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00:00:01
Rich M. Smith: Why Most Marketing Fails Before the Campaign Starts
1 Playsin 2 days
In this episode, Eric talks with growth strategist and former seven-time CMO Rich M. Smith about a problem that quietly undermines many organizations: confusing marketing activity with actual strategy.
Rich argues that most companies do not fail because they lack talent, products, or ideas. They fail because they never solve distribution. In crowded and commoditized industries, the challenge is rarely creating something functional. It is figuring out how to become meaningfully different in the minds of customers and how to consistently reach the right people at the right moment.
The conversation explores why modern marketing often drifts toward tactics before strategy. Companies obsess over channels, platforms, SEO, social media, and performance metrics without first answering deeper questions about positioning, customer behavior, and competitive advantage. Rich explains why many organizations spread themselves too thin, chase “shiny objects,” and mistake activity for progress.
Eric and Rich also discuss commoditized markets, customer experience design, attribution problems, AI-driven consumer behavior, and the growing tension between brand marketing and direct response marketing. They examine how organizations measure success, why data alone can become misleading, and why experience and judgment still matter in a world increasingly driven by analytics and automation.
Throughout the discussion is a larger question: what actually creates durable advantage when products, channels, and tactics can all be copied so quickly?
At its core, this is a conversation about discipline. About understanding customers deeply enough to build meaningful differentiation. And about why great marketing is often less about clever campaigns than about aligning strategy, distribution, and human behavior.
Topics Covered
- Why many businesses fail because of distribution, not product quality
- The challenge of differentiation in commoditized industries
- Why marketing often becomes overly tactical
- The dangers of “spray and pray” marketing
- How CMOs translate marketing metrics into business outcomes
- Why customer experience extends far beyond the product itself
- The relationship between specialization and modern marketing
- How organizations chase “shiny object syndrome”
- The tension between brand marketing and direct response marketing
- Why attribution is harder than most companies realize
- The hidden role upper-funnel marketing plays in conversions
- Why smaller companies should focus closer to demand intent
- How AI is changing customer behavior and discovery
- The difference between AI adoption and AI adaptation
- Why experience and instinct still matter in marketing decisions
- How gut instinct functions like professional muscle memory
- The growing importance of strategic discipline in a multi-channel world
Episode Links
- Rich’s website: https://richmsmith.com/
- Connect with Rich on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/smithlink/
For more episodes: https://unfoldingthought.com
Questions or guest ideas: eric@inboundandagile.com
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Transcript
00:00:02
Speaker
Rich, thank you for joining me. Where does today's recording find you? I am in sunny Philadelphia today, still smarting from some local sports teams' losses.
00:00:14
Speaker
Rich, would you mind telling me about yourself? I've been the chief marketing officer of seven different companies over the last 25 years. Over my career, you know, I really became passionate about helping organizations that are just not growing fast enough with solving that problem.
00:00:35
Speaker
And, you know, one of the things that i've that I've seen is that a lot of organizations fail, not because they have a bad product or a bad service or they have bad people or and untalented people, they fail because they never really figured out the distribution side of the equation.
00:00:53
Speaker
Some of your work has been in heavily regulated industries, which but so probably give you a knowledge set that's different from somebody who's doing, you know, your, I don't know, ah they're they're selling plumbing services, for example.
00:01:11
Speaker
Yeah, it is very different. I, I've certainly spent most of my career working for highly regulated industries and in some cases, you know, with financial, with consumer financial products, um a lot of things that are highly commoditized within, you know our economy. So credit cards, mortgages, home equity loans, deposit products, even on the insurance side, auto insurance, life insurance, health insurance, you know, these are all things that,
00:01:44
Speaker
yeah either they're They're treated like commodities. So as a marketer, one of your big challenges in those regulated industries is, yes, you have to, of course, stay within the regulation you know box and be very cognizant of all of those requirements. But you also have to figure out a way to be different.
00:02:03
Speaker
Because 30-year fixed Fannie Mae-backed mortgage is pretty much the same product. no matter what bank or mortgage company or credit union you get it from.
00:02:15
Speaker
right So how do you market yourself? How do you brand? How do you message in a way that creates a differentiation in the marketplace so that customers can select you and tell what you're good at and why they may want to work with you as opposed to somebody else?
00:02:34
Speaker
If I'm a financial advisor and I'm you know thought of as being what I provide is largely a commodity or similar from you know me to the next provider down the street, then distribution of my messaging becomes very important.
00:02:55
Speaker
I don't know how much we would get into distribution of my actual services, but I don't know if you see any relation here. i used the example of a 30 year fixed, you know, Fannie Mae backed mortgage. The product is not different per se for one provider to the next provider, right?
