<p>EP 428 — Simon Leadbetter argues that most UK businesses are running on guesswork instead of evidence.</p>

<p>Marketing, he says, only works when you start by admitting the customer doesn’t care about you. In this fast, sharp conversation, Simon breaks down why instinct-led decisions misfire and why most firms operate without even basic knowledge of their audience.</p>

<p>Andy and Simon cover data, attribution, surveys, brand dilution, influencers, and why most online stats are bots talking to bots. It’s a full tour of how to actually understand a market before spending money on it.</p>

<p>What You'll Learn in This Episode:</p>

<p>• Use research instead of hunches to choose channels</p>

<p>• Avoid cognitive bias when deciding who your customer is</p>

<p>• Apply the five‑stage ISTAR marketing process</p>

<p>• Test ideas cheaply with real UK sampling</p>

<p>• Improve your Net Promoter Score and act on detractors</p>

<p>Perfect for UK business owners who want marketing that works because it’s grounded in evidence, not noise.</p>

<p>*For Apple Podcast chapters, access them from the menu in the bottom right corner of your player*</p>

<p>Spotify Video Chapters:</p>

<p>0:00 Customers don’t care about you</p>

<p>02:00 Data vs instinct</p>

<p>05:00 What marketing actually is</p>

<p>09:00 Surveys, sampling and bias</p>

<p>13:00 Property, portals and real behaviour</p>

<p>17:00 The five‑stage ISTAR model</p>

<p>22:00 Channels, talent and capability</p>

<p>27:00 Bots, ad fraud and bad data</p>

<p>32:00 PR, email, social and direct mail</p>

<p>37:00 Brand complexity and consolidation</p>

<p>43:00 Mental availability and sales activation</p>

<p>49:00 Creativity, crazies and guerrilla ideas</p>

<p>55:00 Influencers, niches and trust</p>

<p>1:02:00 The one thing to do this week</p>

<p>Watch and subscribe to us on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@bwblondon" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">YouTube</a></p>

<p>Follow us:</p>

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<p>If you'd like to be on the show, get in contact - <a href="mailto:[email protected]" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">[email protected]</a></p>

Every market should have a post it note on their screen that simply says the customer doesn't give a about you.

That's the first lesson of marketing.

Steve Jobs has said something similar.

Nobody cares.

Nobody cares.

They've got lives.

The baby may be crying.

They've got to go to work.

They're having a divorce.

Life's happening in the way.

And you're the noise.

We're saying all the time in marketing, you've got to cut through the noise.

No, no, you are the noise if you're the marketer.

So welcome to business without bs.

The this week we're cutting through the noise on marketing.

What it actually is, what it isn't, and why so many businesses are still running on gut feeling instead of real evidence.

Simon.

And to do that, we've got someone who spent the last 30 years proving that data beats opinion every time.

Or maybe the opposite.

I could have almost written this for you.

Yeah, well, maybe you did.

Simon Ledbetter has worked across just about every corner of marketing that actually matters.

Newspapers, big banks, clean tech startups, major estate agencies.

And now he runs his own consultancy alongside a national research project, minus the fluff and ego.

Simon, welcome to the podcast.

I'm loving this process so far.

I mean, just keep.

Just keep talking.

I mean, this is good.

So, Simon, you're here as our, I guess our professor of marketing, just, just to help everybody understand this enormous subject a little bit better.

But when did you.

When did you.

I guess let's start there.

When did you first realize marketing works better?

When?

Stop guessing.

Very early on.

Because actually my journey with marketing in marketing started literally across the road from where we're sitting.

Oh, really?

So I graduated from my business school.

At my business school, I've been really impressed by this amazing marketing professor called Debbie Clues.

I thought we go to hr, but she sold me the vision of what marketing was.

I did that and I ended up working for a local newspaper group called Northcliffe Newspapers.

But I started in the research department.

Okay.

And it just blew my mind what you could actually find out about customers and what data was available.

So before I did any marketing, I could do genuine damage to the market or my business.

I really understood how you can understand customers through research and data.

And then from that, as I moved from media to financial services and I got my hands on juicy big data, I suddenly realized I don't have any guesses here.

I can literally understand my customers and do exactly what they need.

So what this is.

Is it always important to use data?

I mean, so there's somebody to say that gut instinct.

Gut stands for giving up thinking.

All right, yeah, I sort of disagree because there is something about your instinct will tell you if something's right with experience.

But the best blend is good experience with lots of data, because it's about judgment.

You know, data can tell you what it is.

It doesn't necessarily tell you what to do.

So once you've seen the data, you've still got to decide, well, what do I do with that data?

So I think you need both.

The worst thing you can do, though, is rely on your own prejudices.

In my.

The course that you attended that I run, one of the lines I use is everything you know is wrong.

Now we are.

We've got 187 cognitive biases.

So even the color of this room we'd see differently.

We all think we know our customers and it's all a sample size of me.

It's like, well, my customers are like me, aren't they?

Or you'll see a tiny sector of a market and think that represents the whole.

There's all sorts of heuristic analysis and cognitive biases going on here.

But the best thing you can do is empty your mind, open it and look at the data, because the data are there and they're actually freely available, but people just don't use them.

If we just do a basic step back, I mean, do you.

Is there a way you can define marketing?

What are we talking about here?

Let's just do that, that basic question as well.

So we're using data to do what?

So the first thing to understand about marketing is not what most people think it is.

They think it's what we call promotions.

It's all the advertising, the pr, the social media, the email, the doing stuff.

But marketing is actually a science and an art.

Philip Kotler, who's like the emeritus presser and we've all studied his Principles of marketing book at university, which is the science and arts of identifying the target market and their needs and meeting them profitably.

Okay, so it's got nothing to do with promotions, got nothing to do with social media.

They form part of something called the four Ps, the four Ps of marketing.

And this won't be a marketing lecture for much longer, is this product.

What is your product?

What is your place, where you distribute it?

What is the price of that product and how do you promote it?

That's marketing.

People are obsessed with promotions.

They're obsessed with the advertising, the social media, all the tricks.

But that's probably 8% of what marketing is.

I guess people just jump there, don't they, because they want sales.

So they're like, tell people about it.

People like to be busy.

Yeah.

And people like to tell their boss they're busy.

And when I've ever had employees, they always tell me how busy they are.

But are they being effective?

Yeah.

Because that final word of Kotler's definition is profit.

So marketing should sit very much in the investment column as a business, not a cost, because you should be able to demonstrate what its return on investment is.

Yeah.

I asked most marketers what their return on investment is, and they wouldn't know.

Quite hard to work out.

Again, though, it's been kind of easy for about 50 years.

Why?

Because attribution science, so the ability to attribute things, one activity to another, has been available for a very long time.

The reality is, though, it's historically been quite expensive, but with the rise of large language models, AI and stuff, there's media mix modeling that allows you.

Or marketing mix modeling that allows you to work it out.

It's a bit of science.

You can hire someone to do it, but you can work.

Work it out.

I thought it was always you.

You never know which bit of the budget you're wasting.

And then the Internet's come along and we've got lots of data, but I'm not sure what that means.

