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The B2B Marketing Crisis: Gee Ranasinha
200 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, Gee Ranasinha suggests that B2B marketing is in crisis because "effective" marketing is sidelined in favour of what he calls "efficient" marketing.
He says much of marketing, which is nearly 100% tactical activities, isn't marketing but communications or promotions.
As a result, marketing within the organization is relegated to a sales support function.
The culprit for efficient marketing
The C-Suite and how marketing is seen as an economic activity in which everything needs to be quantified and measured.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Critique of Modern Marketing
00:00:08
Speaker
It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. I don't usually start my podcast by citing a LinkedIn post, but I couldn't resist when putting together the introduction for this episode. And I quote, marketing has never been more disliked because so much of it is generic, annoying, and interruptive. It's contributing to the noise, not the signal.
00:00:36
Speaker
When I read that post, my first reaction was that I needed to talk to the author G. Ranasina, the CEO of Kexino, a digital marketing agency in Strasbourg. There's so much to unlock because G put the spotlight on what many people think, but don't say out loud. Welcome to Marketing Spark.
00:00:58
Speaker
Thank you very much, Mark. It's great to be here. Thank you for the opportunity.
Channel-Agnostic Marketing and Analogies
00:01:01
Speaker
Can I just mention one little thing? You may. You introduced our agency as a digital marketing agency, which we're not.
00:01:10
Speaker
We are a marketing agency, not a digital marketing agency, which goes against the grain, considering the current weather. But that doesn't mean we don't deploy digital tactics, of course, but it means we're channel-agnostic. And I think that's important to specify because I think using the word digital today is a bit superfluous, really. Everything is digital. TV is digital. Billboards are digital. Print is digital.
00:01:37
Speaker
But more than that, I think if you categorise your agency as being digital, it does a disservice to what you're trying to do because
00:01:45
Speaker
Digital is not a noun. It's not an adjective. It's a channel. It's not about digital marketing. It's about marketing in a digital world and using the most appropriate channels of communication to address a particular target audience group. So that's why I don't like to call us a digital. Yes, I am that guy. So I apologize, but we're not a digital marketing agency because digital isn't the only thing we do.
00:02:11
Speaker
Making an excellent point and it resonates with someone like me because I spent 15 years plus as a ink stained newspaper reporter. And I appreciate the idea that there is a whole world beyond digital. There's direct mail and radio and newspapers and billboards, some different ways that companies can
00:02:31
Speaker
attract and engage their target audiences. One of the biggest mistakes that many marketers make is they get myopic about digital, all digital, all the time. And they ignore the fact that their target audiences engage and learn and educate themselves in different ways. We're ignoring
00:02:49
Speaker
these channels that have huge potential and they have a track record of working. That's a very interesting place to be because I think we've raised digital natives who overlook that there's non-digital channels out there.
00:03:03
Speaker
I don't know if you've heard of Maslov's hammer. You probably better know it like everybody else on the planet. Knows it better as if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It really applies. If you're coming as an agency, you're coming at every client problem with a digital hat on.
00:03:20
Speaker
you're severely reducing the consideration space for the application that you want to deliver on a business result for that client. If you go to a Facebook advertising specialist and say to them, what should I be doing for marketing? Obviously they're going to say, I think you should be doing Facebook ads because without saying. So that's why I think it's important to make that differentiation. And I think you're right. I think because there are so many digital natives who haven't grown up with
00:03:49
Speaker
you know, non-digital channels or non-online channels, maybe we should say, because these things are still digital in a certain way. But I think it's important to make that differentiation, to expand that consideration set as much as possible. We should be widening our approach, not narrowing it down, shouldn't we?
The Importance of Customer Research
00:04:08
Speaker
I spend a lot of time advocating for the importance of customer research and talking to customers.
00:04:16
Speaker
And I think it's important because unless you understand how your customers research products, how they do their jobs, you can't do marketing that resonates. If you asked a marketer to talk to a customer and he said, how do you find out about different products and different brands? They might say, I drive to work every single day and I'm on the highway and I see billboards every mile that I drive. And that should be a signal to a marketer that
00:04:42
Speaker
hey, maybe our target audiences are commuters. People are still going to the office, and we should be reaching out to them in a non-digital way. The same thing could work for people who still read trade publications, paper-based trade publications. There's lots of businesses that are still getting those trade publications into their office, and maybe we should be advertising in those publications instead of doing digital advertising. It's the idea that a lot of people are just happy to run with the buffaloes, even if they run off the cliff,
00:05:12
Speaker
maybe we should be thinking more about how our customers actually do research, how they learn about our products and not making assumptions on the fact that it's all digital all the time.
