Transcript
WEBVTT
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Are you struggling to come up with
original content weekend and week out? Start
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a podcast, interview your ideal clients, let them talk about what they care
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about most and never run out of
content ideas again. Learn more at sweetphish
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MEDIACOM. You're listening to be tob
growth, a daily podcast for B TOB
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00:00:24.059 --> 00:00:28.179
leaders. We've interviewed names you've probably
heard before, like Gary Vannerd truck and
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Simon Senek, but you've probably never
heard from the majority of our guests.
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That's because the bulk of our interviews
aren't with professional speakers and authors. Most
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of our guests are in the trenches
leading sales and marketing teams. They're implementing
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strategy, they're experimenting with tactics.
They're building the fastest growing BTB companies in
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the world. My name is James
Carberry. I'm the founder of sweet fish
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media, a podcast agency for BB
brands, and I'm also one of the
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CO hosts of the show. When
we're not interviewing sales and marketing leaders,
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you'll hear stories from behind the scenes
of our own business. Will share the
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ups and downs of our journey as
we attempt to take over the world.
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Just getting well, maybe let's get
into the show. Welcome back to be
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tob grow. I'm your host for
today's episode, Travis King At sweetfish media.
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I'm doin today by Kevin Knight,
who is the VP of marketing at
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be to hell. Welcome to the
show, Kevin. Thank Stravius. Appreciate
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me, of course, so excited
to, you know, chat with you
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about all the different ways that marketers
can start to look at their targets more
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like people. And so today you're
going to be sharing a couple of different
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ways that marketers can, you know, remove this target based thinking, and
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same with sales, and start thinking
and their customers more like people and consumers,
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similar to the way that be Toc
companies do, and not like sales
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targets. So before to that,
I'd love for you to share with listeners
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a little bit about yourself and what
you in the team be to health roape
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to these days. Yeah, sure, so, in terms of myself,
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the reason why I think so much
about this kind of quote unquote consumerization of
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be Tob marketing is because I've been
really fortunate in my career to be able
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to dabble a lot in both be
to be and B Toc. So I
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have worked in marketing roles at Google, Microsoft, facebook, Pinterrist on influencer
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marketing or advocacy marketing company called expert
voice, was a general manager for a
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while a compass and now I run
marketing for Vita, and so I've kind
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of if you take facebook as an
example, my first job at facebook was
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doing sales marketing, so creating sales
collateral, you know, the pitch,
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the messaging to the be to be
audience. And then after I did that
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for a while, I switched over
to the facebook creative shop, and the
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facebook creative shop is the inhouse creative
agency that works directly with facebook's largest advertisers
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to come up with really cool consumer
can and pains, and that was kind
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of the first time probably where it
struck me in my career I was like
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wait, these things are not that
different, at least they don't have to
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be, and at their best they're
probably not that different. And so I
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joined VI to health about two months
ago as VP of marketing and it's been
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really fun for me to get back
to my passion, which is marketing.
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And for those that aren't familiar,
Vida is a is is an APP that
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brings cutting edge technology like machine learning, together with the human touch of health
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coaches, nutritionist therapists, and they
help people get healthy. So a huge
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percentage of the American population has chronic
illnesses like diabetes and obesity and high high
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cholesterol on high blood pressure, and
so for those people, beat as really,
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really effective at bringing together that kind
of machine learning based Hey, what's
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the right steps for you to take
to get healthy, together with the accountability
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and the support of a human coach
or therapist. And then for people who
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are healthy right now, it's all
about prevention, because we have we have
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some pretty pervasive health problems that hit
people as they age in this country and
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and we're doing our best to help
people to make the lifestyle changes they need
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to make when they're younger to avoid
getting things like diabetes. I love it
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and that background is super impressive and
it definitely makes sense why you're so interested
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in passion about this topic of Vita
being BBC consumerzation and that. It makes
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so sense, though, and thanks
so much for sharing that context. Super
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Helpful. Yeah, awesome. So
I'd love to just dive in and kind
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of, you know, start by
talking about, you know, how brands
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can start to leverage branding and and
what ways that you know you either have
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done yourself or ways that you know
be tob decision makers in the marketing departments
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can figure out and start developing more
of what their brand stand for it.
