In this special 100th episode of The Unicorny Marketing Show, Rachel Fairley interviews host, Dom to share key lessons from their podcast journey. This reflective conversation uncovers how the show has influenced marketing strategy and shaped perspectives on brand strategy placement within businesses.

Dom discusses the debate on viewing marketing as a profit centre, challenges the common understanding of ROI, and touches on the digital shifts affecting modern business growth strategies.

What you'll learn:

• The importance of strategic thinking beyond day-to-day tactics.
• Why brand strategy often needs to function independently from marketing.
• How marketing's role must be perceived for sustainable business success.
• Examples of how companies have adopted new approaches based on discussions from the show.

Join us as we celebrate 100 episodes of The Unicorny Marketing Show!

About Dom Hawes

Dom Hawes is the host of The Unicorny Marketing Show, where he shares insights and engages with industry leaders. Dom is the Group CEO of Selbey Anderson Group, helping businesses in complex markets win the future. With over 30 years in marketing, strategy, and M&A, Dom is passionate about creating and marketing new products, services, and events.

Dom is also a blogger, published author, and competitive rower, with interests in RevOps, data, insight, leadership, and management theory.

Dom is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

Links

Full show notes: Unicorny.co.uk

Watch the episode: https://youtu.be/bF6_G2IWsUo

LinkedIn: Rachel Fairley | Dom Hawes

Sponsor: Selbey Anderson

Other items referenced in this episode:

Geoffrey Moore: The Unicorny Marketing Show

The Gorilla Game by Geoffrey Moore

Matt Dixon: The Unicorny Marketing Show

April Dunford: The Unicorny Marketing Show

Ben M. Bensaou: The Unicorny Marketing Show

Nudge

Uncensored CMO

Michael Porter: The Unicorny Marketing Show

Sarah Robb: The Unicorny Marketing Show

Duncan Daines: The Unicorny Marketing Show

97. Marketing a business is everyone's business

41. Must win battles for marketers

Dale Harrison: The Unicorny Marketing Show

80. The Unicorny Marketing Manifesto: What marketing is

81. The Unicorny Manifesto: Why 'phony wars' kill credibility

Graham Wylie: The Unicorny Marketing Show

Dr. Carmen Simon: The Unicorny Marketing Show

A company does not exist without marketing. They might not call their people marketing people and therefore think, we don't need marketing, our product sells itself. But bullshit.

You've got a product, you've priced it, you've worked out how you're going to get it to market and someone does that, ergo, you are marketing, you're just not calling the marketers.

I think it's really hard not to self censor and to produce something that you know your boss will like rather than something you think the brand actually needs. And so I've seen amazing creative work come up internally and had it smashed down by committee to the point where it's.

The marketing braves like to think that there are two poles. One of them's right or the other one's right. And they argue like the truth is always in the middle.

If I've learned anything throughout life, the answer is always in the grey. It's never at one of the polls. Never. Hello, unicorners, and welcome to a very special episode of the Unicorn Marketing Show.

Because this is a century, this is show number 100.

Now, if you're watching this on YouTube, you will probably see we've only got about seven or eight shows here, the rest were audio and only we've gone video first now. So if you're listening to some audio, you might want to go and check us out on YouTube.

Anyway, today we thought we'd do something a little bit different, so I've invited co host Rachel Fairley into the studio and she's actually interviewing me about the 100 episodes or the 99 episodes that have brought us to here and some of the key learnings that we're going to take away. So if you like, this is a recap episode. It's my impression of where we've got to with the podcast.

There's some pretty important things in here which I hope you enjoy. Without any more ado, let's go straight to the studio.

Congratulations on the 100 episodes.

No, 100, eh? A century.

I mean, it's amazing. I was thinking about it on my way here today. I was thinking about all the questions that I have for you. I hope it's all right, but I'm going to.

I'm going to ask them all.

No, that's fine. We're warts and all. Totally transparent. I have to say it has not been easy getting to 100.

We've had some significant obstacles along the way, but maybe those will come out as we speak.

I think so, for sure. But I'd love to start with when you look back on the hundred, what surprised you?

There are a couple of things that surprised me. One is how open some really big and important people have been to come on the show. I'm thinking specifically in the early days. Like Geoffrey Moore.

Yeah.

So he's been my marketing hero probably for 26, 27 years. And I wish I'd known.

So when I was studying his work in the late 90s and there was a whole company based on his work called Gorilla Park I used to work for, which was an incubator fund and the clues in the name. Right.

So he had this book called the Gorilla Game and the whole of Gorilla park was based on his theories about how to bring disruptive products to market. So we literally studied his playbooks inside out. The whole language of the company was his.

Now, had I known that he was so accessible and such a lovely man, I'd have written to him then. But he was lovely. He was really, really helpful, very patient. Because it was quite early on that he agreed to come on.

And I think that's so that really surprised me because actually a lot of people are a bit sniffy and a lot of people have ghosted us when we've approached them. I mean, really not very important people as well, to be honest. They're full of their own self importance.

A couple of people have said they will come on and then have ghosted us. But I think you look through if I'm thinking about the kind of the academics and the authors specifically.

So people like Matt Dixon or April Dunford or Ben Bensau, they've been enormously generous with their time.

That's really interesting because the whole ghosting thing is a phenomenon I just cannot understand. Like it's just so basic manners to say to somebody, I've changed my mind. I find it astonishing.

But when I look at the people who've come on and I think about the fact that there are those that haven't, like, what a positive choice. Because sharing the knowledge, I mean, being able to listen and really hear what's going on in somebody's brain is just phenomenal.

And I think there's an important thing there, you know, because the people we have had on, they share quite conceptually often.

So this isn't a show about practitioning, you know, we might talk about what the show is for maybe later on, I'm not sure, but we deliberately changed it partway through.

And I think that a lot of people, when they're invited onto a podcast, go to one of those resources online and look at the size of the audience and they equate size of audience with quality. And that's not the case. So there are some very popular shows that have very low quality content that can't be implemented.

And one of the things I've loved about this show, we have a decent enough audience, but we're niche. We're deliberately niche because we discuss things that are conceptual or strategic or about leadership.

