John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Creative Elements hosted by Jay Klaus. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals creative elements goes behind the scenes with today’s top creators. Through narrative interviews, Jay Klaus explores how creators like Tim Urban James Clear, Tory Dunlap and Cody Sanchez are building their audiences today. By learning how these creators make a living with their art and creativity, creative elements helps you gain the tools and confidence to do the same. In a recent episode, they talked with Kevin Perry about how he goes viral on every single platform. Listen to creative elements wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Kristi Harold. She’s the founder and CEO of JAM, a multi-million dollar global business that has connected millions of people through play. Since its inception, one of the largest adult recreational sports leagues in the world. The JAM team has produced and delivered over 3,500 playful corporate events in over 30 countries since the summer of 2020, and has been awarded Canada’s most admired culture award in 2022. Kristi consults and speaks on how to move a culture from surviving to thriving, and she recently authored the bestselling book we’re gonna talk about today. It pays to Play: How Play Improves Business Culture. So welcome to the show, Kristi.

Kristi Herold (01:47): Thank you, John. I’m thrilled to be here.

John Jantsch (01:49): This is a milestone, a show for me. This is the first time I’ve had the sister of a former guest on the show, Cameron Herold. Siblings. Siblings. I don’t think I’ve ever had, I’ve had husband or wife never siblings? I don’t think so. Awesome. Little little thing. I get to check off the box. So I wanna know, how does somebody get a job playing?

Kristi Herold (02:13): How did get a job playing? Oh, that’s a great question. Come work for JAM. .

John Jantsch (02:17): . That’s what I’m wondering. Like how did you get that job?

Kristi Herold (02:21): I mean, I started, I just,

John Jantsch (02:22): Other than starting the company, that’s the number one, but, but what led you there? Let’s put it that way.

Kristi Herold (02:28): Well, I was, you know, Cameron and I grew up in a small town about four hours north of Toronto. And then I went, when I went off to university after university, I moved to Toronto and I was like small town girl, living in a lonely world, working at a company and thinking I knew I wanted to run my own business, but I didn’t know what, and I’d heard about these adult recreational sports leagues in the US in San Francisco, and I thought I should try that in Toronto. Like what a great way to meet people, solve my own problem here and try running a business. And I have a vision that it would become as big as it has. That wasn’t my intention in 1996. I just wanted to do something fun and help people and connect and play. And yeah, so here we are 27 years later, getting a couple hundred thousand people annually playing sports and now our corporate business has, is really taking off. So it’s been really a fun ride.

John Jantsch (03:19): So I, I can’t tell you how often entrepreneurs say I started this business to solve my own problem. I mean, it is, it is so inherent in kind of the, you know, it’s like I have a problem, here’s the only way I could figure out how to fix it, is to start a business that, that that didn’t. And I, you know, it, I think one of the beauties of that of course is that I think it does lead to a lot of passion in what you do. Let’s just start within the workplace as you’re pitching this idea maybe to some sort of corporate program to an executive. I mean, what do you talk about as the top line benefits of bringing this into a culture?

Kristi Herold (03:54): Hmm. That’s a great question. Well, I’ve always wanna start with w what are you being challenged with? What’s the, what are the challenges that your organization is facing from a cultural perspective? And what we’re hearing a lot of these days is retention, right? Is, I mean, it’s no surprise, it’s a great resignation and those numbers have gone gotten worse. So retention, engagement, energy, physical and mental health, a lack of connection and a lack of kind of innovation and creativity. So interestingly enough, I sort of started to look at it and was like, well these are all the challenges companies are facing. Our company’s not dealing with that because we have a really fun culture. We have integrated playfulness into our culture. And that’s where sort of the idea for writing the book came from. And I really believe that integrating a little bit of playfulness into the every day at work.

(04:43): I’m not saying stop everything and go play a game of basketball every day. Like that’s not what I’m talking about. And what I’m also not saying is once a year company event doesn’t make for great culture, right? It’s finding a way to make work fun every day. And play has a fantastic way of doing that. And there are ways to integrate laughs and playfulness that will connect your team and help strengthen bonds and relationships amongst them, which then in turn helps all those issues, helps with retention, helps with engagement, right? Helps with physical and mental health, you know, so

John Jantsch (05:16): Yeah, I think another thing that happens too, a lot of times we get very, you know, siloed in work that, you know, we don’t really get to know the people we work beside, you know, all the time because it’s always about the meeting and it’s always about the task list. And I do think that bringing any kind of outside of work, if you will, type of activity, I mean it allows us to get to know each other better, allows us to see commonality and allows us to feel maybe safer, you know, even at work. And I think that’s probably a big part of this retention and engagement, isn’t it?

Kristi Herold (05:45): Absolutely. It’s getting to know our teammates as people who we can then have a laugh with, trust them a little more because we’ve gotten to know them as humans, feel that we can be a little more vulnerable and maybe ask for help if we need it. So then you get like everyone working together as a team towards the common goal for the company. And if you don’t have that, if everyone’s just doing their own thing and are afraid to ask for help or afraid to admit they don’t know something or because they don’t trust there’s no, you know, a lack of trust or in the relationship in the organization, like all of that can be so easily solved by having a few laughs together.

John Jantsch (06:24): Do you still get, I mean, I’m thinking the sort of old hierarchy old, you know, structure of a corporation where they’re, you know, they actually are still people there in leadership that think this is a really ridiculous idea, you know, to bring play. You know, there’s work and there’s play and they don’t mix. And you know, we’re a serious company. I mean, do you still get that pushback? I’m sure that it’s breaking down, the walls are breaking down, but do you still get that some

Kristi Herold (06:49): Absolutely. They’re, and those are not gonna be our target market and not, you know, I mean, I would go toe to toe with anyone. If someone wanted to debate me on this, I would happily debate anybody on this topic. And I think it would be hard to, I think anyone would be hard pressed to prove me wrong on this, honestly, if they took the time to actually listen, like, to dig a little deeper as to what I’m talking about, because I’m not saying like spreadsheets still need to happen. You still need to have your board meetings, you gotta have your day. Like all the work has to happen of course. But if you can do that work and integrate some laughs throughout your day, how much happier is your team of employees going to become going to be coming to work every day? And so, yeah, there are people who are resistant to the idea of a, but I think it’s more they just don’t understand it. And

John Jantsch (07:43): Do you think there’s also an aspect of, I mean, play is kind of beaten out of us, you know, as we grow up, right? I mean, as little as kids, it was like, oh, the only thing that existed and then it’s slowly, you know, you had to become more responsible and you had to do this and you, I mean, is there somewhere there’s some resistance because it’s like, wait a minute, this feels socially wrong almost.

Kristi Herold (08:03): Yeah, absolutely. And it’s funny you, the last two things you’ve said to me are, are things I clearly talk about. I do a lot of keynote speaking now on this, and I speak to specifically to this. I actually say, you know, so many people think work is work, play is play, and never the two shall meet. And this idea of when we were kids, it was our favorite thing to do. So why do we stop? Like why do we stop? Yeah, I play every day. I find a, whether I’m playing my guitar or I play tennis, or I play a game of cards, or I’m having a playful banter with my, the way I communicate with my staff, there’s ways to play all the time. And so why do we stop? Because George Bernard Shaw said, we don’t get old because we stop. No, we don’t stop playing because we get old. We get old because we stop playing.

John Jantsch (08:52): Yeah. Awesome. One. So let’s, you mentioned mental health already, and I mean, I, this is a topic that certainly has always been a very large topic, I think in the workplace, you know, let’s throw Covid under the bus one more time. , and you know, the work from home, you know, that’s gone on. I mean, how big a crisis do you think we’re dealing with in the workplace? I know you’re not a psychiatrist, psychologist, or sociologist, but just in your work, how big of an issue do you think that is? Like leaders need to be addressing

Kristi Herold (09:20): It? Was it, I think pandemic proportions or endemic proportions? I don’t know what the proper terminology is. Prior to the pandemic, it’s only gotten worse. And yes, I’m not a psychologist. I do, however, have six kids between the ages of 18 and 22. And guess what? All the kids and their kids, these, that age group and all their friends are all struggling with anxiety and depression and mental health challenges. And it’s, it is coming to work. It’s, yeah, you know, if people aren’t happy about coming to work every day, if they wake up every morning, dreading going to work, it’s not gonna be good for their mental health. So if we as employers and leaders can make the workplace a little more fun, a little more engaging and rewarding to be part of your team is gonna be so much happier and perform so much better.

(10:19): Yeah, I had two employees leave during the pandemic for, for better career. They felt they were leaving for, you know, better career opportunities and more money. And I wish them both the best. Like anytime over 27 years have had lots of people come and go. And I tend to keep in touch with people that I, you know, I care about as friends who inevitably, lots of my former teammates I keep in regular touch with. Anyway, I remember after about three months, this fellow Sandeep had left and I reached out. I’m like, Hey, how’s it going? I hope your new gig has been well, we miss you. And he’s always this super upbeat, positive guy. He responded, I’m miserable and I’m giving my letter of resignation tomorrow and I don’t have another job to go to. And I was like, what is going on? Fast forward, he’s back on our team, Taylor also left back on our team, and Taylor said to me, she said, you know, I could feel every day my me mental health was declining every day. I had to get up and go to that job. And she’s like, I, the biggest issue was I was working with people who didn’t care about me as a person. And at JAM I know I have people who care about me as a person and I care about them. And so she, you know, like it’s a really powerful thing to, to care and have connections and relationships in the workplace. We spend a lot of time at work,

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(13:14): A lot of play is physical, a lot of play is analog. Let’s talk about that as the anecdote for, I mean, let’s face it, most of us sit in a chair and delete email all day long and, uh, you know, so, so as an anecdote for technology and how technology is really running our lives now, h how do you, how do you sort of insert play into that conversation?

Kristi Herold (13:36): Great question. So, well, ironically interesting , the pandemic shut down our adult sports leagues that had been operating for 25 years in a number of different cities shut us down for almost 18 months. And when we first were mandated the like Canadian mandates were really harsh. Our Michigan operations weren’t shut down quite as badly. But so when we were first mandated to shut down, we were like, how are we going to survive? And I, I remember thinking we have to stay true to our core purpose of connecting people through play, but how do you, I was like, I don’t, and I actually, I remember having a very tearful conversation with my brother Cameron, and I was saying, he was saying, you have to pivot. You have to pivot, you’re gonna have to go online. And I was like, you can’t play soccer through your phone.

(14:21): You can’t play beach volleyball on your computer. It doesn’t work. And but then we opened our minds to possibilities and we actually started meeting needs of company teams who were all of a sudden working from home missing the banter that they, the fun laughs that they could have in the office. So we started doing online games, but we were like, we called them like we’re hosting the best kitchen party ever kind of thing. Like it’s, you’re in a Zoom, but JAM hosts are leading you through a lot of fun and laughter games. Yeah. And has taken off. I mean we built a significant business in a very short time doing that. And now that’s morphed into, we’re still doing virtual, we’re also offering hybrid opportunities and in-person opportunities. So we’ve got it all covered now for the companies that a lot of companies have stayed remote.

(15:07): Right. And, and it’s a, it’s not a negative thing, but that means, you know, I’ve got a teammate who lives in Paris, France, another one in Vancouver, somebody in Calgary, someone who just moved to Cyprus. Um, I can stay connected with them and have some laughs at them by doing virtual events. I don’t have to fly them on a plane once every two months to stay connected and laughing and strengthening our relationships. So there’s positives and negatives to sort of the technology I think. But I think if used properly it can still be a really powerful positive tool.

John Jantsch (15:41): Yeah, I was really talking more about the addictive behaviors, you know, the, some of the online gamings and the, you know, checking faces a million times a day, , I think, you know, we, we’ve sort of lost control I think in a lot of ways, you know, based on the technology we thought was, you know, going to actually give us more control. Right. You know, what I’d love for you to do, if you wouldn’t mind, is give us some examples of how you’ve incorporated play into meetings, you know, teams. Just however, anything you wanna do. I’d love to hear some Sure. Kind of concrete examples that, uh, might get people’s mind spinning about what’s possible.

Kristi Herold (16:15): Yeah. One very easy one that everyone could do starting today. Set up a banter channel in, or a shout out channel or both. We have both in your, whether it’s Slack or Microsoft Teams, whatever your company uses for internal chats, we have a shout out channel. And so every day there are multiple times during the day you’ll see somebody is shouting out someone else for great work done. And it’s, it just is a positive reinforcement. It’s playful and positive. And the banter channel is just where people put silly jokes or funny things like it’s just random banter and it’s, it keeps people laughing and engaged, costs nothing. And it helps build community and relationships. Huddle. We do every single day.

John Jantsch (16:57): We, we actually, I was gonna say we call our shout out channel tacos. So we give each other tacos, so

Kristi Herold (17:04): Okay.

John Jantsch (17:05): We’re completely distributed as, as well . Mm-hmm .