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Maybe share some examples of that that
you either come across or that you've worked
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on it yourself. Yes, or
so, I think the the the biggest
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question here is why do branding in
a bit to be environment, because in
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my experience, so much of the
be to be daytoday is about the tactics
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and it's about, you know,
optimizing that funnel and, you know,
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demand Jen and marketing automation and that's
all really, really important stuff. But
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there's just so little discussion about branding
in most be to be context. But
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if you think about it, every
single decision that a person right, let's
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let's ignore whether they are quote unquote, consumers or customers. Every single decision
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that a person makes about what to
buy fall somewhere on a spectrum that lies
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on one end with rational thought and
on the other extreme with emotional thought.
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And you know, so I think
about you know, if you are signing
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up for a new checking account or
credit a card, that's a hugely rational
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decision. Right you're comparing perks and
benefits and rates and all these numbers in
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kind of a table, side by
side and you're making a fairly objective decision
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about which of those products is going
to be best for your for your life
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right now. But if you're in
the checkout I'll at a grocery store and
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you see a pack of like big
red staring you down and you grab that
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pack of Big Red, that is
a purely emotional decision. Like nobody.
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You never see anybody at the checkout
counter comparing the ingredient lists of gum or
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comparing, you know, calories from
like one gum to another. Like it's
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just pure emotion and that speaks to
me as a big Red Fan who recently
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rediscovered that love of chewing gum.
And so if you think about the brands
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that have that are able to tap
into more of that emotional decision making,
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they tend to have higher pricing power. So a good example of this is
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a gatorade has a stronger brand than
power aid and no matter where you look
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at costs more. It just costs
a little bit more if you want gatorade.
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Brands that have that TAPP into that
emotional decision making tend to be stickier,
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they tend to have more loyalty and
they tend to have higher customer satisfaction
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because people feel happy about using them, because they feel a connection to the
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brand. So that's kind of,
at a high level, why I think
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branding is so important, because if
you have a strong brand, you dramatically
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increase the likelihood that you can tap
into people's emotional decision making, which is
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going to bring you that pricing power, that's stickiness, that user satisfaction,
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all those things that make the numbers
go up into the right I love it.
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And would you want to share an
example of either a brand or like
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any sort of like companies that you
feel like you're doing this well at all?
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Yeah, so one of my favorite
examples here, and and you know,
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reasonable people can probably disagree about the
way I plot these brands on the
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spectrum, but imagine, if you
will, align and on one end it's
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rational, on the other end and
it's emotional. And let's take productivity software
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as an example. I would put
Zoho all the way at the end.
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That's rational. It's just the best
pricing, it's got the most you know,
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functionality for the price. Like,
arguably it's the most bang for your
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bucket. So if you sit down, you look at here's the functionality we
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need and here's the pricing. You
know, that's really where zoho shines.
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It appeals to that rational decisionmaker.
And then all the way at the other
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end of the extreme is g sweet, and g sweet has been able to
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draft off of the Google brand.
And you know, it's so funny when
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you talk to people who are working
at startups or you know when, as
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I've done a couple of times in
my career, you join a new startup,
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if they're not using g sweet,
if they're using Microsoft office, there's
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a little bit of this like wait
a minute, like what's going on here?
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You know, is this is this
company modern? Is it is it
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cool? Is it like is it
in tune with the now, because they're
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using outlook, for example. Right, and so on these two ends of
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the extreme you got Zoho, superrational. You've got g suite. That is
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certainly rational, right. I mean
they lay out the functionality, the features
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of the pricing, but they have
that really strong brand. And in the
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middle here you've got Microsoft Office,
which used to be the dominant brand.