We do have some more implementation type shows too, but it really is about food for thought and that doesn't suit everybody. But what I've loved is that four, five, maybe six companies now have written to me directly to say thank you so much for X episode.

I played that to my executive team and we have now changed the language we use in our organization to try and help marketing become more effective. And I've got five or six of those really big companies who've taken unicornly concepts to their heart. And I love that. I absolutely love it.

Oh God, I really love that.

Yeah.

But there's such a disconnect, I think, between the topics, the ideas, the kind of concepts, the things that need chewing over and agreeing before you can even get into the tactics.

Yeah, massively.

So this is really instilling a conversation at a very senior level about what is right and what is the best approach before anyone lifts a finger and does anything.

Yes, absolutely. Because I think partly many companies tactically are not weak. Right. They know how to do the things they've got to do.

It's just the scope of the department probably isn't large enough or the senior marketers aren't getting the seat at the table that they want to be able to help drive strategy. And I think those are the issues that we've tried to lean into a little bit more.

When the podcast started, it was quite different, wasn't it?

It was really different, yeah. I mean, I think firstly we had three people in the studio always.

So I, you know, I brought a subject matter expert in inverted commerce in to speak depending on what the vertical market was or what the message was going to be. And that was quite hard to hold a conversation between three people is harder than it is to have a face to face with two.

So we, but more specific, when we started we were, we were about like the practice of like the whole thesis to start with was like, you don't learn anything from studying unicorns, so we're going to help you study like ordinary companies like your own.

But, but I realized pretty quickly that like, tactically, many companies don't have A problem because they've got the tools, they know how to use them. You know, they really, really know what they're doing.

If you look at the other big marketing podcasts out there, there are some that focus on like specifics around practitioning. Nudge is a really good podcast, but it talk talks about behavioral economics specifically and a lot of people don't really know much about that.

And they can use the, you know, Phil's take out some Nudge to help them day to day. Then you've got something like Uncensored cmo, which is another really good podcast. Those two are the market leaders, if you like.

But that's much more about the stories of the individuals who come on to the show. And it's about. I mean, it's advertising led, unsurprisingly, because that's the, that's where the history of the people come from.

But it's a very different type of show.

Both of those play problems probably to a slightly larger audience than we would ever seek to because we're much more about issues that a lot of people don't care about, like the senior people do. Interestingly, there's a. What I'm finding, and this is a real surprise, by the way.

We've got a lot of very senior listeners and we have quite a big cohort now of kind of students and juniors because they're being taught strategy at university. But. And then they start work and it's like, why did I learn all that stuff? It doesn't make any sense.

And coming onto Unicorn, they can hear people talking about the things they studied.

That's the shocker though, isn't it? Is that you study and then you go into work and it's all tactics, not strategy.

Even though you've just spent years learning the strategy and how to think about marketing.

Yeah.

And then when you get to a really senior level, it stops being about tactics and becomes more about your ability to influence and be strategic and engage your peers in agreeing what is going to make the biggest difference for the business, add the most value. And in between there, it's very tactical. I think there's like two shockers in your career if you're a marketer, really.

I would agree.

I mean, I think the, the interesting thing also about the strategy models that you learn when you're at university or if you're studying for an MBA or something like that, is you don't get to use them.

Actually, if you're an MBA and you're going into something other than marketing, like Into a strategy department, you might, but you won't touch them for 10 or 15 years or 20 years. And then later in your career when you need them, there's kind of other noise there.

One of the biggest revelations I've had actually, because this has been a really good path of education for me too. So when we started the company, I mean now I came back into the sector from outside it.

I've been doing marketing all the way through, but effectively I was in house, if you like. I was an untitled marketer, I was MD of an E commerce company. Marketing was at our core.

But coming back into the sector, I've been really surprised and it's by the emergence of kind of the marketing bros. I mean they are almost exclusively male. This sort of online bullying, you do it our way or you haven't got a clue type. And that's just like.

I think they have some interesting ideas, but that's not the lived experience of most people that I speak to in this studio. There's a gap there in partly because actually the marketing bros will seek to discount all of the old models.

They say, oh, they're not relevant anymore, you know, And I've had literally people say to me, for example, Michael Porter, he's like, oh, we live in a post portal world. Michael Porter doesn't count anymore. It's like bullshit. That's just bullshit. Just cause you don't know the model, don't tell me it's crap.

But I think that's part of the issue is that in order to make a name for yourself or to make a name for your agency, you have to come up with a model or a way of thinking that you can almost. I mean, there's a group of people I've worked with over the years where we just go tm, you know, just trademark it. Right.

It's about sort of eliminating things and replacing them with what you want to. But the problem is it's really aggressive.

Like I have times on LinkedIn where I actually just feel like I've been smacked in the face by some of the posts because it's. So you're wrong, I'm right. And.

And no wonder people suffer from imposter syndrome because it feels like you're on quicksand and that if you don't agree, you're not part of the cohort.

I think you dealt with this really well in your episode with Sarah Rob.

Yeah, we had a good shoe over that, didn't we?

Yeah. So partly it's fueling imposter syndrome. It's the I know everything and you don't, because I just invented it type thing.

But I think agencies are really guilty of this. And I was doing it in the 90s and literally in the 90s. It was our strategy. Like, we're undifferentiated. How the hell are we going to stand out?

Well, let's invent a process and sell that. No one can copy exactly what we've done. Now, as it happens, we happened to invent quite a good process back then, and it worked really well.

It was just back to front thinking, you know, we said, right, what do you want to do? And we'll go all the way back and say, you work backwards. Yeah.

And that was at a time when our competitors were inventing processes too, but they were more about a process going forwards, not a process going backwards, if you like. These are tiny differences. We invented a process and we pretended that only we could do what we did. So we're just as. We were just as guilty.

But 25 years years later, almost 30 years later, people are still doing it. It's barking.

Yeah, it is. It's totally barking. What has stuck with you?

That's a great qu. I mean, there's a. There's a lot, actually. I think one that's really. I mean, there's some recency bias going on for me here. But, but, but I think as.

As we've gone on, as the podcast has gone on, some of the messages have crystallized. So what started out maybe as a thought is now starting to become a firm belief. And that's just another of your podcasts. Here we go.

