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Getting real about marketing bullshit, myths and gurus: Vince Moreau
202 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, Vince Moreau dives into the world of messaging and positioning.
He discusses his daring transition from academia to marketing and the struggles of imposter syndrome that often accompany such transitions. Moro emphasizes the importance of messaging and positioning, arguing that it influences every aspect of an organization, from marketing and sales to product development, customer success, and capital raising.
Vince shares insights into the debate of brand awareness versus quantifiable marketing, highlighting the value of ROI.
Vince also explains marketers' challenges, such as measuring success and crafting compelling messages. He delves into the importance of narrative in marketing and the role of market research in boosting confidence in a product or service.
Lastly, he critically evaluates popular marketing figures like Chris Walker and Gary Vaynerchuk, suggesting that their personal branding success does not necessarily translate to their ability to provide effective marketing services for other businesses.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Marketing Spark' and LinkedIn Discussions
00:00:08
Speaker
Hi, it's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark, which features conversations with B2B and SaaS entrepreneurs and marketing leaders about the strategies and tactics that make an impact. A key part of using LinkedIn is sparking conversations. It's great to publish content, make comments, and connect with people, but the real value, in my humble opinion, comes from talking to people.
00:00:35
Speaker
It sparks ideas, relationships, and opportunities. And sometimes those conversations are so good and insightful that the next step, the next obvious step is a podcast.
Vince Morrow's Journey to Marketing Leadership
00:00:47
Speaker
Vince Morrow is a great example. I'm not sure how we connected on LinkedIn, but one thing led to another and we jumped on a Zoom call.
00:00:58
Speaker
We covered a lot of ground, particularly around brand awareness. Thank you. I don't even know what to say after such an introduction. I learned that I am a marketing leader now. So that, that makes me feel really good. That's a little bit of ego stroking to set you up for the rest of the day.
00:01:12
Speaker
That's nice, thanks. Why don't we start with an easy question, a softball question. Tell me about yourself and your marketing journey. I'm Vince. I am French, which you probably cannot hear. I am based in France, and I run and I own and run B2B SaaS marketing agency that's called Scalecrush. We do SEO content marketing, and we're doing more and more marketing strategy, messaging, and positioning for a B2B SaaS company like B2B SaaS and tech companies as a whole.
00:01:42
Speaker
My marketing journey is a little bit weird because I do not have any marketing or business background. So many people in our field, which we will get to discuss at some point probably. And I used to be an academic. I did a master's degree in medieval French literature, and I started a PhD in medieval French literature, which I ended up dropping. I did that at McGill University in Montreal. I ended up dropping out because
00:02:07
Speaker
The perspectives in the field weren't that great in terms of employment and making and eating. And it didn't help that my wife was doing the same things. I ended up working in content because I was a humanities like slash literature guy. And then I learned SEO on the job at an SEO agency, set up my own consultancy and then grew that into an agency basically. No textbook marketing background here.
00:02:32
Speaker
I was a journalist and stumbled into marketing and now I get to call myself a marketer. Sometimes it's a rule that I feel uncomfortable about because I don't have training and there's a sense of imposter syndrome. Sometimes you just have to fake it so you make it and I think that's what I've done over the years.
Strategic Shifts in Marketing Focus
00:02:48
Speaker
I am curious about your agency's shift from SEO and content to messaging and positioning because the reality is
00:02:59
Speaker
SEO and content are tangible. They're measurable. You can quantify your performance. Messaging and position, on the other hand, are creative. Sometimes you can't quantify the impact. They're subjective. It's a much more difficult landscape to navigate if you're trying to prove to customers the value that you're delivering.
00:03:28
Speaker
Why the shift and how are you migrating the business over from SEO content to messaging and positioning? How much time do you have? There are a few reasons why we made the shift. The first one is that, yes, you're right. I think I never thought of it that way. The fact that it's easier to prove what you're doing and show the value of what you're doing when you're doing SEO and content.
00:03:51
Speaker
That's also maybe why we're doing it. I'm going to explain. The first reason we're doing it is, I don't know if it's the first or second, but I'll start with it. So now it's the first. It's very pragmatic. It's the fact that SEO and content are super tough to sell.
00:04:05
Speaker
And they're tough to sell because no one wants to buy that stuff because so many people have been burned over the years by SEO agencies and stuff. That pivoting a business when you've got talent in-house, it's not always easy to find work for that talent. And I know I have a great team and so I want them to work on cool projects and not sell SEO mill type projects where they update meta descriptions. That's the pragmatic thing.