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But as someone who used to work
in Microsoft office in all in marketing,
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you know, I don't think that
there's a lot of discussion about the brand.
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There's a lot of discussion around the
tactics of growing the business and I
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think that the people who identify very
passionately with using office are people who identify
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very strongly with habits that they already
have in terms of using email or excel
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or something. They don't want to
relearn new tools. But I don't I
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don't see a lot of emotional connection
to the office brand and I do see
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a lot of emotional connection to the
Google brand, even in the enterprise.
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That's a fact and I can attest
to that too, because it's real and
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pretty sure almost every company I've worked
that is used g sweet and then prior
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like the older ones that have been
around loader, have used outlook. So
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definitely can attest it at also being
the case for me as well. Yeah,
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I love it. And in terms
of some best practices that you would
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mind sharing, like do you have
any like best practices maybe from BBC World,
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that you know bb brands can kind
of take and take a look at
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to either do some research or some
strategies that might be helped for for these
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different be to be braves that could, you know, change their strategies a
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little bit. Yeah, for sure. I think there's there's a couple of
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tactics, the three or four tactics
that are just absolutely table stakes within B
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Toc that you don't see as much
of and Bab and. In my mind,
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there's just no reason why that should
be the case. The first that
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I would call out is good old
plane and simple blocking and tackling, reach
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and frequency. If you talk to
a consumer marketer, they talk about reach
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and frequency. They know who they're
trying to reach and they have an idea
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of how often they want to reach
those people and they do so under a
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sustained period of time, whereas you
know, in a beat to be context
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there's a lot more like short term
optimization. There's a lot more like,
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well, you know, we're going
to run a campaign here and we're going
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to do a Webinar and we're going
to try and drive people to the Webinart
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and they're going to dump them in
our email and it's just a lot more
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focused on those kind of tactical steps
and much less around what are we doing
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to nurture this body of people that
we want to be building a reputation with.
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A brand is just a reputation,
right. It's your it's your image.
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And a friend of mine who I
worked with at facebook, who's an
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absolute genius in just about all things
marketing, getting Paul Adams. He used
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to just beat into my head whenever
we're working on a project that brands are
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built the same way as relationships,
a series of lightweight interactions over time.
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So if you think about any relationship, right, if you're still close to
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your high school friends, your college
friends, it's because you talk regularly and
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you know, if you've got a
partner of spouse, most of those discussions
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that you're having are super lightweight.
They're not like the deep, like what
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would you do if you were on
a desert island and you can only take
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one book? Right, it's more
like, you know, wow, like
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you should have seen the diaper I
change today, like that was crazy.
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You know, it's like super lightweight
stuff, but it builds relationships and so
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if you want to have a strong
brand, you've got to have you've got
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to follow the same tactics that you
do to build a strong relationship. Lightweight
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interactions. Over time that's reaching frequency. Another one is storytelling. Be Toc
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brands are always aspiring to tell amazing
stories and be too be brands seldom do
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a good job of this. But
there's two stand out examples in the last
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few years where I think be to
be brands have have really shocked the world
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and they've come in here and they've
they've they've punched way above their weight.
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There they're right up there with the
best consumer brands. The first that I
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would point out, and it's a
few years old now but everyone knows of
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it, is the Jean Claude van
damn epic split for Volvo trucks. Now,
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Volvo trucks, like Volvo, is
kind of a consumer brand, but
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Volvo trucks is a different company and
Volvo trucks is a be to be brand.
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It nobody like goes to like a
car dealership and buys a semi truck
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from Volvo. It's a be to
be like enterprise purchase. And the reason
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why force from Botto Force, the
agency that worked with Volvo on this,
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the reason they did this is because
they wanted to tap into that emotional sational
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decision making. They wanted people who
might be in the market for a semi
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truck to feel cool when they're making
that person. They wanted their kids to
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be like, oh, Vobo trucks
are so cool, you see that John
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Claude van Damn thing right. And
so I think that was a really,
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really effective tactic for using storytelling to
build a brand in a BEDB context.