Another of your episodes.

This is why I came today, so that you could, like, you know.

Anyway, so Duncan. Duncan Danes.

Oh, yeah.

Before he came on, I was starting to talk to people and we were starting to get the understanding that marketing is too big to be left just to the marketing department, largely.

Well, for a number of reasons, because the perception of the rest of the business of marketing has been shaped by what marketing is now, not what marketing should be. And marketing in terms of the department, because if job titles get in the way, just choose them because they're an artificial construct.

So there's a number of things that all add up. And so to hear Duncan talking about the fact that he doesn't even have marketing his job title anymore.

Now we've been calling them untitled marketers up to that point because, oh, I still don't have a good name for them. They're very different than shadow marketers. It's a very different thing. Shadow marketers like do their own shit in spite of marketing.

Whereas Untitled Marketers are part of that go to market process and they're on script. That's really stuck with me. And in fact, we've got another episode that at the time of this recording hasn't aired.

I think it's going to be episode 97 where the title is Marketing A Business is everyone's business.

Yes.

So it takes that theme on and says actually the marketing department is there to try and coalesce, to try and work with strategy to make sure the allocation of resource is efficient and effective. But it's everyone's job to help take a company to market.

I realized looking back on my career that one of the reasons that I wanted to be a brand person is because brand works across a whole organization and a marketing doesn't.

Well, it doesn't, but it should.

So you just mentioned actually one of the other revelations to me, not maybe not to the audience, you probably knew this already, but it was a revelation. It was a revelation to me.

And I did say this has been about education for me and obviously growing an amazing community, is that brand sits outside, should sit outside of marketing. It's a different thing. I think one of the. So in my, in my upbringing, if you like, professionally and throughout my life, partly because maybe the.

The 12 to 15 years I spent out of agency land was probably longer than that, where I was effectively running my own company. Like the company, the strategy, the brand, the marketing, they were all the same thing because I was the person responsible for all of them. But I.

But so my experience in enterprise is small.

And so that's one of the fabulous learnings, bringing people like yourself in who have an understanding that brand needs to sit separately than marketing. It can't be something that the marketing department looks after.

And I think that might be the key to why a lot of companies struggle with the concept of brand. Because they just think it's part of. Like to them, brand is the color scheme that the marketing guys use.

Yeah. In the same way that marketing is just about your ads and your promotion.

Yeah, totally. Yeah.

I think that's part of the issue though is if I was a CEO, I would want the levers of the business strategy and the brand strategy to report straight to me because that's everything I have basically to move the business forward.

And the two of them, I mean, they're not mutually exclusive exactly. There's overlap.

They're like half and half of the same piece. And so, yeah, it often ends up in marketing, which means that you then have.

Can have some difficulty with HR in getting the people experience to actually because you have to get the experience for the people who work there to be what it needs to be to deliver the desired experience for the customers. You put it in marketing, you have a problem with hr, right?

You put it in, you put it with the CEO's office and then marketing gets a bit snooty about it. But you need really strong CEOs who go, these are my levers. This is what I need in order to be able to do the job.

Because brand has to execute through the experience, through the products, through the marketing, through how you hire people, how you reward them, the experience they have. So it's much bigger. Yeah, I'm interested that that stuck with you. But it sounds like a lot of the conversations have been quite persuasive.

So are there any. Do you look back on any where you're like. I definitely do not agree with that.

Still there's definitely. There are a few, it's not necessarily a whole interview, but a few themes that I don't agree with. There was one actually that never aired.

It was a good interview, but the person we interviewed left the company and the company wouldn't allow us to air it. And of course we always rely on sign off. But in that interview, and it was echoed a few times, the concept of marketing as a profit center arrived.

And so marketing is a profit center and more with less. They came out about the same time. They're a feature of a down downturn.

And the problem when you talk to someone like me who is, you know, self taught but a theorist and conceptual is that profit center has a very different set of implications. Like when someone says, for every dollar I spend on marketing, I know I get $3.40 back in revenue. That doesn't mean it's a profit center.

It's a different thing. And my concern, and I still disagree that I will never agree with that and the whole concept of ROI as well.

ROI is a measurement of marketing effectiveness or marketing efficiency. Maybe we can come on to that later.

I think the profit center thing is really important though because if you start to believe that marketing is a profit center and you don't accept that it's a necessary overhead, it's a necessary investment for the company that starts to affect the decisions that you make. So you're instinctively going to have to get immediately shorter term because you're constantly chasing a return that you can measure.

And this is another good argument probably for taking brand out of the marketing department. Because if you're over indexing on the short term because you think you're a profit center and you're trying to maximize that roi, that measurement.

Sorry.

You are making decisions that are going to give you problems in 18 months to 36 months and beyond because you're not building a house on solid foundations. You literally skimming the market. It would be like a farmer wanting to harvest every month of the year. You just can't do it.

Yeah.

It even goes deeper than that. I saw in one of the B2B marketing, one of the metrics that they measure is what percentage of revenue is marketing responsible for?

Oh, I hate that. Like, I hate last touch attribution. I just can't stand either.

That's called sales, right? That is called sales. Like, I'm not, I'm not denying, of course, that marketing plays a really big part in helping sales cross the line.

Marketing is a multiplier. We know that. We've. That's one of the other learnings that's come out of the podcast. It makes it easier for sales to do their rock, to do their job.

But to try and, as you say, do that kind of last click or last mile attribution to justify the existence of marketing, that's like, like trying to justify oxygen exists. Like a company does not exist without marketing. They might not call their people marketing people and therefore think, we don't need marketing.

Our product sells itself. But you've got a product, you've priced it, you've worked out how you're going to get it to market, and someone does that, Ergo, you are marketing.

You're just not calling them marketers.

Yeah. The other dynamic, of course, is that marketing brings in people to work for the business.

Because you don't join companies where you don't like how they come across. And that is marketing. It doesn't matter what recruitment actually run. Like, that's not what most people see. They see the brand, right?

Absolutely. Because, you know, if they're smart, they're thinking, well, they're making a decision.

And there's lots of many decisions, but one of them is who do I want on my cv? Because other people will rate it.