Kristi Herold (17:09): And then we have a huddle every day. We do a seven minute huddle at one o’clock. So if you’re living in Vancouver, it might be 10 in the morning if you’re living in Paris, France, it might be seven in the evening or six in the evening. But everyone comes to huddle and it’s a different leader every single day and huddle. It’s always the exact same agenda. And huddle starts always with good news. Whoever’s the leader has to share their good news and what huddle always ends with. I mean there’s obviously important metrics and stuff that we’re sharing and important announcements throughout the seven minute huddle, but it always ends with leader’s choice. And leader’s choice can range from, I mean one of my favorite ones was the leader said, I would encourage everyone to pick up the phone and someone today who you haven’t talked to in six months, sometimes someone will say, you know, sent post a picture of your first sports team that you ever played on in the banter channel or the best Halloween costume you ever had as a child. Or you know, it just, someone else might say, go for a 15 minute walk today. That is my choice for you as leader to encourage everyone to get outside and get fresh air. You never know what you’re gonna get. And it can be very playful and fun and it allows everyone to shine as a leader because they’re leading this, yeah. This huddle. So you get to meet different personalities.

John Jantsch (18:21): I’m curious, how do you get that done in seven minutes? We sometimes we do a daily huddle. We sometimes struggle to get it done in 15. It

Kristi Herold (18:27): The odd time it does go over, we try and keep it pretty tight and we have a very clear agenda. There’s like five or six points that the leader covers off and it’s their job to keep it tight and it’s o yeah, usually it’s pretty, pretty darn good. Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:39): So, so what are some other kind of structured things that you’ve brought into, you know, not just these kind of everyday things, but like where somebody really wanted to make a significant change in culture. And obviously that’s not gonna happen from one, you know, event, but what are some, some avenues that, that you’ve brought in to folks that have really seemed like they’ve been received very well?

Kristi Herold (19:02): Celebrations. We do core value awards highlighting great Achieve like we do the core value awards once a month, celebrating anniversaries, have a company sports team get, you know, offer it to your team cuz there are adult sports leagues in every city across North America. Sure. So sign your team up for a kickball league or a beach volleyball league if they would like, you know, offer it. Maybe you have a company, an office book club. We do that every two months. Perhaps it’s a company rock band or choir for those that aren’t necessarily sporty. There are ways to play every day. Like there are so many ways to play. I mean I could go on and on and we’re not gonna have time to go through it all, but I

John Jantsch (19:37): Bet you there are some examples of it in it pays to play. So la last question. What kind of guitar do you play?

Kristi Herold (19:47): Acoustic and I only started playing in my early forties, but, so I’m very average with guitar, but I have a lot of fun. I really just play so that I can sing along cause I like to sing so Awesome. I do it to entertain myself.

John Jantsch (19:59): Well I’ve been doing it for about 50 years and so I have a whole wall if you could see my, a whole wall of guitars to that I love to play with. So I always love to hear what other people play, but I mostly play acoustic guitar as well.

Kristi Herold (20:12): That’s awesome. My, my favorite guitar, I have one in Toronto that is a seagull, which is a Canadian brand and it’s a beautiful guitar. I love it. John, I did wanna ta mention, since I couldn’t get into lots of tactics, I’m happy to offer a, the a free PLAYbook PDF document that would list sort of a top 10 list of tactics for your listeners so I can get you that for you.

John Jantsch (20:31): That that would be awesome. That would be great. Also, invite people where they might bind the book or where they might find out more about, uh, the work that you are doing at JAM.

Kristi Herold (20:39): Yeah, that would be great. kristiherold.com is is my website. K R I S T I H E R O L D.com. And then jamgroup.com is our, is where we have all our corporate event offerings and adult sports leagues.

John Jantsch (20:53): Awesome. Well, Kristi, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you on these days out there on the road or on a field or in a, on a Accord or something like that.

Kristi Herold (21:03): That would be fun. One, let’s do another one with both Cameron and I, we can banter together with you.

John Jantsch (21:08): Oh, that would be very fun. I’ve, I’d love it. Let’s do it. All right.

Kristi Herold (21:12): Let’s talk about growing up in an entrepreneurial household or something.

John Jantsch (21:15): No kidding. Yeah, pretty crazy.

Kristi Herold (21:17): Thanks John.

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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Creative Elements hosted by Jay Klaus. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals creative elements goes behind the scenes with today’s top creators. Through narrative interviews, Jay Klaus explores how creators like Tim Urban James Clear, Tory Dunlap and Cody Sanchez are building their audiences today. By learning how these creators make a living with their art and creativity, creative elements helps you gain the tools and confidence to do the same. In a recent episode, they talked with Kevin Perry about how he goes viral on every single platform. Listen to creative elements wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Gaia Bernstein. She is a law professor, co-director of the Institute for Privacy Protection and co-director of the Gibbons Institute for Law, Science and Technology at the Seton Hall University School of Law. She writes, teaches and lectures at the intersection of law, technology, health, and privacy. Her forthcoming book, Unwired: Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies shatters the illusion that we can control how much time we spend on our screens by resorting to self-help measures. So, Gaia, that was a mouthful, but welcome to the show.

Gaia Bernstein (01:35): Thank you for having me.

John Jantsch (01:37): So let’s get right into the, there. There are some very interesting, scary, ominous things in this book, but there have been a number of books recently. I’ve had a couple of folks on my show over the last couple years that have written books essentially talking about how, you know, we need to untether and we need to, you know, not be so, you know, wired. I mean, what are you kind of hoping to add to that collection of warning books, I suppose we can call them.

Gaia Bernstein (02:06): Yeah, that’s a great question. Most of the books, I think practically all books written so far were written by psychologists or right marketing experts and people who were looking at a problem, and many of them agreed that there was an issue, but they were looking at self-help measures. How can we help ourselves? In the extreme case, they would talk about therapy, but I’m coming from a different direction. I’m look saying basically we have been trying this for years. We try our screen time. She just keeps going up. Yeah. And we are blaming ourselves instead of looking at other solutions.

John Jantsch (02:48): So yeah, so as an example, I remember one of the books was talking about like removing all the apps from your phone and you know, things like that. Right. So it was just kind of doing all these measures to take back control. But I think the whole first part of the book is about this idea of it’s an illusion, this control. So do we first have to understand that before any kind of measures makes sense?

Gaia Bernstein (03:12): Yes, definitely. I basically, we now know we spent tons of time online. That’s no surprise to anybody at this point, but when we got into this, we did not realize that we are going to end up spending more. So much time. We thought we were just adopt, adopting, you know, an app or we’re going to start texting on the go. So it was small decisions. We didn’t realize that once we start using them, tech industry is manipulating us to spend much more time than we intended. So we were under the illusion, we were making all the choices. One fact we were not, and by the time we got it, it was a bit too late because our life was completely entangled in screens.

John Jantsch (03:54): Yeah. I wonder, I know somewhere in the book, and there’s obviously lots of research on this, in fact, there’s apps to track this, how much time we actually spend, say, on mobile devices and things. And I would bet money that most people greatly underestimate how much time they actually are on the devices.

Gaia Bernstein (04:12): I think people do underestimate, I still underestimate myself. I’m shocked every week to find out how much time I spend on my phone. The, although I think that the problem is that these apps are part of the illusion here. Yeah. Because we get notifications of how much time we spend on our phone, and the idea is that now if we know we’re going to do better , but these apps and other self-help tools are not really getting at the addictive elements of tech, it just doesn’t make us believer in con in control.

John Jantsch (04:46): So let’s just start with this premise. Is there something evil going on here?

Gaia Bernstein (04:52): I think we, for the last few years, we’ve gotten a lot of information from the tech industry, from whistleblowers. People like Tristan Harris. Francis Hogan basically showed that companies like Facebook and other online companies, and they basically know that there are addicting users to spend more time online. They’re hired psychologists to do that. And when they realize how it’s affects kids, for example, how Instagram affects especially girls and how, and they still decided they’re just going to ignore it because the whole business model is based on having users spend more time on screen.

John Jantsch (05:31): Right, right. Yeah. It’s amazing the notices you get now, it’s like, so and so just posted. I was like, I don’t even know who that person is, , you know, but there’s this like, here’s the message we want to, it’s been, you know, 12 minutes since you’ve been on our app, so you we want to get you back in there. It’s pretty, pretty crazy. How, how manipulative, I guess it really is. I mean, is that, I know you used the word liberally in in the book. I mean, is that what we’re talking about is intentional manipulation?

Gaia Bernstein (05:58): It’s definitely intentional manipulation. It’s basically you, we get most of our products for free. Yeah. And we get Gmail for free. We get Facebook for free. These companies, the, this business model has been in effect for, since the beginning of the internet. Basically they make money by harvesting our data and our time. And there’s not been enough attention to the time part of this much more attention to the privacy issue. But basically we have to stay on line for as long as possible so they can collect more data on us and then so they can target more advertising in us. So they basically, they create designs to make sure that their business model works.

John Jantsch (06:40): Yeah. So, so there have been some, I was gonna say hints, but they’re far more overt than that suggestions that, that some of the current state of mental health in certain countries, the state of political environments, the state of, you know, cultural and social norms or the changes, you know, can really be linked to this sort of, these sort of new norms. Would you suggest that there’s something to that?

Gaia Bernstein (07:08): I think for the last two and three years, we’ve had a lot of data coming out. If we’re talking about kids, I think it’s pretty clear there’s a public health crisis of kids mental health issues related to addiction impact and cognitive development. And there’s also a lot of research about adults, how it affects their wellbeing. Mm-hmm. about how these algorithms that are supposed to keep us, us online for longer create hate. And we’ve basically been in this science wars for a decade, but the evidence now is so, so far. And it, I think that there are very few people who don’t think there’s something very serious going on here.

John Jantsch (07:50): So you mentioned kids, um, in, in particular, and I never really got into the online gaming thing, just, it just never appealed to me. And so I’m really not as aware of that. But I’ve read some articles recently that, that talk about the addiction of, particularly of online gaming. I mean 10, 12 hour days, you know, spent , you know, in inside of the games. I mean, it, I think that goes far beyond say, you know, somebody who checks Facebook 25 times a day or something. I mean, so, so I know you cover that pretty extensively. And I think that there probably, if people aren’t aware of, you know, some of the addictive behaviors around online gaming, I think particularly it would be pretty alarming, wouldn’t it?

Gaia Bernstein (08:33): I think with online gaming, we see, I would say, but the studies vary, but one to 9% of the gamers are concerned to be clinically addicted. Mm-hmm. that is like, they’re not, they’re spending so much time online, they’re neglecting other areas of life, like school, their work, and, but there are lots of gamers who just play a lot. And I think this overuse of spending so much time on screen when your whole social life is on screen for the games, is very similar to what’s happening with social media. With social media. We just see more girls doing it with games. We see more boys doing it. But the amount of time and the impact and the fact and the features, the design features, which I use in games, are very similar to the features which are used in social media.

John Jantsch (09:19): Yeah. So, so is it, are we talking about something that will be, you know, it will not, the true sort of ends will not reveal themselves for 20 years and at that point will have societal crisis?

Gaia Bernstein (09:33): I think the what’s happening is already revealing itself. I basically, I believe teachers are noticing what the kids are different than they used to be. Especially after spending the pandemic in front of screens. They have trouble paying attention. We can see kids are behaving differently. They’re looking at screens, they’re not talking to each other. The data shows are staying at home more. They’re not going to parties, they’re not meeting up with each other. So, and then you have all the data about mental health, the mm-hmm , the uptick in the suicide rate, anxiety and depression start in 2010. At first it was clear if there were other factors, but I think the enough studies showing now there’s a correlation between smartphones and social media and the climb and kids mental health, especially girls,

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(11:56): So you make some parallels that, you know, at first I was like, why are we talking about cigarettes? But you kind of draw some parallels to the tobacco industry, which was, was found to, you know, do everything they could to make these things that they sell more addictive. And consequently, a lot of litigation, a lot of, you know, things happen that I don’t really know what the state of that industry is, but certainly some regulation, pretty heavy regulation came. Are you suggesting that that’s where we’re headed here? I mean that at some point somebody’s gonna be able to sue one of these online gaming companies because they are making the games too addictive.

Gaia Bernstein (12:36): So basically it’s already happening. Part of what I show in the book, I draw the parallels because I think there’s a very similar strategy going on of basically cigarette companies blamed people for smoking saying it’s not responsible. Our responsibility, you’re choosing to smoke, right? Same thing is happening with tech. And the same strategies, legal strategies are taking place. So we already have a lot of parents suing games. There’s a very famous loss going on Quebec now suing Fortnite for being addictive as cocaine. They’re, for the last year, there have been multiple parents actually youth class actions suing social networks for addicting kids and affecting their mental health. And I think most interesting, a very interesting parallel to the cigarette companies, we’re now seeing school systems suing social networks for addicting kids because they have to pay for the cost of the kids mental health. That’s exactly what happened with the cigarette companies when states started suing cigarette companies because they had to pay for the health cost of smokers.