But if ever I hear the quote from John Wanamaker, 50 of the money I spend on advertising is waste.

I just don't know which half.

Yeah.

1890S.

Yeah.

And there is some very clever ways to attribute data.

You just need to speak to someone who understands how you attribute.

Attribute data with results.

Yeah.

And you can model.

Is it 100% accurate?

No.

Is it better than just guess?

Yeah.

About a thousand percent.

Yeah.

And where does insight actually fall apart at some point or.

Yes.

I mean, you know, there's the classic lines, you know, if Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.

The Walkman would never been invented if people.

If the guy who invented the Walkman had actually used the research.

Sometimes you do need those leaps of faith, those kind of like, I just feel this is right.

And it's that kind of.

That's the entrepreneurial spirit and the.

The radical, you know, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

The George Bernard Shaw quote.

But even if you have a good instinct, you can test it.

You can still go back to data.

If you think this is what I want to do.

You can still survey people and find out if it's the right thing to do.

It used to be when I worked across the road from here, if I wanted to conduct a piece of market research, it cost me £10,000.

Take six, seven, eight weeks and it come back in a really big printed tome full of what we call crosstabs.

Lots of little bits of data with sources and margin of errors and probability scores.

Nightmare.

Now you can pay someone like Opinium or YouGov or Ipsos Mori 500 quid.

They'll send it out to their panel and you'll get an answer in three days for 250.

500.

So dubious on surveys though, because who's got time to do surveys?

I mean, we see the government surveys come in and it's a bit like the information always comes from students and grannies.

It doesn't come from busy entrepreneurs.

You want to know what busy entrepreneurs think?

Well, good luck getting the information out of them.

So I interviewed 507, I interviewed, I surveyed 507 SME owners for something I'm working on the moment.

Oh, wow.

You can, through random sampling find them.

And the critical thing is you want to work.

You can't do this yourself.

But why?

They wouldn't have had the time to give up.

I don't know any SME owner who said, oh, I want to survey you.

Be like, well, I'm busy.

You'd be surprised.

People will.

You've got to construct it really carefully.

So this has to be a one hit question which take three seconds to do and it's a tick.

Okay, that's one, just one question, one question.

What do you think of this tick?

They'll do it.

If you want to go longer, you get to a point where you can get like a 10 question survey.

But you've always got to be really controlled that the sample you're getting is representative.

So you mentioned the voice of the agent, which is this four year research program that we've run last three years.

We've had a lot of success.

Great responses, great results.

I was speaking to the CEO of a big tech company, our industry, a lady called Heather Staff, amazing woman.

And we just said these numbers just feel a bit too positive.

So I actually went to a big research house and said, I want to do a genuine random sampling of the entire universe.

We deal with very different results.

So explain that to me a bit more.

What did you surveyed originally?

So we were asking the Data that we had.

Do you use this technology?

Okay.

And we got some really good results and we can report them.

We thought very positive about them.

We knew they were generally the more involved people.

Do you use an iPhone?

More like, do you use this type of property technology?

Prop tech, we call it.

Yeah.

So do you use Spectre CRM, do you use Loop CRM, these kind of technologies?

Yeah, yeah.

And we needed to know that, see what the state of the prop set universe was.

The numbers came in, it gave us the relative position of them all, but the overall numbers just felt high.

And the other one we're asking about was the adoption of AI and so much hype about AI.

So we went and said, okay, we're kind of sampling.

People who are interested in filling to your point want to fill in a survey.

So they're not necessarily representative of the whole.

So we went back to a proper research house, guys called find out now and said, could we do this with random, genuine random sampling where you'll send it out and it'll just be random people.

It's one question.

They'll just tick it.

Yes, that's.

They'll be online.

Will they?

They'll be online.

So I mean different people do it different ways.

So people like opinion.

Ipsos, Mari YouGov, they have a panel of people who've agreed to be part of that survey.

But because it's a huge panel, they're able to make sure it's representative.

So no group, grannies or student is overrepresented.

If they come in more, they will down weight those results.

So the people who have responded who represent the whole are more weighted at more average.

Okay.

We talk about margins of error and confidence, degree confidence levels.

So a typical piece of research, the results will be within 3% of the number with a 95% confidence level.

All that means is there's a 95% chance that the results sit with that number or 3% either way.

So when you see an opinion poll in the elections, what it normally says is plus or minus 3% because you can't get.

It's exactly 42% but it could be 39 to 45% average, typically.

So you would recommend to a business to What?

Go to YouGov?

Go to one of these people who offer this as a service and you can come up with any question you want and they'll push it out there.

And then there's what?

There are loads of people who are members of YouGov who answer questions all the time.

They get paid.

Yes, you get Points for it, which you can use within the YouGov ecosystem.

They've got 356,000 panelists in the UK.

Okay.

So it's pretty representative.

The more niche you go.

So you can go, I'd actually like to target people in these midlands.

I'd like to target business leaders, I'd like to target people in this sector.

I'd like to target the affluent.

And for me, before you do anything for the sake of investing 250, 500 pounds, it's just because if literally everyone goes, we hate it.

Yeah.

You may want to consider not doing it.

Can you ask internationally?

Do you.

Okay.

Panels are all international.

Obviously, the more you grow the sample, the more you cover more countries, the more expensive it comes.

But yeah, YouGov Ipsos Mori opinion, they operate in most OECD countries.

Okay.

And I mean, why.

If.

If.

Is it.

Is it a fact that hunches just keep surviving a long time otherwise?

Or there's so many variables that you're not legislating for if you're.

If you're trusting your gut.

So you may be incredibly successful at business, not because your hunch is right, but you're a great salesperson.

Okay, so you may think I'm doing really well by selling all this stuff, but actually, if you actually more reflected the market, you might do even better.

And you know, Peter Drucker says the art of marketing is to make selling unnecessary.

Because if you're doing really, really good marketing, people should just come to you because they hear about you and go, they're amazing.

I must use them.

If you're having to sell and we all have to sell.

But the reality is, the more you have to sell something, the less effective your marketing has been.

Because what you've not done is you've not got into their life and made them want to use you.

A great example, properties in the last decade of my life.

But I work in different sectors.

I think Rightmove has 97 million visits a month.

Wow.

There's only 48 million.

Sorry, 52 million adults.

So hold on, how does this maths work?

And there's only a hundred thousand housing transactions.

What are we all doing?

We love looking at property.

We love it after the weather is our number two hobby, is it property?

Property, Property, property, property.

Yeah, yeah.

Just imagine.

I just look.

Look what the neighbor's house is worth.

Oh, imagine living in that 15 million pound house.

Or.

Oh, look at that.

We could move to Tuscany, couldn't we?

And it's just.

It's part of our national conversation.

So the kind of the data that you get from that really tells you that people are interested in that thing because rightmove it's their business has identified that's what people are interested in.

People love looking at property.

Yeah.

Even though only a fraction actually going to do something.

And yeah we know that most people There's a.

The LinkedIn B2B Institute did some research a few years ago called the 95.5rule which is at any one point only 5% of people will be in the market.