Well, exactly. I know. Talk to me about the roi.

So ROI is an arbitrary financial metric that we've borrowed to try and make sense of what we do. ROI is a measurement of efficiency, not effectiveness.

Yeah.

And ROI is generally used for tangible assets. I buy a building, I know what the cost of that building is. It has a tangible worth. And I will let that building out.

And my ROI is all of my what I spend on it minus all and what's left at the end. And I get that. And then I can, I can measure my ROI as a percentage of my total expenditure.

But it's very easy to do that with something like a fixed asset because your timelines are defined. Your rent is for a period of one month. A lease on a car is for a period of a number of days or a number of weeks.

You know what your return on that asset is.

And equally, if you're a private equity company and you're investing over a five year cycle, you measure your, you're measuring your ROI over a defined cycle. How do you define that cycle for marketing? How do you know when the, when the impact from the work you're doing starts and stops?

The only way to do it, I can imagine is that you do it based on the sales cycle, which as people like Duncan Danes explain to us, can be 10 years and you.

Exactly. Or you can use like really sophisticated econometric modeling, but no one's got A, the budget for it and B, that's an imperfect science too.

So the problem I have with return on investment is it's bogus. It's completely bogus. And also, you know, marketing is an investment in one's future. There's no doubt about it.

But just because we've used the I word doesn't mean that the right KPI to measure it is return on that specific investment.

A better way in my book is to look at the performance of the whole company and say, is the company is achieving its strategic objectives, its revenue objectives, its profit objectives. If it is, then what we're doing, don't change it.

If it's not, then let's start exploring how we can change the things we need to change in order to hit the right metrics. Marketing is part of that success. You may never be able to measure, but you just got to be okay with that.

I love that. I love that those are the two things that have annoyed you.

I get really bent out of shape. I don't know quite why, because it's quite a nerdy thing to get bent out of shape over.

I generally have a problem with if you take like any misapplied statistics or bogus measurements and they're everywhere, they are, they're endemic. Wherever we look at the moment, in the news and the media, on social media, people are quoting bogus statistics and bollocks at us, frankly.

And our job, we're the Marketers, we're supposed to be able to see through that stuff.

Yeah, it's got to be true.

Back in the day when you went on the tube in London, that when they were doing their sort of prompted and unprompted recall tests for brands, the first question they'd say is, are you in marketing?

Yes.

And if you go, yes, I can't talk to you, off you go, yes.

I couldn't get onto any panels, so.

Because we're supposed to be able to see through that shit. But I'm worried that a lot of people these days don't.

So what's the best advice you've heard?

Best advice? Blimey. Well, there's been loads. I mean really loads. In fact, I generally learn at least one thing from every episode.

But some of the stuff that's maybe had the most immediate impact on me have been those things that helped me change either how I lead or how I manage from day to day. Because as well as hosting, I've also got, you know, the day job.

You've got your day job?

Yeah, you've got to go run it. And by the way, we also need to market.

So, you know, I wouldn't go as far as to say we are in B2B marketing just because we sell to other businesses, because it's a different thing. But. So Georgie Gilmore had this thing about must win battles. And I love the concept of a must win battle.

It sort of plays the Sun Tzu in me, you know, and all that military training I had, don't try and focus on winning the war, focus on winning the battle and identify which ones you absolutely must win. So after that episode I went with a blank piece of paper and I looked at all of the things that were on my kind of agenda and in my to do list.

And we run little Kanban boards and it's just always full of stuff and it's like, just started deleting the ones that didn't really matter and it's like, right, those are my must wins. And then we went out to the agencies and we started talking about must wins.

And I think, I think that was really impactful because it was something that you could take away and do immediately.

Other episodes have sort of helped change the way that I think about either how I see the market or how we interact with it, or how I want our, my day job, how I want our group to develop. And I mentioned a couple of them already. That whole brand thing I think was really important.

And understanding that brand strategy sits outside of outside of marketing and the marketing department as it's perceived today. One of the interesting things, as an aside, because we're like a bit of a rabbit hole. One of the.

I was, somebody asked me, it was off air why I thought that marketing had sort of changed. Because in the early days I always say, oh, how do you think marketing changed over the last 10 years? And it has, obviously.

The difference between then and now is then we couldn't do stuff ourselves.

So, you know, if you think I wrote 87 letters, interestingly after the military to try and get onto a brand program with, you know, as a junior brand manager manager or trainee brand manager, ended up joining agency because I couldn't get a job in them. But you joined as a trainee or an assistant brand manager and you were steeped in strategy from day one.

And when you wanted to get the stuff implemented, you typically went to an agency to get that done.

We can self publish, build our own websites, make our own videos, make our own podcasts, we can do all this stuff. And so the economics then change. You can't have an agency doing all of that stuff. You'd very quickly bust your budget and everyone else's too.

So you start building an in house department to do the stuff and then you're still doing all the other stuff, by the way, all the strategic stuff, the CMOs doing all of that. But what the rest of the business see is there's a headcount and their output is comms. That's what they see.

Get a different answer.

Very different answer. Yeah, so that I can't even remember what the original question was. But I think that that change in marketing informs how we think.

So now I look across our agencies and I see in some of them we're still doing production stuff. This is about learning, about taking about.

What impressed you, but also what you've actioned well.

So I'm now I am, I'm actively in conversation with a few clients to say, how do we not do this kind of work for you?

Like how do we help you set up a either joint venture where we'll help you do it or an in house department where you can get better value from that piece of work. Because actually we'd rather be working on other stuff more creative or more strategic or more impactful or help us fill the gaps.

Because that kind of high, high volume, low value stuff is really hard. You can't deliver value from it in an agency unless you're offshore.

It's so true. I mean, I've brought in marketers into like in house roles where they can see that their work in agency is drying up because the tech is taking over.

Yeah.

The thing you really want from an agency is kind of clear thinking because when you work across such a variety of accounts and a variety of businesses and you see all sorts of different problems and how they can be solved, you can come with such fresh eyes to a problem and offer completely different. And I think that's very stimulating if you're in house.

And the other thing is creativity I've never seen, and I know I'll get lambasted for this, but I've never seen really amazing creative come from in house.