00:04:33
Speaker
marketing slash really positioning work that we have done is also that we have seen over the years as we were working on SEO and content projects, most of the projects that failed, not failed in the SEO results failed, but failed in the sense that the client stopped working with us or weren't getting the results because they weren't doing their part. That was because of a lack of marketing strategy in the business.
00:05:01
Speaker
And so we've seen that, and we've seen that with talking, like you mentioned, LinkedIn is talking to a lot of people. I also know that this is a real problem in the market. Marketers in leadership positions who
The Importance of Strategic Narrative
00:05:14
Speaker
do not necessarily know what to do with the money that's allocated to them.
00:05:19
Speaker
and basically have no idea what angle they should choose to approach their market and stuff. And so that's why we're trying to slip through the cracks here and infiltrate that little niche that we've seen where I think we can solve that problem because we've got the marketing experience, we've got the content experience, and also that messaging and positioning stuff, you can do as much content as you like if you don't have a strategic narrative to put in that content,
00:05:47
Speaker
you might as well have no content because it's going to be fluffy. It's going to be boring, dull content, however you want to call it. If you do not put your strategic narrative in your content, that content may rank and people will forget it as soon as they read it, basically, if they even read it. So I think those are more connected than one might initially think. And so to me, it feels like a natural transition. I did warn you it was going to be a long answer.
00:06:16
Speaker
It is interesting that you talk about a strategic narrative and the way that it permeates the entire organization because my spiky point of view is that positioning is seen as a marketing exercise and often dismissed as a fluffy marketing exercise. But I believe, wholeheartedly believe,
00:06:38
Speaker
That position underpins marketing, sales, product development, customer success, HR, raising capital, because it provides a company with a coherent story that they're telling everywhere and to everybody. Personally, I think the positioning is completely underrated and seen as a nice to have versus a need to have.
00:07:03
Speaker
I agree with that it is something that is probably above marketing in terms of the hierarchy of things. And it should definitely be a culture thing for bigger orgs that they should know the problems that they solve and how they solve them and how that integrates with.
00:07:21
Speaker
the other problems in the day-to-day of their customers. But at the same time, we as marketers are in a very good position to actually do that because we have access to market insights, to market research, or at least we should have access to market research.
00:07:37
Speaker
We are in a position where we can, depending on the type of business, obviously, if you're working with enterprise clients or you're working with professional services firms, no one's going to let you interview customers because that's not how it works. You're not going to be able to interview the CFO or Fortune 500 company because you're part of the marketing department. But for most businesses out there, we as marketers have all the tools needed to do that, which is why I think it's a good thing to have marketing work on that if it is not a fluffy exercise, obviously.
00:08:07
Speaker
We've tackled one of my favorite subjects, which is brand positioning and messaging. Let's shift gears a little bit.
Challenges in Proving Marketing ROI
00:08:13
Speaker
Over the past 18 months, the marketing landscape has dramatically changed. Budgets are shrinking. CEOs and CFOs are watching every penny and demanding that marketers drive ROI from their budgets. And meanwhile, the economic landscape is volatile. And the question to you is how do you sell marketing to people and companies who don't want to buy it?
00:08:36
Speaker
or they're cautious about taking the plunge? That's a tough question. And I'm not a salesperson, so I may not even be the best person to answer that question. But I think the down-to-earth, pragmatic answer to that question is you don't. You don't sell stuff to people if they don't want to buy it. There is no way to do that. There are ways to do that, but you don't want to build a business on those practices. It's tough.
00:09:05
Speaker
I think the toughest thing for us is not to find people who need marketing. It's to find people who need marketing, who want marketing, and people who need marketing, want marketing, and want to spend on marketing. Because these are three different things. And this is also why I say marketing is the best place to start when you're doing customer research. People might have a need
00:09:27
Speaker
but no want, they might have a need and a want, which we call demand, and they might have a need, a want and no budget. Having a problem and wanting to solve it does not mean you're ready to pay for it, right? My arm is aching or something. It hurts. Maybe I don't actually want to go to the doctor, or if I go to the doctor and it's 150 euros or $150, then I'm not ready to pay that. And that's problem solved. You can try and sell me that stuff as long as you want.
00:09:58
Speaker
If the conditions of the yields do not change, then I'm not going to buy. If you know me and follow me on LinkedIn, which if you don't, you should. I know you, Mark. I'm saying that for the audience. I'm doing a shameless plug. I always say that you cannot make people buy some stuff they don't want to buy, and it's all about the problem that you solve.