John Jantsch (13:43): So while people are maybe taking that tack, do you see that is really gonna, will that end up being able to influence? Yes. So they get fined, they pay a lot of money, they’re still selling cigarettes. Right? So will the same thing happen to Facebook? They get fined, they have some regulations, but they, but it doesn’t really change anything.

Gaia Bernstein (14:04): So first of all, I think things have changed with smoking. I think far, of course we have e-cigarettes, which is a different story, but smoking has gone down significantly since the first studies came up in the 1950s and regulations started sixties, 1970s and lawsuits. So, but the thing is, it’s not as no magic pill. It’s not as though, you know, there’s gonna be one Supreme court case. There’s going to change all of this. Right. This is not going to happen. Yeah. So basically what we are going to see is what happened with cigarettes. There were multiple actions, class actions, legislations, advertising warnings, all of this happened and things changed over time. This is, we’re already seeing this happening now. And that’s, I predict what we are going to see here. We also have like, I would say the Achiles heel of the personal responsibility argument and kids are so affected and we saw basically where kids are concerned, it’s much easier to regulate because it’s hard. It’s harder to argue that kids are making choices, that they’re responsible. Right. So I think regulation to protect children is where things are going to start shifting for all of us, not just for children.

John Jantsch (15:14): So, so you’ll have to prove that you are over 18 or something before you can log into a game or it will come with a warning that says this could cause cancer. I mean, are we talking about similar, similar types of measures?

Gaia Bernstein (15:28): So one of the things I am recommending in the book, I think for example, parents bought their kids Minecraft as an educational game and it’s been declared as one of their most addictive games in all times. I’m sure these parents would’ve loved to know before they downloaded the game, what’s the level of addictiveness. I think if you had some kind of warning, then this would prevent parents from downloading what also might affect game companies to think before they put these addictive measures in there. So I think that’s definitely one thing that, that we are likely to see the issue of age. Well I think there are all kinds of bills trying to restrict if in Utah something’s just passed to restrict the age of kids. This has been happening in other countries as well. But, so it’s complicated because you need to be able to au authenticate the age and Right, right, right. You and kids are very smart technologically. It’s not, I’m not saying it’s easy, but we might see that having kids cannot buy cigarettes until they’re 21. Now, when I was a kid I could just walk, get my parents cigarettes. Nobody said a word.

John Jantsch (16:31): Well, remember we had the machines, you know, right. That, that nobody was checking. Is this some, do you find that, you know, Americans are notoriously whether we actually are free or not or notorious, like I’m gonna make my own choices. You know, I don’t want people telling me I can’t drink, you know, sugar drinks and I can’t drink, or I can’t eat X food. Are there other countries that have embraced this and are really running down the track pretty quickly on, on reigning this in?

Gaia Bernstein (16:58): So there are southeast countries in Southeast Asia have been worried about gaming for over a decade and now more about social and networks. So there’s, of course China, China is a bit of a difficult example because it’s China. So the totalitarian regime, we don’t think that we should be copying their laws. They’ve experimented with lots of systems. One system they’re experimenting with is not actually, they’ve implemented it already. It’s a sh basically restricts how much time kids can spend on social networks. 40 minutes a day on the Chinese TikTok equivalent. And there’s also a limit to how much time they can play games per week. Now it’s interesting because now basically TikTok is trying to restrict kids’ time in the US They’ve already been doing it in China for a while. So we are seeing this, but it’s not just China. I think Japan is doing the same thing. And other countries like Thailand, South Korea have experimented with different methods. So I think it’s important to look there and see what their experience was, what worked, what didn’t work. They’ve tried some methods they decided not work well. Yeah, they used to like, like, you know, getting kids off games at midnight. It was, kids were going crazy when they had to get off at midnight. So I think we should look at the whole spectrum of options and learn because we’ve not been thinking about it for long enough.

John Jantsch (18:18): So as somebody who spends a little time on privacy issues, you know, where does it fall in that line? I mean if, let’s just call it the government. is shutting my computer off at midnight. Are there privacy concerns about that sort of heavy handedness?

Gaia Bernstein (18:36): So there are concern of some privacy advocates who are concerned about the idea of getting people’s age and the identification part of it. So there are issues. The thing is where I, as somebody who writes about privacy as well, I think there’s a strong privacy ad argument for that because the whole business model is based on data and time, as I said. Mm-hmm . So basically the hope is that this business model will be replaced by a different business model, which is not based on our time and our privacy. So I think anything that takes place, which sort of stabilizes this business model is good for privacy as well.

John Jantsch (19:13): Maybe I’m asking the same question, but again, you know, at what point does private enterprise, you know, get overregulated because you know, because the, you know, the ends justify the means.

Gaia Bernstein (19:33): So the question is, I think the big question is how harmful you think a product is, right? Because when we think something is very harmful, we do not have a problem regulating it. Right? So the, but the thing is, even with cigarettes, which we know are vial, we know they cause lung cancer death, it took, the first studies came out in the fifties, only in 1964. The certain general announced it was harmful and then people started slowly to regulate. So the thing is, the big thing is to end the science war and to decide how harmful we think it is. I think for kids it’s definitely very harmful for adults. It’s not doing, it’s not so great either. So if you think something’s harmful, you regulate to protect people. It’s a bit like the seat belt when you think about it. Mm-hmm. , I mean people were so excited when they had to put their seat belts on, right? . But obviously seat belts save lives. They don’t think people would argue about that.

John Jantsch (20:31): Yeah. Yes. We don’t even think about it anymore. You get in the car and put it on. So, so who’s in charge of making this happen? Is it, you know, legislators? Is it medical communities? , I mean, you know, who takes the lead?

Gaia Bernstein (20:45): I think it’s a move. First of all, it’s a movement. It’s already taking place. So I think it has different parts and part of it is legislatures, part of it is lawyers. I think parents are taking an important role here. Mm-hmm. , they are suing for class actions. But I think they have a big role of changing how schools use technology because schools are, have this policy of the more technology. It’s not just the schools, it’s the federal guidelines actually. Sure, sure. The more technology in schools, the better I think. Right. Parents can take a big part here. And the medical authorities basically, when do these science wars and from the, if we look at the food wars, tobacco wars, they end when you have an important professional organization like the American Cancer Association with cigarettes. Right. You know, make declarations or governmental authority that this thing is harmful. And we don’t have that. We have very partial recommendations from the American Pediatric Association or the World Health Organizations about screen time for kids and mostly for young, very young kids. So, so that’s, so I would say the movement has, there’s lawyers, there’s medical professors, the medical organizations, and there’s all of us who can also influence the norm. The people who have businesses, they can think about what business model they want to adopt. Yes. Do they want a business model based on time

John Jantsch (22:09): It’s funny, when my kids were little, it was the warning from the pediatrician was don’t let ’em watch too much TV. But now nobody watches TV anymore. Right. .

Gaia Bernstein (22:18): I beg my kids to watch tv.

John Jantsch (22:20): . Well, guy, it was great having you stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. You wanna tell people where they can find more about Unwired and maybe more about the movement you’re suggesting and connect with you.

Gaia Bernstein (22:32): So gaiabernstein.com is my website and they could also find a book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, anywhere they buy the books.

John Jantsch (22:40): Awesome. Yeah. Awesome. Well, again, thank you for taking the time and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Gaia Bernstein (22:45): Thank you so much for having me.

John Jantsch (22:47): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co not.com. Co. check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Creative Elements hosted by Jay Klaus. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals creative elements goes behind the scenes with today’s top creators. Through narrative interviews, Jay Klaus explores how creators like Tim Urban James Clear, Tory Dunlap and Cody Sanchez are building their audiences today. By learning how these creators make a living with their art and creativity, creative elements helps you gain the tools and confidence to do the same. In a recent episode, they talked with Kevin Perry about how he goes viral on every single platform. Listen to creative elements wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Henry Adaso, fueled by Coffee and Hip Hop. Henry is an award-winning marketing leader with over 15 years of experience, a former music journalist. He’s a natural storyteller and innovative marketer. He’s currently the head of marketing for CMEX USA and the author of three books, including his latest that we’re gonna talk about today, The Art of Messaging – Seven Principles of Remarkable Messages (Or How to Stand Out in a Noisy World). So, Henry, welcome to the show.

Henry Adaso (01:30): Thank you for having me, John.

John Jantsch (01:31): So going through your background, I feel like you have a very colorful journey to how you got to hear . You want to give us a little kind of what’s been your entrepreneurial journey? It kind of brought you to this point. I’d love to hear a little more about it.

Henry Adaso (01:46): Yeah, John, absolutely. Colorful is the right word. I call myself an accidental marketer because I didn’t know that I was going to end up in marketing when I was a young boy in high school. I was the kid who used to annoy all of his friends by making my own kind of handwritten newsletter and then forcing my friends to endure my newsletter. So I, I always thought I was going to become a publisher, but to somewhere along the line, I noticed that they were kicking publishers out of the building because of this thing called the internet. And so I pivoted to digital marketing, and what I quickly realized was that a lot of the same skills that I had developed writing my own book when I was a kid and writing newsletters translated to marketing because it’s ultimately about storytelling. And so today I work as a marketer and I love it.

John Jantsch (02:34): So, so, you know, messaging obviously is a key part, strategic element of marketing. I, I’m, I agree with you, but I’d love to hear your take on why you chose to call it the art of messaging. Why do you feel it it is elevated to the level of art?

Henry Adaso (02:52): That’s a great question. I think that people are intimidated by messaging it. It’s something that is often thought as a reserved for a select few copywriters, marketing gurus, great communicators. But it’s really an art. It’s an art in the science, but it’s primarily an art. And it can be taught, it can be learned. And what I realized looking at a lot of different brand messages is that they tend to have certain things in common. They have certain attributes in common. There’s a pattern that occurs. And if you study that pattern and try your best to recreate that in your product or service, if it works, it has to work. It’s not about something that doesn’t work. If you have a product that truly solves a problem, you can learn from the best brands on how to message in a way that truly resonates with your audience.

John Jantsch (03:45): Where, you know, if somebody comes to you and says, oh, we’ve got this company and we’ve got, you know, we’ve been around for X amount of years, and we just feel like we’re copying what everybody else in our industry does, I mean, where do you first send somebody to look for, like, where is your message? You know, like where is it hiding? You know, the secret sauce that’s gonna really make a difference.

Henry Adaso (04:04): There’s a great quote by Michelangelo that says, every block of stone has a sculpture in it, and it’s the job of the sculptor to find it. So every brand, no matter the industry, whether you’re B2B or B2C, there’s something that is interesting about your brand. And sometimes you may have to dig a little bit deeper, maybe do some research, talk to people who’ve been there a little bit longer. But you really have to try to understand the essence of your product or service or your brand. And that’s where I would begin. So for example, there’s a sock company called Bombas, and they sell socks, which, you know, could be consider the commodity, but they’re very successful because their product is tied to this idea that the, one of the most essential pieces of clothing that, that you really need is something that keeps you warm. So like socks, right? So every time you buy a pear, they gift one to, uh, somebody in need. So that’s a story, and that’s something that’s interesting that makes them, it kind of takes them beyond the idea of just being a soft company to now something bigger than that. And that’s really where you start. What is the essence of your brand? What is the thing that really makes you a little bit different from the others?

John Jantsch (05:17): You know, one of the things that I find is I think there are a lot of companies out there that they are unique. They are doing something different. Their customers, you know, stay with them because they are doing something different, but they still tend to talk about what they sell. How important is it to understand the problems? You’re, so you really solve for your customers, even if they’re the little things. I mean, I think that’s sometimes where people get caught up. They think of this messaging being this grand thing that’s gonna make us sound, you know, really important and amazing when their customers will say, well, yeah, but it’s, this is what you actually do for us. I mean, how important is it to understand the problems you’re solving?

Henry Adaso (05:58): I’m a marketer and I’ll be the first to admit, we love talking about ourselves. , we love talking about how great we are, how great the product is. It’s a very, it’s a comfortable space to be in to talk about how great the product is, but the customer is really interested in one thing. And that is, what can you do for me? So what we have to do is shift our messaging from a We Messages, which is focused on how many awards we’ve won, how great the company is, and shift it to a you messages, which is how do we talk about the customer? Every opportunity that we have, we need to be saying, let’s talk about you. What problems do you need solved? And the thing that resonates the most is if we can show the customer that there is a transformation on the other side of that conversation, on the other side of that interaction, we’re more likely to engage them and we’re more likely to be effective with our messaging.

John Jantsch (06:50): Yeah. And obviously with a Title seven principles, you know, we’re gonna break down a little bit of, of framework, but I’ll tell you a question I get all the time, and I’m sure you do as well when you talk about this topic, is the company that says you, you used bombass, you know, sells socks, which is a commodity. But you know, what if I sell just a really boring product, I don’t know, let’s say cement for example, know anybody who does any messaging for, you know, a product like that. I mean, how do you turn something kind of sexy maybe that just people don’t think is?