Because being part of a business means that you're almost constantly self censoring yourself in order to make sure that you keep your job and you stay.

And so coming up with something really, truly cut through in this incredibly noisy world, because that's what all this tech has done has made it possible to put out lots of plastic into the air. Right.

I think it's really hard not to self censor and to produce something that you know your boss will like rather than something you think the brand actually needs. And so I've seen amazing creative work come up internally and had it smashed down by committee to the point where it's just vanilla, it's gone beige.

And so I think when somebody else walks through the door and goes, this is what you need to do and this is why people actually listen.

Those systems are self regulating as well though, because you're not going to keep that creative for long if the work they're doing is being bashed down and never gets to see the light of day. So I think these things are Cyclical. So they go in house, they go out to agency.

I think the challenge with the kind of high volume, low value stuff now is that. And I think Covid changed this.

It changed the mindset of many people that if I'm outsourcing it, I may as well outsource it to India or, you know, the Philippines. Some tech, also some tech, you know, AI. It's not good enough yet, but it's getting there.

But you still need that brilliant, brilliant on brand idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what you need.

You need that creative or to how to take an idea and translate it into lots of different channels so it works in that channel in a way. That's right, yes. You know, but not into resizing ads and making 4.9 million of them and 16 languages and blah, blah, blah.

I know, it's, it's, it's interesting. Okay, so I mean, I'm loving the fact that you actually walk out of these podcasts and then adjust your day, your day job.

Do people in your company worry about who you're going to interview next?

Yes, they do. Well, look, the other thing is I'm a prolific read and so. And then I think they worry that I've read a.

You know, every time I read a book I come back with a different idea a little bit. But, but that's my job. Yes, that's your job as an entrepreneur. My job is to constantly question things. There was one thing actually came out again.

It came out in your interview with Sarah Robb and when I heard it, it was like, shit, do we edit that out? And it's like, go on. No, because actually this is profound. So I had to go away and research it.

But at the first time I heard it was in your interview. So the nature of. So I've always believed in agencies being specialist.

The nature or how people regard specialism has changed and I hadn't noticed it. I think it may be a Covid thing. It may be Covid plus technology plus everything out by Zoo and all those other things that are going on.

But so back in the day, specialist de facto almost meant vertical market. Yeah, almost de facto. Yeah, there are kind of production specialists and this kind of stuff, but you can sort of do a bit of it.

You could do a bit of everything. And some people would say, oh, specialism is we're full service, which, you know, okay, fine, whatever.

You said that one of the biggest things you rated from agency people people was they could bring expertise from outsider sector to help you understand what other people are doing. And I heard that and thought, shit, well, how are you going to do that if you've got a whole business based on vertical market specialization?

Which is why I went away and researched it and I took that straight to our board and said, look, I heard this thing and I've been researching it. I think the nature of specialism in the minds of our market is changing. Changing.

And there are a few other things that have been going on at the same time. So it would then be easy to think, well, what people want is they want specialists in social media or advertising or this or that. So I think I.

Where I got to in this research, and this is where we're implementing this right now, not trade secret, is people want specialists in outcomes. I need to do the following thing. How have other people done that? It could be enter a new market.

It could be grow market share, it could be divest a product, it could be. There are a number of outcomes. And so. So what we're talking about is productization.

And loads of agencies are looking at, how do I take that process, that bunch of assets, that bunch of things that we know how to do really well and productize it so that we can a scale better, but also demonstrate extreme specialism to our clients.

I see. I think that's beautiful.

Started there, though. Started.

Sorry for being so provocative, but that is the nature of the podcast, isn't it? It's the power of the podcast.

Yeah. And you've got a question, so. And you have to question all the time.

And I do get lovely emails from people about the podcast saying, look, you made me really question what I'm doing. And that's why I think we should never be worried about being really challenging about some fairly fundamental beliefs people.

Have we talked earlier about ROI or profit centers. There will be people who go, who thought, God, you're a dick. You don't understand my environment. But question it. Find an alternative.

That's what we're supposed to be for.

I think you can go away and have just as provocative a conversation with the people in your business.

So, for example, if HR won't let you get access to the employee base to find out what it is that the employees think makes the business tick and makes it special, then go and have that discussion. Like, don't walk away from it.

If the finance Leader wants to do ROI and you don't want to do it, go and have a conversation about what other metrics would be meaningful to the business. There's this also this sort of false, like, marketing's got to fix the way it speaks so that it speaks in the right way. Do you know what?

It sounds like the kind of advice that women get all the time. Like, you need to adapt because this is the situation. You're like, well, hang on a minute.

If they bring their brain to the table and I bring mine, surely between us we'll come up with something that's brilliant.

But no, it's all about marketing's got to adapt because it doesn't understand how to speak to finance or to the boardroom, which I just think is nonsense. And then the same nonsense is that finance doesn't know how to speak to marketing.

That reared its head in a few podcasts about how marketing, like, don't say brand in the board because if you say brand, they'll think you're mad. No, they won't.

No, they won't.

So you've got to say reputation instead. It's like, hang on a second, that's a totally different thing. Totally different reputation and brand. Totally different things. So.

But I think this is one of the problems that we have with platforms like LinkedIn, like any. Everyone and anyone's got a voice doesn't mean it's the right voice. And people have to be very careful what they listen to.

So one of the reasons also why we try to present on the show so opposing views. So we had Dale Harrison who said, demand generation is a myth, doesn't exist. You can't create demand, it's physically impossible.

So then we have to bring in a counterargument. A full time demand generation person say, actually you can. This is how you do it.

And then we allow people to make their own choice of whether they believe or not.

And actually it's never one or the other.

No, this is, that's what I love. The other thing about marketing, this is the marketing break. The marketing braves like to think that there are two poles.

One of them's right or the other one's right. And they argue like, the truth is always in the middle. If I've learned anything throughout life, the answer is always in the gray.

It's never at one of the polls. Never.

Yeah. And it's all about what aspect of that is going to work for you.

Yeah, I mean, I love the fact that you're thinking more about the outcomes because I in terms of what you offer. Because the business problems are never about the tactics. They're always about how to solve essentially a market impact problem, right?