00:03:17
Speaker
So what can be different is distribution. So in a highly commoditized business, distribution often becomes a differentiating factor.
00:03:30
Speaker
So how you bring your product to market, in what form, to whom, to whom, right? That can really be something that will differentiate your business from from another. you know if if If you're a financial advisor,
00:03:47
Speaker
it's probably more important to think about who you're targeting, right? And where are those target customers are likely to be receptive to hearing your message. Um,
00:03:59
Speaker
But how you go to market is probably not that much different from other financial advisors. But if you're in the mortgage business or the credit card business or you're in the healthcare business and you can get a leg up from a distribution perspective, an example would be coffee.
00:04:22
Speaker
Starbucks is the 800-pound gorilla in that category. Was Starbucks innovation coffee? No. Starbucks innovation was distribution.
00:04:34
Speaker
They created what they call the third place, the place between home and work, right? And that was where people would go, stop by the coffee shop to make that transition between home and work.
00:04:47
Speaker
And then they started putting shops all over the place. And so they really came out with a unique distribution engine and that allowed them to really capture that market.
00:05:01
Speaker
I like that example because i was thinking as you were talking about distribution or the way that you were framing it before you gave the Starbucks example, I was thinking, i was wondering how often you run into, have run into in your career,
00:05:22
Speaker
times when going to market, you know, even if it's just with your positioning, your general, your broader messaging was, hey, you know, Twitter is a new thing you Clubhouse or whatever during COVID is a new thing. We should be there jumping on a new channel, which is really pretty easy to replicate because that's not something that is unique to my business unless I'm the owner of Clubhouse and probably very few people who will listen to this even remember Clubhouse at this point.
00:06:01
Speaker
But you know, some new channel. I was wondering how much you encounter, hey, not a lot of people are here, so let's get a bit of a first mover advantage, which seems to me like then an aspect of marketing and consulting your clients is that we have to stay on the ball. You know, when we identify that there's a new channel, then, and it's not always just new channels, you know, there are new approaches, there are trending memes or any number of other things. then
00:06:34
Speaker
it But you know you have to pay attention. You can't rest on your laurels. But then you brought up Starbucks. And as much as you can attempt to replicate that, I think that one of the aspects of Starbucks you know figuring out the third place, especially early on,
00:06:54
Speaker
before they got into, you know, that you were going to, you can buy their products any number of places that they have, you know, a Starbucks on every corner and so on, was that they, whether intentionally or not,
00:07:11
Speaker
they were serving the customer's job. And the job was about the third place that I would like to have somewhere else to go. That's not a bar and meet with my friends.
00:07:21
Speaker
And then eventually you've had entrepreneurs that would go and have meetings there or whatever else. And so I'm curious if you can, you know, state sort of a balance or a mix of how often you feel like with your clients or businesses either you encounter, you have to, as I put it, stay on the ball and you have to be sensitive to, if there's a new opportunity, we need to be ready to evaluate it and maybe to move. So we need to be nimble versus something like,
00:07:56
Speaker
you know yes maybe you need to do that but also 50% of your marketing work or 50% of your marketing strategy perhaps needs to be figuring out something that is a durable advantage like that third place for Starbucks Yeah. So what I call a lot of what you were talking about is shiny object syndrome.
00:08:21
Speaker
People want to chase the shiny new object. all right And I think marketers are particularly susceptible to that, just be the way that we tend to be wired. We get excited about new things and we want to go try them. And, you know, so a lot of or one of the functions that I ah that I really provide to my clients is helping them to stay disciplined.
00:08:46
Speaker
So it's quite possible that a new channel could be an amazing fit for your organization. But let's go back to the strategy that we created and talk about how is that channel aligned with our strategy?
00:09:01
Speaker
How could it be better than one of the other things that we're currently doing? ah you've You've got to make a strong case to go do that.
00:09:13
Speaker
doesn't mean that you can't make the case. Sometimes you yeah absolutely can, right? It depends on what kind of business you're in and, you know, where, like, if you're a ah you're selling, making something up off the top of my head, but you're selling apparel to teenage girls.
00:09:31
Speaker
All right. And you've been on Instagram and Facebook and you're, you're, you know, marketing on your website. And then all of a sudden TikTok comes along. And you see more and more growth. That doesn't mean that you need to be the first organization to jump onto TikTok, but you can see that your targeted customers are using this other channel, this new channel that just came onto the scene more and more, and it's displacing the channels that you're already running on.