Henry Adaso (07:22): So I happen to know a thing or two about selling some given that’s primarily what we sell. And it, and I have to tell you, it’s one of the, just on, on the surface, it’s one of the most boring products. It’s literally just a gray powder, right? in, substitute the bags and it’ll look the same. So how do you make that interesting? A couple years ago we started this tradition, I’ll tell you a quick story. And we, at the end of the year, we would create a holiday newsletter and we would send out a holiday newsletter to our customers just as a, as an an expression of our gratitude for their business. Over the course of the year. The first time we did this, it was a very standard holiday newsletter. There was nothing special about it. It simply said, you know, happy holidays, it was beautifully designed, content was great, but we didn’t get much of a response.

(08:07): So we switched it up a little bit. And the next year what we did was we gathered all of our sales folks and we created this theme around football, and we had them hold up props. So footballs, helmets, trophies. And we also wrote in the newsletter, little fun facts about them. So this helped personalize our sales folks. And this newsletter had trading cards that you can tear out . And so if you’re a customer, you received this, it was, it’s not your usual cement newsletter, right? And then now you have something else to help you connect with that salesperson because they’re a person, right? That got a lot of great feedback from customers. The following year we did a similar theme, but this time with superheroes. And the same thing, dozens of customers wrote us asking for additional copies of our holiday newsletter, which is a marketing material, right? So, so here we are in a world where there’s so much noise and most customers are saying, I just get outta my inbox. I don’t wanna hear from you, but we have the reverse where they were saying, can you send me more copies of your marketing materials? All we did differently was tell a story. Mm-hmm. . And a story is something that always resonates. So I would say for something, someone who may be thinking, I have a boring product, I mean a niche space, just try to tell a story.

John Jantsch (09:28): Yeah. Yeah. So you, I have a framework that I think you probably refer to it as “best” because that’s what it’s spells, B E S T. So you wanna kinda unpack that. These are like the kind of some of the key elements. The good message has. You want to kind of go through that framework.

Henry Adaso (09:44): So I looked at about six years ago when I was working on the agency side, I looked at a, a lot of brands and they had, that had great me. And I started to study them to understand what they had in common, because I wanted to replicate that for my team. We had lots of clients that needed messaging. And what I realized was that all of them had these four attributes in common. They, it just kept coming up over. And the attributes are, they’re bold, remarkable, messaging is empathic, it’s specific, and it’s transformative. And so those four attributes spell out the word best, which makes it easier to remember. Mm-hmm. . And so a bold message is something that makes you stop and look. It’s something that earns your attention. It’s something that is engaging. And that’s the first question we have to ask is, in a noisy world, how do we make people stop and pay attention?

(10:42): An empathic message is simply something that incorporates a core human need in the messaging. So what is the emotional need that we’re solving for? Is it peace? Is it joy? Is it relief from pain? Is it I’ll help you make more money, spend more time with your family? What is that emotional driver? And then specificity is about understanding that nothing is for everyone. And we need to be clear about who the product is for and what it is as well. Because sometimes you’ll be driving and you see a billboard and you’re wondering what are they selling? Right? , at that point, you could have earned attention. So we have to be clear about what’s on offer and who it’s for. And then the last attribute transformation is really showing what the outcomes would be for the person. People don’t buy features and benefits. They buy the transformation. And so if you are, if you have something that helps people make more money, well the transformation is not that they’ll make more money, that might be a benefit. It’s what the money brings them. Mm-hmm. , it’s time with your family, it’s, Hey, maybe I’ll be able to pay off grandma’s mortgage or travel more. That is more likely to connect us.

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(13:30): So, you know, I’m imagining a group of folks sitting around saying, okay, yeah, this, that’s a really bold message. And we’re talking about like the transformation and you know, we spelled out exactly what we do, but then you take it out to the market and it’s like, I don’t get it. Right? I mean, how do you kind of test to the point where you’re like, yeah, this is, you know, how do you know? How do you know you’ve nailed it with, you know, the ideal client you’re trying to impact?

Henry Adaso (13:56): I encourage all marketers to take testing very seriously because the market knows best. And sometimes we will have, you may have a hunch or maybe you have some best practices based on experience, but when you test it, you might discover something different. So think testing is the first place I would go. And one easy way to test is through email marketing. So you could maybe test your headline and the way this works, most email platforms allow you to do this. You would have two different subject clients and then you would break your audience into two and send one subject line to one audience and the other to the other group. And you’ll study this over the course of two to four hours to see which subject line yields more opens. That’s how you pick a winner. So that’s one relatively affordable way to test. Uh, another one would be to run ads if you have, if you’re already running some ads, try different headlines and see which ones are generating more clicks.

John Jantsch (14:56): Yeah. Yeah. And increasingly, you know, some of these tools, particularly the tools that are trying to sell your ads, you know, will actually, you know, show you a winner. It’ll, you know, it’ll produce the winner for you because that’s the one that’s making them the most money. So consequently it’s the one they want to want you to land on.

Henry Adaso (15:13): Yes, yes, yes.

John Jantsch (15:15): How important is it for an organization to have kind of a central message or a core message? You know, something that really delivers the brand promise first. Obviously there’s messages for campaigns, for products, for divisions, for different types of clients, but how essential is it to have something that brings together, like, this is what we stand for?

Henry Adaso (15:35): Consistency is credibility. So it’s very important to be consistent with your messaging across all of your customer touchpoints within the organization. If you have sales and marketing and customer experience delivering different messages to the marketplace, that is a perfect recipe for market confusion, right? So we wanna mitigate that by creating a source of cohesion for our messaging. And this could be something as simple as having a value proposition matrix that is available to all of your touchpoints. What I propose in the book is a messaging menu. And so your messaging menu has different servings of your messaging, starting with the starters, which could be something like an elevator pitch or your smaller plates, which could be something like your social media posts or entrees as I call them, which are longer messages when you have a presentation, what is your messaging? But they’re all part of the same core message. They’re all part of your value proposition. And so over time, if you deliver the same message consistently, then it becomes clear what you stand for and what your brand is all about. And then when people are ready to make a purchasing decision, they know exactly to turn to you.

John Jantsch (16:54): So you have a couple, um, exercises, I guess you called it. Somebody could actually, again, as an organization, you know, go through the one, I might have this wrong, but the, is it messaging tower or is that how you refer to it?

Henry Adaso (17:05): Messaging tower. So the messaging tower. Tower, yes. So that that, that is a tool that allows you to extract the most effective messaging points, the most important attributes of your product or service. And the messaging tower essentially is saying that there is a hierarchy when it comes to messaging. So at the base of your messaging is going to be your features, and these are things like descriptive elements of your part. Mm-hmm. the service. So if we take a headphone for example, maybe it’s lightweight or the color or the base production, those are all features and they’re descriptive and features appeal to a technical audience. Then at in the middle of the tower, you have your benefits, which is what can it do for me? So for this sticking with the headphone example, it may be something like, hey, it’s portable or it has noise cancellation. So it allows me to have peace of mind when I’m on airplane. At the very top of your messaging tower is the transformation. And the transformation is the powerful why behind your product or service. It answers the question you,

John Jantsch (18:12): You’re just gonna look damn good. Right? Exactly. . So by talking about this in a hierarchy, I mean you’re kind of suggesting that like all these things, if you gotta have, you gotta understand the features and what, how those translate to benefit before you’re gonna get to correct. What may be the most important part, the transformation is that right?

Henry Adaso (18:32): Absolutely. Really the cream of the crop is the transformation. If you can get to the transformation, you have a better chance of connecting with your audience. The example that I always think about is Beats by Dr. Dre headphones. So I noticed that their messaging was, hear music the way your favorite artists hear music. Mm-hmm. . And that is a transformation because at the time there, there were no premium headphones that could do what Beats could do, so, so the messaging there was about you having that proxy experience to the celebrities that you like and look up to, right? Versus they didn’t talk about the features, they didn’t talk about the benefits, they simply went for the top of the messaging tower, which is a transformation. There are lots of brands that do this effectively and cite several examples in the book as well. But when you start, once you see this messaging tower, you start to see it all over the place. You see billboards that are doing this. You see commercials that are doing the same thing. That is the most powerful type of messaging, the messaging that says, Hey, here’s how your situation will be different after you buy this product or service. Great.

John Jantsch (19:41): Well, Henry, I wanna appre, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You want to tell people where they can find your work, your book, uh, connect with you in any way that you’d invite them to do?

Henry Adaso (19:51): Absolutely. You can find me on my website, henryadaso.com or on LinkedIn. It’s going to be Henry Adaso or Instagram at @henryadaso as well. John, thank you so much for having

John Jantsch (20:02): Me. You bet. No, I’m, again, I appreciate you taking the time and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Henry Adaso (20:09): Look forward to meeting you in person. Thank you so much.

John Jantsch (20:12): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Creative Elements hosted by Jay Klaus. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals creative elements goes behind the scenes with today’s top creators. Through narrative interviews, Jay Klaus explores how creators like Tim Urban James Clear, Tori Dunlap and Cody Sanchez are building their audiences today. By learning how these creators make a living with their art and creativity, creative elements helps you gain the tools and confidence to do the same. In a recent episode, they talked with Kevin Perry about how he goes viral on every single platform. Listen to creative elements wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:54): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Morra Aarons-Mele. She’s a host of The Anxious Achiever, a top-10 management podcast that helps people rethink the relationship between their mental health and their leadership. You might recall she was on this show for one of the best titles ever Hiding in the Bathroom . But she’s back with another book we’re gonna talk about today, The Anxious Achiever: Turn Your Biggest Fears Into Your Leadership Superpower. So, Morra, welcome back.

Morra Aarons-Mele (01:28): Thanks, John. It’s good

John Jantsch (01:29): To be back. So leadership and mental health, uh, in the same sentence, I mean, is juxtaposed even, are we talking about a bit of an oxymoron here?

Morra Aarons-Mele (01:38): No, we’re talking about,

John Jantsch (01:41): I mean, people don’t typically think about those two things I know is the whole point of what your, what your work is about. But, so help me kind of work this idea that, that you’re putting those two type topics together, you know, intentionally.

Morra Aarons-Mele (01:55): Yeah. I don’t think that there should be any false separation between the discussion of leadership and mental health or to that matter, mental illness. Yeah. You know, it’s a part of life at anyone’s part of life. They will probably experience mental ill health and hopefully mental wellness. Right. It’s, it’s exists along the spectrum and we all go through it, and it’s part of our leadership and how we show up. Sure.

John Jantsch (02:18): I don’t disagree at all, but the fact that you’re having to talk about normalizing this in the workplace, there’s a lot of really built up angst about it, isn’t there? I mean, just the, you know, go back a generation and you never talked about mental health issues, right. It’s like that was, you know, that was taboo. And so a lot of people are dealing with that baggage, right?

Morra Aarons-Mele (02:39): I, I think so. Even today, you know, we, um, we conflate mental illness or ANGs or depression with weakness, right? We, we conflate it with characteristics that seem to go against what we want our leaders to be and stand for mm-hmm. . And so of course there’s no incentive for leaders to talk about their mental health because everyone is afraid that they’ll be judged. Right,

John Jantsch (03:00): Right, right.

Morra Aarons-Mele (03:02): And that’s the kind of stigmas they’re trying to break.

John Jantsch (03:04): Yeah. And I think when we use the term mental health, you know, obviously people go a lot of places with that, you’re narrowed in on this idea of anxiousness, you know, which mm-hmm. again, you talked about a spectrum could be in this, not a little of nothing. And the point that you’re making is that this is like, this can be a strength, right? I mean that this idea that you’re an achiever doing this, so, you know, it hasn’t always been seen as a good thing. So how, what, what are you bringing to the conversation? You know, that’s gonna help people see that as No, that’s a strength of yours.

Morra Aarons-Mele (03:36): I hope people understand that leadership and anxiety go together because , when you’re leading, you’re going into the uncertain. Yeah. And a lot of anxiety is about facing the uncertain and the uncomfortable, even scary feelings that we have around that. You know, what leader is an anxious Yeah. And indeed, when we think of our, our greatest leaders before battle, when we read history, we understand that they were full of fears and deep, deep insecurities before battle. The key is moving through it and being able to go into battle.

John Jantsch (04:09): Don’t you think though, a lot of those leaders that you mentioned, you know, this insecurity came like after the fact, or at least admission of the insecurity came after the fact, but they felt like, no, I’ve gotta put on the, I’ve gotta put on the face, you know, and don’t you think a lot of leaders take that? Like, I, you know, even though I’m dying inside, you know, I can’t let that show .

Morra Aarons-Mele (04:28): Some do, some don’t. I mean, when you read histories, for example, of Abraham Lincoln, he walked around with great melancholy and anxiety, and he didn’t hide it. In fact, he built a team around him of people who could take care of him even in his lowest hours.

John Jantsch (04:44): Do you feel like there is more anxiety today? Maybe this is just a guess , but more anxiety today? And if so, what’s causing it? Or are people just more freely talking about it in it appears that there’s more?