Yes, you want to have more impact, you want to have more customers, happier customers, buying more, you know, better margins, etc. So the answer to the exam question is always like, how do you increase your market share?

Break new markets, get a new new product to market in a way that's going to, you know, thrive, et cetera. And so working out what combination is going to be required for that business. There's so little of that. That's a cookie cutter from.

You've done this for my four competitors. Can you come and do that for me now? I don't want to be like them. I want to be different and better than them.

I actually, you know, being a magpie and stealing from other industries, it's so amazing when you work with agencies that can offer you that, that can say, okay, well you could do it like this, you could try it like this, or this has worked and I think that's really exciting. But also if you're the employee, it's really dissatisfying outsourcing or getting tech to do all your job for you.

I mean, what are you, a glorified project manager? You can do 10, 20 years of marketing and feel like you started learning strategy.

You've basically managed meetings and pressing buttons, you know what I mean? And then now suddenly you realize you've dedicated all this time and you're not really sure what it is that you do.

I think that's another aspect of it is that the more that you work with agencies can explain to you what is going on in different industries and how different people have challenged and worked on that. Actually, that is making you strategic in a world even where you may still be executing all the tactics.

Yes.

You have to figure out what's worth doing in what combination and why.

There's a theme for next year.

Oh God.

I think we're going to work on 27 states. Have I talked to you about 27 states? Okay, right. So writing that down, you heard it here first. Unicorners. So the tech Bros.

We have, we have polls, we've got stp, segmentation, targeting, positioning at one end. I touched on this a little bit in episode 80 and 81. You've got STP at one end and you've got MBA market based asset theory at the other end.

So basically you've got the traditional approach versus a new approach that says that all the old stuff is bunk and there's no gray area in between.

So I think back across all the people that I've spoken to and we're missing three vital components and you just mentioned one of them, then obliquely maturity of the product, size slash, market share slash maturity of the company. That's an imperfect one. And then the market, how developed is the market or how mature is the market?

And if you then ascribe three variables to each of those three, you get 27 different states and then you start thinking, okay, if my state is I've got a niche product in a startup in a early market, what marketing theory should I be applying and what why? Now the obvious one there is stp because you are startup, niche, early market, you have to segment, you have to target.

There isn't a market to market like whole market at. So MBA then becomes irrelevant.

If you then map out all of those 27 different states and you look at why a company might adopt a particular marketing theory or a blend between them and then you start looking at what strategy they might then seek to implement or achieve objectives. I should say achieve objectives in order to fulfill a strategy. Then you start to get, if you like, a bit of a playbook.

So I was talking about this to Graham Wiley who was on a few episodes ago, and I said, and what I've done is I've gone out And I found 27 companies, business marketing companies, UK based, who fit every single state.

And I'm going to go and try and interview the people that did the marketing to talk to them about their experience to validate is this theory that we've developed right or wrong. And he went, you've built bias into your model before you've even started. And I said, well, how do you know?

He said, well, it's a bit like, you know, the data science guys, they said, here's a picture of a Spitfire and with all the holes in it. And they were looking at how to bolster. Have you seen this thing?

No.

Right, okay, so imagine an airplane, World War II airplane comes back, it's riddled with bullet holes. And the engineers when it got to ground, looked at all the bullet holes and went, oh, it's gone all the way through.

How are we going to reinforce that so that the bullets don't go through? Someone says, you're reinforcing the wrong bits. This is the plane that made it back.

Yeah, that is so true.

They made it back. You can shoot a hole through that wing any day of the week and the plane's still going to get back. So I've done the same thing.

I was only looking at successful companies. So I've gone out and I've sourced 27 companies who applied as far as I can see.

And I'm validating at the moment exactly the right theory in the right way, doing the right thing, but the company still failed. And next year, Rachel, I want us to dig into 27 states and interview the people that were involved in the actual implementation of it.

I think it'd be really cool.

Oh, I'd love that. Oh, that's brilliant.

So that then gives effectively a playbook of 27 different circumstances and what you might want to think about. And there's another layer that one can overlay over that. But I'm not going to talk about it yet because.

Because I only just met the person who said Eureka. And I think there's two models we can mix here.

So in 25, we're going to come out with some, I think some significant work that will be really helpful to people in their.

Oh, that's brilliant. Because it's all about what strategy you need for the situation.

You were talking about it earlier. You said, I want to know what people are doing in other markets in that situation.

Right?

Yeah, yeah. But in that. So if you are in. If you're in high technology when you were hpe, Right, Yeah.

You're not going to look at what's happening necessarily in financial services or pharmaceutical. They're slower moving, the regulations different, the environment is very, very different.

You're going to want to look at other markets that are probably like more similar. Like pharmaceutical is just completely different. I may be wrong.

No, it's true. What I craved, what I thought was I wanted to.

And I mean, it's been like this for the last five years, 10 years, is I crave talking to companies where a new market has emerged that's parallel to theirs and they're just not considered to be a player in it at all. And they have to shift their brand. The thing is, people will know the name of your company, so you have brand awareness. Right.

But they're not familiar with what you do or necessarily favorable for that market. They basically don't think you're an option to buy. So I'm always fascinated by companies that have had to break new markets.

How do you basically get people to reconsider you because they pigeonholed your brand, they pigeonholed your company and said, that's what you do. And you're like, yeah, but we also do this. How do you get them to believe you?

There's a whole show there.

There is a whole show there.

So that's like. If you're, if you're a large incumbent and the blue ocean appears, how do.

You move into it?

How do you.

Yeah, because most companies, I've had experienced that over the last 10 years with all the tech shifts that have been happening, there've been things that have, that are existential to them which have changed the nature of their business.

And it's not a complete pivot. It's not a complete pivot.

It's not, it's a, it's almost like a lift and shift. Right. But you know that I don't want to learn that from other companies that are like mine.

No, no, I get that because.

Because that's mimicking. I'm not going to get the cut through.

I want to learn that from people where they've done it in completely different situations where everyone's going, there's no parallels there. And you're like, there is. There was a new market they wanted to step into. Like, what do you do? That's why the 27 will be really interesting.

So. Yes, so 27 states would help inform.