00:10:20
Speaker
If people do not see marketing as a solution to a problem, you can't sell it to them. And at the same time, I don't the phrase educate the market because I think no one wants to be educated by strangers on the internet.
00:10:35
Speaker
at least not unwillingly. But at the same time, this is the effort that we have to do is to show, prove that marketing is something else than just fluffy terms thrown around that some people actually have thought about this and published research about it and that it can be a serious field and it can be a serious endeavor if you're doing it the right way, approaching it the right way. I think that's my less pessimistic answer. When somebody said to me, and it resonated that,
00:11:03
Speaker
A lot of companies are afraid to do marketing and at the same time they're afraid not to do marketing. So they're caught in this gray zone where they know that marketing needs to be part of the business mix. They understand that it drives leads and brand awareness and sales, but at the same time they look at their balance sheets and they get spooked. They get spooked by the fact that sometimes marketing is
00:11:27
Speaker
quantifiable and sometimes it's not. And when they're looking to pull back on spending, marketing is often an easy target. And it's frustrating to me as a marketer, because I recognize that there are certainly short term benefits to driving inbound, but there's the long term that a company needs to think about. And often the long term
00:11:51
Speaker
considerations get put aside because of short-term issues. Marketing, like you said, it's a long-term thing. And at the same time, these companies.
00:12:01
Speaker
When they see what's on offer, they cannot differentiate the good from the bad and the bad from the ugly. There is no way to do that right now. And the bar in marketing is very low in terms of the amount of people with actual marketing skills in the industry. That's pretty low compared to the number of marketers, right? But everyone can call themselves a marketer
The Debate: Data-Driven vs. Brand-Centric Marketing
00:12:25
Speaker
and set up a marketing business.
00:12:27
Speaker
And everyone can try and sell that. How does one, who does not have the marketing skills, because otherwise they would be handling their marketing already, how does one differentiate who is good and who isn't? How does one make sure they're not getting bullshitted by someone and that all of that is actually legit, what that person is saying is legit. That's the toughest thing. And that usually leads to inaction because it's the safest thing to do, like you mentioned.
00:12:57
Speaker
other side of the coin is that the bar is really low. Like anyone who is willing to do some kind of actual marketing work will get results because no one wants to do the work. It reminds me of a story, a guy I know.
00:13:15
Speaker
He wanted to go into the military or the police. I don't remember which exam it was. So they have a paper test, which he passed. Then after that, there is a physical test. And that physical test, the way it is designed, it's the Le Cliché test. It's a VO2 max test. The way it is designed and the threshold that they have to hit to pass the test.
00:13:40
Speaker
It is designed to sort out people who actually trained once a week for the past six months or a year and people who didn't. How hard is it to go running once a week? How hard is that, right? It isn't. 75% of people fail that test.
00:13:59
Speaker
And that just shows, I think it's the same for marketing. If you do the work, you will get results. But if you take shortcuts and blame it on the test, or you blame it on the market, or you blame it on marketers, or you blame it on something else, then that won't work. So I think the end question or the way that comes back to the education, I don't like that word.
00:14:23
Speaker
People have to understand that we as marketers can be less aspirational. We can be less bullshitty. We can do all that. But they also need to stop believing in the shortcuts. Because there are no shortcuts. They do not exist. And if they exist and they work, they're not good for you, right? Steroids are a shortcut. I don't know what the side effects or steroids are. But if you want to get a heart attack at 40, be my guest. There are consequences to taking shortcuts. We all know that.
00:14:52
Speaker
There are both parties can actually act on this and do better for sure. I think the reality is that marketers talk a good game. They get people very excited.
00:15:04
Speaker
even though there may not be a lot of substance behind the talk, and it's easy to get seduced by a marketer because that's our job. Our job is to get you excited, inspired, and willing to do things that you may want to do. So that is very interesting. A related question is that marketing, particularly digital marketing, has been quantified by data for the past 10 years, although I see the pendulum swinging back to brand. Data has
00:15:31
Speaker
steered how companies determine whether marketing has been successful or not. In the process, I think it's made a lot of marketers dependent on KPIs and dashboards and whether the green arrows are more prominent than the red arrows, green being good and red being bad. But what about the importance of marketing that can't be measured?