00:10:02
Speaker
That could be an indication, okay, maybe we should go get over there and use that channel. I think it also depends on are you, what's what's your position in your category? Are you the market leader or are you trying to break your way in and be a disrupt disruptor in a market?
00:10:22
Speaker
If you're the market leader, you probably don't jump on Tic Tac, right? You own these other channels. You're the 800 pound gorilla in these other channels.
00:10:33
Speaker
So you would be a slow follower over to that channel. If you're in a position where you're not coming from strength and you need to break into an industry and you need to make a name for yourself, yes, then a new channel might be a great opportunity to do that because you're going to reach different kinds of consumers there. You're going to reach people who are early adopters per se, right? And so that that can make a big difference in how you go to market. So I think it comes down to bottom line, having a very disciplined approach that is grounded in your strategy, right? And making the case of why you should do something. And one of the things that
00:11:17
Speaker
I see a lot is, you know, I'll start working with a client and they're spending their money they're spending a little bit in a whole bunch of channels. And the problem there is that they might get lucky. One of them might hit, but chances are pretty good they're not getting enough critical mass in any of those channels in order to really measure statistically whether it's working or not.
00:11:46
Speaker
because they're spread too thin. And i often counsel, like, look, let's really get very, ah you know, let's get very disciplined around how are we measuring what's happening in each channel and how would we rank order the channels today in terms of profitability um and scale, right? And what can we stop doing?
00:12:12
Speaker
you know, if we're going to let's figure out what can we stop doing so that we can take that same budget and apply it to another channel to really tell whether it's working or not.
00:12:23
Speaker
And would you take a similar approach if you were walking into a new client today? Absolutely. Yeah. I would take the same approach walking into a new client. In fact, that's one of the things that we often talk about, what channels are using, what are the performance metrics in each of those channels, um and how are they ah you know how reliable is their data coming out of particular channel?
00:12:53
Speaker
at Because, again, if you don't really get critical mass, you're probably not going to read anything, any kind of result, right? I'm generally the analytics or data-minded person on projects. That's not to say that I'm a database person by any means.
00:13:13
Speaker
You know, I'm not doing SQL queries, writing SQL queries, or, you know, coding in r or anything of that nature. But i I'm very interested in how do we know that things work?
00:13:31
Speaker
And even if we don't, you know what information do we have and what might that mean? And as a result, I feel like I've encountered a lot of situations where the data doesn't really seem to tell us a lot.
00:13:47
Speaker
Like the line chart goes up or down over time, but we don't necessarily know that that means anything. And, you know, maybe if it's website analytics,
00:14:02
Speaker
Maybe we have page views and we have data about what countries or states or whatever people come from and what pages they look at. But maybe we don't have any conversion data, whether it's lead forms or purchases. or i mean, well, if you have purchases, you're going have some sort of purchase data, but it might not be tied to the marketing data.
00:14:25
Speaker
And I'm guessing that you run into that at least sometimes. so If you do, Do you generally find yourself in a position where you, you know, you put together a program and you're saying yeah the, the, the theory behind your program is, or the animating spirit or whatever else is, well, it seems like this or that channel or effort or something is worthwhile.
00:15:03
Speaker
And maybe we don't have more data than feelings or that it tends to work in this industry. So that's what we're going to try out. Do you get, is that a common situation for you? Like it has generally been for me.
00:15:16
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. It is definitely very common. um and, ah you know, and it's, it's kind of a double negative for a lot of organizations because,
00:15:30
Speaker
One thing I find with smaller organizations or mid-sized businesses is they almost always have under-invested in data and the infrastructure that they need to measure their activities.
00:15:47
Speaker
Almost always.
00:15:51
Speaker
Coupled with the fact that they generally have more junior and inexperienced people running their marketing function. That's, a again, a double negative, right? Because if you're in a situation where you don't have complete data and you are looking at, ah you don't you don't have great ah monitoring capabilities and data analytics capabilities, then experience becomes more and more important.
00:16:22
Speaker
Because it will take somebody like me, who's been doing this a long time, to look at the data that they do have and come up with what's what's likely happening, creating a likely scenario out of that. And you know not not tooting my own horn, but I would have a much better chance of doing that.
00:16:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:52
Speaker
the on the flipside you know large organizations that are putting those metricss in place they can encounter another danger and that's confirmation bias So lots of times we have an opinion about something and then we seek out data and information to support our opinion or we spin it in a way to support our preconceived opinion. So, you know, and and small organizations are susceptible to that too. But I think it happens more and more in bigger companies or bigger organizations where somebody forms an opinion about something and then lo and behold, they find data to support it.
