Throughout our youth we are subtly encouraged to fit into our surroundings, staying on the expected path of taking our studies as far as we can before getting a job. Today’s guest didn’t do that, dropping out of high school to go work in the retail sector.
Because she was a go-getter, she was recruited in 1997 to join in a retail experiment by a telecom carrier. At that time, cellphones were exclusively a corporate thing; they were seeing whether there could be a consumer market for them. That turned out to be a great money-making opportunity.
That led to her owning her own physical store called Parlez Wireless, that operated as an authorized dealer for that carrier. She sold the franchise six years later and since then she has been providing consulting support to other businesses in Service and Retail sectors, as well as Speakers, Consultants and Authors.
After hearing the unconventional path she took, you can see why her philosophy on marketing isn’t the same as everyone else. She believes using those old tired ways yields merely mediocre results, and she wants companies to do better than that. So she teamed up with Alan Weiss in 2022 to write her second book. “Masterful Marketing”
I first met her a dozen years ago at a Podcasters Across Borders conference and I’m so glad to have you join me to hear from Lisa Larter.
Small-to-mid-sized businesses make up half of the economy. When surveys are done on why one company is chosen over another, buyers most-commonly cite the people as the main factor why they buy from them.
It’s great that the founders or select team members are known by those buyers. But what about those who don’t know them? How can they get a wider circle to know about their expertise and how excellent they are at what they do?
The vehicle that my guest believes does this better than anything else is public speaking.
Majeed Mogharreban is a professional speaker, world traveler, and founder of ExpertSpeaker.com. Holding professional speaking status for 10 years, Majeed has worked with the United Nations, Fairtrade, celebrities, politicians, Olympic medal winners, CEOs, and top entrepreneurs to give speeches and tell stories that change the world.
As my eldest son has been in university, he’s worked part-time at a sporting goods store. The section he works in is the category-leader in the store – as you can probably guess – it’s shoes.
Need to admit that I’m not that into shoes.
I am fascinated by the conversations my son has with customers when it comes to shoes. They not only talk about the design features of a specific shoe. They also chat about the athletes who’ve worn it or collaborated with the brand to design it. They bring up details about how that athlete signed with the shoe company, the battling that went on between that brand and other companies to win the athlete’s endorsement.
Clearly when people buy shoes for exercising or training for something, they aren’t just going after ergonomics.
This back-story on the brand’s struggles matters to them, as if they’ll only wear a brand that works as hard as they do in staying fit or competing in sports.
This bond clearly applies to shoes, but it obviously reaches to many other types of brands too.
It’s good for products to have a strong brand message and proof-points of their value, but the true winners are those that connect their story to the customers’ internal values, or that give the customer a transformational experience.
Today I’m talking with someone who works with what he calls ‘meaningful’ brands, producing their media creative in a way that resonates with buyers. Fittingly, the name of his London-based boutique agency is ‘Way’
My guest is a public speaker, an ultra marathon-runner, podcaster, skydiver and minimalist. In 2021, he released the book we’re talking about today: “Not Another Pair of Shoes”
For several years running, noted marketing expert David Meerman Scott would access all the corporate press releases captured by major wire services. These covered product launches, major client signings and other moments when companies would talk about what distinguished them from their competitors. He posted his analysis of all this data and, without fail, almost all of them chose the same words to describe themselves. They made matters worse by, in David’s words, by “using gobbledygook-laden phrases that are so overused to have become meaningless”
We know we must try to embed our brand’s personality into our writing – my last episode featured an expert talking about that. But that’s not all we can do.
We’ve got to change the way we talk about ourselves, to cut through people’s cynicism. If we’re ever going to be believed by our prospective buyers, we’ve got to own what customers say in reviews of our products or services, and make claims about ourselves that duly represent what they could experience by buying from us.
Though noble, pulling this off sounds like a ton of work. But the premise of the book I’m covering today is that it’s doable, if you make it part of your normal marketing workflow. The book which came out in 2022 is called, “Prove It.“
It’s the second book by Melanie Deziel, whose first book was “The Content Fuel Framework” She is an award-winning speaker and content creator. She has worked at various media companies, including The New York Times and Time Inc. In addition to her professional experience, Melanie has also taught courses on content marketing and digital marketing at universities such as Fairleigh Dickinson, Syracuse, and the City University of New York.
Our guest says that marketing has a problem. In his words, “I think there’s an over-reliance on people’s opinions at the expense of creating a vision and sticking with it.” and he claims this hurts our ability to build brands that get strong traction. Already a published author, he devoted his second book to this argument. The book’s title is his plea to marketers: “Stop Listening to the Customer: Try Hearing Your Brand Instead”
Adam Ferrier is the founder of Thinkerbell, an agency that creates ‘measured magic’, and was ranked 2021 number one Creative Agency in the world by industry publication BestAds – the first time awarded to an Australian agency. Leading Australian publication Mumbrella also lists Thinkerbell as Full Service, Creative, and PR 2021 Agency of the Year (the only time an agency has ever won all three titles in one year).
Adam is one of Australia’s leading consumer psychologists, a brand strategist and an authority on behavioural economics. He’s the author of The Advertising Effect: How to change behaviour (Oxford) and Stop Listening to the Customer: Try hearing your brand instead (Wiley). No stranger to the TV screen of Australia, Adam is a regular panelist on the Gruen Transfer, 7’s Sunrise, and 10’s The Project.
As the creator of the idea behind the WARC World Innovation prize (2013), and winner of the rare Cannes Gold Lion and Gold Effie double, Adam has won at all of the world’s major advertising shows. He created the successful board game The Analyst (translated into four languages), space; an unconference where ‘ideas meet influence’, and the social cause agency DOA (Decade of Action). Adam also co-hosts Black T-Shirts, a podcast that delivers XXL creativity for marketers.