Morra Aarons-Mele (04:59): It’s, I mean, it’s hard for me to know. I’m not a right, I’m not a data scientist, but I do think that when you look statistically, the numbers of people reporting anxiety and depression in this country are overwhelming. And certainly among our young people, we’ve been through a period which has been really damaging to our mental health. Yeah. And I don’t see much that is making our mental health shore up right now. Certainly on a global scale. And even just from a macroeconomic perspective, things are very, very uncertain and scary. And that’s when we get

John Jantsch (05:31): Anxious. I mean, and, and we talked about like what we’ve gone through, but even now, as we continue home, I mean, is that actually making the issue, uh, worse or sustaining the issue? Uh,

Morra Aarons-Mele (05:40): It’s hard to know, right? I mean, I think the, the jury definitely is not out there. I think for a lot of people working from home makes their anxiety feel better because they may have less social anxiety. Yeah. Right. There may be fewer instances. On the other hand, anxiety loves a communications vacuum. And when we’re all, and we’re communicating on slack and strictly in audio, we may have more anxiety because we’re not clear on what our counterpart wants. We may feel the need to control and we’re micromanaging more. So it’s hard to know, but I think there are pros and cons. Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:14): So obviously you spend a great deal of time in the book, not just explaining the people have these anxieties, but transforming them, you know, to being from a, from a what was maybe at one time a weakness, uh, to a strength. So what’s, what’s the process that somebody might, uh, go through? Because I, you know, I’ve spent 10 years, uh, meditating just to get rid of stress and anxiety. Uh, and now you’re telling me, bring it on.

Morra Aarons-Mele (06:37): No, look, I’m not telling you bring it on. I mean, if, if, if you found a way to dissipate it, amazing. Good for you. Um, you probably have a lot to teach

John Jantsch (06:46):

Morra Aarons-Mele (06:47): Because ultimately what you’re doing when you’re meditating is you’re sitting with thoughts and you’re just sitting with them. You’re observing them, you’re noticing them, but you’re not holding onto them.

John Jantsch (06:59): Right? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Morra Aarons-Mele (07:02): And what has that process taught you?

John Jantsch (07:04): Uh, that reality is far less scary than than, than, uh, the, the assumed, uh, reality, which I feel like is the creation of a lot of anxiety.

Morra Aarons-Mele (07:16): That’s right. Anxiety is all about the assumed reality , right. Anxiety is our brain’s threat appraisal system going into high gear. On the other hand, our brain may sense a real threat or it may not. Right. And so many of us, myself included, spend so much time anticipating threats Yeah. That we almost forget how to calm down. Right. And then along the way that anxiety becomes our activating energy, it becomes our oxygen. Yeah. It pushes us forward. And we can’t separate what’s anxiety and what is our true drive for excellence. And it can really, really have intense consequences. And so in the book, I do a lot of what you probably do as a meditator, noticing when your anxiety pops up in what circumstance, how your body feels.

John Jantsch (08:04): Yeah. It probably gets a bit habituated Right. Too. Like we stop mm-hmm. noticing it becomes of when X happens, Y is going to occur in my body or in my head, . Um, and, and so you’re right. I, the first step probably is actually witnessing it to some extent, right?

Morra Aarons-Mele (08:20): Yes. And anxiety’s tricky. I spoke with someone the other day and, and he said, you know, my anxiety shows up as vertigo, huh. And I was like, wow, that’s unexpected. You know, there’s a detective work process that you have to go through sometimes because we think that we know an anxiety hits and it’s that classic sort of fight or flight and our heart starts racing. Right. But always like that. Right. And, um, the thing that’s interesting about work is it gives us a lack. We can pick up a lot of patterns for our anxiety going off mm-hmm. if we pay attention

John Jantsch (08:49): Mm-hmm. . So do you have a framework, if we wanna call it that, to to, to that you’re actually can coach you through, you know, here’s, I didn’t know every individual’s front, but do you have, at least for how somebody might go through this transformation to turn it into, as you said, a I think a I think even superpower somewhere,

Morra Aarons-Mele (09:07): , I mean, in this book, I’m not a, I’m not a clinician or psychologist, but I draw on many different schools of psychology and research and you know, I mean, I think that the general consensus, like you said, is that when you feel like your anxiety is getting in the way, the first step is to notice it. Yeah. Really understand how it’s showing up, what it’s feeling like in your body, naming it, I’m anxious, I’m really anxious before this negotiation, what’s going on? And then doing the work to understand it, right? I mean, that is the work that we all do, but it can be really, really illustrative. And in the book, we look at everything from your childhood hurts mm-hmm. , those patterns that mo may go very, very deep to recent job experiences to, again, habits that you get stuck in. You know, so many of us get stuck in what I call thought traps. Mm-hmm. , right? Those negative instant thoughts. When we feel anxious specifically about something that we feel might shame us, our brain goes to a place of, I’m not worth it, I’m stupid, I’m gonna fail. Right? And that becomes a comfortable habit. Perfectionism is the same thing. And so it’s really about understanding and playing detective, and then trying to figure out what’s motivating the anxiety.

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(11:56): There was a book a few years ago, and I don’t remember if it was really even very good , but the title got my attention was called Stress for Success. And the main point that the author made was that if you’re not feeling a little stress, you know, you’re just not trying or you’re not pushing yourself enough. Um, I mean, is there any of that, um, thought, uh, process, uh, in anxious achiever?

Morra Aarons-Mele (12:21): Yeah. I mean, the neuroscience will will show that, right? I mean, we need anxiety. It keeps us alive. So if you are, um, faced with something that you really care about, that you feel might be a test, um, that you feel you really want to take a leap forward mm-hmm. , and there’s a risk of failure, of course you’re gonna feel anxious. You need to feel anxious.

John Jantsch (12:42): So what, what is the right word? But the, again, a lot of scientific research is really going in body connection. You know, what physical manifestations, you know, are, you know, are people experiencing because they are not managing the anxiety or the stress?

Morra Aarons-Mele (13:03): Well, we like to get into habits, right? Mm-hmm. . And, um, our brain creates habits as a way of hoping to dissipate the anxiety. So a lot of us, when we’re anxious, we may go into familiar behaviors, right? A lot of us may reach for a drink, we may reach for Netflix, we may reach for TikTok mm-hmm. , right? Mm-hmm. , we may exercise. Some of our coping mechanisms are what’s called adaptive. Mm-hmm. , they help us and some are maladaptive mm-hmm. at work. We also have anxiety habits. We may get into micromanaging. When you’re anxious, you feel out of control. It feels really good to try to reassert some control. And that could mean calling your team and bothering them . Right. It could be overwork. And so the important thing is to see how you’re reacting to the anxiety and ask yourself, is this really, is this serving me? And that’s where the mindfulness comes in again.

John Jantsch (13:56): Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Yeah. Is

Morra Aarons-Mele (13:57): This serving me? And sometimes you might say, yes, I am anxious right now. This is serving me.

John Jantsch (14:03): Yeah. So when it comes to, you talk about leadership and obviously typical leader, you know, manages people. So in some cases, teams or multiple teams. Are we at a point where, you know, a true leader now should be coaching around mental health, even though, you know, obviously not providing, you know, therapy, but somehow coaching or at least giving people opportunities to be coached around it.

Morra Aarons-Mele (14:30): I mean, this is a pretty controversial topic as you can imagine. Yeah. And it’s new, it’s really evolving, you know, in the field of workplace mental health. I, I say that, um, n no manager or colleague should ever feel like they need to be someone’s therapist. You know, that is not your job. There are a lot of programs that are helping, especially managers become conversant Yeah. In talking about mental health. Right. So that you can at least there. But you know, in part of the research for the book, and in my podcast I’ve interviewed many HR leaders and you know, their general consensus is your job as a manager is to listen and facilitate. So you wanna be someone who’s safe to listen to. You don’t need to solve an employee who’s having a mental health challenge. Right. That’s not your job. You can facilitate where they need to go next. Yeah. And I think that that is sort of maybe can help managers relax a little bit. It’s not your job to be the therapist.

John Jantsch (15:20): Many people in managerial positions are, you know, look a lot like me age-wise, um, and, uh, they are managing people who look a lot like my kids. Is there a a real challenge, you know, cross generationally? It’s

Morra Aarons-Mele (15:35): So funny, every time I say yes, I get people writing into me saying, no, it is not about generation. , you know, I think it’s really, really individual. Yeah. There are many people of certain ages who’ve been through a tremendous amount of therapy and their own healing journeys. Yeah. And another thing that’s interesting that I have heard anecdotally is that people who are, who have power tend to be more open and more willing to talk about things like mental health. Mm. And people in the start of their careers as well. It’s the people in the middle. Yeah. The people who are just holding on for dear life. Right.

John Jantsch (16:12): And this is just like another black marker possibly. Right. Well,

Morra Aarons-Mele (16:15): This is just something they just, they just feel overwhelmed by because they’re in the climbing phase of their career. They probably have a very busy home life.

John Jantsch (16:22): Yeah. Yeah. I have just anecdotally maybe millennials, maybe Gen Z, you know, tend to just be much more open about it. I mean, so the stigma appears to be gone of saying, you know, on, on Facebook, you know, my therapist said, you know, which Oh yeah. 20 years ago, you know, would’ve been somewhat, you know, it would’ve been with your girlfriend and a couple glasses of wine maybe. But that’s about it. Right. Um, so is that, is that just a social change or is that, you know, a positive change for, for good in, in the entire issue?

Morra Aarons-Mele (16:55): I think it’s hugely positive. I mean, I wish everyone could have a therapist. I think it’s a truly remarkable experience. And obviously there are a lot of barriers to getting good mental healthcare in this country. Yeah. Um, but I love, I love when people are open to talking about the road to self-awareness the same way they would as developing any other skill. Because what this comes down to is self-awareness as a leader. Yeah. And self-awareness is one of the most sought after an elusive leadership characteristics. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:25): I’ve often said, I think it’s the, it’s the, you know, super powerful leadership. I think, you know, because that, you know, where people really, when when people struggle with that, you know, then they give people answers and they , you know, they try to hold on to power themselves and you know, not, you know, not give it out. I mean, the most self-aware leaders wanna rise everybody up and they want, you know, they wanna share, you know, with the team, which are all I think very positive, you know, types of things.

Morra Aarons-Mele (17:52): Yeah, yeah. For sure. So

John Jantsch (17:55): If, if, if somebody reads this book and they’re a leader and they say Morra, we’d love to work with you. Do you do any work inside of organizations? Um, because this is, this might be hr, has certainly might be leadership, it’s definitely culture side of organizations. So where would you go to help an organization that’s trying to maybe change the culture, not just an individual leader who’s trying to get better?

Morra Aarons-Mele (18:22): I mean, this is really about culture change, you know, and I think the good news is as leaders change, culture changes, I don’t think that this kind of reduction of stigma around mental health in the, in the workplace should be seen as a perk or a nice to have or something we’re doing for the Gen Zs to keep them happy.

John Jantsch (18:38): It’s an AppRight or something, right? . It

Morra Aarons-Mele (18:41): Is actually foundationally about working better mentally healthy workplaces Sure. Work better. Absolutely. Where people, you know, have boundaries and treat each other kindly and can have open communications. I mean, it’s kind of the, the shangrila that we’re all looking for. So all of this stuff is actually foundational to anything you’d learn in a basic leadership or seminar. Right.

John Jantsch (19:02): But as you just pointed out, particularly when it comes to culture, that’s not something that you put on a plaque. I mean that, you know, that’s gotta be, you know, that’s gotta be lived and it’s gotta be lived a lot and it’s gotta be repeated and um, you know, before people believe it. Especially if you’re trying to make a change. You know, I mean, I think that’s the hardest part. You know, you’ve grown to 200 people and you know, they have accepted the organizations a certain way. Um, you know, changing that, you know, is really difficult, isn’t it?

Morra Aarons-Mele (19:32): It’s absolutely. I mean, that’s the thing we’re all working on. That’s why podcasts like ours exist. Yeah. Yeah. . But, you know, I’m not, I’m not saying that change has to start with a single person because we all live in systems, but I do think if you’re feeling anxious at work and it’s getting in your way it’s worth looking at. It will lead you to a path of discovery.

John Jantsch (19:51): Yeah. If nothing else, you’ll be happier. Right? ,

Morra Aarons-Mele (19:54): That’s, well, there you go. .

John Jantsch (19:56): Well, Morra, it was great having you back on the show. You wanna invite people where they can find, I know the book will be available everywhere, but, uh, where they might connect with you as well.

Morra Aarons-Mele (20:04): Absolutely. I’d love it if you listen to my podcast, The Anxious Achiever, wherever you get your podcast. And, um, if you have a question for me, reach out on LinkedIn and I’ll write back. Just send me a message.

John Jantsch (20:14): Awesome. Well, again, thanks for taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days soon out there on the road.

(20:19): Thanks.

(20:20): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before Tex? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Creative Elements hosted by Jay Klaus. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals creative elements goes behind the scenes with today’s top creators. Through narrative interviews, Jay Klaus explores how creators like Tim Urban James Clear, Tory Dunlap and Cody Sanchez are building their audiences today. By learning how these creators make a living with their art and creativity, creative elements helps you gain the tools and confidence to do the same. In a recent episode, they talked with Kevin Perry about how he goes viral on every single platform. Listen to creative elements wherever you get your podcast.