00:15:53
Speaker
What about marketing that drives brand awareness and brand affinity? For example, beer companies spend millions of dollars on marketing and advertising. They blow their brains out on Superbowl ads, but it's not like they want to recoup their costs in the short term because they understand that marketing is a long-term play. They understand that if people are aware of their brand and know that it exists, then the likelihood of them buying a product at some point in time
00:16:22
Speaker
is going to happen. My question is how does brand awareness, and this is a big question that we're not going to answer in a short period of time, but how does brand awareness fit into the economic landscape, the marketing landscape, and the focus on ROI?
00:16:41
Speaker
Are we going back in time when marketers like David Ogilvy were hailed as superstars because their work drove brand awareness? What are your thoughts on brand awareness versus this quantifiable marketing that everybody seemed to have leaned into for the last 10 years? This is a tough question. And I think my answer is pretty controversial. When you look at what works and what doesn't, because in the end, that's what we want. What works and what doesn't.
00:17:11
Speaker
If you look at it that way, where does ROI fit into this? What I'm saying is, what does work mean?
00:17:20
Speaker
And what does success look like? That's the fundamental question that marketers cannot answer. Because for some period of time, it was leads. Everyone's like, these leads. And because leads weren't that great, they invented MQLs and SQLs. There are good leads and then bad leads. And now that we've had MQLs and SQLs, people say, no, it's not leads, MQLs. It's opportunities. So how's that difference? I don't know.
00:17:44
Speaker
And then that didn't work either. So now they're saying, oh, marketing should drive revenue. Okay, so what does work mean? And if you mentioned you're preaching to require, because you're using my examples and feeding them back to me with the Super Bowl things. That's what a good interviewer does, right? Exactly. If you think about this, what does work mean for a Super Bowl ad?
00:18:09
Speaker
The only thing that they are probably watching is how many people saw it and how many pennies per view we got or something. That's the context of that discussion.
00:18:20
Speaker
ROI is out of the picture. Like you mentioned, it doesn't matter. It's marketing budget. We spend marketing budget. That's it. It's allocated. It's going.
Simplicity in Marketing and Brand Awareness
00:18:28
Speaker
So there's that the issue that I think we've had with marketing budgets and stuff. And again, how much time do you have? Cause I can talk about that all night. There is a saying that people sometimes use that says something along the lines of what cannot be measured, cannot be improved. Can I call that an aphorism? Probably like that very.
00:18:50
Speaker
Assertive saying, you could argue is pretty false.
00:18:56
Speaker
I can improve lots of things that I cannot measure. If a drawing has no shadows, then I can improve the drawing by putting shadows. And maybe if you draw way better than me, which you probably do because I suck at drawing, then you can probably put less shadows. Then how do we quantify who added more shadows and less shadows? One counter example, and you see that logic goes out the window. The issues we've built our entire ecosystem on that premise.
00:19:25
Speaker
that what cannot be measured cannot be improved. Let's measure more. We've got this enormous amount of data. Analytics gives you more data than anyone ever needs. And we don't know what to do with it. So people started saying, yes, but we've got the data. But I've got the good data, right? So this is the MQL versus SQL kind of discussion. I've got the good data.
00:19:51
Speaker
And the more pressure is put on budgets, the more pressure is put on budgets, the more people want to measure. Oh yes, but I'm paying a dollar. What am I paying it to? Where is it going and how much is it bringing back? So the minute you start with the idea that measurement is the number one thing you need to do to know whether something is successful,
00:20:16
Speaker
The minute you do that, the minute you force yourself to do more of what is measurable. And so you do more of the stuff that doesn't work.
00:20:27
Speaker
When I say doesn't work, it's because there are two things that work in marketing. When I say work, because I asked the question, is what drives long-term growth? So not growth this quarter or next quarter, but what drives long-term growth? To drive long-term growth, you need two things. You need mental availability, so you need basically space, some kind of space in people's heads.
00:20:52
Speaker
And you need physical availability. So when people think of you, you need to, they can actually buy from you. If you go out of business in the meantime, then sorry. To drive that ads suck. The measurable stuff just sucks. It does not work.
00:21:07
Speaker
So there is a graph that's famous if you look at it online. It's a long-term growth versus sales activation. So what people call sales activation campaign is, oh, we need more sales next quarter. What can we do? So we're going to sell ads, or we're going to do an event, or we're going to do that kind of thing with the sole purpose of driving business and not the purpose of building a brand. When you do that, it spikes like that. And then the minute you don't do events anymore, it just stops.
00:21:34
Speaker
You do another event, you get four leads, you sell 200k or something more than last quarter, and so on and so forth. The stuff that's measurable isn't great at driving growth. It just isn't.