Your job is to talk to the 95%.

So when they think I need to come and talk to someone about that service, you're in the top three brands they're considering.

Do you think property has been a good experience for you in terms of to be a generalist in marketing or.

It's been an eye opener because it's probably the first time I've actually sold a thing before then everything I sold was services.

Okay.

News, investment, mortgages, credit cards, loans.

I'd never written advertising.

I never sold a thing.

Selling a house is quite a big thing.

Yeah, it's a big thing.

It's a very involved thing.

And they don't buy them every day.

So not newspapers where they're buying them.

What do you buy like three or four in your life maybe.

Yeah.

Average tenure of, of houses that move, we talk about seven to 13 years.

But the average tenure of all Property in the UK is 20 years.

So a house changes every 20 minutes years.

Now there are properties which are kind of like that sweet spot of where people upsize and downsize because they have families and don't have families and they move more frequently.

But all property, including the stuff that never sells, including some stately homes and things like that never sell.

Takes the average to 20 years.

And it makes you realize how in.

In how inactive or how slow moving.

I call them non moving consumer goods.

Yeah.

Because people who sell Mars bars are selling fast moving consumer goods.

Yeah.

We're selling non moving consumers both figuratively and literally.

In fact physically the house doesn't move.

The house remains where it is.

You have to go to it.

But they're very, very slow.

The average completion time in the UK is six months.

I know, it's crazy, isn't it?

It's getting worse.

And is it getting worse?

Yeah.

Oh my God.

We're trying to get it where the industry is trying to make it better but.

So tell me about the five stage model.

Tell me what that is.

So it started when I was teaching marketing what I Realized very early on my career is most people hadn't learned marketing.

So I had done my marketing degree and had a diploma in marketing when I started working because I did it at the same time I did my degree, went into marketing and suddenly that most marketers they may have studied Greek or geography, very useful human geography.

So I started developing a process which originally called, was called knowledge strateg action.

Know what's going on, have some sort of strategy and have that action plans.

Because what I was seeing very early on in my career is what business did is they were doing something post rationalized a strategy and then worked out what data they needed to support it.

Sort of the wrong way round.

You start assuming you don't know anything, get the data and do it.

Over the 30 years it grew from being what was knowledge, strategy, action to being a five stage process.

So start with insight.

What do we know?

Strategy, where are we going?

Talent, who's going to do it?

Action.

What do we do?

And results, what do we expect as a result?

So get the data, make a plan, get some talented people.

Do something.

Yeah.

And then see what the results are and then those results feed more insight.

It's a cycle so it keeps going around.

What I've done a lot of troubleshooting as a so like an interim or fractional leader and I go in and often what you have is no insight, no strategy, the wrong people doing the wrong things and seeing no results.

And you've got to move those parts gently to go.

Well, let's start with really understanding our market.

So I think the stat is that only 46% of marketers know basic demographics about their audience.

So you don't even know who they're talking to.

How do you know if you don't know who your audience is?

What do you write?

If you don't know what to write and you don't know who your audience is, where do you send it?

Now I've spoken to businesses.

Oh, we use Instagram for business.

Does your audience use Instagram?

No.

No.

Well, your audience might be on LinkedIn or tick tock or Facebook, but you're using Instagram because you like Instagram.

But that's not necessarily where your audience is.

Go where your audience is and you will be more successful.

Do you take for talent?

Do you try and split a team up with different skill bases?

Someone needs to do social, someone needs to do whatever.

Depends on the size of.

Sometimes you have no one, sometimes you've got, I mean I had 150 marketers when I was at night Frank.

So I was able to divide them up into specialisms.

So I had social media people, I had direct mail people, I had different sector people, I had PR team.

So you know, big teams, functional specialists.

Yeah, yeah.

I was about to say, and how do you divide them by function?

Yeah, well you can divide them by function, which is a very good way to do because, you know, now marketing has become really quite complicated.

You want people who are quite deep skilled in a specific area.

Social media is not really for amateurs.

Nor's email, nor direct mail.

In fact, none of them are really for amateurs.

But in the first instance, you almost certainly want a generalist who understands the principles of marketing.

And then through a combination of freelance, part time agency, virtual assistants and large language models, you can pretty much build all the capabilities if you've got a single person running your marketing.

But as you grow, well, what the data will have told you.

What's the most important channel for you?

Oh, social media is the most important channel for us.

So the next person I have is going to be a social media professional.

Actually, no.

PR is the thing we should be doing.

Okay, go and find a PR specialist, normally an agency.

You won't get that out of the data though, will you?

The data would say these people don't do or don't like this thing.

Oh, you'd be asking that as well.

Do you read magazines or something?

100.

So we subscribe to two fairly major data source, Experian, which tells us exactly who people are.

That's the postcode.

It's the postcode thing, but now it's household level.

So I was looking with, I was looking at the data with them yesterday and I live in one postcode and there are five different profiles in that postcode.

Wow.

From a very high end one which we live in, of course, and then a rental community and obviously we need both.

But if you looked at the average majority profile of that postcode, it would say a rental profile.

Okay.

But the household, now it's down to household level.

That tells you who they are and sort of what they would likely do.

We then integrate YouGov data.

How have they worked that out?

Anyway?

I did look up mine.

It wasn't miles off because they've got.

Millions and millions of data points on you.

They're a credit reference agency.

Okay.

So they literally have your data.

They know what you're buying, they know.

Exactly where you live and who, who you are and where you shop and where you shop.

And then we layer in what's called yougov data, which is a big research panel, the one they mentioned before.

They interview 350,000 people, which tells them what people think, where they shop, what their attitudes to various things are, what social media channels they use, whether they read newspapers, watch the tv, how much time they spend on things, what's their favorite hobbies, where they go on holiday, how much they spend on holiday, their relationship status.

And that all gets melded into a melting pot of view that says that house there is most likely to have that kind of person in and buy your product.

That house there isn't.

Okay.

And that person there is, reads newspaper.

So you need to spend money on pr.

I know.

I mean, you'll heard me say on various stages I've been on and various things I've been on, if you've seen them, is I talk about the four riders of the marketing apocalypse, which is you should always have pr, email, social media and direct mail in your marketing Strategy.

In a B2C environment.

In a B2C.

In a B2C environment.

In a B2B environment, you can probably think about dropping direct mail.

But don't underestimate the power of print.

In a digital age, we're all sick to death of screens.

And I hear that digital marketing.

There's an argument half of it's not even really.

I mean, not just, oh, half doesn't work.

Like maybe digital marketing doesn't really.

Digital advertising doesn't work even a bit.

We're very good at filtering it and ignoring it.

And also the current estimate is about £250 billion of ad fraud, which is basically digital adverts that aren't reaching anyone.

So some estimates fraud because they're just ripping off companies because they already know the data is not real.

They already.

Who already knows?

The media agencies.

Okay.

Allegedly.

Just for legal reasons.

Yeah, but we already know from all the research that a vast quantity of online traffic is bots.

Okay.

Oh, I see what you mean.

Yeah.

It's not even real.

Yeah.

And they're being showed adverts.

