Category: Books

There is a lot at stake when Companies develop some technological or physical product. But they face an equally high risk in getting the product positioning right. Weak positioning can mean the difference between success or failure.

When we don’t have our positioning nailed, it’s as if we’re talking to someone who doesn’t speak our language. And when they don’t acknowledge us, we repeat the same message even louder, as if that will get our point across. For those who remember John Cusack 80s films, you might be familiar with the movie Better Off Dead’s scene with a French foreign exchange student having dinner with her American host family.

Shouting doesn’t work when you’re using the wrong language, and it doesn’t work with the wrong positioning either. Luckily, someone has come up with the process for finding the best positioning for our product, saving our market from being subjected to random jargon. 

April Dunford was a startup executive, running sales, marketing and product at seven B2B technology startups over the course of 25 years. She is now a consultant who has had the privilege of bringing her positioning expertise to more than 100 companies. She codified her process in the 2019 book “Obviously Awesome,” which makes these ideas about positioning accessible to any company 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• Scene from Better off Dead (mentioned segment starts at 1:30)
• Violinist Joshua Bell
• Net Promoter Score
• Wordle
• Clayton Christiansen

We humans are good at dealing with small numbers. So good, scientists have coined the word “Subitizing” to describe how we know small numbers as well as the back of our hand. The opposite is also true. We can’t differentiate big numbers. We know that 10 to the power of 10 is bigger than 10 to the power of 9, but how much bigger? Even on hearing that they differ by a factor of billions, we stumble to gauge that kind of scale. 

This puts those of us who present numbers in a pickle. Historical greats like Florence Nightingale had a terrible time presenting her data to government leaders. She broke with convention, framing everything in terms of soldiers not statistics, to argue how to prevent needless deaths in military hospitals.  The book in today’s show explains methods used by her & others to convey numbers that the brain has a hard time grasping.

Knowing tactics that worked for Florence,  should at the very least help us convince management to approve our marketing initiatives. 

Since graduating with a BA in Psychology and Philosophy from NYU, Karla Starr has written columns for Medium  and appeared on NPR and CBS Sunday Morning. She has also written for many magazines and won an award for the Best Science/Health story from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Her first book was Can You Learn to Be Lucky? Why Some People Seem to Win More Often Than Others. We’re talking today about the second book  Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers, with Chip Heath 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• Paul Slovik
• Steven Pinker
• Karla’s newsletter The Starr Report on Substack.
• Karla’s website

William of Ockham – 1287 – 1347  was an English Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher, and catholic theologian, born in a small village in Surrey England. He had a way of reducing explanations down to their essential core, frequently and effectively showing that the simplest explanation of a phenomenon was usually the right one. Ockham used this so much, his name has become associated with this principle – which we know today as Occam’s razor.  

Dan White graduated from Cambridge University with a Masters of Arts. He has worked in marketing, market research and brand consultancy for 30 years. He is equally passionate about using imaginative visuals to bring marketing concepts to life. If people understand and remember an idea thanks to a clever framework or visual metaphor they will be able to use it in their day-to-day work. You can consider his book Smart Marketing to help you apply Occam’s Razor to today’s marketing problems. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• Byron Sharp
• George Box “all models are wrong; but some are useful”
• Millward Brown and the MMA Growth Debates
• The Professor and the Madman
• Dan’s LinkedIn profile  Dan’s Twitter profile

In 1942 economist Joseph Schumpeter claimed at the core of our economic system was a “process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”  He called it creative destruction

Half a century later, Harvard professor Clayton Christiansen wrote in “The Innovator’s Dilemma” that “By doing what they must do to keep their margins strong and their stock price healthy, every company paves the way for its own disruption…The reason why it is so difficult for existing firms to capitalize on disruptive innovations is that their processes and their business model that make them good at the existing business actually make them bad at competing for the disruption.”

Which of these two is telling the truth? They both are, it depends on companies and the individuals within them. It’s up to them whether they will change with the times or be left behind.

My guest today is Engelina Jaspers, who has experienced revolving-door CEOs, business course-corrections and lots of reinventions during her 30-year corporate career. Across all her VP leadership roles — marketing, brand strategy, environmental sustainability, corporate communications — none escaped disruption. After being tapped to lead multiple company-wide transformations, Engelina became a student and teacher of business and career agility.

These experiences led her to develop the MARKETING FLEXOLOGY Management Framework™ — a mindset and a toolset for future-proofing your career, your team and your marketing platform. Engelina shares marketing agility know-how in her book, presentations and workshops so you, too, can anticipate and prosper from unplanned change.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• NRC’s Downloadable (PDF) 5-point Agility Scale 
• Uniform Commercial Code
• Engelina’s LinkedIn Profile
• Engelina’s website and info on the book: marketingflexology.com

Email is a powerful medium. At minimum, it serves a company’s need for transacting with vendors & customers, etc. But some companies go much further, putting it at the centre of their business. The author of today’s book, has done this in three distinct businesses. How did he get there? Just listen to his story. 