00:21:50
Speaker
And the problem is that more pressure is put on marketers to drive more business, to play a bigger part in the business in the bottom line. So what they do is they always cross the next line. It was leads, then it's MQLs, then it sent SQLs, then it's opportunities, which probably proposals or something, I don't know. And now it's revenue. So people came up with the invention of
00:22:16
Speaker
Marketing influence revenue. Saying, I do marketing, but I do the right kind of marketing. And these other suckers, they do the bad kind of marketing. I have a question for all these guys, because what they're saying is we need to measure which marketing actions actually drive revenue, which is something marketers have no control on.
00:22:36
Speaker
And we're going to do that with this new fancy attribution software that my pal built in the last six months and cost 150K a year. We're going to do that with this. But let me ask you a question. If you're calling it marketing influenced revenue, doesn't anyone who looks at your website qualifies as influenced by marketing?
00:23:00
Speaker
But it's basically then every revenue is marketing influenced because you had a logo, right? So at some point someone thought of a logo. And so what I'm trying to say with this nonsensical reasoning is marketing is an ecosystem. It's not like people click on one ad and then buy and then you do more of that ad and it works more because otherwise we'd all be boring five millions from the local bank to invest in Facebook ads and sell for 5x ROI. This is not how it works.
Overcoming Attribution Challenges with Strong Branding
00:23:30
Speaker
How it works is you need to build a brand, you need to have a narrative, you need to understand the market, the problems. You need to say back to people what they feel and connect that problem to your solution. It's that simple. It's that simple, but it's complicated. It's simple, but hard. It's hard. I think that's the problem that marketers are encountering these days is that
00:23:59
Speaker
They've become so dependent on data and KPIs to measure their success. They've lost the narrative. If you look at the average tenure of a CMO, it's less than four years and it's shrinking because the CFO or the CEO will look at the CMO and say, your marketing's not working.
00:24:25
Speaker
And they'll blame the marketer for not doing the right things in some respects. And it sounds somewhat sacrilegious that is that a lot of marketing is a leap of faith. Yes, you do the research for your customers. You do marketing that is the right thing to do. Some of it can be quantified because there's a correlation between if I do this kind of marketing, then this will happen. And that's the short-term demand gen performance marketing that you talk about. But a lot of it is what I call slow burn marketing. And you don't know it's working, but it's working in the background.
00:24:55
Speaker
People are having conversations, they're driving referrals, they're talking about your brand at conferences, but you have no idea that it's happening. You can't measure it, but it's working. That's the conundrum facing marketers is that they can't claim that success.
00:25:12
Speaker
We all have stories to tell around that. I was with a prospect last week and it's a guy I invited on LinkedIn. Just invited him, dropped a message saying, Hey, hi, who are you? What do you do? And you can check out my profile. No, I'm not selling anything. I'm just like, Hey, I exist. You exist too. Let's exist together. The guy went to our website, check out, checked out our content, checked out our playbook, responded. And what I thought was going to be a casual conversation like this one turned into a discovery call.
00:25:42
Speaker
He had qualified himself through my content. I have two questions. Had my content not been there, would I have been able to add one lead to my CRM? Probably not. The second question, which shows even more how that works, I think, is how many people checked out my content and did not reply to my message? You don't know.
00:26:10
Speaker
So how many times, and this is like the survivorship bias, how many times did my content not influence people the right way? I could draw the conclusion that this is great. My content's working because that guy said so, but maybe I put up 99% of people because it's bad content and that guy is just a statistical mistake. You never know. And if you trust measurement, what is the data saying to draw conclusions? You can go in the wrong way.
00:26:40
Speaker
The problem is not the data, it's what you do with it. And most of the times, the data is used to prove something that has already been decided before.
00:26:53
Speaker
I use the same reasoning when I work with small businesses, because I do that sometimes. People have like high-tech consultancies and stuff, and I help them build their narrative and build their marketing. And I say, like most small businesses or professional services firms, they're relying on referrals. And they always say something along the lines of, we get most of our business from referrals.