An unstoppable force in the Australian advertising landscape, Adam’s hands delegate the keys to embrace evidence-based creativity – whether to buy, perform or change – through cognitive behavioural psychology, hardcore creativity and a deep understanding of behavioural economics.
Regardless of when you’re hearing this, it’s safe to say that you’re running into content generated by AI. There is a lot of good brought by chat tools, but there’s one thing we want coming through in our content – that is to sound human. What engages people is content with personality, content that evokes a response. And that’s what today’s guest will break down for us.
When Alison Ver Halen found herself between jobs, her roommate’s dad, who was an attorney, offered to give her things to do around his office until she got back on her feet. One of the things he needed was someone to write blog posts for his law firm. He knew she had a strong writing background, so he offered her the gig, and she was more than happy to get paid to write.
After six months, he told her she had brought in $75,000 worth of business for his law firm, just from the blog posts she was writing for him.
After a while, she started writing for an associate of his, and then for some friends of hers. She did get another day job, but she kept writing on the side, and her client list kept growing until she knew she couldn’t do both any more, so she quit the day job to devote herself to writing full time, and she’s never looked back.She heads a Chicago-based agency called AV Writing services, in which she produces content for clients, with the help of her dog, Bobbi.
We’re ending our series on advancing analytics today. We’ll focus on the software that, for many marketers, is at the core of this field: Google Analytics. It was introduced in 2005 as a read-only tool that tracked basic info on websites. The name has stayed the same over these last 18 years, but so much else of Google’s technology landscape has changed: they have released many other tools: Tag Manager, Google Data Studio, now Looker Studio, ways for API’ing between systems in and outside of Google, and most importantly a place where it can all be managed – Google cloud.
The new Google Analytics GA4 was born of this environment.It’s been criticized as being immature since it lacks features that were in the old UA interface. However, if judged by how well Google integrated it into their stack and how much those with technical skills can do with it, we would rate it as ready for prime time. Add to that the fact – in a matter of weeks Google teams won’t have to maintain two analytics tools, and they’ll get to focus exclusively on just one – GA4.
We can debate Google’s motives for tightly integrating GA4 with the whole Google cloud. I’m not wading into how good or evil it is to give away a product and hope users try the paid cloud platform that comes with it. But I’ll say that using Google Analytics with these other pieces lets you do much more with your data that you couldn’t do with the old GA. And when tools directly or indirectly make money for Google, that incents them to keep those tools and keep improving them. I’ll leave it at that.
Our real question is how do we economically benefit from the available tools. And that’s what our guest is going to tell us. His book which came out in early 2023 is called “Learning Google Analytics: Creating Business Impact and Driving Insights” The business impact spoken of there doesn’t mean using GA4 as a standalone lookup tool. Using it like that and ignoring what’s possible, would make the rest of the whole Google stack seem (to quote from the Movie ‘Contact’, “like an awful waste of space”
Our guest knows the value of integrating Google’s tools for many world-wide brands, as he’s done through digital agencies on his own as a GA consultant since 2008. Mark Edmondson has helped turn the out-of-the-box Google Analytics into a package that automatically describes, predicts and activates better marketing outcomes. He currently works at Devoteam as their Principal Data Engineer.
Mark grew up in Cornwall, UK before gaining his Masters in Physics at Kings College London. He now lives in Copenhagen with his wife and two children, enjoying playing music and cycling around the many lakes.
You have strategized and run a program with positive results, you would think that you simply show leadership your data and then you can sit back while they lavish you with praise.
Not quite.
If it isn’t packaged right, it won’t have that hoped-for impact. Remember Maya Angelou said ‘people will forget what you said…what you did….but will never forget how you made them feel.’ That feeling is conveyed through stories. To find and tell those stories, you need business intelligence and data visualization tools. I sought out a Googler who’s an expert in their tool for doing this: Looker Studio.
Sireesha Pulipati is an experienced data analytics and data management professional. She has spent the last decade building and managing data platforms and solutions, and she is passionate about enabling users to leverage data to solve business problems.
Sireesha holds a master’s degree in business administration and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. Her work history spans multiple industries – healthcare, media, travel, hospitality and high-tech
She is currently at Google as a technical lead, helping with the business intelligence and analytics strategy for internal teams.
John Thompson is the author of the 2020 book Building Analytics Teams, and a 35-year technology executive in the fields of data, advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI).
He is Global Head, Artificial Intelligence (AI) at EY. John was an Executive Partner at Gartner. He was the global advanced analytics and AI function at biopharmaceutical company CSL Behring, where he led an analytical applications team.
John has built start-up organizations from the ground up and he has reengineered business units of Fortune 500 firms to reach their potential. He has directly managed and run – sales, marketing, consulting, support and product development organizations.
He has been a technology leader with expertise and experience spanning all operational areas with a focus on strategy, product innovation, growth and efficient execution.
Thompson holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Ferris State University and a MBA in Marketing from DePaul University.
He has been fortunate to hold numerous executive and c-level roles, including serving as the Global CMO at two Fortune 500 companies. While leading sales, product and marketing teams at world-class companies including Oracle, SAP, Schneider Electric, Siemens, United Rentals, he sat in the executive chair and board room meetings where we confronted key issues of performance, growth and transformation in several industries: construction, industrial, software, energy & automation, IoT, the public sector, healthcare, and other technologies. Living and working outside the US for 14 years in Europe, Eastern Europe and Asia has helped develop his global fluency.
His fellow partner at the Revenue Enablement Institute is Steve Diorio. You may also be interested in a previous podcast episode with their associate, Neil Hoyne