00:17:34
Speaker
and then And then it becomes an argument about what's what's really opinion they turn into a data argument, which is very difficult to counter. One thing you reminded me of is, you know, there's a somewhat famous case study. Pepsi was going to stop, what was it, advertising with the Super Bowl, and they were going to go all to performance marketing.
00:18:00
Speaker
And then it was two years or something, and they were right back to it. I feel like I have been on both sides of this in a very simple division of brand marketing marketing.
00:18:12
Speaker
direct response and it's not just that but but to put it very simply brand marketers or really big business marketers you know if you're in if you're a verizon or apple or i don't know what then there's just a lot of activity that you just do just because and you know you're keeping share a voice or keeping yourself top of mind or whatever a share of mind all of that stuff But somebody who is more direct response oriented would say, but how do you know it's working?
00:18:48
Speaker
And so then in the Pepsi example, they stop because they apparently couldn't point to it works or not. And then their sales drop and that's your experiment, at least in a very simplistic sort of test.
00:19:04
Speaker
And And so you can't have, thing you can't just have something where you say, we have to have an ah ROI, you know, like a direct r ROI, let's say.
00:19:17
Speaker
You can have an ah r ROI of marketing across the board, certainly any you should. But as you're speaking about that, I'm also thinking about the direct response marketer that steps in and says, okay, we've said financial advisor. We've used that as an example a few times.
00:19:36
Speaker
Okay, Mr. Financial Advisor that works in some small town and there are five of you in this small town. Why are you posting on social media? You don't even know if it's working.
00:19:46
Speaker
You should stop doing that and you should only go to paid search or something with proper tracking. And then you find that, well, all the leads dry up because you you weren't measuring it or given the activity, maybe you couldn't even measure it, but there was real value being being produced. And it's not as much of a question, I suppose, Rich, as probably it should be as the host here, but you've probably encountered these things too. and
00:20:19
Speaker
when you deal with clients where the you know they're not writing a blank check for marketing, you have to choose where do you put your dollar. And it can be really difficult if a client has a budget of whatever is is small. you know Let's say that their ad spend, of all things, is going to be $2,500 month or month. if that small for their market then add on top email activity or postcards or whatever they might, whatever else they might be doing, it gets really easy to stop doing the thing that apparently has no return.
00:21:01
Speaker
And then you get into the Pepsi situation. Yeah, yeah. Another great question and one that I've encountered a lot throughout my career. the it it does largely depend on the size of the company, too. So I'll caveat that what I'm about to say by that. Maybe we can come back and talk about what some of the differences are.
00:21:22
Speaker
But yeah, there are certain channels where it's very difficult to measure the direct activity of that channel, you know, broadcast TV, right?
00:21:35
Speaker
Putting your name on a football stadium, uh, very difficult to measure, uh, completely measure the value of that. Right. Uh, but you know, in the Pepsi example, and I, and I've,
00:21:50
Speaker
so I've so seen others and heard of others. um You know, one of the only ways sometimes to measure whether something is working or not is to stop it. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean stop it everywhere.
00:22:03
Speaker
Right. You can conduct experiments. Let's let's say you're a national company. You can conduct an experiment in a certain market and turn off.
00:22:15
Speaker
Let's say you're doing TV, brand advertising, as well as paid search, et cetera, turn that off in one market. Or, you know, try to, I mean, there are statistical ways to find markets throughout the country that are representative of other markets, right? So you can construct a test that way where, yes, you stop doing something and you measure what happens. Because, look, we're we're in we're in a multi-channel world.
00:22:47
Speaker
And these these are complex adaptive systems, right? People often say, you know, well, you're having a conversation with your CFO and your CFO looks at where you're spending your marketing budget and they look at display advertising as an example and say, well, why are we you spending any money on display advertising? It doesn't look like we get any customers from it.
00:23:10
Speaker
Okay, well, but if you turn off display advertising, What happens? Now you start getting less organic, right? Because most people don't click on the ad when they see it, right? Sometimes they don't even consciously know that they saw a display ad.
00:23:29
Speaker
But that impression trigger them later on when they see maybe something else or they see you show up in paid search or, right?
00:23:41
Speaker
there's, that's a kind of an upper funnel activity that creates more opportunity to convert that demand in other channels. So you can build, and I've done this, you can build multi-channel attribution structures to be able to assign some value to channels like display advertising, right? Because again, the CFO will look at your results and say, well,
00:24:11
Speaker
Organic is great. Like when people just come to our website and they buy stuff, that's great. So we should only do that. Let's shut down everything else. Right. But the minute you shut down everything else, your organic dries up too.