Would you like to go on holiday, Mr. Bot?

Who's clicking?

Your ad isn't a human being, it's a bot.

And you're drawing conclusions on who your audience is based on that bot.

Click.

There's that big scandal with X previously when they found the the source of all the rage were mainly in the Far East.

They weren't even British accounts.

It's quite, it's quite an epidemic at the moment.

I mean, even Sam Altman wrote about there's a theory called the dead Internet theory that essentially all of Internet traffic will basically bots talking to each other, minnows being driven by the algorithm to where the latest rage storm is.

Yeah, yeah, I feel like that.

And the reality is if you're using that data to make decisions, you're basing your decisions on things that aren't even people.

Maybe that's the dangerous data, isn't it?

Just sort of collecting it from the Internet.

You need research.

Yeah.

It's why you need to always balance.

It used to be called the first T model, which is you want data which is actual physically known people who bought your product and you know their address, you know everything about them.

Real bots.

Real.

Real bots.

Real bots.

And then you want to research to try and work out the people that you don't know because your customers won't be a slice of the market, but doing some research.

So the last report we produced, you know when you get a legal letter from a very big firm and it's quite stern, they didn't like the numbers I used in the table because it reflect any of their digital stats significantly lower.

What we had was a major research house literally ask how many of you visit these sites?

Literally tell us self declare.

Thousands.

I think 25,000 people were interviewed.

So very representative.

Nothing like the digital stats.

Nothing.

Of course, yeah.

When you're looking at people who saying I get so many visits a month to my website.

Well, how many are actual real people?

How does Rightmove get 97 million visits when there's only 50 million 2 million adults.

Wow.

Where you know, of course people go more than once, but someone going more than once isn't two people.

No.

You know, if you think about when you're buying a house, how many times,.

How many they declare 97 million a month.

Well, the independent stats I've got hold of are from a company called Similar Web.

For anyone on listening to this, if you go to Similar web, you can type in any URL and it'll give you the stats of how many people they visit.

But that's visits.

Think about when you're buying a house and you visit a website about rightmove or zoopla on the market.

How many times do you visit that site?

Lots.

Every time you visit you counted as a visit.

So that's not numbers of people.

No, that's numbers of visits.

I would say there's lies.

Damn lies.

And Internet statistics, if I could say it.

Internet statistics, teeth in.

Now that's what you need.

Both.

I mean, I love the Internet because it gives me access to a market through social media.

It gives me tons of data that's really, really rich.

But I have to treat it with a bit of caution and match it back to research and balance the two.

Because the real view is probably the research view within margins of error.

Yeah.

So do proper research.

And then that's why things like out of home have advertising are so good.

Because there's no bots looking at out of home advertising.

It's real.

And newspaper people buying newspapers, was that on your list?

Your four four horses, pr, pr, email,.

Social and direct, are the four that you have to do.

Okay.

Yeah.

Because no, no out of home there.

Well, there's a longer list than that.

Yeah.

And I would go on further depending what your budget is.

But what amazes me is the number of companies that aren't even doing the four basics.

Okay.

The most powerful marketing that you can do after word of mouth recommendation, which all marketing do is help, but it can't really do after that.

The number one is pr because if you appear in a credible source like a national newspaper, regional newspaper, a famous influencer, you're basically borrowing their credibility.

If I tell you you're amazing.

So if I tell someone you know that you're amazing, I'll make this right.

So I meet someone, I tell them Andy's he's amazing.

They're more likely to believe me than if you tell them you're amazing.

Yeah, I've tried.

I know you are amazing.

I know you're amazing.

More important, say I'm a national newspaper and I say Andy's amazing.

People are going to believe that because what's my interest in saying that?

So by borrowing the credits.

That's why PR.

The other thing about PR is the best time to have done it was 20 years ago or today.

Because it takes time to build credibility.

Credibility is the hardest thing to build.

It takes time.

Then email.

Emails don't decay.

Emails used to decay at a rate of knots.

As we switched from Hotmail to Outlook to Gmail to BT Internet, we all moved around emails.

Now your email address is likely to be the same that it was.

Oh, is that right?

We used to move a lot.

Oh.

Because so many engines were coming out.

Yeah.

We all ended up with Gmail.

I hate to admit I used to have BT Internet.

I feel ashamed to admit it now.

Yeah.

But no switch to Gmail and I don't look back.

But you know, some people have Outlook.

Yeah.

Which was used to be Hotmail.

Do you remember Hotmail?

I remember Hot Man.

And we've all been around now they've settled down, that email is good.

And the other thing about email is if someone's giving you an email and said they'll opt into your communications, they said they'll opt into your communications.

No longer strangers.

They can unsubscribe like that with the unsubscribe buttons.

So they are your warmest.

AI filters are coming though.

Yeah.

One on.

I've got one on.

Yeah.

AI filters are coming though this and that.

What that means is the more filters there are, the more important that clean list really is.

Because if they're still accepting your communication and they still like your communication, they're warm to you, then you've got social media.

If someone had said to me when I started out on John Street 30 years ago, someone was going to give me a media platform completely for free that would allowed me to upload video and words and audio and images and it could reach the entire world's population.

I connected with anyone I want, I'd have rip their arm off.

But the number of people go, no, I don't use social media, only do one.

I think it's complicated.

Like you alluded to earlier.

Like you said earlier, do you advertise, do you not?

Which platform and getting your posts right.

Doing good posts start with insight.

Yeah.

There's a great rule.

There's a CMO whose name I'm going to forget because I'm.

I'm on a camera so I'm going to forget the name is.

And she said every marketer should have a post it note.

Can I swear?

Yeah.

Every market should have a post it note on their screen that simply says the customer doesn't give a about you.

That's the first lesson of marketing.

Steve Jobs has said something similar and nobody cares.

Nobody cares.

They've got lives.

The baby may be crying, they've got to go to work, they're having a divorce, their life's happening in the way.

And you're the noise.

Now, you were saying all the time in marketing, you've got to cut through the noise.

No, no, you are the noise.

If you're the marketer, you are part of the bedlam that's getting in the way of them, what they want to do.

I watched a cinema with my brother all years ago.

He says, I hate all these ads.

And I went, what the ads that mean your ticket is only 17 pounds, not 25 pounds which pay for it, but it's interrupting what he wants to see, which is the movie.

So your skill as a marketer is to make the thing they see.

It's why so many ads are good, because they're entertaining, they're an art form.

You know, you think, well, that's actually quite a good advert.

I really enjoyed that.

But company called System One did an analysis.

They're amazing data company.

Look at all ad success.

Basically, 52% of the money that 50% stats spent on advertising is basically boring.

Really.

It's just rubbish.

Someone's gone, I need to produce an ad.

They produced an ad and it's boring.

But if you start with insight of what the customer wants and covertly put your message inside it.

Do something fun.

Do something fun.

Entertain me.

You know, I want bread and circuses.

Entertain me.

Life's hard enough.

Bread and circuses.

Pan Am.

And it's the.

It's what Roman emperors used to do.

They say, keep the.

Keep the peasants happy with bread and circuses.