00:05:22
Speaker
I read a very scary statistic a while back, which said that most marketing managers haven't spoken with a customer in the past six months, which I find scandalous, to be honest. And I think, you know, number one trait of marketers in general is being humble, right? Do not assume. You are no matter who you are, what you sell, you are not your target market. And even if you were and you crossed over,
00:05:49
Speaker
the barrier to the other side and became a vendor. The very fact that you now have a sales hat on means that your insights are no longer valid. The whole market orientation stuff is about being humble and understanding that
00:06:08
Speaker
The way that the channels that you use, your commutes, the influences which you notice in your day-to-day life are yours and they're not necessarily representative of your customers. Those sorts of things, thinking everybody thinks the way that you do and using that as the base point of your marketing is not customer research, that's narcissism.
00:06:30
Speaker
So it's going back to basics, assuming nothing. It's basic market orientation stuff. It's assume absolutely nothing. And we do this whenever we do a customer, a client onboarding process, we have this process where we assume nothing, even if it's a business of which we've worked with in the past, the similar sort of industry or category.
00:06:53
Speaker
We assume nothing and we start from scratch. So that's client interviews, stakeholder interviews, partners, all that usual stuff and assume nothing. It's not the sexy part of marketing, certainly, but it's getting your fingernails dirty in the dirt, rolling your sleeves up and getting on with it because I don't think you can do a decent job unless you can start from that zero point and move upwards. It's a sad reality and
00:07:20
Speaker
The one comment that I will make is when I start engagements with clients, I asked the head of marketing or the CEO if I can talk to customers. And I position it that I only want a 15 to 20 minute conversation with a customer because I don't want them to think that I'm asking a customer to make a big commitment. It's a Trojan horse because what I find is that once I talk to a customer,
00:07:45
Speaker
Then 15 minutes becomes 20, becomes 25, becomes 30. Absolutely. Absolutely. They're happy to actually being able to see to somebody close but not close, if you like.
00:07:56
Speaker
And what's even more interesting to me is that they tell me things that I say, that's really interesting. I didn't know that. So that's how you feel about the product. This is how you do your job. I'll go back to the client and I'll summarize the conversation and I'll say, Hey, they said this and this. And the reaction that I get sometimes is really, they said that they feel that way. They want those features.
00:08:21
Speaker
which sets off the alarm bells because it obviously indicates that they're not talking to their customers and not getting that real world insight that may need to do better marketing or sales or product development. I don't know why that happens. I just don't understand why companies don't talk to customers on a regular basis.
00:08:37
Speaker
They don't do that. But also I think having you in that role, a third party in that role is an enviable position for the client because quite often the customer is more likely to reveal their true opinion.
00:08:51
Speaker
than they would if they were speaking to somebody from the actual business.
Insights from Customer Interactions
00:08:56
Speaker
They feel they can be a little bit more open and a little bit more forthright. I always, for those customer calls, I always make sure that the person knows in advance that it's all anonymous and they can feel free to be as forthright, as vocal as they want, and the transcriptions, if those transcriptions ever make it,
00:09:16
Speaker
to the client, they're abridged, and they're always anonymous, because obviously, otherwise, that whole trust feeling is gone. That loses the insights that you're trying to get, because you don't want shills, do you? You don't want people to just say, everything's wonderful, the sun's shining, the birds are singing, everything's great, because that gets you nowhere.
00:09:34
Speaker
absolutely nowhere. What you want to find out is those touch points which can be improved. They may be something really small. We completed a project a couple of months ago and they didn't even know that one of the biggest hurdles that the customer really found annoying was the company had recently implemented one of those automated phone answering things, press one for sales, press two for support, all those sorts of things. And they just wanted to speak to a human being.
00:10:04
Speaker
which normally in those cases is you press zero, but for some reason the default wasn't zero, it was another number. So nobody could bypass that to actually get to a human being. And it may seem to be a small thing, but especially if it's a support call, where there may be some emergency involved. Having a quicker route to get to speak to the right person within the organization may be a bigger issue than you think it is.