00:27:13
Speaker
And I say this, how many times you were referred to someone and they contacted you. Do you know how many times you were referred to someone and they didn't feel you were the right fit so they never got in touch because you're marketing so bad? You don't know. Maybe it's never. Maybe it's all the time. You don't know until you do that research. So what I say now is,
00:27:35
Speaker
I talk about confidence, which is an emotion, but once you've done the work, once you've done the market research, you've built your narrative, you've thought about it. You're confident in what you're saying. You're confident that you have a narrative, you have a plan, you know where you're going. Maybe it's a bad plan, but a bad plan is still better than no plan. I agree. And I think that the problem
00:28:00
Speaker
with a lot of companies is that they don't have a strong message, a strong story that they want to deliver to the marketplace. Regardless of whether you can drive attribution or not is what you're looking to do is attract and engage the right people. You want to do things that spark emotions that generate reactions that get people thinking about your brand as a possibility and what could be possible
00:28:31
Speaker
if they used your product? What would that experience be like? How would their life change professionally or personally if they used your product? And one of the biggest challenges facing marketers these days is attribution is increasingly difficult. And if you listen to people like Chris Walker who is
00:28:52
Speaker
banging the drum about dark social and dark web. What he's basically saying is that most of your dashboard information is pretty useless. The replacement that he has is as useless in my opinion. Why is that? Because his replacement for it is like a self-reported attribution, which he coined as SRA. And the idea is, oh, we'll ask people on a forum where they heard about it. Rand Fishkin had a really good
00:29:19
Speaker
blog post recently and ran fishkins from Spark. You've got to read it because what he basically said is that that self attribution, how did you find out about us form has nowhere near the value that someone like a Chris Walker.
Critique of Marketing Self-Promotion
00:29:34
Speaker
advocates. It's not even that it has nowhere near the value. It's that it has no value. There is no value in this. And I can prove it by stating a simple fact. When you ask heterosex sexual men and heterosexual women how much sex they have per week, you get different results.
00:29:53
Speaker
They have sex together, right? So you should get the same amount for men and women. So people lie sometimes because they just don't want to tell you. And if you reflect on your own habits with that self-reported attribution, if I saw an ad and this is why I'm contacting you, there's no way in hell I'm telling you it's from an ad. No way in hell because you're going to use that information against me. It is interesting because I have a client and we set up that exact form on the website and then I was able to
00:30:23
Speaker
track every lead we got every demo request we got I was able to track what how did you find out about us it was all over the place and majority of the time people didn't even give a reason because they couldn't be bothered we didn't make it obligatory and Google I heard you from a friend it was pretty much useless information I think that's really interesting if I can add something here I think that shows because you mentioned Chris Walker I didn't I think that shows how these people are hurting the industry
00:30:52
Speaker
and they're hurting more businesses than they're helping. The reason I'm saying this is he's constantly trying to reinvent the wheel and he's constantly spinning in circles and chasing his own tail. His entire business depends on his public image and the fact that he has something new to say and he'll say anything because it's new.
00:31:16
Speaker
The best way to say new things all the time is to make them up, right? That's a really good way to have lots of things to say. So he does that. He makes things up, like quite literally, like brutally. If you look at his content with an ounce of clinical thinking, he makes things up all the time. And the best strategy to be able to make things up on the fly is to complexify what is simple.
00:31:41
Speaker
And this comes back to what we were saying about when I intervened, I say, no, it's not complex. It's hard. People misunderstand difficulty and complexity. So complexity is how intellectually challenging something is. Does it have a lot of intellectually moving parts? A nuclear plant is pretty complex, right?
00:32:01
Speaker
And difficulty is how easy it is to execute. Building a nuclear plant is fairly hard to do. There are things that are simple and hard.
00:32:13
Speaker
doing a deadlift. Simple and hard. Very simple, or a pull-up if you don't know what a deadlift is. You grab the bar and lift yourself up. 90% of people can't do a pull-up because it takes years of training for most people in our current shape and form. It's simple, it's hard. There are things that are hard and simple.
00:32:34
Speaker
And yet there are things that are complex and simple. You'd argue, for example, that driving a car is complex and simple. You've got lots and lots of things to think about when you drive. Once you know how to do it, it's pretty straightforward. Marketing is simple and hard. It's very simple in its intellectual form, but it's very hard to do because its interview customer is very simple.
00:32:59
Speaker
But running customer interviews to get the kind of insights that you're looking for, that is really hard. It's not something that you can do on the fly on your first try.
00:33:10
Speaker
The entire industry of professional marketing services is based on the assumption that marketing is going to be easy when it is actually simple. And so Chris Walker is always telling you that you do not understand marketing and this is why you're failing. The reality is you understand perfectly what marketing is. You're just too bad to do it.