Give them bread, give them circuses and they won't revolt.

Bread and butter, maybe.

That's great, Simon.

That's really good.

Blind spot research agents and consumers disagree on almost everything.

What has the voice of the agent revealed?

That surprised even you how interested people actually say they genuinely are in property.

Because I said earlier how much we love property, it's still a bit of a minority interest.

So while we get these massive numbers of people when they're interested, interested, and we all casually look at it, it's not actually everyone all the time.

You'd think with 97 million visitors, and that's one portal of three portals, property portals.

The number of people looking, actually.

Then if you drill it back down, I think it's like 23 million people in the country will have visited a portal.

That's less than half.

So in reality, while 23 million people is a lot of people, that's the number who used to watch the Two Ronnies.

In the days when we had four channels, we had three channels.

It's still.

Not everyone is on it all the time.

So that's the thing that was the first thing that surprised me is I kind of thought though, but it's got to be more like 45 million or 40 million.

Nope.

23.

24 Million people.

Okay, that's interesting.

The other one that people get wrong is who.

What.

What channel to use to communicate with people.

People pick the one they like, not the one that works.

Oh, I don't do direct mail because I don't like it.

You're not the target audience.

I don't care what you think.

Yeah.

When I Used to work at Auto Trader and I must say this, I was voted at school to most likely a second car salesman.

I just did it with 356, 000 cars on my forecourt as opposed to 12, so I don't know, epic scale.

As the head of marketing for Auto Trader and I remember demonstrating that one of the best places we could advertise for Auto Traders on the back of a bus.

Why?

Because when people sit in a car and the back of the bus is sitting in front of them, especially in London where you're moving at three miles an hour, you might look at that ad and go, I hate my car and the five cars behind it.

Because cars, buses are quite big, so there's a good chance to reach people and you've got someone sitting behind that bus for a very long time.

And we'll do something funny with the exhaust, whatever.

My boss didn't like it because he didn't like bus advertising and I thought it was degrading and I said to him, graham, you're chauffeur driven to work from your stately home.

You never see the back of a bus.

You're not my target market.

I don't want to appeal to you.

In fact, I almost.

You're the opposite of who I want to appeal to.

Yeah, yeah, Now I'm talking about people who are buying secondhand cars.

You've never had a secondhand car, Graham.

You have a chauffeur driven car.

You're not my target market.

It's not your target market.

And that's the problem is people think that they are the target market.

Whereas if you look at how agents communicate in the channels they prefer and what people prefer, they're not the same.

No.

And the people running the business are probably.

Yeah.

Maybe wealthy or.

Yeah.

Unusual people.

Anyway, I've been doing this business for 30 years, young man, and I don't need to do that kind of nonsense.

It's like doing the same thing 30 times for one year is not the same as 30 years experience.

No.

And do you remember when we didn't have mobile phones?

I do.

And we didn't have email and we didn't.

The world has changed.

Get with it or it will swamp you.

I mean, that gets back to your point that you're not the target market so you need the research.

Yes.

Because otherwise you're guessing again and you know we are.

You know, there's a.

There's an example I give in the course which is a.

Basically a can that is.

It's a Coca Cola can.

What color is a Coca Cola can?

Red.

Okay, we see the picture, it's a red can you zoom in on the picture and it's made up of green, white and black.

There is no red in it.

Because your brain tells you Coca Cola cans are red, it makes it red.

You know, your brain will tell you the world is the way you want it to be, to make you feel comfortable.

It won't tell you the way the world is.

That's why you need to do research, you need to get data because you need to go, I know I've got these biases and I kind of need.

It's like people go like, but everyone agrees with me.

No, everyone you know, who's from a very small section of society that tends to be like you agrees with you.

That's not everyone.

No, no.

I encourage people to subscribe to call the YouGov Daily.

So YouGov Daily is so again, massive panel, loads of questions.

You'll see their content in newspapers and on tv.

They basically the top three issues of a day.

They'll serve there them every single day and they'll email you the results.

They'll tell you what four and a half, 5,000 fellow Brits think about that issue.

They'll tell you by party or by age, however you want to interpret it.

And you can say, but everyone must agree with me on this view, be it politically sensitive like immigration or how you feel about Harry, Prince Harry, all those things.

And sometimes you'll go, I think we're clear on Harry now.

Now fellow redheads unite, he's got more hair than me.

Yeah.

And you say, oh my word, I'm a minority.

Yeah, that's the weird thing.

You actually go, actually I'm in the minority.

What I thought, everyone thought.

So I had a managing director say to me, so I'm going to a conference in June which is a big industry conference and a certain former deputy leader of the Labour Party is going to be speaking at conference.

It's fair to say the property industry is not a fan of that person.

And this managing director Messimus, it's outrageous they're bringing.

The point is everyone in my office agrees with me that they shouldn't be there.

And I went, the problem is if you've got strong views and you're quite political, people who disagree with you may not be comfortable telling you they disagree with you because they may have different views to you.

So if you're an entrepreneur or a founder, you're likely to be quite strong willed and quite driven and quite determined.

And everyone's basically rabbits in front of a headlight.

When you're going at 99 miles an hour and everyone's trying to clear up the wake behind you, they may not tell you what they think.

So you can't assume.

Now that's in a local basis where you're with an office.

Imagine now an entire market, and you think the world is the way it is.

And entrepreneurs generally are unreasonable people.

They've gone, that doesn't work.

I'll make something better.

And they will.

And most of them will fail.

That's how entrepreneurship works.

The ones who succeed will be convinced they succeeded because they are right.

Could be timing, it could be luck, it could be many other variables and good luck to them.

And I like being one of them.

But I also have to know that actually I've had some advantages and I've had a bit luck and family help, and there's all these things going on around me.

So actually, had I not had those things, I could have failed or I could have a different success.

So it's understanding all these layers around you.

It's not as simple as I was right or I am right.

You need to have humility.

Yeah.

Especially when it comes to an audience.

How do you work out the right questions to ask if you can only ask one or two things?

Well, amazingly, these people will help you.

Oh, so you say, look, this is my problem statement, if I'm gonna go manager, consultant about it, is this is what I'm thinking of doing.

What would be the best question to ask in this situation?

You can send them ideas.

Isn't it, this is my product, or.

This is my product.

This is my problem.

This is what I wanted.

I'm thinking of doing this.

It is so cheap and accessible these days.

I'm surprised more people don't just use it all the time.

Have you asked.

Have you used AI to say, what shall I do?

Do you think it's reasonable advice?

Yeah.

I mean, I'm a huge technophile, so I love larger language models.

I don't think it's AI.

You know, it's.

It's not.

It's very narrow.

I mean, you know, this is not.

It's.

It's a predictive model.

Yeah.

So it's after this word.

This word should come next.

Yeah.

There's no intelligence in it.

I like Guillermo del Toro's quote is, I fear.

I don't fear artificial intelligence.

I fear natural stupidity.

And I think that's true.

But large language models are as good as the data you put into it and the prompts that you ask.

So the worst thing you can do is ask ChatGPT something because it'll come up with an answer.

The worst thing is a really plausible answer.