00:24:22
Speaker
So these things all all work together and consumers are not single channel for the most part. They're not single channel people. Right. We are on you know our phones. We're driving our cars and listening to the radio in the car and seeing billboards and going on different websites. And chances are pretty good we might see an ad. And then later on, we go and go to the website and we just type in the web address of the company. and it looks like we came from organic search.
00:24:52
Speaker
When the reality is we never would have been there had it not been for those other channels. So it is it's really important. you know and Now, that's more of a large company problem.
00:25:03
Speaker
the The other side of it is if you're just starting out you know and you're a small organization, that has a small marketing budget that you can spend every month.
00:25:14
Speaker
Well, going back to what we said before, spreading that budget across a lot of different activities is just a recipe for not being able to measure anything and not get critical mass anywhere. You know, there is a there's a continuum that all buyers go through.
00:25:30
Speaker
starts out over here on this side where they don't even know who you are. They don't even know anything about your product or service. They may not even know that they need it.
00:25:41
Speaker
all the way down to they know that they need it, they're ready to buy it, and they've got they're looking for solutions, and they've got their credit card or cash in hand ready to make a purchase.
00:25:53
Speaker
or If you're a small organization, you're starting out, or let's say you're just launching a new product, you don't want to play over here in the awareness arena. You want to get as close to that demand intent, like where they the strongest demand intent as you possibly can. So as close to the bottom of the funnel as you possibly can and, and focus your energy there. Because if you can't get traction there, you're not going to get it when you move further towards the awareness side of that continuum.
00:26:26
Speaker
Yeah. And at the same time, you know, I had Bob Hoffman was on here. i forget which episode that was, but I can link to it in the show notes. And I remember one thing that he said, it seems really silly, but it's true, is that you can go so close to the bottom of the funnel that you Well, of course your marketing is going to work. And the example that he gave was, if you want the highest redemption rate on your pizza coupons for your pizza shop, the best place to distribute your pizza coupons is in line at the restaurant.
00:27:04
Speaker
yeah And so fortunately, most of us don't do things that are as silly as that. Like you don't have, if you're doing e-commerce, you generally don't just have people show up on the website and you say, hey, you want 25% off?
00:27:20
Speaker
You might have sales, right? Where you're trying to motivate a higher conversion rate, or you are trying to motivate someone to make a bigger ticket purchase, a bigger cart.
00:27:34
Speaker
value but as you know it's both true the example what he says and yet also i don't know about you rich but i don't think i have ever gone that close to the bottom of the funnel where i'm just giving away money more or less Yeah, it's ah's a really good point. And, and you know, your your pizza coupon example is a funny one. And that's a great way to illustrate it.
00:28:05
Speaker
ah Yeah, i think there are circumstances where you can get, let's say, too close to the bottom of the funnel and end up eating up profitability that you otherwise would have expected.
00:28:20
Speaker
captured, right? And that's the pizza coupon example. Well, did you, they're already there in your shop in line to buy pizza. Why are you giving them a discount?
00:28:31
Speaker
Discounts are used to motivate people to show up to buy pizza. not for the people that are already there. Right. And, you you do have to be a little bit careful about how you apply things like that, because you don't want to, ah you don't want to offend your core customers that don't need a discount to buy your pizza.
00:28:53
Speaker
Right. And if they see their neighbors all getting coupons and they don't get a coupon, Well, now that might annoy them about your brand, right? So it is it is a tricky area to play.
00:29:04
Speaker
But yeah, can you get too close to the bottom funnel? Yeah, I'm sure you probably can. um i rarely see that problem. It's usually the reverse, right? It's usually they're not anywhere close to the bottom of the funnel and they're just starting out and they're spending all their money over here and they're not able to show anything from it and they don't know why. Yeah.
00:29:27
Speaker
And it's because you got to get people, you know, it's much more efficient to market to people who are ready to buy. And when you're just starting out, that's really critical for you to work on finding where those people are.
00:29:40
Speaker
Shifting gears again, you mentioned to AI earlier. And when I speak, Very often, if I'm talking about marketing, I will get asked about AI.
00:29:52
Speaker
and There are all sorts of questions. you know What's my perspective on marketing in the, sorry, AI in the marketing space, the future of marketing as a result, how to use AI, any number of things.
00:30:06
Speaker
And so given your experience, That was a question that I had written down. Rich, what's your perspective on AI and marketing or AI in marketing?
00:30:17
Speaker
Yeah, ah another great question. You know, i I often talk about AI. There sort of are two sides to it. And I think one side is what I would call ah adoption.