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My other favorite one, and I'll
just step back for just a moment,
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one of my favorite things to do
whenever I'm speaking to a group of people
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is I'll just say the name of
a brand and I'll ask them the first
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word that comes to mind. And
so I'll ask them, I'll say,
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you know, when I say Volvough, what's the first word that comes to
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mine? And everybody says safety,
and I say what about Mercedes, and
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they say luxury, and I say
what about BMW? And they say performance,
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Sporty, fast, and I say
Oracle and they just look at me
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blankly, and I say sap and
they look at me blankly. and Oracle
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and SAP, by the way,
are in the top twenty brands in the
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world. Is ranked by intergrowing.
There's a big brands, but nobody can
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tell you what they stand for and
then I say what about IBM? You
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know, people say. People say
Watson, and that, I think,
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is a really, really good example
of a be to be brand using what
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has been historically BEAC tactics of to
build a BB brand. So Watson,
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of course, is famous among consumers
for winning on jeopardy. So this is
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and it's just a brilliant campaign.
So here you've got this incredibly cutting edge
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artificial intelligence technology and you want to
go out there and win in what is
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becoming a really crowded ai and ML
market place. And what do you do?
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You show off your technology and a
consumer, you know, landscape like
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in a consumer channel like jeopardy.
It's an absolutely brilliant storytelling and I think
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idms one of the strongest be to
be brands out there, because people can
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think of something. So those are
a couple of the big ones. I
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think that, you know, two
more, if I can just add real
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quick, are the experience. So
you know, I know there's lots that's
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being said about we work right now
and some of it is fair and some
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of it is unfair, but you
can't deny that we work has built a
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really, really strong brand. Right
let's leave valuations aside for a moment and
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the way they built that strong brand
is by having an experience. And as
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a guy who spent a lot of
time at we work and a lot of
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time at Regis, he just can't
even compare the two and I think they
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stand as kind of a representation of
this contrast between historical be to be.
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Regis just feels like death when you
walk in, like it's just it just
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it sucks the will to do anything
interesting out of your out of your mind,
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whereas you go into we work.
And they thought really hard about the
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experience. And if you think about
be to be marketing, there's so much
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conference attendance, there's so many events
that we do under the auspices of thought
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leadership and I don't think that we're
thinking enough about the experience and what the
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snacks we serve says about the brand
and what the lighting and the staging and
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the the core on the furniture says
about the brands. That's another one that
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I would I would put out there. Today's gross story revolves around search engine
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marketing. Delphis, a big data
platform, had hired an agency to manage
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their Google adds a few years ago, but they weren't seeing the results they
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wanted to see. Being such a
technical be tob solution, they set out
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to find a team that could take
on their challenge. After countless proposals,
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they found the perfect fit directive consulting, the B Tob Search Marketing Agency.
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And just one week after launching directives
campaigns Delphic saw their lead volume double and
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their costper lead drop by sixty percent. I have a hunch that directive can
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get these kind of results for you
too, so head over to directive consultingcom
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and request a totally free custom proposal. That's directive consultingcom. All right,
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let's get back to this interview.
I'm just thinking, like if if you
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were to be leading a you know, rebranding, you know campaign or rebranding
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project for a company, like what
are some things that you would want to
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like, what would you think about? Because it sounds like there's a lot
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and when it comes into branding,
right, especially when it comes to be
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to be brand, and these different
companies are trying to think of okay,
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well, all right, well,
if we need to do this branding project,
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well, where we start? Like
there's there's a lot of places.
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So I guess. Could you?