00:10:30
Speaker
I go back to my days as a journalist. When I talk to customers, I make it clear this is an off-the-record, background-only conversation and it immediately disarms them because they feel that they can be as honest as they need to be and that because they're talking to a third party is that they're more comfortable. And especially like I have CEOs or marketers who want to be on the call with me and I say, that's just not the way it works because you're never going to get the information that you need.
00:10:59
Speaker
Okay. So we've gone off script, but this is good. This is the way the conversation's going. I'm sorry. This is how I go. I go off on tangents in different ways. So you need to pull a choke chain on me and pull me back in and bringing me back into where you need to go. So I apologize for diverting us on that. You've completely disrupted my flow, all the preparation that I did just to get ready. Let's just stop and start again. Okay. It's Mark Evans and you're listening to the Barking Spark. There you go.
00:11:28
Speaker
Okay, so let's go back to the quote because I think we could have a really great conversation. We can spend the entire podcast unpacking this quote and I'll repeat it just so people understand where I'm coming from. And the quote is, marketing has never been more disliked.
00:11:45
Speaker
because so much of it is generic, annoying and interruptive. It's contributing to the noise, not the signal. This is the way that I feel. And I've been leaning into this for so long. And the reason it resonated was that I was like, yes, you're speaking the truth. So unpack that force. Why did you write it? What do you mean? And what was the reaction when you put it out there? The subject matter topic is something
00:12:13
Speaker
with which I have a close affinity, just like you. Basically because I see the inevitable disasters of lazy, ineffective, inattentive marketing messaging, probably more than most. And that's not just because I'm a voracious consumer of marketing output from all sides.
00:12:34
Speaker
from many channels and from many media. It's because I speak with business owners, I speak with startup owners every day, often multiple times a day. And I have to empathize with their predicament because they're invariably being steered to take a particular action or series of actions by somebody who basically, dare I say it, hasn't got a clue about what marketing actually is.
00:13:01
Speaker
this is where it stems from. Most of the ideas that I have for LinkedIn never make it to LinkedIn or videos or anything else but every so often the similar sorts of marketing irks creep up and to the point where they'll rise above the surface and I'll think that I need to actually have a think about this, put some thoughts in order and let's see where it takes me. I wouldn't say it went viral or anything else whatever virality is, I'm certainly
Marketing Crisis: Efficiency vs. Effectiveness
00:13:29
Speaker
not in
00:13:29
Speaker
that kind of echelon of LinkedIn celebrity like you are, for instance. But in my own little way, it certainly got a blip from the algorithm, which was very nice. I think it did resonate with, to be honest, it resonated with far too many people. It would have been nice if we had enough contra-arguments to say, no, actually, I'm quite proud of what our business does for their marketing or such and such a business. But I didn't hear that. Too many people
00:13:59
Speaker
were in the congregation agreeing rather than being on the other side and encountering where I was coming from. The premise really comes down to my ongoing issue with what marketing is evolving into and how marketing with a capital M as a proper core business function is in crisis.
00:14:29
Speaker
What do you mean crisis? It's in crisis for two main reasons which are quite different but are nonetheless connected and I think firstly I think marketing is in crisis not because marketing doesn't work because clearly it does when executed with a degree of brain work involved but I think marketing is
00:14:57
Speaker
very cool. It's ideologically disliked in the, let's call them the higher echelons of business, meaning that effective marketing is being sidelined in favor of what I call efficient marketing. There's two strands and I'll go into the effective marketing and efficiency marketing in a minute. That's number one. Number two is I think marketing is in crisis because
00:15:26
Speaker
much of the actual work, which is nearly 100% tactical work, that's conducted by what I like to call as people who call themselves marketers, because I don't call them as marketers, that work is only
00:15:44
Speaker
a tiny percentage of what real marketing is actually about. What these people are actually doing is communications or promotions. As a result, marketing within the organization is relegated to a sales support function. It's producing brochures or printing up a PowerPoint deck or ordering tote bags or stress balls or something, right? While automating lead generation and automating advertising
00:16:11
Speaker
delivering substandard and ineffectual results to sales team and getting the blame for it, really. So to get back to the efficiency versus effectiveness, okay. That comes down to the way that the C, not the C-suite, but many C-suite individuals have been educated and have got to the position that they have.