Some of them because one of them will be that, but another one will be trying to persuade existing customers to shift to the new world era. Right.

When actually what you realize is it's not up to you whether you produce the right products and services is whether or not you can persuade customers that they should make this change. That's another completely different dynamic. Right.

Because you see businesses that do all the R and D and they get it to market and almost nobody, nobody wants it. You're like, well, you haven't actually warmed up the customer base to do it.

And you've done it inside out. You haven't started with the customer and then work backwards.

Well, exactly right.

Because for example, if you did that with electric cars, you'd have done all the lampposts, turning them into electric charging points before you release the car. So that, that was already there rather than doing it the other way around.

So that's the nature of disruptive markets. Which, by the way, 27 states.

27 states takes market based asset theory, segmentation, targeting position, and then overlays the work of people like Jeffrey Moore and Chan Kim, Rene Mauborn out of Insead. It overlays those other models because it allows you to take them into consideration. It's kind of cool.

Oh, I love that.

I know it's going to be cool.

No, that's pretty.

That's one other thing Actually, sorry. Which this gave rise to and came out of the last few episodes.

I think we need to knock the phrase B2B marketing on the head and that's going to upset a lot of people, particularly those they have in their brand. But there's no such thing as business to business as a category. In my world.

Where I come From, I perceive B2B to be a phrase that brand marketers used to use to belittle cousins that didn't do advertising.

And we touched on it just now and I'm seeing, I'm starting to think it, I should say more and more that the discipline of business marketing in pharmaceutical is very different than business marketing in finance, which is very different than business marketing in tech. And there are industries that probably run in parallel or you know, that if you think about a classic bowling alley, you know, that are one pin away.

There are those, and those are. It's those one or two pins away that you'd be looking at for lessons where people have found markets like those.

But if something's five or six or seven pins away, you. You've got as much in common with them as a business as you do with Persal. And so to lump them all together is really unhelpful.

And I think that's why at the moment, the marketing bros are slagging off B2B marketing in inverted commerce, because they don't like their advertising. But advertising is not an appropriate communication method for many companies in business marketing.

Well, no, I mean, we've heard that from so many people, haven't we? So the other thing I've noticed is all those big. There's been a few people who have taken on B2B roles this year, like leadership.

B2B roles who are B2C consumers. Loads. Loads.

Right. Some quite big roles.

B2B marketers. Sorry. And so it's been all about how the B2Cs are going into B2B and they've realized it's really complicated.

And I tear my hair out because most businesses, Even if you're B2C, are you direct? Are you through Resellers, are you through. I mean, honestly, like, there's no such thing as B2C.

It doesn't exist.

None of this exists. It's just marketing.

Totally.

And your whole sticky toffee pudding, as it occurs in my head, STP on my house, STP is sticky toffee pudding.

But segmentation, targeting, positioning is just about understand your market, understand how your buyers are actually wanting to go to market and shop what the category entry Points are what they're looking for. I all makes them feel like they made a good choice.

And then how you allocate your resources, of course.

How do you actually help them know about you and get to a decision where they bought and they feel satisfied with their purchase however they buy. Is that an alleyway that's happened?

Because if you go all the way to being a sort of coloring in tactics department, then you start to evaluate yourself by whether you're in one camp or another, that actually if you reverse up and you go back to just being a really brilliant strategist who knows how to execute through different combinations of tactics, then it doesn't actually matter to you. It's not threatening to be in a world that is not like the one that you last worked in.

Oh, totally.

Because you're going, right, okay, I'm going to come neutral to this. How does the market work?

That's a really good question or question statement. Whatever you just said was really is bang on. I tell you why. If you don't have have.

In my opinion, if you don't have the grounding of the strategy and strategy models that you. That will allow you to hop between different environments and they can be fairly fundamental ones.

Value chain analysis, five forces, your Boston Matrices. I'm talking about those.

There's no SWOT analysis.

I'm sorry, there's no SWOT analysis. No, no, that doesn't exist. But no, I mean, you know the bigger models that allow you to look at a market and analyze them properly.

If you don't have a background or a foundation in that and you have just a playbook that you can implement and you know how to follow, then you might find it harder swapping into different lanes. But if you have got that stuff behind you, then a different lane is just a different challenge. Same thing, different challenge. Yeah.

That's why I still wish there was a proper qualification and you could be, you know that everyone had to be a chartered marketer.

Totally. Well, you know, actually I've given the chartered industry marketing quite a lot of crap on the podcast. Cost, maybe unfairly.

In my this month when I paid my membership, they gave me an opportunity to have a discounted course and I'm going to take it because I've had a look at the syllabus. It looks pretty good actually and it's like £300 to be fair to them. I think a lot of what I've been asking for exists. I just don't know about it.

Yeah. So I left last year.

Did you?

Yeah. I felt.

It felt a bit brave leaving, but I was in a kind of mood of, if I don't feel the benefit, I'm not paying for it, and I'm waiting to feel the need to go back.

But I couldn't work out what the point was, because what I really wanted to do is to create marketers who have such a good understanding of the theory and the strategy that you can. You can go off and you can do courses on how to build a website or how to write great content or whatever floats your boat.

But I don't want to go there to learn how to do digital marketing. I want to.

Yeah.

So see what I mean? And I think that was my frustration.

So this is the thing. The course I've seen is more foundational than that.

I was even thinking maybe we should start the Unicorny Marketing Academy and teach some foundations. But I think the courses look like they're already there.

Is there anything where it's still going around in your brain? Like you're not sure if you agree with it, you're not sure if you disagree with it? It's just sort of.

There are a few things. I mean, you know, the. The whole concept of double jeopardy, and I know it's, you know, we're quite technical.

You taking on Mr. Sharp. Professor.

Professor Sharp. I'm definitely not taking on Professor Sharp.

Don't do that.

But I get Double Jeopardy. I understand why Brands grow. It's probably one of the best marketing books that's been written. It's really, really good.

Yeah.

But Double Jeopardy, I think it's. It comes back to the STP versus versus NBA argument, actually.

And I think particularly which I ranted about in episode 81, you know, he published the aggressive paper in January slamming Kotler's work. And it's not one thing or the other, but double jeopardy only works and is only important if you are a market leader.