00:33:34
Speaker
Which is fine. It's very easy to solve as a problem. Just hire someone who knows and then we circle back to your first. As Taylor Swift has her army of Swifties that will come to her defense whenever she
00:33:49
Speaker
is attacked in any way, shape or form. I'm sure that there are an army of Chris Walker fans that will rally around him and say that what you're saying makes no sense. Let them prove it. Let them prove it in reason. It's a bit of a tangent here. One of the things that Chris Walker has done is he's done an amazing job of marketing himself. He's a good looking guy. He's very articulate. Chris Walker is a very good marketer. He's a very good marketer. He has tremendous energy. He is everywhere and anywhere.
00:34:18
Speaker
And I give him a thousand percent credit for building his personal brand and using that brand to build his business from scratch. Remember he was a marketer, like a corporate marketer, just like you and I a few years ago. And he jumped on the LinkedIn bandwagon early and hard and wrote it so well. We can challenge his hypothesis or his theories or his views of the world, but the reality is he's a great marketer and he's not the perfect marketer. Gary Vaynerchuk, for example,
00:34:48
Speaker
is an amazing self marketer, but most of the stuff that he says is crap. It's bullshit. But your ability to market yourself does not necessarily translate to your ability to do marketing for other businesses.
00:35:01
Speaker
You can be great at building a brand and do all that stuff, but be really bad at providing marketing services. I'm not saying he's bad. I think he's a really good marketer. I just think that he is head deep in this at this point and it's too costly to go back.
00:35:20
Speaker
Because every time I look at his stuff, it's more and more extreme. And there is a cultish dimension to it as well. As you mentioned, there is a cultish dimension, which I do not like at all, like the personality cult and that kind of thing. I'd rather stay away from it myself. It is what it is. We don't have to deal with that problem, fortunately or unfortunately.
Promoting Critical Thinking in Marketing
00:35:39
Speaker
Final question, why don't we shift gears to something a little more serious, a little more
00:35:43
Speaker
in depth, when we originally jumped on our, Hey, get to know your call, you talked to me about a concept called marketing self defense. Yeah. And how it's used to do critical thinking to make better marketing decisions. I went through our transcript and I thought about what does this mean? And, and how did you embrace this philosophies? Can you elaborate on what you
00:36:07
Speaker
mean by marketing self-defense? And what can marketers do to start embracing this approach to marketing?
00:36:14
Speaker
When you think about what we do as business leaders or whatever, I wouldn't consider myself a business leader. People who are like CMOs in companies and I own a company. What we do most days is decision making. We make decisions. Some are random and do not matter. And some matter a lot, like who to hire or in which direction to go, which product to launch, et cetera, how to launch it. We all have beliefs, things that we believe but do not really know are true.
00:36:45
Speaker
We don't know why we believe them, but we do. Some of these beliefs are actually real, like they are true in the end, and some of them are not. For example, one believes that I dropped because I'm French, and this is a very French thing. French people believe, 90% of French people believe that if you go out in the cold and you're not dressed properly, you will catch a cold.
00:37:09
Speaker
It's a very random thing. I'm using it as a light hearted example. It's better than a religious one. And the reality is that this is completely false. You catch a cold because of a virus. This is just the way it is. Sorry, you can go out in the cold without a coat and you will not get sick.
00:37:26
Speaker
Like I mentioned, religious beliefs are some people who are in cults or some people, some beliefs can have a big impact. What I want with my life is to limit the number of beliefs that things I believe in that are not true. I'm going on a tangent here, but I'm coming back, right? I'm not saying I can remove them completely. I will always believe full things, but I want to believe as few false things as possible in my life.
00:37:55
Speaker
The way to do that is to use the scientific method. It's the method that we've used for the past 200 years or so, 250 years, and it works really well. We have dropped the mortality rates of children down to something like 1%, 1 to 3%, and it used to be 30%. We have sent stuff on the moon. We have plenty of examples of that working. And we can apply that method.
00:38:21
Speaker
to other areas than just like science or math or physics, we can apply it to marketing, and it's called evidence-based marketing. The idea is that we are going to determine what working means, and we're going to test it. We're going to see whether it's actually true or not true. There is research being published all the time in marketing, and there is a good institution called the Ehrenberg Bass Institute that has published lots of research around
00:38:50
Speaker
evidence-based marketing. Another way we can do that when the research is not present, when we do not have the research, is to use critical thinking. Critical thinking is a way of thinking, an ensemble of principles that will help us
00:39:07
Speaker
get closer to the truth or get closer to reality or ensure that we are not too disconnected from reality. That's the critical thinking part. I'm coming back to your question. So we got the idea to set up a newsletter that's called Marketing Self-Defense and the idea is to
00:39:27
Speaker
help people master these concepts, most of which are pretty simple, but also hard, remember, they were simple to understand, but hard to apply, and apply that to marketing decision-making.