00:16:39
Speaker
CFOs especially, but CEOs as well who've usually come from a finance or economics background. I think they have inherent distrust in marketing because it goes against the logical sequential rational thought processes.
00:16:57
Speaker
that finance people love so much. If you think about it, much of business is founded under a kind of engineering type model. Most management consultants, for example, come from an engineering type background. You could even argue that economics is based on an engineering model, in that it looks at economies and markets as though they operate under the rules of Newtonian physics. One plus one is always two.
00:17:22
Speaker
Since every other area of the business is overwhelmingly driven by rational logic based thinking, trying to find ways to reduce costs, reduced effort, increased productivity, efficiency, all that sort of stuff. Okay. That line of thinking is now being extrapolated into marketing with the goal as being to reduce effort and of course cost by mechanizing the process.
00:17:51
Speaker
But while, if you're supposing you're making a widget, you can reduce the cost of manufacture of that widget without necessarily having a detrimental effect on the efficacy of the widget itself, unless you make it so cheaply that it's no longer fit for purpose and it breaks, okay? But reducing the cost of marketing manufacture, if we can call it that, invariably reduces its effectiveness.
00:18:19
Speaker
because the arbiters of effectiveness are greater than the constituent parts, if you like. While business process is based on rationality and logic, and presupposes a fixed and rational target, one plus one is always two. But marketers aren't dealing with fixed and rational targets.
00:18:43
Speaker
because human beings aren't rational. The human beings aren't machines. They don't think the same way, do the same thing in the same way, even in the same context. We don't behave logically, we don't behave rationally, which means effective marketing involves experimentation. It involves out-of-the-box thinking. And most importantly, there is more than one way to effectually deliver on a tangible result. It's not like,
00:19:11
Speaker
the only way two can be arrived at is by adding one plus one. There are other ways of getting to the same result. Since the levers are being pulled by influences which finance people see as being superficial or irrational, because they're not logical, certainly, they're emotional, right?
00:19:36
Speaker
It scares most of them to death because they're looking for everything to be measurable and quantifiable based upon the assumption that life is like physics, right? Where all the important metrics that determine the outcome of something are numerically available and attainable. It's also just like in economics, it assumes that you have all the information required to understand the condition.
00:20:02
Speaker
And it can be expressed in a unit that can be measured across interrelated disciplines. But human behavior isn't like that. If you look at the sorts of things that influence a buyer's decision, there's no such thing as an SI unit of irritation, or regret, or fear.
00:20:24
Speaker
which are all things which help drive our behavior to go in a certain direction. These are contextual influences. The base idea that you can create a totally rational logic-based model of human behavior, as though humans behaved like atoms,
00:20:41
Speaker
is totally absurd. You're preaching to the converted because my background is as a creative before creators became this very sexy kind of kind of thing.
Creativity vs. Data in Marketing
00:20:53
Speaker
And I've always had a very I don't know what the right word is, but a very sort of uneasy relationship with creative versus data. The pendulums started to swing 10, 15 years ago towards data and KPIs and that everything that marketers did
00:21:11
Speaker
needed to be measured and quantified. And that decisions, even micro decisions were based on what the numbers told them, what the dashboards were signaling. Green was good, red was bad. And that you constantly needed to be optimizing to make sure your marketing was as efficient as possible. In many ways, marketers have become data jockeys rather than creative thinkers or critical thinkers. That's a dangerous place for them to be. And it goes back to our
00:21:42
Speaker
the start of this conversation when we talk about the fact that not all marketing is digital or should be digital. And that's contributed to some of the challenges that marketers have today. And just going back to your point about emotion versus logic, if you ask a marketer, many of them will acknowledge the fact that people make decisions based on emotions, how they feel about a product or brand. You regularly cite the example of,
00:22:10
Speaker
Apple versus Dell. When you buy an Apple computer, you feel like you're making the right decision. You feel like you're part of something bigger, something powerful, something almost like a tribe. When you buy a Dell, there's no feeling there. You feel like you're buying something that's functional and affordable. It's a utility. It's almost as if data has
00:22:34
Speaker
made many marketers forget about that side of the marketing equation. They lean so hard into what the numbers tell them that they forget about that people are consumers feel and they think
00:22:47
Speaker
and they're unrational creatures who sometimes do things that make no sense. That's an interesting place to be. And I guess it goes back to my question, maybe we're rambling here, but it's the idea of marketing that can't be measured, but works in different ways. Listen to, see a lot of your videos on LinkedIn.