And there are very few leaders in any market market. So it's not relevant to many people.

But I want to be able to include these sorts of thoughts in the podcast, but I'm not sure how relevant they are, which is why it's floating around in my mind.

The other thing that I think about a lot and I don't have an answer to is measurements, because, you know, it's okay to poo poo roi or poo poo marketing as a profit center, but, you know, in a world where everything has to be measured and we're taught it doesn't matter if you can't measure it. And all that kind of stuff. It would be good to find a way of getting a better understanding of how we communicate the value of marketing.

Whether that's. Whether that's measurement or not, I don't know. And that's never more appropriate than if you're an agency.

You know, a certain amount of money is changing hands every month and the CFO is going to be looking at the agency numbers going, what are they doing here? I'm trying to change that by. I am trying to get a change the way that we report away from standard KPIs towards what?

How are we helping our clients win and how measurable is the work that we do against them achieving their objectives, I. E. Winning? Like, can we put a direct line between our work and their win? And if we can, then we're happy.

But if you get three or four months where there's no direct line, then you know you've got a problem.

We just finished writing the book and I had to do the chapter on measurements, which then I had to give to Sarah and I doing it together. So I had to give her my chapter and then she had to work on it and add all of hers.

And then it came back and it went back and forth quite a few times. But the. Until final, it's hours.

Now, my sense of it is, of course you can measure whatever you like, but if you don't really understand the problem that you're trying to solve, then you don't actually know what to measure. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is you have to understand what it is that the business strategy is trying to achieve.

And then you need to understand how well it's doing on that at the moment because you're deciding what strategy you're going to take in marketing to actually make that happen, to make the business strategy reality.

Right? Yeah. Yeah.

So you, you basically work out where you've got the gaps and where you're doing really well and what you need to kind of. It's like plugging holes in a pipe of water. Like you're just trying to. You're trying to figure out, like, how do you make this actually work?

Those are the things you're measuring because that's where you want to make the improvements. But then ultimately you should just be measuring revenue and margin. At the end.

It's about, you know, it's about whether or not you are seeing the sales go up, whether you're making the money that you want to make.

But I think these are, these are like, I've always thought of them as sort of indicators that the work you're doing is working or not working so you can adjust your plans to get there.

So you're seeking short and medium term correlations.

Yeah.

So that you can get a long term result. And we should always measure things on the long term. This podcast for example, I don't even look at the weekly numbers.

Yeah.

I look at my 28 day numbers. That's the shortest term I look at. Are we trending up?

Are we trending down and then over and then over that Actually I just look at the position over the last six months. There's nothing I can do to an individual episode that is going to change the fortune of this podcast.

No, but like everything that I've ever measured I don't have. Never cared about the individual. Like if I run, if I run brand health or whatever it is, I don't care about the individual results.

I just care about whether the graph.

Yeah.

Ever so slowly instead. And maintaining. Yeah, right. Because often people invest money, time and energy in getting a spike and then they just drop straight back.

It's like a sugar crash. Do you know what I mean?

It's like answering this. Emails from those people who can tell you they can get you on the front page of Google or the top charts of Apple, you get a spike straight down.

Again, because particularly especially businesses that are word of mouth or grow by a recommendation because they always compound. SaaS business is classic for that.

Of course, because as long as you close the back door properly, you're not losing too many people, then you're looking at compounding over time.

But if that was your problem, that you thought you had grown and you were losing customers, then all of your strategy would be about how to process, sell, upsell, retention. Right. In which case those would be the metrics, but you're still looking for the revenue out the other end.

We come across this on the. You measure the success of the marketing by the health of the business.

Yes.

Not the other way around.

Yeah, exactly. My last question is, having heard everything, who is the one person that you would love to interview again?

Oh my God.

Because you've met a lot of pretty amazing people. Where did you. Where do you feel like you're not done with the conversation? And no, you're not allowed to say me, even though obviously.

Well, modesty would prevent me from saying that. Anyway. There are a few actually. I mean, quite often we have discussions with people about whether they would come back at some stage in the future.

And I have some who are intending to come back. If I could do it face to face, yes, I would go and interview Geoffrey Morris again. But while I'm there, I'd also be able to see Carmen Simon.

I'm all for ethnographical studies and, you know, empirical science through data, but taking a neurological approach to, taking like a neuroscience approach to why things work for me is a really fascinating way of understanding, certainly the communication side of what we do. And Karma is really good at explaining all of that. And I only had 40, 45 minutes with her.

So if I said it's not answering your question because that's fine, you're allowed. I would fly to LA and I would interview or San Francisco.

I should say I'd interview Jeffrey Moore because I only touched on two books with him, Crossing the Chasm and Zone to Win. He's written eight or nine. I'd like to look at some of his other materials. Material. And I want to go.

I'd like to go into Carmen's labs and actually see stuff happening. It'd be really cool.

I wish I had a magic wand. Do you think I totally wave that now? Yeah, I think, yeah.

Really cool.

I think that's amazing.

Especially now we're on vid because I'm assuming there's nothing secret in the lab. We could then video all these machines working and we could. Yeah, that'd be really cool.

See how people really think and how you can.

Both of those are authors slash academics. I also really love, obviously, really love meeting people at the sharp end who are making things happen.

It's almost impossible to distinguish between them because they're also different in different stages of career, different sectors, different jobs. I mean, there are those who are more polished because they've done a lot more of this kind of thing and they're easier for me to interview.

And therefore sometimes we can go do deeper, deeper into a subject. But anyone who is challenging the status quo or pushing the definition of marketing is always going to get a seat in the studio.

Rodigo, that was show 100. Thank you very much indeed to Rachel for tolerating me, but also for joining the Unicorn project.

And thank you to you for coming and watching or listening to this episode. If you have anything, by the way, you'd like us to tackle any topics, any issues, any challenges, please do write to me.

You can find my contact details on the show notes on unicorny.co.uk as always, we'd really appreciate you giving us a thumbs up or reviewing or rating or recommending this podcast to friends of yours. We are growing. I'm delighted to tell you we're growing quite quickly. But we could always do with new blood.

So thank you very much indeed for your attention, and I will see you next week.