Those confirmation biases we have and all this coding biases, it sounds right, it flatters us, it agrees with us, we think it's right.

The best thing you can do is upload, and I mean upload massive amounts of data because it will work on the data it's given.

So you need to upload.

So I do a lot of research profiles for companies and I say look, upload all those profiles into Chat GPT and then ask it the question.

And one of the best thing you can also do is when you ask Chat GPC Gemini Copilot, Claude Plexty, nevergrock, if you can ask those models, if you want to ask it to do something, the first thing you do is improve my prompt because then it will tell you what it thinks.

You said you know, the problem is not the answer.

You ask the wrong question.

So I talk about in my courses, the problem about marketing is people don't understand the language of marketing, so they ask the wrong questions.

If you learn the language of marketing, you'll ask the right questions.

Same if you haven't got any data, it will make stuff up.

So we did an analysis where we asked, it was ChatGPT.

We asked ChatGPT a profile of my hometown.

He gave us one.

We then uploaded a whole bunch of data from Experian and YouGov and it was different.

It was importantly different.

And then we uploaded the profile of a client's customers in my hometown, entirely different.

So there was a generalization of what our town was like.

There was an improved analysis of what our town was like with some information, jarred information, but then critically loading up the customer profile, said, you're not interested in the whole, you don't want the whole of your hometown.

You want this slice of it.

And this slice is specifically different.

So it's uploading that data is so important because give it context.

Give it context.

Yeah, give it a framework.

And that, that critical thing is ask it to improve your prompt.

Because again, how you think AI would read your question is not necessarily how it will read your question.

You want it to play it back to you to make sure that what it's finding out is what you asked so it can be taught.

And the good thing is to have one and use it a lot so it understands you.

Why never grok?

Just political reasons.

I would never do anything that lone scum wants.

That alone.

It's an anagram of Elon Musk.

Oh, right, is it?

I didn't know that.

And it's why I call Twitter because it's XI and shipping and you know, it's a shitter and lone scum.

Brilliant.

And the Schroster car to all my Tesla driving friends.

I love Teslas.

I just wish they weren't owned by Musk.

Oh, poor Musk.

There's nothing poor about him.

So, okay, so what did I mean, you've worked at all these different brands, a lot of them.

Huge.

What did Country Ride teach you about brand complexity?

Done badly.

We had 64 brands.

Okay.

Yeah.

So they're basically wide.

Has 64 brands.

It has.

And now it's part of connells.

It's got 83.

Wow.

So Countrywide's what the largest estate agents was the largest.

And then it got basically went pop and got bought by Connell's.

So Connells also owns what's the sequence Brand.

So people like William H. Brown, Barnard Marcus.

There's a whole series of tiny state agents under the Connells, but Connells is their flagship.

So Connells Group is now the largest estate agency group.

A company called EXP is the largest individual brand, which is Winter Sell Point.

Why don't they just call it all one name?

It's not.

Well, yeah.

One of the most popular posts I ever wrote on LinkedIn was how I'd rationalize the brand strategy, which is if you look at all the data, they should rationalize to about five or six brands.

A big regional brands and some high end property brands to compete with the likes of Knight, Frank and Salvos who are national brands.

So their Hamptons could become the high end brand.

John D. Woodwick, the London brand.

But then they have lots and lots and lots and lots of little brands.

And the problem with that is now Procter and Gamble famously has something like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of product lines which is tried to rationalize.

But they got £5 billion to spend on marketing.

If you want to build brand awareness and understanding of your brand, if you've got one brand, it's really easy because you only need to sell that brand.

You've only got one brand and you've got sub brand, which is this podcast brand which supports it and gets the audience in.

Brilliant.

That's great.

But if you've got 83 brands.

Now my budget at Countrywide, which is just the countryside, 64, I had £50 million to spend a year on marketing.

People go, oh £50 million.

Divide that by 64, 63.

It's not a lot of money.

And so a lot that goes to the portals anyway.

So all of a sudden you're down to, I can buy some stamps for this brand.

Yeah.

Whereas if all that money had been poured into three or four brands, I'd have cleaned up.

Yeah.

It reminds me of a record label, this.

Because the record label's got so many artists.

It's the same problem.

Yeah.

So would you just call it.

You would have picked the best brand and just rebranded or every shop.

Would you?

Yeah.

So my argument and my.

My cmo, we worked on it.

It's kind of, when we're looking at it is they really need to go down to some big regional brands because there were some regional names.

So it was no point.

Having the brand that works really well in the northeast wouldn't necessarily work well in Wales.

There were strong brands there.

Certainly in Scotland there was some Scottish brands that work well.

But you'd roll all the other brands into it and have one Scottish brand, one Welsh brand, four or five English brands and two prime brands.

I wonder what this state ages.

I don't really care what the brand is so much.

It's about.

It's about the house there.

They're all the same.

I would say to myself, the key.

Thing obviously is you want stock.

When we call it stock.

I hate that term.

It's how I was going.

Houses, people full of houses.

And the more houses you get.

But what marketing theory teaches.

And there's a great book called the Long and the Short of It by Lesbinette and Mark Field, which looked at how marketing splits out.

There's two types of marketing.

Brand awareness and sales activation.

Brand and sales.

So brand is about creating awareness for your brand.

So people have heard about you.

The 95% who aren't in the market at the moment.

Sales activation is for that 5% who are about to be in market or in market and you want to get them.

We all obsess about that 5%.

But when you're looking around, how do you pick the estate agency that you want?

It's the one that you think of.

I'm selling my house.

Let's say you're saying it's that way around.

So if you're thinking, I'm going to sell my very nice house, let's say you have in a nice top tier house.

I can guess two of the brands that you would pick instantly.

Knight, Frank and Savills.

Yeah.

And then probably one other.

And you go for Them.

Why would Knight, Frank and Saville's have such instant recall with you?

Because they are the brands for the prime properties in this country.

Yeah.

They're in the magazines with the fancy properties.

You see them everywhere, you see their boards outside the nicest houses, you see them in all the magazines, you see their press coverage, you see them, they're always talking about the market.

They're right up there.

If you're, say, selling a More typical house, 250,000, £300,000, which one do you pick?

There'll be 12, 20, 30 estate agents in your area.

Which one do you pick?

The one that you can recall.

Right.

And there'll be three.

Now, one of them is probably.

You've seen the most boards, that's a good sign.

The most boards, they are selling a house like the one that you want to sell.

So that's a good sign as well.

But the way of filtering it.

But reality, the way most of us work is we just think of them now that when I go to a supermarket to buy something, my hand just goes to the product that I want because that company spent millions of pounds to put that product front of mind when I get there.

And then it's habitual and then it's forming.

So I mean, Byron Sharp, who's the dark lord of marketing, basically, he's a professor from Australia.

He wrote this great book called How Brands Grow.

And the two fields that we talk about there is mental availability and physical availability.

Mental availability is.

You've got.

It's got to be where you'd think about it.

So when I think of it, what brands are in my mental availability?

There probably three brands in any sector that you think of instantly, two or three.

So you've got to be in those top three.