00:23:06
Speaker
What you talk about and what I'm feeling as an undercurrent these days in marketing conversations is the idea of brand awareness. And the idea that, as you've mentioned recently, that only 5% of consumers are actively thinking about buying a product right now or buying your product right now. The other 95% are not thinking about it. It's not top of mind. But brand awareness is such an important
00:23:29
Speaker
thing to make sure that you're part of their world in some way. You're touching them in some way. You're making them think about that at some point when they get around to thinking about a decision, you might be part of that consideration set. And do you think that marketers are underestimating the power and the need for brand awareness these days? I think we are slowly seeing
00:23:54
Speaker
one of many U-turns that the marketing industry seems to go through pretty much every few years. It's usually a generational thing as a new person gets into a certain role, they seem to reinvent stuff which actually we've known about forever and we have to give it a new name because otherwise the new people in those positions won't look at it because it's deemed old-fashioned. The thing about
00:24:19
Speaker
sales activation stuff, okay, what is now rebranded performance marketing, as though anybody wants to do non performance marketing, but the great thing about sales activation marketing, whether it's digital or otherwise, is the attribution side of things. Sure, it's a lot easier to track touch points and all that cool stuff that people like to get really excited about. And brand awareness is certainly much harder to measure.
00:24:45
Speaker
And this is usually where the finance department comes to blows with the marketing department because what the finance department wants is a clear cause and effect correlation. But that's not how it works. And I think that's why brand awareness marketing is not frowned upon, but it's at a lower priority level within the business because it's a slow burn.
00:25:13
Speaker
Business owners and senior managers are being increasingly pressured to increase revenues, lower costs, increase efficiencies, and deliver tangible differences within a financial quarter, or certainly by the end of the annual report. What we're talking about is a slow burn. It's a longer, more measured, strategic initiative, which won't deliver results
00:25:42
Speaker
10 days or 10 weeks. Over the longer term, it's actually delivering as much as other slower burn areas of the business in the same way as R&D is or product development is. We're all looking at the same thing. We're looking to increase business growth and make incremental growth that much more effective.
00:26:06
Speaker
But business owners and senior executives have their backs against the wall. They're being pressured to lower costs. And since they have to show results in a short timeframe, such longer term strategic thinking goes out of the window. I think the brand awareness stuff is coming back into fashion because people are realizing the disproportionate returns on investment of purely digital advertising from a sales activation standpoint, right?
00:26:37
Speaker
There's plenty of examples even recently about how very large businesses, how they've looked at their digital marketing spend, their digital advertising spend. A few years ago, I think it was about three, four years ago, something like that, may have been before COVID.
00:26:56
Speaker
It's funny how those COVID years you just excuse and jump between pre and after and you forget there was actually a couple of years in between. So P&G, the world's biggest advertiser, they turned off $200 million of their digital ad spend.
The Role of Brand Awareness
00:27:12
Speaker
They saw zero change in their business outcome.
00:27:15
Speaker
Uber did a similar sort of thing. They had $120 million of ad spend, which was specifically designed to drive more app installs. And they turned off $120 million. And the result was zero difference in the rate of app installs. I think Airbnb did the same thing too. Airbnb did the same thing. Chase did the same thing. eBay did the same thing. There is a caveat here. They didn't reduce their marketing spend.
00:27:43
Speaker
They just spent the marketing dollars that were apportioned to digital. They spent them somewhere else. That's why I think we're seeing the shift back to brand because we're having a shift back to what the marketing industry knows that works.
00:27:56
Speaker
since it's been proven and demonstrated at least 10 times longer than digital marketing has even been around. It is interesting that we rename things so that they appear to be sexy. So performance marketing is a classic example. And the other... ABM. ABM's another. ABM basically selling to a very targeted group of customers. The other thing that... Good grief, really? What works? Good grief. Nobody thought of that before, did they?