00:39:39
Speaker
So for example, I mentioned survivorship bias earlier. I got a lead and that proves that it's working. Think about all the other things that did not survive. Think about all the leads that you did not get. What does that say about the same data sample and how can we use that information to make better decisions?
00:39:58
Speaker
I can also mention a few of these principles, another one which is really well known as Occam's razor. Occam's razor states that if there are two hypotheses, we want to favor the one that does not involve any additional cause. For example, I got a very violent pain in the back of my neck and then it's swollen and then there's a bee flying around. If I say an alien bit me,
00:40:22
Speaker
But it's not as good as, it's not as good of a hypothesis than if I say I was standing next to the house, it could be a bee. This is obviously an extreme example. But if we use that in our day to day decision making, then that can help us make better marketing decision. And a really good example of that is something that is well known in the marketing research world is that most ads actually only make people buy who would have bought anyway.
00:40:53
Speaker
That's really interesting. How do we protect against that? Does that mean that ads are really bad? I don't know. I'm not an ads guy, but this is a fact. If you see an ad, you probably would have bought or e-commerce coupons are the same thing, right? If you make a coupon, then yes, you sell more, but do you sell more because people wouldn't have bought with the coupon or do you sell more because of the coupon?
00:41:16
Speaker
The truth is if you think of your own buying habits, usually if you know that a website always has product on sale and it doesn't have product on sale when you're laying on it, you're just going to wait for a few weeks for them to... So you're going to subscribe to your newsletter and these guys go, our newsletter is growing. Yes, but it's because you're shitting yourself in the foot.
00:41:34
Speaker
So we can use all these principles, and I call that marketing self-defense because it's protecting against the BS of the industry. It's protecting against the bad decisions, and it's protecting against the bad vendors as well, because there is one component which I plan to address a lot, and that is how to choose a vendor, how to know whether that guy I'm talking to is actually legit or not, which is the big overarching questions, the red thread that we have here. It's interesting because you mentioned that because I recently
00:42:02
Speaker
published a free guide on how to discover and hire the right fractional CMO because it's a perfect example of lots of people out there calling themselves fractional CMOs, but they don't have the experience or the expertise, but it's a fancy marketing title to cover.
00:42:18
Speaker
There's lots of stuff to wade through in the policies and things that simply aren't true. And lots of people doing self-promotion. Promotion is fine, by the way. I'm not saying people should not self-promote because this is something that people tell me sometimes, but everyone's entitled to their own marketing. Well, the truth is that you're French and I'm Canadian and we are simply not good at self-promotion. Americans, and I say this in a very respectful way,
00:42:42
Speaker
are great at waving the flag and telling people that the absolute best in the world. And we suffer from being a little too humble. But again, we're rambling off in different directions and that's fine for a podcast conversation. And I'm super excited that we're able to pull this off.
00:42:59
Speaker
We've covered a lot of ground. Some of it's been controversial, which is great. I expect that the Chris Walker fans will be coming to his defense with lots of enthusiasm. Even what I would like to do, I would like to have that kind of conversation with a Chris Walker fan. If someone has a podcast and wants me on, she's just going to chat about all these things and exchange opinions. That would be really fun. What would be even better than would be a Chris Walker, Vince Morrow podcast in which
00:43:26
Speaker
It's a discussion, a very respectful discussion and an agreement to agree to disagree and explain themselves. That would be fun because I think that we don't have enough of those discussions in marketing. We're all nodding our heads saying you're right or you're wrong, but I think that would be a really great conversation. I'm open to it. Maybe you should do some marketing to see if that happens. Anyway, one final question is where can people learn more about you and what you do?
00:43:51
Speaker
You can find me on LinkedIn. I do not have Twitter, which is no called X. And you can look at scalecrush.io to see what we're up to these days. And you can always subscribe to the newsletter, which I'm really bad at launching on time. So be prepared.
00:44:07
Speaker
Thanks Vince for a great conversation and thanks to everybody for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or our favorite podcast app and share via social media. If you're a B2B or SaaS company looking for more sales and leads but struggling to do marketing that makes an impact, we should talk. You can reach out to me via email, mark at markevans.ca or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.