Physical availability is where you want it when you need it.

I can literally get it because if I can't get it, I'm going to pick something else and they will then have the loyalty there, because I know I want that category, I want that product, but that product's there.

I'm going to buy that other product.

And what do you think?

I mean, if you were gonna change all these brand names, I mean, you get into the question of changing a brand name and the damage.

I mean, that happens.

Sometimes you have to change your brand name.

Is there a way of doing it?

So the best advice you ever get in market is never change your brand?

No.

Yeah.

There's a very big company I work for and I was actually out with this friend of mine.

We've both been senior leaders of those companies and they changed their brand.

And we were like, really?

The heritage in that brand, everything about the brand is just wrong to have changed that brand.

They changed the brand anyway.

The best advice you can get is don't change your brand.

If someone comes in, says you must change your brand, point them at the door.

What you can do is reposition your brand and just adjust it gently.

So again, I was talking about Knight Frank and they still haven't done it.

My one regret they never did when I was there is Knight Frank.

Do you know what the dot above an I is called?

Oh, an ipsic or something.

Isn't it tittle.

A tittle.

Tittle.

It's a great word for pub quiz, but it's called a tittle.

And I brought in these amazing designers when we were looking at the brand and one of the designers said to me, said, that circle should be a diamond.

What?

He went, look at your logo.

The logo of Night Frank is four houses, four red houses with a square in the middle.

That middle white is a diamond.

The circle above the eye should be a diamond to complete the picture.

Yeah.

It's such an obvious fix and you go, that's such a clever idea.

And that little dot then becomes an icon and everything.

The end stop of articles.

And, you know, that little red dock appears, a little iconic thing on everything, that star.

And it's the missing bit from the four houses.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

Can we get them to do it?

No, of course we can get them to do it, but that's kind of where a gentle adjustment could be done to make a brand better.

Now, some things do need rebranding, but you'll do it really carefully.

You know, you really understand what brand heritage there is, what value is in the existing.

The worst thing Musk ever did was call it x.

4 And a half billion pounds worth of brand value gone overnight.

Do we still tweet?

Yes.

Do we X?

No.

I know why he's doing it and it's.

It's a complete tech view of how you should do branding them in time.

Why did he change the brand?

Because he's an eager.

No, sorry.

Because he wants this, basically this, with this almost like this.

What's it called?

It's like a app of everything.

Right.

So he wants basically X to be the X of everything.

So it's like.

It is just.

It's X, it's X marks the spot.

It's kind of.

I see why he's done it.

He just shouldn't have done it.

To Twitter.

Twitter was already fine.

He could have done his own thing but it was a mistake and you know, and what he's turned Twitter to, no one really wants to go to it anymore.

Don't generally anyway because it's become a bit of a swamp.

Yeah.

Is it dying Twitter?

Well, volumes are down significantly and Some estimates are 60% of the 67% of the traffic.

Traffic is bots.

Wow.

But the worst thing about it's still where most of the serious journalism happens.

So if you're in a war torn area or if you're a journalist, you'll still go there because the news tends to break their first still.

Yeah, it's because that legacy of what it used to be.

But over time I suspect that would die.

But back to the agency example.

What to do there is you wouldn't rebrand, you would consolidate brands.

So you go through stages.

So the first thing is you show that say for example this brand is now co owned by this brand.

Brand.

You put the two brands together.

Okay.

And then the old brand fades away.

So let's say you sold.

God forbid this business.

It's not happening.

Exactly.

Whoever bought it could put their brand next to it.

Yeah.

And over time OC would gradually fade.

Away until it was just over my dead body.

I'm not recommend it.

I wouldn't recommend it.

That's how much money you want.

I suppose.

Everyone has a price.

Everyone has a price.

I love ethics.

Disappearing as the numbers go up.

I had ethics and then.

Yeah, exactly.

Let's talk about some top performing habits.

What, what three drivers separates growing agencies from the rest.

So businesses.

I don't sound like a broken record but they'll really understand their market.

You can tell the under the market and actually these are the people where actually their instinct is good.

You know they normally tend to be quite niche.

So for example, they'll literally know.

Exactly.

So you know, we get areas like, you know, the pink pound.

We get you know, the, the Silver surfer market.

They really understand their target market.

The answer really, really well.

And actually they can rely quite a bit on instinct and experience.

They still get the data in.

But you know, I look a lot of high end estate agents.

They literally know it's the shuffle wearing gang who go hunting at the weekend.

The shuffle wearing gang?

Yeah, you know, shuffles and you know, loafers and check shirts.

Anyway, they know that's their audience, that's who they're going for.

They'll also have a plan.

It's almost like going back to Isto really.

But they'll actually know where they want to go.

Most businesses are kind of like they're just selling stuff, whereas the successful people is I want to get here.

They'll have written it down.

There's so much evidence if you write a plan down how much more powerful it is than if you just think it.

So actually write it down.

But write it in short form.

We talk about strategy on a page.

So get it down to a sheet of A4 so you can really look at it, make sure it's that right.

And then I wish it was.

I wish it was more complicated than this.

They are more active on more channels so they invest more in marketing on more channels and they're just noisier and it should be harder than that.

But I work with a lot of tech startups and they'd build a great product and it's clearly going to fail because you look at their marketing budget and say it's a fantastic product but no one's ever going to hear about it unless you tell people you exist.

Mental availability, no one's going to buy you.

Physical availability.

You need brand awareness before activation.

You need to start the journey long before people buy the 95% who aren't the 5% yet.

So it's that simple thing as really understand their markets, have a really clear plan and then not last because one way I will add to that is they just do more marketing which is slightly self serving.

I know as a marketer but that's what the data tell us.

What about crazy stuff?

What about, you know, putting cuddly bears and things or meerkats.

We love guerrilla marketing.

So guerrilla marketing.

So really weird strategies.

The famous example, I don't know if it's public, I don't know how public is.

There was a famous drinks company that launched a new product as a canned.

A fizzy can.

Fizzy drink can.

And they basically approached a bunch of festivals and said look, we need to build awareness this.

Can we clear up all your rubbish?

What?

Can we clear up your rubbish?

It's like yeah, we just want to clear up all your rubbish.

It's like okay, but we might want to do some littering first.

What do you want to do some littering?

Basically they dumped tons of their cans on the field and every single photo of that concert that festival had the cans.

People saw it, thought that must be a really popular drink they would all empty when they were dumped.

Wow, that's gorilla.

Yeah.

And it's that kind of like really thinking alternatively about stuff actually work massively.

Did it massive.

And you know, you look at those things where you go, who decided to tell.

Compare the market.

They were going to go with a meerkat.

Yeah, that's a very brave marketing agency or gravitating agency.

Look how effective it is.

It's iconic.

Now everyone knows Sergey and the gang.

We like animals, don't we?

We love.

Oh, great tricking.

Great trick in marketing cats and dogs.

All the data say that if you put cats and dogs in your advertising, massively uplifts to take up.

It is.

We love our fur babies.

We absolutely love our fur babies.

So yeah, if you include pets in a. Pets in a video.