00:28:22
Speaker
The other thing when it comes to brand owners that I find interesting is people like Chris Walker talk about the dark web and dark social. What they're talking about are these backroom conversations, these things that you can't measure. You don't know they're happening, but they're powerful. They're influential. They're things that matter. And those conversations happen because a company has
00:28:46
Speaker
done a really great job of amplifying their brand and the value that they deliver. People know about them and they're aware of them and as a result they talk about them. But we wrap them in sexy terms like dark social and dark web when we're really talking about brand awareness and
00:29:03
Speaker
We aren't going back to the fundamentals, but I think no one really wants to admit it because the fundamentals are boring and they're not terribly exciting. And as you mentioned, if you're a company and it's all about marketing automations and efficiency, you can't quantify brand awareness. That's hard to quantify, but that's just the world in which we live in. And I think it's a struggle. Some things don't need to be measured. What? Firstly, there's a lot of things we're measuring which we shouldn't.
00:29:33
Speaker
but we do just because we can. And there are other things, hard things, which cannot be measured in a traditional way, especially in B2B. 90% of buyers have been in that funnel far longer than we think they have. And so to suggest that a single piece of content is compelling enough to deliver a particular action is just bonkers.
00:29:58
Speaker
It's just naive. Customers aren't single channel targets. Correlation doesn't imply causation. With Uber and P&G and all these guys, they prove that. The reason why I bought that can of Coca-Cola yesterday, I didn't, if I did. If I was into Coca-Cola. The reason why I bought that can of Coca-Cola isn't because of the TV ad I saw last night. It's because of the ads I've seen on the bus stop, in the Metro, in the cinema, in the magazine over the past 35 years.
00:30:29
Speaker
And then the second reason which you alluded to before is about this 5% 95% being 95% of the people who actually see your messaging are out of market audience, right? This actually came out of LinkedIn, Ehrenberg Bass, the Ehrenberg Bass Institute in Australia. They did the research study for LinkedIn, which goes into much more detail.
00:30:50
Speaker
So clearly, and Dark Social plays into all of this stuff as well, but it's clear that branding and brand awareness marketing is a vital component of the mix for any business. Now that doesn't mean you don't do the sales activation stuff because you can lead a horse to water, but it means you have to have a balance and it needs to be weighted in favor of brand awareness marketing. And there's plenty of evidence to show the effect of this approach. In the UK, there's work done by, uh, Les Burnett and Peter Field.
00:31:19
Speaker
going back like 10 years, they're culminating in the book, The Long and the Short of it, which goes into plenty more evidence about not only does the brand awareness stuff work over the longer term, but it increases the efficacy of the sales activation stuff. Because if you think about it as a graph, you spend money on sales activation, you get an uptick. And then once you turn the taps off, it drops back again.
00:31:45
Speaker
And that's the cyclical approach that goes on again and again. But by having this brand awareness work going on in the background, that sells activation stuff. Yes, it goes up, but when it comes down, it doesn't go back down to zero like it did before, because now there's a threshold level.
00:32:07
Speaker
There's an awareness, there's what Erembo Bass, what Jerry Romano would call mental availability. You're now within the category, you're within the consideration set of the buy, you have that mental availability, so you're not coming back down to zero. So the efficacy of your sales activation stuff actually becomes better and clearer.
00:32:29
Speaker
But like I said, we're talking about a longer term approach, which many businesses and senior managers don't have the luxury for. Or maybe they don't see the benefit because it's too far down the line. On a related note, and this is a really great segue into another topic that I want to explore with you is a topic that can't be quantified in many ways is brand positioning.
00:32:51
Speaker
I love doing brand positioning. I think that brand positioning has a direct impact on marketing and sales, product development, HR, raising capital, customer success.
Intangible Benefits of Brand Positioning
00:33:03
Speaker
When people ask me, how do I quantify the success of brand positioning? I can't come up with a good answer.
00:33:11
Speaker
There's not a KPI that I can point to or a metric that I need to use. And in some ways brand positioning, like brand awareness is the leap of faith. You have to believe that by telling a clear and compelling story, it's going to be something that will resonate with target audiences and make your brand the obvious choice. That's a message that a lot of companies have a hard time
00:33:39
Speaker
understanding or accepting. And as a result, they see brand positioning, if they see it at all, as a nice to have as opposed to a need to have. I think it falls into the same camp as brand awareness. It's an important part of the marketing foundation of a corporate foundation, but it certainly doesn't get the respect and investment that it deserves.