00:30:31
Speaker
And that's where most people are spending a lot of their time in thinking. And what I mean there is they're thinking about What tools can I bring in that are going to make what I'm doing internally more operationally efficient and economical?
00:30:47
Speaker
And that could be in the marketing realm, you know, with... ah you know using AI to generate you know display ads or imagery or write code for your website, right? Or it could be in a lot of other areas within the organization. So I think a lot of people are spending their time on that. Like what tools should we be using? what can How can that make us more efficient? Maybe we have to hire or we can you know carry less headcount if we do that, right? um What I think not enough people are thinking about is what I would call AI adaptation, right?
00:31:22
Speaker
And by that, I mean, you know, AI is dramatically changing how consumers shop and buy and make decisions.
00:31:33
Speaker
And if you don't think that, I don't care what kind of business you're in if you don't think that ai is influencing your target customer, you're wrong. they absolutely It absolutely is.
00:31:45
Speaker
And you've got to think about, well, okay, well, how how is the advent of AI and these AI tools changing how my target customer shops and finds me, right? Right.
00:31:58
Speaker
AI search is a great example. ah You know, perplexity is a fantastic tool. I use it all the time. If you go to perplexity and you ask it, um tell me where is the best place to shop for a mountain bike in my area?
00:32:17
Speaker
Okay. It's going to actually give you an answer. to that question. And when you read that answer, it's, you know it gives you the impression, almost gives you the impression that you're talking with a trusted friend, and you're getting a word of mouth recommendation. Because that's the way it's structured within the answer in AI search platforms.
00:32:39
Speaker
It saved me from going out and running a Google search on bike shops and my zip code and looking at all of them and looking at their ratings on Google. I feel like by asking perplexity, perplexity is doing all that for me, whether it is or not, different story. Right. But I feel like perplexity is doing all that for me. And they're coming back to me with a with an informed answer and saving me all that trouble.
00:33:06
Speaker
So, look, if you're a bike shop, you need to be able to show up in searches like that. And that's true, again, not just for bike shops, but really for any organization. So really think about how how is buyer behavior changing based on AI and how does that impact what we do?
00:33:30
Speaker
How are we going to adapt to that change? One thing that I think about and plenty of others have commented on it is how is it changing the development of someone's career?
00:33:43
Speaker
You know younger folks, when you're not hiring a junior copywriter or if you're using, i don't know what, but let let's say you're using HubSpot or Salesforce or some CRM and marketing system.
00:33:59
Speaker
like that, the more that it starts to do for you in content generation or insights or who knows what, then the less you might need someone junior.
00:34:14
Speaker
And again, plenty of people have commented on this before, so this is not an unusual thought, but it seems to me like It is for me, I should say, a big open question.
00:34:28
Speaker
you know How might that impact somebody who gets to be our age rich and didn't go through there you know the the learning phase of becoming a marketer or a copywriter or a designer like you and I did? you know Will they have that wisdom? I'm sure that they will.
00:34:50
Speaker
I feel like that you know humans adapt very well. But I'm having a really hard time predicting what that might look like. Yeah, i I wish I knew who to attribute this quote to because it really stuck with me. And I don't. But the quote is, you know, AI is not going to replace humans.
00:35:11
Speaker
AI is going to replace humans who don't use AI. And i think that's really true, right? Will organizations perhaps have less head count as a result of having AI tools than they would have had otherwise?
00:35:27
Speaker
Yeah, sure. But that's happened with every technological advancement, right? Look at the internet. When that came along, like when I started my career, the internet didn't really even exist.
00:35:42
Speaker
Okay, that was a game-changing technology that came along. um Did it cost some people their jobs in industries like print and direct mail? And yeah, it did.
00:35:57
Speaker
No question, right? But did it grow the pie overall much, much bigger? 100% it mean, you think about, you know, we're on the internet right now talking to each other, right? It's it's just, it's ubiquitous in our lives. And I think AI is going to follow probably faster the same kind of pattern where, you know,
00:36:21
Speaker
because of the pace of technology is increasing, et cetera, et cetera, right? It's going to follow the same kind of pattern. I mean, three years ago, you and I would not have been talking about AI. Today, i don't know about you, I use it pretty much constantly for various things, right? ah So it's definitely become a part of my life.
00:36:39
Speaker
And I think that that will be true for pretty much every kind of career and the future is going to be humans augmented by ai tools.
00:36:50
Speaker
Because you touched on experience. that's like Those are the things that is really hard to replace with AI. AI can help you get something done, but it's not necessarily going to give you a great idea about what to do.
00:37:05
Speaker
It's not going to help you ah you know answer those kinds of questions. right That takes experience. That takes people guiding the AI tool in the right direction to make it more and more effective.