Although I would say as I used to work in pensions, grinning geriatrics running down a beach with a bloody golden retriever.

I was sick to death of those pictures after about two, three years.

But dangerous.

Too effective.

Yeah, people love dogs, people love cats.

We are a pet loving nation.

But I guess you get your data.

But then it's almost.

Don't get too caught by the data or when you're doing a strategy, be a bit, you know, have someone crazy in the room or.

Yeah, we used to come the crazies.

I'm not sure it's politically correct called the crazies anymore, but anyway, the crazies.

You do need the mad ideas.

But it's really interesting when you blend the science of data with the art of creativity, what happens is a beauty to behold.

If it's just art, it's not based on anything.

If it's just science, it's dry.

Keith Weed, who used to be the chief marketing officer of Unilever, calls it the magic and the logic.

Yeah, you need both.

Yeah, but you can't have one or the other.

The definition of marketing is the science and art.

Not the science, not the art, but the science and art.

And the art is the creative doing.

Doing crazy stuff.

Crazy.

So crazy even, even if it's not crazy, beautiful stuff.

Now why is it not beautiful?

You know, I talk a lot about Seth Godin, who's an absolute guru in the industry, is marketing guru Svengali, and he says, you know, you've got to be remarkable.

Literally.

The definition of remarkable is worthy of remark.

That earlier stat from system one, you know, 52% of advertising is boring.

Most advertising is meh.

If you think about the ads you may have watched on TV last night,.

Of the ones you're going to remember,.

How many brands can you remember?

Yeah, very few.

Repetition helps.

Repetition, repetition, repetition.

Do say the thing called the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve.

We forget 90% of what we're told within 48 hours.

So you need to keep telling people and telling people.

That's why school is so repetitive.

So tell people a lot of times.

Tell people repetitively and be interesting.

No, if I went.

Holidays are coming.

Holidays are coming.

Do you know the product?

Yeah, it rings a bell.

What is that?

Coca Cola.

Okay.

Of course.

Holidays are coming and people, people, they used to tour the country with the trucks and there were thousands of people on the streets.

It's a fattening, fizzy drink.

People love it.

What do you think about sonic music marketing or.

Yeah, musical cues are really important.

What you really want to look at music.

What the data tends to be telling us at the moment is musical cues are almost more powerful than celebrities.

We're a bit sick of celebrities.

And they can divide opinion and they can also do things that are wrong.

Occasionally you can do one and suddenly turn out to be a Nazi and that's not great for your brand.

So I didn't really screaming racist.

That's a bit disappointing for our random tricky bit of a PR reputational moment.

Drop them, drop them, drop them.

And also celebrities can divide opinion.

Where was a great musical cue?

We all know the Netflix sign up sound.

You know the sounds of it.

God, that sound.

Yeah, that sound.

And even like, you know, some it's tell if I get this wrong.

It says hasn't worked.

Audi.

I'm sure it was Audi.

No, it's Volkswagen.

It was one of the Audi group.

Sorry.

This is not working then, is it?

The example.

They made a big thing of the sound the cars make their doors clunk more.

Yeah, and that kind of stuff, you know, everything's like bank.

And it's that sort of soundscape that we get with good cars now.

There's nothing.

A cheap car goes clink when you shut the door.

A good car goes thunk.

Yeah.

Clicks.

Probably gets a proper robust door.

You feel that?

Feels satisfied by that.

My manhood is confirmed.

So, yes, sound influences these days, they.

Fit into the celebrity category.

They're less.

Less.

No.

So no, we are more likely to trust influencers.

They are now in the PR world.

To me, you should engage with influencers.

But with things called nano and micro influencers, there's an enormous amount of evidence.

There's a great company called Magic Circle that looks at this data actually bought by a company by analytic partners.

That's an in piece of information that's of relevance to no one.

But they demonstrated that your return on investment, the smaller the influencer, the higher Your return investment if you work with them, because they'll know a niche.

Yes.

So basically, you know, someone like Kim Kardashian, you might have to pay her 20 million pounds to use her channel.

She'll put you up.

It's drowned out by everything else she's doing.

And you'll reach a huge number of people who aren't relevant to you.

Back to targeting.

If I get the person who talks about houses in Hemel Hempstead or Grantham or Notting Hill, and I get them, and they got 2, 000 connections who actively listen to them, their recommendations, that's way more powerful because that's exactly the audience that I want.

So we are very likely now to trust social media and influencers more than we like to trust other channels still.

TV is the number one source for news in this country still.

But we're an average age of people in this country is 54.

So actually we're older than we think as a country.

And that's changing over time and falling.

But if you find influencers that are really relevant to your local audience, your.

Sorry, your target audience, have a great network, talk to them about a strategic relationship.

They're desperate for money now.

They want money, they want income.

And you can say, look, we want to work with you on content and ideas.

We'll help by funding your channel, by giving you money.

And it'd be public display, we'll admit it.

What we want you to do is talk honestly about our product, warts and all the warts and all things you don't like, it's fine.

It's almost feedback for us and we'll value it.

Negative feedback's good.

Be honest, be authentic, be yourself.

But we really want to reach your audience.

A few of them is way more important than getting a Kim Kardashian on your social media.

So if you're running an SME or you're an entrepreneur right now, other than collecting the data, following your plan, I mean, what else should you be doing?

I mean, should you.

Should you try and get more globe, like, spend more money on the data to get more global and then say, oh, it turns out in Germany, this thing will be really popular, we should go launch our distribution?

Or how'd you.

How do you.

Where'd you choose?

I don't think there's.

There isn't one answer, which is kind of annoying.

Well, obviously the first nature has come to 30 years of marketing in one day, which is my.

Yeah, yeah, big up your course.

It's amazing.

That would.

That would Help.

And, and that gives you regularly.

Yeah, every.

They're down to four times a year now across the country.

All over the UK, it's now 99 quid because the venues are now supporting it because they want to spread the word about marketing, so they're much cheaper than they used to be.

So 99 pounds for 30 years in marketing is not a bad return.

No, brilliant.

In terms of what you should be do, what you should do is the first thing is do just the minimum amount of research you need to do to understand what your market is interested in.

If you have a hundred emails, send out 100 emails and go, look, I'm thinking of doing this.

What do you all think?

I need your help.

And most people go, yeah, I'll give an opinion, of course I will.

Everyone likes the underdog, everyone likes the entrepreneur.

You know, the plucky person who's gone into the field and doing stuff.

Yeah.

I'll give you some information.

Bit more money you do a survey with, you go rips or smart opinion.

Just, just check what kind of money you have to spend with it.

Give me a ballpark.

So if it's just a consumer panel, thousand, 2,000 people, representative of the UK, then it's probably 250 quid.

Okay.

Very affordable.

If it's a B2B, more like 500 quid.

They're harder to find.

Okay.

And you know, they'll, they'll give you a game, but easy.

We also have this thing I actually taken out of my pocket as well because I'm on a podcast is we have these things called a mobile phone.

Now, I'm not suggesting you do a Michael McIntyre send to all, but you can literally send to everyone in your contact base is, I'm thinking about doing this, what do you think?