In his  primary school years, Matt Paulson played games like SimCity on his family’s PC. Keen to share what he learned with other fans, he made a website and watched as visitors started coming by the hundreds. Learning that you could make money by putting banner ads on your site, he signed his little website up and small cheques started rolling in. But for the time being, it just served him as a way to make pocket money.

Like many University students, he found himself in the middle of his studies, needing money to cover tuition costs. The college newspaper had part-time job openings for writers. Between that and taking freelance gigs on ProBlogger, mainly about personal finance, he managed to get by.

Matt then fused his writing skills with selling banner ads like he’d done before. He launched a finance blog that generated about the same income as you’d make on a computer science graduate’s salary. He made  many websites along this theme, and because they were highly dependent on Google’s algorithm for traffic, they rode some high highs and low lows. In the aftermath of one rankings smackdown, he resolved to never give a tech platform the power to damage his business like this.

The solution was to manage their own content distribution. That meant showing their brand on a variety of finance portals, but also networking directly with their audience, getting them used to seeing the site’s brand in places like their email inbox. So they launched an email newsletter. That newsletter, called MarketBeat, now has three million email subscribers. Financial product companies pay top dollar to advertise in the newsletter, to get a piece of the one million monthly outbound clicks it receives. Along with premium subscription products, this business now employees thirteen people and grosses more than $25 million in top-line annual revenue.

You now know the story of a young guy who founded an email empire. And while he’s proud of it, he’s equally passionate about living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota with his wife and 3 young kids. 

Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• Matt’s book “Email Marketing Demystified,” (3rd edition release date: fall 2022)
• CCPA
• Email coregistration
• Matt’s personal website
• Matt’s LinkedIn Profile and Twitter Profile

Our guest came out of university not knowing what field he was going to go into. But he managed to get an internship at ad agency Saatchi and Saatchi. From there he went to work on a variety of accounts, dream clients like Penguin Books, Budweiser and Sony PlayStation. He then settled into the online entertainment space working with goalpoker.com and jackpotparty.com. And in between that and some unpublished novel writing, he found his real groove, giving advice on what young marketers could learn from things he had done. So after a career that’s done just about everything that you could do agency and client side in marketing he’s now sharing his advice.

NB: I apologize for technical issues we had with the recording – hope you’ll listen to what Harry has to say

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• Ads by Car manufacturer Skoda
• Two types of campaigns, parallel to film-making’s Above the Line / Below the Line functions
• Harry’s LinkedIn Profile
• The book’s website

EXCERPT: Don’t be Derailed by Rejection

You’re going to get rejected. A lot. That’s just a given, and if you’re on A Grade student who’s sailed through school, university, and sporting success with the gilded sheen of a winner, this is going to sting a little.

Get used to it.

This isn’t a game of round pegs for round holes. Every hole has more edges than a jigsaw and there are always shit loads of more qualified people trying desperately to mould themselves to fit in. The bravery you need to defeat this early rejection will just be a leather jerkin when compared to the metaphorical suit of armour you’ll need later on, when whole campaigns or businesses you’ve poured your soul into are rejected without so much as a thank you email.

The best plan is not the most correct plan. It’s not the one that requires barricading your door, working day and night for a week to write out. It’s the one you stick to. 

This logic can apply to diets, preparing a speech, training for competition, or keeping a New year’s resolution. It can also be applied to one thing that is rarely fully implemented – a marketing plan. A great hack to overcome false-starts is to follow a program that’s short enough, you see results in as little as 30 days. And that’s the tactic used in today’s book.  

Written in 2019, “Action Tracking” is aimed at formulating a digital marketing strategy. Its author, Katrina German, came by her expertise here in a circuitous way. She’s worked in different media, from books, to television to running a technology company. The common element was that they all centred around communicating stories, and reaching and marketing to the audiences hearing them. She’s been helping companies for the last 6 years. Tying digital actions by sales and marketing to a coherent plan that’s aligned with their strategy. 

But this talk isn’t just about scaffolding and building your online strategy. We talk about the drawbacks of current social channels. The issue of social media’s impact on mental welfare was brought to the fore by the 2020 movie “The Social Dilemma.” The platforms knew about their negative impact on audiences before we as marketers did, but now that we are aware, we can’t ignore our impact. When we use sensational headlines so our messages spread further, it ups the ante for all posts to please the algorithm. This degrades everyone’s experience and subjects our followers to mentally-corrosive content.  This isn’t the kind of Internet Katrina wanted to see, and so she did something about it. Her most recent reincarnation is as founder of Ethical Digital, a Canadian agency that respects the voices of women and Indigenous and other minority communities. Their belief is that more inclusion in the ranks of marketing practitioners will improve the digital experience for everyone. I can’t argue with her here and I hope you stick around to hear this upbeat tone at the end of our talk.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• Using Ads to test your Headlines, a tactic made famous by Tim Ferris
• Google Analytics Chrome Extension (uses GA3)
• Google Keyword Planner
• Google Trends
• CMSs like Squarespace
• Marketing Automation tools like ActiveCampaign and MailChimp
• Documentary “The Social Dilemma”
• Katrina’s LinkedIn Profile and Twitter profile