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Louis Gudema. He is a fractional CMO for B2B companies and mentors, startups at MIT. Previously, he founded and grew a marketing agency and pivoted into a SaaS company, growing it into one of the top three or four companies in the national market before a successful exit. The first edition of Bullseye Marketing was named one of the best marketing plan books of all time by book Authority. He also does a little side hustle as ghostwriter of business and marketing books. But we’re gonna talk today about the second edition of Bullseye Marketing. So Louis, welcome back to the show.

Louis Gudema (01:38): Hi, John. Great to be back. Good to see you

John Jantsch (01:41): Again. So every time I have an author on, oh by the way, I also should have should point out because I’m certain he’s listening that Douglas Burnett wrote the Forward for this new edition with the, uh, marketing book podcast. I, he tells me I’ve been on like six times. He’s better about that stuff than me keeping track of. But whenever I have second,

Louis Gudema (01:59): He’s telling me that you were, uh, very close neck and neck for his most, his champion for most

John Jantsch (02:04): Episode, his most episodes by one author. So I always ask second edition books, authors, why’d you write a Second Edition? What was needed? What’s new , you know what? Because obviously that it’s a lot of work to do and to update a book. So there had to be some compelling reason, I’m guessing, that you felt it needed an update.

Louis Gudema (02:25): Yeah, it turned out to be more work than I expected. So the reason I wrote, and Douglas was very encouraging, even two or three years ago, he was like, you should do a second edition. So I’ll have to ask him someday why he thought it needed improving . But first of all, the first edition was B2B and B2C, and this edition is exclusively B2B. And I, that’s really my expertise. That’s where I do, you know, almost all my work. That’s where most of my experience is. And so I really wanted to focus on that. One of the things, and I have two or three others I’ll quickly say, but one of the things is that I think B2B marketing especially lacks creativity compared to B2C. So I populate the book and tried to make a real effort to show how people, and give a lot of examples from a lot of companies of kind of really creative and excellent B2B marketing.

John Jantsch (03:13): Yeah. And I actually wanna dig in, dig into some of those differences a little bit. But uh, go ahead.

Louis Gudema (03:18): Yeah, so another thing is that I laid out in the first book that the three phases of the Bullseye Marketing approach, you know, and the first is to take advantage of your existing marketing assets for fast, inexpensive results. Secondly, use intent marketing. And thirdly, I called cast of white or net and I renamed it a more accurate scientific correct phase, which is build your brand and grow your mental availability. Because what I’ve learned between the two additions is much more of the research that it turned out really validated by bullseye approach and the real importance in the long term of the third phase of building mental availability. And I can explain what that is. Yes. And it’s something that in this era of short-termism that, that so many marketers are focused on, what can we do with this campaign? What can we do this quarter that they’ve, they miss out on the long-term growth that can be achieved through those phase three programs, which is equal to, or even greater than the, those short-term

John Jantsch (04:32): Programs. I, I was gonna bring up the phase approach cuz it’s one of the things I really liked from the first edition. I know it’s back in this and I think that I’ve been, you know, for many years talking about, you know, I call it the customer success track in my last book. That, you know, there are there certain things that have to be done first, can be done first. Maybe it’s the low hanging fruit or it’s the foundation, you know, but it’s then what’s the promise of what’s next and the promise of what’s next. And I think you maybe don’t call it the same thing, but I think there’s a little bit of that same idea. The long game, you know, goes on while the short game is played as well.

Louis Gudema (05:05): Yeah. And I realize, you know, the first edition I thought was kind of focused on people who weren’t really experienced marketers. And then it turned out some very experienced marketers like were saying this is really great and very helpful. And so there the first phase is both a foundation for success in the second and third phases, but it’s also, you know, in and of itself, it can produce a tremendous result just in three or six months.

John Jantsch (05:34): Yeah, yeah. Like here’s an idea, send an email occasionally to your 1,237 customers that haven’t heard from you. Right.

Louis Gudema (05:42): , well it, that was, so bullseye marketing grew originally from the fact that I was working with companies, you know, as a fractional CMO and things that were supposed to be like the best, you know, like inbound marketing or social media posts or other things, you know, they wouldn’t produce results in in three or six months. No. And I thought, well, what really does produce results? And that’s when, you know, bullseye Marketing grew out of that. And also from my experience as you know, I’m sure you’ve had work, I would start to work with the new client and I’d say, oh, how many email addresses, you know, do you have? And they’d say, oh, we have 12,000 or, you know, whatever the number might be, right? And I’d say, oh, how often do you, you know, email them? And they’d say, oh, around the holidays,

John Jantsch (06:31): ,

Louis Gudema (06:31): And, you know, email is marketing is such a tremendously powerful, you know, and almost free tool. And yet they weren’t taking advantage of it. And so that’s where the idea of the marketing assets that were kinda like money that people had in the shoebox under the bed, you know, and they just had to use it better.

John Jantsch (06:50): I had a client one time that, that we were doing a monthly newsletter and he was like, you know, that’s just a pain. Let’s just kill that. I just, you know, I don’t wanna do that anymore. And I was able to show him spikes in web traffic, spikes in conversions, , you know, every single time that thing went out. He was like, okay, I get it. I get it. . Yeah. So it’s awesome. Hey, you know, speaking of conversions, I also like your thinking on this. You know, a lot of times I have said before on stages that, you know, if you dropped me into your business and you said, look, you’ve got, you know, a couple weeks, what’s like the one area you would work on? And I always say it’s sales or conversion , you know, rate optimization. Cuz you, most of the time nobody really focuses on that. You like tweak the dial one half a percent and sometimes, and it can really drop to the bottom line. Can it, so you have, you talk a lot about conversion rate optimization. So tell me a little bit of your thinking on what you’ve seen when you’ve got people to focus on that.

Louis Gudema (07:46): Oh yeah, I mean it just makes a huge difference. You know, it, it’s just the idea is so simple is it’s way easier to double your conversion rate with the existing amount of traffic than it is to double the amount of traffic with the existing rate of conversion. And it, when you double your conversion rate, which you know can, it’s one of those, another one of those almost free things. Yeah. You know, you’re not only getting twice as many leads or sales or whatever your conversion is, you’re cutting the cost per conversion in half. And, and sometimes it’s, it’s really obvious stuff. Yeah. And so, you know, I I like to say that if you start to ramp up your marketing without first optimizing your for conversions, yeah. It’s like trying to full a buck fill a bucket that’s full of holes, you know, you’re just wasting a huge amount of your time and effort.

John Jantsch (08:42): Yeah. And I’ll throw one more variable in there. You get lead conversion cranked up, raise your prices , and you know, it may cut into conversions a little bit, but you know, it’s pure profit in many cases. So, you know, it’s worth the take worth taking a look at both of those, I think in a combination.

Louis Gudema (09:01): Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:03): Te tell me a little bit in your experience, um, the, what you see as the significant marketing differences between, you started already alluding a lot of B2B businesses, you know, the marketing’s very boring and because they feel like, oh, it has to be very professional or something. But talk about just the significant differences between B2B, not talking about like the tone or the messaging, but the, you know, the significant like channel differences even or approaches to, you know, a B2B marketer as opposed to a B2C marketer.

Louis Gudema (09:33): Well, and I’m gonna talk about the leading B2C companies, the p and gs and those Yeah. Right, right. Cause they, yeah, they do it so well. And there are some great B2B markers like Salesforce, you know, which really gets it also, and I give other examples in the book. But what they realize is that you have to build this idea, uh, of mental availability first of all. And that means that customers, it starts with the recognition that 95% of your market is not interested in buying from you today. Right? So it doesn’t matter what you say or what you offer, you know, they bought it six months ago, or they have a vendor they’re happy with or they, or it may be a, you know, if a, a firm has an accountant, a law firm, you know, some other, uh, service provider that they’re very happy with, they’re just got not gonna switch.

(10:28): If they bought a new crm, you know, two years ago, you know, they’d have to be really upset to switch, you know, and that’s true just of many things. The typical consumer insurance customer stays with the same company like Progressive or Geico for 11 or 12 years. And you know, and that’s the case in the B2B world too. So mental availability is building up awareness so that you are top of mind when they do want to actually buy something in your category. Because the short list is often very short. And one, sometimes just two companies, you know, I, I have in there a study in the book where someone, an analyst was surveyed their customers, their clients who had just bought new digital asset management systems. These are big enterprise expensive software system. A majority of the clients had looked at one vendor, they had done no competitive bake off at all.

(11:27): And I hear that all the time from small company, you know, companies that are selling to SMBs, you know, that they are, you know, someone hears good things about the MailChimp or about HubSpot or about Constant Contact and they’re like, they look at it, yeah, looks good, let’s go with it. And they don’t spend, you know, three months doing a competitive bake off. And if you aren’t, if you don’t haven’t built up that mental availability over the previous months and years, you don’t know about that opportunity. All the search marketing in the world and email marketing in the world will not make you aware of that opportunity cuz they’re just not gonna talk to anyone. They’ve already settled before they bought it. And so you wanna get yourself, and this is what, you know, this is why p and g and companies like that, you know, you look at the Today Show and they do their 15 second ads and it’s just to constantly be, you know, maintain that aware that mental availability, which is more than awareness, so that when you are ready to buy, when you are ready to switch, you are the one they’re thinking of.

John Jantsch (12:31): You know, I can already hear listeners saying, well, that’s great, p and g has billions, you know, somewhere, you know, how can I afford, you know, how can I invest in that type of, you know what, maybe people would’ve called brand marketing or something at one point. How can I invest in that when I really can’t measure it, you know, scientifically,

Louis Gudema (12:53): Well, I compare it, I like to make this comparison, John, brand marketing and building awareness is like exercise, you know, it’s well documented that people are healthier and live longer and live healthier, right. If they exercise, you know, five times a week, right. You know, half an hour a day, not a huge investment, but you know, if they do that they will be much healthier and live longer. And that’s like brand marketing. You know, it’s not with exercise where you can say, you know, last Tuesday I ran a 5K and that’s what made me healthy, or I got X return from it . Right. You know, it’s the doing it constantly over and over again at the same time, you know, in terms of medicine, you know, when you got an emergency, you get a, you know, chemotherapy, you get surgery, you get your covid shot, you know, those have great short-term effects. They may even save your life, but they don’t produce long-term health and wellness. And so you need ’em both. And what the researchers, what the studies show is that optimally you have a roughly 50 50 balance and spend between brand and lead generation.

John Jantsch (14:04): Yeah. And I can attest to the fact that having that long-term approach, whatever it is, however, you know, shows up, doesn’t, it’s not always running ads, you know, on the Today Show that having that brand mental availability, brand awareness out there actually makes your marketing your short-term marketing more effective. I have found. So in other words, you know, we’ve invested for years in inbound. That’s just part of what we do. I produce content, we’re on social media, I speak on stages, I do webinars. You know, those are all kind of things that in many cases are just kind of getting the name, keeping the name out there when we then decide there’s something we wanna promote and we put ads behind it. I can tell you anecdotally, but I, you know, probably could go do better than that, that we have people all the time saying, yeah, I read Tape Marketing eight years ago and then I saw your ad and it just reminded me how awesome it . You know, I mean, it, it, you know, I, again, I th I I think it’s really testament to the fact that they support each other. I think it’s not just like for the long term someday.

Louis Gudema (15:05): Oh, sure. So are you familiar with Gusto? The Oh, okay,

John Jantsch (15:08): Sure, sure. Actually, my, my, my daughter has done a lot of marketing with them or my daughter’s firm. Yeah.

Louis Gudema (15:14): Okay. So I quote the former CMO of Gusto, she was the CMO when they grew from 500 to 50,000 in customers. Yeah. So hugely successful. Now she’s the ceo. That’s what you get when you go from 500 to 50,000. You get to be CEO next time. Yeah. And of Mutiny a marketing AI firm. Ah, and she says that at Gusto, she found that whenever she turned off the brand marketing, six months later, their customer acquisition costs, their CAC went through the roof and their conversion rates tanked. And, you know, she tried it. She ran the, this experiment and other companies, Adidas found the same thing in B2C, you know, six or seven years ago, they said, oh, we’re just gonna do this, you know, digital lead gens, you know, online sales stuff, we don’t need the brand marketing. We’ll leave that to Nike. And after about three or four years, they said, oops, you know, they found out. So a lot of companies have found out in a lot of different industries that just exactly what you said, brand supports LeadGen, and you need ’em both, you know, hand in hand.

John Jantsch (16:30): This is a

Louis Gudema (16:30): Say, just one other thing, and they are fundamentally different. Yeah. Yeah. And you might even need different people or different agencies doing them because the brand is all about creative and emotion and characters and humor

John Jantsch (16:44): Message. Yeah. And

Louis Gudema (16:44): The lead gen is all about rational, 10% off sign up for our webinar conversion optimization stuff. So they are very different skills. And you may need different, you know, groups of people doing them.