00:37:21
Speaker
You just supported a statement that I made in a keynote I gave recently. And I believe that the way that I stated it was, technology has no sense of importance except statistically.
00:37:39
Speaker
and Whereas you and I, Rich, whether we want to talk about music or a joke or an idea or marketing or business strategy or whatever,
00:37:50
Speaker
we have these feelings that there's really something there. And we we have them on the flip side too, you know going the other direction of, I don't think that's a great idea. That doesn't mean that we're right.
00:38:01
Speaker
It doesn't mean that all humans agree, but we have this sense that is often not rational and we will rationalize it after the fact, of course.
00:38:12
Speaker
But The more and more experience you get, the higher of an on-base percentage, basically, that you get with these feelings.
00:38:25
Speaker
And that's not 100% true. Like, our our success rate is still fairly low with feelings. You know, but it's not to say that when you're 20, your success rate is going to be 1%. And when you're 60, your success rate is going to be 50%.
00:38:41
Speaker
But you might go from 1% to 5%. And so, and yet at least at the moment, you know, artificial intelligence can...
00:38:56
Speaker
in in ah broadly, let's say, can tell you things like this have tended to work. So given the context that I have, this is what you should do. Or here are 10 ideas.
00:39:10
Speaker
And it could have come up with a thousand ideas, but it has some context about my business challenge or whatever. But if you come up with 10 ideas of your own, Rich, and then you use artificial intelligence to come up with another hundred ideas in a split second,
00:39:25
Speaker
You'll scan down that list and you'll still have this feeling of good idea, good idea, bad idea, bad idea, bad idea. And it's a bit of that is the wisdom.
00:39:38
Speaker
It's the experience. And it's understanding that the more at-bats you get with any tool, the more you learn when it's appropriate to use and when it's not.
00:39:53
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's ah that's definitely true. you know what the you know One way to think about what you're describing is it's almost like muscle memory.
00:40:05
Speaker
If you're a golfer or a skier or you play baseball or and you do it for any length of time, you don't think about what you're doing when you throw the baseball.
00:40:16
Speaker
You just throw it and you throw it well because you're you've learned how to do that. Same I think is true with what you're describing is that experience is like muscle memory.
00:40:29
Speaker
You've seen situations like this before, and that gives you a massive leg up in determining what to do next. Those gut feelings that you have when you're scanning down a list of ideas, and you say, this one's good, that one's not, and you're getting a gut feeling, that's really like muscle memory doing its work.
00:40:54
Speaker
Right. You have seen something like that before in it And you it's telling yourself it's gut instinct. But, you know, there's a lot of science that has proven that actually gut instinct is a real thing.
00:41:08
Speaker
It is, you know, we are are we're neurologically wired ah that way. And let's say, you know, someone walks into an interview with you and you just get a bad vibe about the person.
00:41:22
Speaker
Where is that coming from?
00:41:25
Speaker
It's probably coming from experiences that you've had with people who were similar to that person in some way. Right. And that may be completely unfair. I'm not suggesting that, you know we should always listen to our gut instincts and situations like that. That might be totally unfair and you might miss a great candidate if you do that. Right. So you do need to be careful of that tendency. But like we can pretty instantly read the emotion in someone's face.
00:41:53
Speaker
um we can pretty instantly read body language and what it's telling us about how a person is feeling in the moment, right? Most of that is unconscious, right? Most of it it comes from experience, having seen it many many, many, many, many times. And, you know, our brains basically evaluating the data that they're receiving comparing it to the experiences that we've had in the past and telling us something about it.
00:42:26
Speaker
And that's, I think, I think that's exactly what you're describing. You know we, we have two, um, you I think Daniel Kahneman called them system one and system two and his book thinking fast and false thinking fast and slow.
00:42:42
Speaker
Uh, you know, most of our thinking is done by our subconscious brain, what some people call the primal brain or the ancient brain. And, We tend to do about 95% of our thinking there and only about 5% of our thinking in what we think of as our consciousness.
00:43:00
Speaker
Right. And that, that, you know, is, is it' it's survival, right? We were biologically wired to be able to scan the environment and see things that were going to be dangerous to us and react to them without having to think about reacting. Right.
00:43:18
Speaker
right That's how our brains evolved. And so that leads to these instances where you feel like you're having a gut feeling, but that's really your system one telling you something.
00:43:30
Speaker
I realize we're going pretty far afield from where we started, but you're reminding me of things. You may very well have heard of these experiments that they've done, but don't know.
00:43:41
Speaker
when there are tests that are done to see if human beings can essentially develop a new sense or replicate a sense that they lost, for example.