Would you mind sharing like where you would
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start if you were, you know, going through a rebrand, you know
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as a BDB company? Yeah,
for sure, branding and rebrands are one
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of my favorite things in the world
and you know, their tons of fun,
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but I find that they're often overly
complicated and unnecessarily overwhelming. I think
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that you can do an effective branding
exercise or reband branding exercise with a pretty
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simple tool, and I can't take
credit for this tool. I think I've
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just picked it up through working with
people much smarter than myself over the years,
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and so I'm borrowing these principles and
kind of Mashine them together. But
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I start with any branding exercise you
want to develop a brand key, because
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if you can develop a brand key, then every time you're evaluating a tactic
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or a campaign thereafter you don't have
to sit there and reinvent the wheel and
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think yourself, well is should we
do this or should we do this?
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Like you already know what your North
Star is, and so there's four really
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simple ingredients or elements of what I
think is an effective brand key. The
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first as your audience. You have
to know who your audience is. I'll
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summarize them first then I'll dive in
each of them really briefly. The four
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elements are audience, values, style
and essence. So when it comes to
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your audience, you have to know
who you're talking to. And the pitfall
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that I see most brands get tripped
up on here is they cast way to
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broaden net. And again it's easy
to point to consumer examples because we're all
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familiar with them, but look at
BMW. BMW's target audience is clearly a
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middle aged male, the tons of
middle aged female and younger female and older
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females by them. So it's better
to know exactly who you're talking to and
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speak clearly to them and count on
the fact that there will be other people
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for whom that same style and message
will resonate then to try and be all
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things to all people. So really
hone in on your audience. The second
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piece values. What is it about
your business that resonates with your audience?
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Codify those like why do people?
Why do people like working with you?
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Is it the technology? Is at
the customer support? Is it the ease
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of use? is at the like
it always work like? What is it
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you know and codify those and keep
coming back to them over and over in
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your storytelling. The third is your
style. This is colors, this is
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voice, like how do you show
up? You know, are you are
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you fun? Are you serious?
And there's just way too much sterility and
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be the be marketing in general.
And the final is your essence, and
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essence is one of the hardest,
by the hardest piece of the brand key,
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but it's the most important because it's
really that that quintessential North Star.
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Your essence is the one word that
comes to mind when you think of a
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brand. So when people say Volvo
is safety, safety is the essence.
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When they say Mercedes is luxury,
luxury as the essence, and when they
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say that IBM is artificial intelligence,
that's the essence. Most brands, though,
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have not they've not been consistent enough
in telling, in distributing the same
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messages over and over over time,
that reachion frequency, couple with the storytelling
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to be able to develop any meaningful
brand essence. But you can start by
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codifying that brand key and having the
discipline to make sure that everybody in your
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organization is adhering to that brand key
with every single piece of marketing you put
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out love that. Thanks so much
for sharing that that context and that's super
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helpful framework that I think a lot
of people will find a lot of value
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and if they just take their their
brand through that exercise. So thank you
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much, awesome and I have one
other question that I has been kind of
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picking at me for a little bit
and related to some of s that that
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you shared. I figure in our
pre interg conversations you talked a little bit
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about a perceived wall within marketing between
BEB and BTC. Can you talk to
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us a little bit about that wall
and like what you mean by that,
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so people can you know, understand
that's a little bit yeah, so one
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thing that I've encountered a ton in
my career is this perception of this notion
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that if you're hiring somebody for a
BBB role, they have to come from
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a BBB background. You're hiring somebody
from a consumer role, they have to
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come from a consumer background. I
think that is a really, really stupid
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way to build a team. I
think the cross pollination between the disciplines of
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be tob marketing and BE TOC marketing
can make both of those functions way way
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stronger and way more effective and without
a doubt, some of the strongest performers
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I've ever managed and ever hired are
people where I hired someone from the other
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kind of side of marketing to take
a role in the other side. Right.
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So I'd hire a BTC person to
do content marketing. I'd hire a
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BB person to do brand positioning and
branding and and growth and things like that,
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and I think that the discipline of
marketing is consistent and coherent enough that
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it's not like you're starting from scraps. Like if you're a marketer, you're
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a marketer first and foremost, and
then the difference between be to be marketing
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and be TOC tends to be one
of execution and the way that you approach
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problem solving. So if you can
cross pollinate between those two, I think
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you end up with a far,
far stronger marketing team. So I would
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encourage anybody who's building a BETB team
to be looking at recruiting B Toc Marketers.