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(18:35): If this next question were part of a drinking game and you had to drink every time somebody asks a question about this right now, if we all wouldn’t be getting much done, but where are you, where, what’s your take on AI in marketing these days?

Louis Gudema (18:49): Uh, I think it’s very new and I think it’s gonna have a huge impact. I actually was sitting, you know, I, until last month, I headed up a group in Boston that you’ve spoken to sales and marketing innovators. And we had a speaker today on AI in marketing, and he was making a point. So first, all the writing I see from AI today, I think is very bland and mm-hmm. Undistinguished. Yep. But who knows what it’ll be like in two or three years. But he was saying that, you know, what AI does is it brings in a huge amount of internet content and, you know, and then it generates new things from that. Now, LinkedIn itself, the LinkedIn B2B Institute says that 75% of the ads on LinkedIn are in a, and as we’ve been talking about, most B2B ads are not very good. So if you’re using an AI that’s taking in all the mediocre stuff that’s being done today and creating new things based on that, I don’t think that’s what you want. I, you know, and I think that to the degree that AI is valuable, marketers have to be better than AI or, or we won’t have jobs.

John Jantsch (20:01): Well, you know, at least what I’m telling people right now is it’s an efficiency tool. It’s a research tool. So, you know, you may ask it’s something and get 20 ideas where you would’ve thought of 10 or something. You know, I’m with you. I mean, it’s certainly not at the cut and paste stage by, by any means. Boy, I tell you, it does a good job of outlining things. It does a good job. Metadata is a perfect example. I mean, you know, for SEO purposes, keyword research for SEO purposes, it just speeds. You know, it gives us a lot of speed and efficiency in doing some of those routine tasks. And I think that’s how, if we use it that way and free up sort of those, the mental capacity, you know, to think strategically, I think it, it certainly has a place today.

Louis Gudema (20:44): Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, it’s great for brain, you know, brainstorming and you might get, you know, 15 or 20 ideas and you say, yeah, that one, you know that that might be a good topic. Although I heard, uh, I saw on Twitter, this guy at this agency said that they were doing a branding campaign and they asked Chad g p t and it came up with, you know, like 10 15. And then, so they immediately tossed all those out as being the obvious banal things. And their job then was to find the new innovative approach that something like ChatGPT wouldn’t come up with.

John Jantsch (21:22): Yeah. Yeah. We’ve been using it a lot for some strategic research too. You know, you develop a persona and then say, you know, what are the 20 concerns that, you know, this persona might have when buying X Service or considering X Service? And, you know, I have to say it, you know, it, it is probably the common stuff, but it just, you know, it’s, it create create in that particular case, it creates a nice framework for, you know, maybe we ought to be messaging around a few of these. Yeah. So let me shift gears a little bit. You are an author of a great book, bullseye Marketing, but you also write books with and for other folks, really, truly for, I suppose, as a ghostwriter, you, you wanna talk a little bit about your decision to do that? I find it difficult because it’s so much work to write a book. I can’t imagine writing somebody else’s book.

Louis Gudema (22:11): . Well, you know, they have to pay you to do it

John Jantsch (22:15): .

Louis Gudema (22:16): So I can help you on that part of it. So yeah, after I wrote Bullseye Marketing, I contacted a few publishers, and the thing is, I’ve been a, a ghostwriter, if you wanna call it that. Well, that’s for my entire career. Right, right. I’ve written for, you know, I’ve written for CEOs, I’ve written for clients, you know, campaigns, I’ve a hundred page manuals and videos and, you know, I’ve written for clients my entire career. So this is just a, a different form of writing.

John Jantsch (22:42): Different package, huh? Yeah. A different package. Yeah.

Louis Gudema (22:46): Yeah. And so I, I let a few publishers know, and last year one of them contacted me and said, yeah, we do need someone to write a marketing book. And it was an interesting topic. It was B2B, but it was not an area I had done a lot of work in. So it was kind of interesting. And I, I could learn the author and I got along very well. He liked, you know, what I wrote, and that helped us get along well. Right. . Um, so now in that case, I did not have a credit, and now I’m, you know, talking with a, another author who, where I would be a co-author on the book. So yeah, I am interested in doing that. And as I said, it’s kind of a, you know, it’s something I’ve done for a long time.

John Jantsch (23:28): Well, you know, ChatGPT, they’re, you know, just have it spin out books for you and then they’ll be very profitable. Right?

Louis Gudema (23:35): I think so , I think if I can just have ChatGPT write it all in the background, it’ll, you know, and I can do about 20 or 50 at a time.

John Jantsch (23:44): Yeah. , like who are some of those people? Patterson, James Patterson, that spins out, you know, like eight books a year. But I guess he’s, I guess he’s just hired an army of people that can work inside of his sort of framework model and write. Oh, is that what he does? Yeah. Yeah. Apparently. So that’s why he, that’s why he’s so prolific.

Louis Gudema (24:03): Well, Stephen King does is outrageously prolific with his novels. Yeah. I think he ha does something like, I, I read his book on writing. I think he has a goal of something like 2000 words a day.

John Jantsch (24:16): Oh, wow.

Louis Gudema (24:17): And so, you know, he sits down every morning, writes his 2000 words, and, you know, that’s,

John Jantsch (24:23): That’s how

Louis Gudema (24:24): You, he has another very

John Jantsch (24:25): Long, how to say that that’s how you get to eight, 800 pages. Right.

Louis Gudema (24:29): Yeah. .

John Jantsch (24:30): Although I will say Bullseye Marketing is no thin work there either. It’s, uh, I think you’re with the index, you’re over 400 pages and in that book and it’s really, you know, I don’t know if you see this as a compliment or not, but I think it’s a, I think it’d be an amazing textbook just because you cover so much ground and you do it in, I think in very practical ways.

Louis Gudema (24:49): Well, thank you. I have, I had a, a one reader in their Amazon review of the first edition called it an encyclopedia. Yeah, yeah. Of marketing. It’s, you know, when I kind of picked it up to do the second edition, I was like, this is ridiculously ambitious . But it’s funny you mentioned that cuz when Douglas Burett interviewed me, you know, five years ago on the Marketing Book podcast, he started off by saying, so I weighed this and it weighed 1.5 pounds. So I were you, it wasn’t what I thought was the most notable, but apparently it is longer than those

John Jantsch (25:28): Books on top of pages. You, I don’t know who, you know, Wedgewood Press got the paper from, but I just think it’s, I think it’s just a bulky, heavy book in general compared to a lot of other 400 page books. So it has something to do with the weight of the paper. I think even,

Louis Gudema (25:43): Well it’s got over a hundred full color illustrations.

John Jantsch (25:47): Well that too. Yeah. Did the first tradition, I’m forgetting, did the first tradition have color? Oh, okay.

Louis Gudema (25:52): And so, you know, wanted high quality paper.

John Jantsch (25:55): Yeah, yeah. Well you accomplished that. Well Lewis, thanks again for taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You wanna invite people to connect with you and find out more about Bullseye Marketing in its various forms.

Louis Gudema (26:07): Yeah, so, so the book will launch on May 2nd. I’m not sure when this will drop, but either, you know, right. Presumably

John Jantsch (26:17): It’s May 2nd, 2023 I should say. Cuz people listen to this show years later.

Louis Gudema (26:22): That’s true. May 2nd, 2023, the ebook can be advanced ordered, but the physical book for some reason cannot. But you can buy it May 2nd and you can connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter or louisgudema@gmail and would love to, you know, communicate with any of your, uh, listeners.

John Jantsch (26:42): Awesome. Well, again, thanks for stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you again soon. One of these days out there on the road, Lu. Thank you, John. Be well. Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Creative Elements hosted by Jay Klaus. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals creative elements goes behind the scenes with today’s top creators. Through narrative interviews, Jay Klaus explores how creators like Tim Urban James Clear, Tory Dunlap and Cody Sanchez are building their audiences today. By learning how these creators make a living with their art and creativity, creative elements helps you gain the tools and confidence to do the same. In a recent episode, they talked with Kevin Perry about how he goes viral on every single platform. Listen to creative elements wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Christina Inge. Just two decades of experience leading digital strategy and management and managing complex marketing technology projects. She specializes in articulating effective, efficient digital strategies for organizations using the latest channels to drive results. She’s the founder of Sleek Marketing, which offers hands-on education on digital marketing in the Boston area, and she’s also the author of a book we’re gonna talk about today, Marketing Metrics: Leverage Analytics and Data to Optimize Marketing Strategies. So Christina, welcome to the show.

Christina Inge (01:34): Thank you John for having me here.

John Jantsch (01:36): So here’s my first question. When you use metrics and strategies in the same subtitle title, most businesses I end up running up against don’t have a strategy, let alone a data-driven strategy. So, so how when you’re talking to somebody about this idea of a data-driven strategy, how do you bridge that gap if they really aren’t working from a strategic framework anyway?

Christina Inge (01:59): I think most people, even if they’re not working from a strategic framework, either believe that they are, yeah, , or know that they are not and wish to do so. I have yet to meet anybody who says, you know what? I hate strategy. I wanna just fly by the seat of my pants day in and day out. I’m sure they’re out there, but mercifully or unmercifully, I have not met them. . So the first thing is, there’s really not a lot of resistance to the idea of having a strategy. People don’t have one, but that’s all the more reason why they want to have a strategy and why they turn to data. Because if you don’t have a strategy right now, half the time, if not 70% of the time, you believe, rightfully so in most cases, that the reason you don’t have a strategy is because you don’t have enough. And data is really just information. Yeah. So most of the time people are like, yeah, I absolutely need a strategy and I need the data to develop that strategy. And datadriven strategy is like the buzzword of the moment. Sure. So people are for the most part on board with it, especially if they don’t currently have any kind of strategy at all.

John Jantsch (03:11): So, so you know, well, a lot of times when you work, what I hear you saying, I shouldn’t put words in your mouth, I’m gonna ask the question, is that a lot of people figure out what they’re gonna do and then say, let’s figure out how to measure it. And what you’re in some ways saying is, let’s look at what the data tells us to figure out what to do.

Christina Inge (03:29): Yes and no. So you should be always making data driven decisions. You should probably not be making decisions just based on gut feel or the mood of the moment. And I’m just, uh, swinging around here to be slightly less backlit, although I have that angelic look here going on. So you should be looking at the data to have it help you decide what to do. But you should also be conducting experiments. You should be doing ABM multivariate testing to test out hypotheses about what you should be doing. I’ll give you an example. So you can look at the data for what worked six months ago in a space like consumer, I don’t know, health and beauty, right? But what was on trend six months ago, what was on trend three months ago is not necessarily what’s on trend now. So if you go at that, go and look at that data and say, well, these particular influencers were really productive for us, or this kind of subject line in our emails or our marketing automation was very productive. It is not necessarily going to be the case right now. So I say, yeah, look at the data, but don’t just retroactively look at the data and then proactively predict forward. Well, predicting is a forward looking thing. Pride forward what you’re going to do, use that as a guide. But the past is only one of the many guides to what you should be doing. You should also be actively experimenting.

John Jantsch (04:55): One of the complaints of course, that I think people, uh, have today is there, you know, 20 years ago there was only so much you could measure today, lots of data, lots to be analyzed. So I mean, probably too much, right? In some cases. So how do we kind of get to what’s the important stuff?

Christina Inge (05:16): Anything that’s related to ROI is what you should focus on. I’m gonna say there’s three things you should be focusing on. One is anything related to roi, because at the end of the day, you’re either in the business of making money or if you’re a nonprofit, you’re in the business of serving a particular mission. And then your roi, it may not be monetary, but it’s gonna be there in elephants saved or disease cured or what have you. So you need to first and foremost say, am I doing things that help us meet our mission? Whether it’s shareholder value or saving elephants? Is this email campaign? Is this social media campaign, ad campaign, this combination of things, this customer, are any of these things helping us actually achieve that mission? And for that unique KPIs, key performance indicators that tell you, well, how will I know that we’re succeeding?

(06:07): So that’s the first thing, and I’ll get back to the issue of KPIs in a moment, but I wanted to also talk about, all right, what are the other two things that are help you narrow down to the metrics that matter? Not everything is gonna be a direct driver or even a quantifiable driver of roi. So for instance, if you have an outstanding, if you do a rebranding the way Campbell Soup recently did a rebranding, maybe more soup’s gonna fly off the shelves, maybe not. Maybe it’s gonna give them a little bit of a bump. But rebranding, people often don’t do it with the view towards all this is in and of itself, right? Going to cost people to stamped and buy my product. So you also want to measure consumer perception, your own positioning in the marketplace. And that takes it a step above ROI to the overall health of your branding your company.