00:43:54
Speaker
yeah ah You know, one thing that I'm recalling is there were these experiments where people who were blind they put these sort of like a ah backpack on them more or less. And it had, it would put pressure.
00:44:09
Speaker
It was, it had the ability to put pressure at different points on their back and the backpack had a camera attached to it. So when this person who was blind could walk and or would walk around, they, the camera would pick up objects in their path and would press on their back in different points and in different ways so that through their skin, they got some feedback about the physical world.
00:44:37
Speaker
And with different experiments like this, like there have been versions, actually, if I recall some of this data correctly, the there were versions of this where they did it with the tongue because the tongue is the most sensitive of the different places that you can do things like this.
00:44:54
Speaker
and You know, it doesn't take very long for people to not just be able to sort of see the world, if if we want to call that, but to be able to process that data just as quickly as you or I would, such that Someone who's blind can walk down the street and they don't consciously think about the feeling on their back or there's something there and there's not something here or whatever.
00:45:24
Speaker
It's just becomes part of the background noise, noise, part of the unconscious. And I felt like you made a really good point when you were talking about muscle memory, because there are things like, you know, the earlier that you learn a musical instrument or a foreign language, for example,
00:45:47
Speaker
the less that you have to process something and consciously process it, and the more it just becomes part of you. And I will stop talking here in a second, but they I think the book where I encountered a lot of this was a book called Live Wired, and I think it's by David Eagleman, if I'm recalling the name correctly.
00:46:12
Speaker
And yeah one example that he gives a few times throughout the book is Arnold Schwarzenegger was born in Austria and came over to the U.S. s when he I think he was 27 or something like that and pretty much cannot get rid of his accent.
00:46:30
Speaker
And the person that he puts him up against is the actress Mila Kunis, who came over when she was three, something like that, from think it was Ukraine.
00:46:42
Speaker
And she has no accent. And I realize this is glossing over a lot of details, but basically what he says is it takes only a few years before yeah the way the sounds that you hear and actually process and understand what they mean, how they're different from one another, and then what different sounds I can put out.
00:47:08
Speaker
It doesn't take that long before those really are sort of set in stone. And for afterwards, for you to do a perfect American English accent, you're actually more than likely just mimicking it rather than having it be natural.
00:47:27
Speaker
And so that muscle memory thing reminded me of that. And I think you make a a really great point that the more you use these technologies, the less it becomes about replacing a person, for example, and more about, well, what can you do?
00:47:47
Speaker
What can the human and the technology do together? I think there's a real danger the the current environment, particularly around ai of of people making, you know, leadership making decisions that, well, we can get rid of this function, that function, this other function, because AI is going to be able to do it all.
00:48:12
Speaker
And ah my strong guess is that there's that that's going to be an overcorrection in that direction. And they're going to realize that, AI can do a lot of things, but we still need the skill sets of people who have experience in certain areas, right, that can help to guide the AI tool. Or, you know, AI can do 90% of the job, but it can't make do that last 10%.
00:48:41
Speaker
right, that needs human touch. So I think that we're highly likely to get into a situation like that where where you know we've overcorrected because of the promise of AI and then realized that, oh well, we're losing ground, we're losing traction, and we're not getting things done. And the reason is there's nobody nobody guiding the AI on what it's doing.
00:49:07
Speaker
If somebody is listening to this and you could give them one thing to think about, or you could put one idea in their head that would actually have a meaningful impact on how they go to market, how they distribute their products or services, maybe how they use AI.
00:49:24
Speaker
And it's maybe it's a book that they read. Maybe it's something they look up. Or if you could just flip a switch, you could snap your fingers and they would think this way.
00:49:36
Speaker
Is there something that you would want people to know or a way that they would think that would have a meaningful impact? Strategy comes first, right? You it can't jump straight to tactics.
00:49:48
Speaker
You have to start with building a good strategic foundation that then informs what tactics to use. And it is way too common that I see organizations that are just doing lots of activity, lots of tactics without any kind of strategy holding them all together.
00:50:09
Speaker
And that is a recipe for failure. Rich, I really appreciate you being here. I've looked forward to the conversation. Where should I send people?
00:50:20
Speaker
The easiest place to find me is my website. It's richmsmith.com. I also host a podcast called Revenue Science, which is available on all the major platforms, YouTube, etc. So those are probably the two easiest places and and best ones to get a hold of me.
00:50:38
Speaker
Awesome. Well, I'll have links in the show notes. And Rich, thank you for joining me. I appreciate you being here. All right. Thanks so much, Eric.