to me, as I pour my heart and a lot of energy into producing this podcast with all the brilliant minds that share their perspective here.
00:39:37
Speaker
And if you are curious to use the huge potential of sustainability marketing for your own brand and you know the value that a great marketing strategy brings to really connect with your target audience, give me a call or send me a message. I'd love to get to know you and your projects. You can find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok or through my newsletter, where I write in-depth thought pieces that help you build a successful and exciting marketing strategy.
00:40:06
Speaker
Again, thank you so much for listening. I really look forward to sharing more with you in the future.