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I would encourage anybody WHO's building a
B Toc Team to think about somebody
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from a B to be background who's
probably going to bring some new rigor and
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some new tactical focus. And I
would encourage anybody who works in marketing to
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not pigeon hole themselves or allow themselves
to be pigeonholed as either be to be
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or be TOC too early in their
career. It's fine to do that later
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if you really figure out what you
love, but early on, don't let
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that just be a game of chance. Take take the deliberate time and effort
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to try to get experience in both
hands and know that every day you spend
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in one of those silos you're building
skills that are relevant to the other one.
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Got It. Love that. I
think it's super helpful to such an
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outside of the box way of thinking
about hiring and building a team, because
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that's that's definitely what I've never heard
before. So that's that love. That's
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fireman, but it's working for me, so I like to think it would
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work for others to right. Totally
love that. That's what the shows all
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about. Offer and value that you've
experienced and found success with and then figuring
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out how to deliver that value back
to everybody else also. Well, Kevin,
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this has been such a great conversation
and one of the ways we like
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to wrap up the show is for
guests to share a strategy that they're either
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currently trying or thinking about in the
future. So do you have anything that
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you're, you know, working or
working towards that you get? Sure?
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So, I'm pretty new at Vita, been in roll for about two months,
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and the way that Vida historically goes
to market is we sell to employers
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like large fortune five hundred companies and
they buy Vita on behalf of their employees.
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They provided as a benefit because if
their employees are healthier than they're more
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productive, they're happier, they're more
loyal, they spend less time, you
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know, sick and out of the
office and they cost a lot less in
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in medicine and doctor visits and hospital
stays and things like that. But one
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of the things that that we're really
starting to think earnestly about right now is
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taking the same product that has traditionally
for us as a business, been distributed
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through the enterprise and going directly to
consumers with it, because I believe that
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if you're willing to spend seventy five
bucks on a gym membership, then you
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want to be willing to spend seventy
five bucks on a health coach who is
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any combination of a personal trainer,
a nutritionist, you know, any number
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of other certifications and areas of expertise
that can help you be really holistly healthy,
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and so this is a fun exercise. I get to kind of practice
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what I've been preaching here as we
take the muscle that we have built on
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BB marketing and take that and apply
it to building a direct to consumer B
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Toc Brand. So it's what I'm
thinking a lot about right now and hopefully
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we will be able to look back
on this in a few months and talk
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about some successes. I love it. I love it, Kevin. This
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has been such a valuable conversation.
Man, if listeners want to stay connected
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with you or follow up to ask
any additional questions on some of the topics
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that you shared, what's the best
way for them to connect with you?
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I'm a big fan of Linkedin.
I'm Kevin Ja night at Linkedin. Got
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00:25:37.039 --> 00:25:38.799
It. So you guys heard that. Connect with Kevin on Linkedin if you
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have any questions, as I'm sure
I know I do have a lot of
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questions from some of the value that
you shared with us. So I'm go
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ahead over to linkedin and connect with
Kevin and thanks again, Kevin. We
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really appreciate you beat on the show
today. Thank you, trap is.
372
00:25:52.750 --> 00:25:59.710
Appreciate you having me. We totally
get it. We publish a ton of
373
00:25:59.990 --> 00:26:02.950
content on this podcast and it can
be a lot to keep up with.
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00:26:03.509 --> 00:26:07.660
That's why we've started the B tob
growth big three, a no fluff email
375
00:26:07.740 --> 00:26:11.740
that fools down. Our three biggest
takeaways from an entire week of episodes.
376
00:26:11.180 --> 00:26:18.049
Sign up today at Sweet Phish Mediacom
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