00:34:08
Speaker
My question to you is, am I riding this pony horse too hard? Am I so vested in the value of brand positioning that I'm missing something here? Or do you think that like brand awareness, a lot of companies don't appreciate, understand how brand positioning can make an impact on the entire organization? I think it falls between sort of two stools, really. One of the issues.
00:34:36
Speaker
with actually doing proper real brand positioning work is because it's hard to do. It's part of marketing strategy. And just like every kind of strategy, it means having to put a figuratively stick in the ground about who you are, the problem you solve, who you serve and why they should give a shit. But by stating who you are, you are also by inference stating who you're not.
00:35:03
Speaker
Like in Michael Porter's book, strategy is about what you say no to. And that scares most business owners and senior managers to death because they want to say yes to everything. They don't want to be pigeonholed, yet that's exactly what they need to be for the customer to make any sense of what their value proposition is. They need to be able to compare them to something that they know. That's number one. And then the second one is that
00:35:32
Speaker
Like we're talking about for brand awareness, we're talking about a longer term financial payoff. It takes time and it takes effort to implement any positioning efforts throughout every touch point of that organization, not just within the organization and the sales team. You might have partners, you might have distributors, you might have resellers. It's not a five minute job.
00:35:55
Speaker
It's not seen as a key component of competitive advantage, sales success, or the inherent market value of the business. And I think that's one of the biggest areas which business owners and season executives can turn things around by having a more easily identifiable message as to those basic questions, who you are, problem, all that stuff.
00:36:23
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Which they don't bother. They go straight into product or they go straight into features and they debase the value of whatever they're selling by comparing themselves with the competition. And if they can't make a big enough differentiation in terms of how they're positioning, then the customer will default to price as being the ultimate arbiter for foreclosure. So it's, it's like they're shooting themselves in the foot. It explains why to your original
00:36:53
Speaker
point is why a lot of marketing is generic and boring.
00:36:57
Speaker
is that I think a lot of companies are terrified of being different. It's easy to run with a pack. It's easy to say things that everybody else is saying and to highlight the same benefits and features and price. It's hard to think out of the box. It's hard to say, we're not that. We're different. We're over here. We take a different approach. We have different things that we focus on and that's a very challenging place to be. And if you're a marketer and you want to talk like that and you want to walk like that,
00:37:26
Speaker
then there's risk involved. To your point about marketing being all about efficiencies and productivity is that it's hard sometimes to pull that off when the benefits are long-term as opposed to short-term. If you start talking differently, it may take the market time to understand where you're coming from, why it matters. And in a short-term focused world, that's a really difficult place to be, which is why I think positioning doesn't really get the attention it deserves.
00:37:51
Speaker
Absolutely. That's why we have so much generic vanilla cookie cutter type messaging created either by marketing automation or by AI, dare I mention the term, because people are defaulting to what everybody else is doing. Everybody wants attention, but nobody wants to stand out, right? There's the dichotomy there.
00:38:15
Speaker
You take the top five players in a category. You look at their customer facing collateral and you cover up the logo. The words and pictures are usually interchangeable. Nobody's standing out anymore. Everybody's too frightened to stand out because they may alienate a customer base. But the thing is those customers weren't your target market in the first place. So what's the problem? It's fascinating. And I think that
00:38:42
Speaker
There's got to be more risk involved in marketing, more out of the box thinking, more experiments to stand out in very crowded marketplaces. Just on a little bit of a segue, because you did mention that word that we're talking about. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'll go into the naughty step, Mark. I apologize. No worries. But you did mention that word that every marketer is talking about these days, and that's AI. And there's a lot of places we could go with that. But one area that I've been thinking about recently, and
00:39:10
Speaker
I was on a LinkedIn meeting and they started talking about the mechanics of this using generative AI for image generators. What that means in terms of how the data is being manipulated, what the outputs are, and what the future means in terms of these image generators and the biases that they throw off.
AI Bias and Data Reliance in Marketing
00:39:34
Speaker
Do you think about this particular part of the AI ecosystem and are there things that you're worried about when it comes to AI for image as opposed to copy?
00:39:48
Speaker
AI generally, okay, AI and LLMs have proven themselves as being amazing tools across many industries, not just marketing. And they're great in marketing for things like data analysis and research and spotting trends. Actually, you could argue even more importantly, spotting outliers, automating disparate marketing tasks. AI is great for all of that sort of stuff.