(06:54): And then finally, if you wanna think about it as a Venn diagram where ROI is here, well may encompassing mo that mostly your brand health is here. Then the biggest circle of things you need to be measuring is your industry. You want to think about looking ahead to trends. Don’t forget, when you think about building a blue ocean strategy, one of the ways in which you can carve out a blue ocean for yourself. And if that’s not a mixed metaphor, I have no idea what, so we’re carving out an ocean and leveraging the ROI and running it up the flag pole. Oh my word. That’s way George jargon for a Monday afternoon is, which is when we’re recording this, but one of the ways in which you can create a blue ocean for yourself is by anticipating trends, right? Being ahead of the curve. Now, of course, the idea that there’s always a first mover advantage has been thoroughly debunked. In fact, that paper got retracted and cringe whenever anyone says first mover advantage. Cuz it’s not that simple. Sometimes there isn’t, sometimes there isn’t. But what you can’t afford to do in this world is be utterly oblivious to emerging trends. And instead simply being reactive or trying to be proactive, but only being proactive with a narrow time horizon. So time horizon A, look at your ROI of what you’re currently doing, time horizon B, look at the health of your brand and then the big time horizon start metricating overall industry trends.

John Jantsch (08:25): So on top of too much data, another thing that I hear quite often is this idea of attribution. How do I know exactly what did what, because the customer journey’s a little all over the place, . So are there some best practices in even assigning attribution or guessing or dividing attribution amongst channels?

Christina Inge (08:51): There’s again, three things there that I tell people to focus on. One is, on a tactical level, you want to have a tagging system in place. Mm-hmm. , like if you are not on a very basic level setting UTM parameters, or in some ways actually tracking all of your marketing efforts, start there, right? Gather that data. People will say, well, we can’t measure this or that because it’s on a third party. Yes, you can. Maybe not perfectly, but yes you can. So get the mechanics of measurement down. But a bigger challenge for a lot of people are the two other big things with attribution modeling. The first is simply having an attribution model and understanding what those are. A lot of times people have been doing analytics for quite some time, but they have no real clear idea of the differences between different attribution models like first touch, last touch.

(09:45): Mm-hmm. data driven of course, is very big for anybody using Google Analytics or many other platforms Right now we’re just gonna tell you what we think your attribution is and that’s fine. But you should still be able to manually set and explore different attribution models. So you instinctively understand how to map a customer journey and know the differences in attribution. If you attribute things to what we call first touch, which is the first interaction someone has last touch, last interaction, and so on and so forth, like equal credit to everything, those are really gonna give you dramatically different pictures of your customer journey.

John Jantsch (10:25): So, and Oh, go ahead. Oh, I was just gonna say, if you wanna finish that point, cuz I’m gonna move on to completely different,

Christina Inge (10:33): Oh well really quickly. The biggest part of customer journey mapping that people leave out is empathy. You want to have an ability to put yourself in your consumer’s shoes. It’s not just the data, it’s being smart about the data.

John Jantsch (10:48): Hmm. Say more about that. Okay. How, how are you, how do you end up being smart and build empathy back into the data?

Christina Inge (10:55): Well, the nice thing is that there’s a couple of tools out there, and in case anybody’s wondering what the movement is over my shoulder here is I’m being photo bombed by my dog, . Hi Kelly. Say hello to the people. Yeah. So we are one of the favorite tools that I like to use. I am shocked by the number of people who don’t start every marketing effort with personas. People will talk about these great groups of customers they have like, oh, millennials for instance. And I often use this example, in fact, I’ve used it in other podcasts. So I’m, I wish I had something completely original to share with you, John, but it’s a favorite analogy that I like to use. I will, when I do this, when I do my class at Harvard for instance, or at Northeastern, I’ll put four pictures up first I’ll say, okay, do you wanna reach, let’s say teenage girls, parents with large numbers of kids, people who travel with their pets and LGBTQ millennials and everyone’s like it.

(11:52): Totally. And then I put up a picture of a teenage girl and it’s Joan of Arc, and I put up a picture of a person with a lot of kids and it’s Genghis Khan . And then the guy traveling with a bunch of pets is Hannibal crossing the Alps with his elephants and the LGBTQ millennial is Alexander the Great and I say, are any of these folks gonna buy your gum or your frozen dinner service? No. But what would they all buy? Oh, armor. Yes, they would buy armor or I don’t know, catapults or whatever the heck you needed. I don’t know what Hannibal needed to cross the LPs, but I dare say armor was part of it. Swords spears, they’re in the market for those products. And so one of the things that happens when you don’t have personas is that you lump people together by demographics or by a specific buying behavior that may ha be no indicator of who they are.

(12:45): Because I tell you right now, Joan of Arc is not buying your car insurance from you or your lip B and try selling anything to Genghis Khan. Mm-hmm . So the point here, being an A persona is a really good way to take that vague abstraction of your, you know, millennials with two kids or whatever, and actually think long and hard about whether you’re sell, whether they’re buying what you’re selling. The next thing that I really love to do, it’s called an empathy map. I don’t know if you’ve used one of those in the past, or I’m sure several of the listeners have love empathy maps. There’s some really great templates out there, but they help you dig into how is your consumer feeling in the moment? Yeah. What do they,

John Jantsch (13:29): What are they seeing? What are they hearing? What are they saying? Right? Right. Exactly. Yep.

Christina Inge (13:34): And that takes that persona who is still a two-dimensional figure, and you are right there with them and you’re understanding what they need. Like, gosh darn, I wish I had a catapult at this moment.

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(15:23): So what role, because you do consulting, what role do consultants have in really bringing data more to the forefront with their customers? So a lot of marketing firms out there, yep. Say, oh, you want a website or you want leads, you know, we’ll get you that. But they’re not really, they’re certainly not leading or pushing a client to be more data-centric.

Christina Inge (15:44): Think the role that consultants plays a vital one, because we’re often perceived as more objective. And I would say arguably we often are, and that helps us look at the data without knowing so much of the backstory that we aren’t willing to consider certain things. So going back to my favorite analogy, if you’ve been trying to sell pet beds and you’re not selling them and you think, oh, we need to redesign the pet bed, and I come in with my crew and we say, no, the reason that your pet beds aren’t selling is because your target customer has an elephant, we are the ones willing to speak to the quote, literally or figuratively, usually figuratively elephant in the room, right? And say, okay, the fundamental assumptions here are wrong. We can do that from place of emotional safety. That’s part of it. I think the other vital role customers play is again, that fresh perception, which comes down to the fact that we can conduct data audits or other inventories or even just questions asked about what kind of data are you collecting and identify gaps that people have learned to live with.

(16:51): I mean, I’m a lifelong Bostonian and I can tell you that when people come to town, they’re often absolutely shocked about how much we live with potholes. We’ve gotten used to it, we take it for granted. Oh yeah, the streets are filled with potholes, whatever. And it takes an outsider to say, wait a minute, the streets are filled with potholes. Now mind you, I can’t go out and fill those potholes. So it’s, the analogy falls apart, but the point here being, it often takes that external perception to tell you what’s actually happening beyond just sort of puncturing those common assumptions, which people often desperately want you to question, but you are also actually asking, well where’s the state of com coming from? That’s very

John Jantsch (17:36): Valuable. All right, so I’m gonna, we don’t have all the time that it will take for you to answer this next question , but I’d just

Christina Inge (17:43): Like to

John Jantsch (17:44): , I’d just like to you to weigh in on the changes in privacy. Certainly tracking, certainly the data we get. You know, obviously everybody’s familiar with, you know, the Facebook, you know, tracking that’s gone or behavioral, you know, attribution that have gone away. Where do you see that, whether we know where it’s going or not, what do you see that businesses need to be doing? Because, you know, it’s not as easy to get some of the data that we used to get,

Christina Inge (18:10): You know, don’t, I can actually answer this pretty quickly because I would say it’s two things. One is double down on your own first party data, right? Make sure that you’re doing data audits, making sure your data is ethically collected. In other words, it’s fully opted in and make sure it’s clean. I guarantee you most people’s data is not as clean as they’d like. It’s kind of like your refrigerator, your fridge is never as clean as you’d like. Neither is your data. The other thing you want to do is start going old school, in my opinion, which is figuring out what are the proxies for the data that you can no longer collect. I mean, even Google is using predictive modeling to fill in the gaps that are resulting from people opting into integrated privacy protection, whether it’s legally mandated or not. What I mean by that is I’ve been in marketing long enough that I remember when you had to target people by the magazines they read and those kinds of targeting where you’re targeting people by a self-evident, self-selected and self-identified interest are not bad. And we have to get back to thinking like that. To go back to my analogy, if you are trying to figure out what you can sell to Hannibal Alexander, the Great Joan of Arc and Genus Khan, if you were forget their age, forget their other demographics, if you were targeting all of the, the readers of, or Facebook, well I’m that old that I actually refer to Facebook, Facebook fans or Instagram fan fans of Catapult monthly

John Jantsch (19:41): .

Christina Inge (19:42): You would be getting your target audience and you’d be doing it in a much less invasive way because you’re partnering up with media outlets that have already reached people. It doesn’t matter who they are, it doesn’t matter what they are, what matters is what they want to buy from you or what cause they want to support or activity they want to engage in. Go where it’s self-evident that the crowd you’re gonna find does that, that data is out there and that data tends not to be as tightly regulated, nor is it as ethically questionable. So

John Jantsch (20:12): Go back, yeah, you, you know, everybody’s locking down on the online data, but you can buy a lot of data. You know, I can buy a mailing list of just as you said, people that read a certain magazine that have maybe a certain ailment. It is pretty, pretty crazy. And so I, I mean, I, I think what you’re suggesting too is app pending customer data with some of that, uh, external data might be a way to build, uh, a richer profile or persona.

Christina Inge (20:37): I, I have my own moral reservations about when and if you should be doing a pending, you can certainly do that and it will get you a lot of that data, but if you don’t feel comfortable, so a pending customer data would mean I’ve got a list of 20,000 of my customers and then I go to a data broker and I find out how many of these people are into canoeing, right? Or chain mail or whatever. That may still be something your consumer doesn’t want you to do about them, but if you, again, partner up with folks who have already found your audience because they self evidently need to congregate around a certain media property that I think everyone feels comfortable with. But you know, that’s a line you have to decide yourself organizationally, append is an option, but so can partnerships, so can good old fashioned advertising or media partnerships or inf more contemporary influencer partnerships can be a way of getting around that data privacy as well in a way that’s maybe a little bit more comfortable.

John Jantsch (21:35): You and I are recording this in March of 2023, Google Analytics, which is a, I would suggest a core tracking piece of data gathering by July of 2023 is changing its model completely and certainly its interface completely. Do you, what are you telling people about GA4 today?

Christina Inge (21:55): I actually am quoting my friend Chris Penn on this one. Chris is telling people that you should already be on GA4. If you are on uni, you know, if you’re on Universal Analytics that’s going away and you’re gonna lose your historical data because you are gonna be stuck with switching over in, I don’t know, July or whenever you’re gonna be forced to do. So you could do it maybe even now, but you’re already then, but you July it’s going away. So I don’t know if you’re planning on doing it anytime soon, but do it as soon as possible. Switch over so that you’ve got that historical data. Because what’s wonderful about GA4 is its predictive modeling. It’s gonna predict your, for instance, your most likely converters and it’s gonna need a nice rich data set to do that. So the longer you wait, the slower you’re going to be able to realize the great benefits of it and it’s gonna, you, you know, the learning curve, you just have to accept it and learn how to use this new platform and you’re gonna be happy you did.

John Jantsch (22:53): Yeah, I’ve been telling people you had to learn GA3 , so it’s just, you’re used to it. But we actually did that, we actually put the tags on all of our client sites probably a year ago. So we’ve been collecting that data, but we don’t have many of ’em that want to, you know, use the interface until they have to. But we’ve at least been collecting that data. So yeah, you definitely, and and you know, the myth that they might just push it back for six months, I think is people better probably stop listening to because they have no incentive to push it back. It, it is a free tool that they’re getting sued for using right now. So I guarantee it’s gonna happen on July 1st. That’s my permission.

Christina Inge (23:29): Even if it gets pushed back, you’re, you have nothing to lose because you’re still collecting the data.

John Jantsch (23:35): Yep.

Christina Inge (23:37): And that’s the point. So, no,

John Jantsch (23:39): You’re doing great. So Christina, thanks so much for stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You wanna tell people where they can find certainly marketing metrics, but really even connect with you and your work?

Christina Inge (23:48): Absolutely. So you can find my book Marketing Metrics on Amazon and it’s, I believe the Kindle version is currently, I had a nice little discount as well of I think 20%. But don’t quote me because you, I don’t know when you’re gonna be listening to this. If you want to find out more about me, you can go to my, the website of the agency that I founded here in Boston in 2014. We are in our ninth year in going strong. And that’s thoughtlight.net thought as in thinking light as in light bulb, T H O U G H T L I G H t.net. And you can reach out to me there, you can find out a little bit more about our services or even order the book. And I personally answer all emails that are addressed to, Hey you.

John Jantsch (24:34): Awesome . So Christina, again, thanks for stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Christina Inge (24:42): Thank you. Have a great day, John.

John Jantsch (24:44): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.