00:40:09
Speaker
And yes, I think many people have mentioned about the quality of text. If we're looking for anything which is emotive, or there I say it, the word creative, in whatever way you want to describe it. But the thing is about images, which is really interesting. There's a fantastic piece of research
00:40:36
Speaker
conducted by Bloomberg Technology. Two people by the name of, don't ask me, I've studied this a lot, so I know their names are Leonardo, Nicoletti, and Dinabas. They did a really interesting experiment. The base premise is that the images created by AI image generators, any of them, mid-journey, dally, stable diffusion, take any of them, they offer a distorted view
00:41:01
Speaker
where biases, according to gender, race, age, skin color, whatever, are exaggerated and more extreme than they are in the weird world. So they did this experiment where they used stable diffusion in this particular example, and they prompted it to generate pictures of workers in various professions. And then they generate like 5,000 images or 10,000 images, they sorted the resulting images by skin tone and perceived gender.
00:41:28
Speaker
And they found that the higher paying professions, CEO, lawyer, politician, that sort of thing, were dominated by images of people with lighter skin tones, while lower income jobs, cleaner, janitor, fast food worker, produced images of people with darker skin tones, right? If you ask AI Ems generated to make an image of a CEO at a desk, you're more likely to get an image of a white middle aged man.
00:41:58
Speaker
And what gets really interesting is they've got a similar story when they categorise by gender. So higher paying jobs produce disproportionately higher males than females. And the racial and gender bias split was found to be substantially more than the data from the real world because they compared it to the data they got from the Uris Bureau of Labour Statistics.
00:42:23
Speaker
So for example, they asked AI to generate pictures of the doctor. And in reality, in the US, 39% of doctors are women. But the results from the AI had them at 7%. So there's a fantastic YouTube video that I can send you. But the point is that AI, whether it's text, images, video, whatever, it's working on large data sets. If there are biases in the data sets,
00:42:53
Speaker
then the AI engine are working on those datasets and it's going to result in a biased output. So what then happens is those biased results get fed back into these large datasets, invariably compounding the errors that are being made.
00:43:08
Speaker
Right? I think it's also important to remember that there's no such thing as an unbiased data set. So try to compensate for this is a much harder question than we think. And the video explains this much better than I can. But I think regardless, I think this is something that shouldn't just concern marketers. But all we seem to want to do with AI is produce some generic vanilla, seemingly original thousand word blog post or 300 word outreach email and call it a day.
00:43:39
Speaker
That is the world we live in. And that's the dangers of AI is that we're going through the motions in many ways. And there are obviously benefits to AI. I mean, talk about image generation, there are downsides. We could probably spend an entire podcast.
00:43:54
Speaker
talking about that, but we have covered a lot of ground. For people who are interested on the non-quantifiable side of marketing, this is a great conversation. If you're a data geek, maybe what we've been talking about is sacrilegious. If you're a data geek, I apologize in advance. I'm a data geek too. Data is important. It's just we need to concentrate on the right type of data and inevitably we focus on the stuff that's easy to measure, which is not necessarily the best data to measure.
Conclusion and Engagement Invitation
00:44:22
Speaker
I think at the same time, as marketers, we talk about this mythical marketing mix in which we're pulling levers in different ways for different target audiences. And I think that data and things like brand awareness and brand positioning, they're all part of the marketing mix that we have to be aware of. We've covered a lot of ground and I thank you for your insight and your perspective. Where can people learn more about you and Kexino?
00:44:47
Speaker
We can go to kickseno.com, K-E-X-I-N-O, but the easiest way to get hold of me is on LinkedIn. That's where I hang out mostly. Please reach out and let's have a conversation.
00:44:56
Speaker
That is where G hangs out, and that is where he posts what I feel are some of the best videos on LinkedIn. They're short, they're sweet, they're impactful. Fairly kind for you to say, Mark, checks in the post. Thanks for your time. I'm a big fan of them. If you enjoyed this conversation, rate it and subscribe via Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and of course, share by social media.
00:45:19
Speaker
If you're a B2B or SaaS company looking for more sales that need but struggling to do marketing that makes an impact, we should talk. Reach out to me by email mark at markevans.ca or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.