Meet Neha Bucaro

With a remarkable professional journey spanning media, strategy creative and research, Neha is a true believer in the power of transformative thinking. Throughout her career, she has worn some big titles, led, and inspired brilliant teams, and collaborated with some of the biggest brands in the world. With an innate comfort with data and refined strategic and creative thinking skills she has honed an expertise in her craft that is both broad and deep. Neha has helped her clients navigate shifting market dynamics, competitive disruption, technology, and product evolution and changing consumer expectations with grace and success. Over the last 5 years, she has applied her skills to benefit non-profits, early and mid-stage startups and investor backed businesses. Every client, no matter their size or stage, benefits from her unique blend of creativity, strategic acumen, and business pragmatism.

Highlights

00:00 Welcome to the Social Capital Podcast

01:25 Introducing Today's Guest: Neha Bucaro

02:44 Diving Deep into Strategy

04:46 The Critical Role of Strategy in Today's Marketplace

09:50 Exploring the Impact of Generative AI on Creative and Strategic Services

12:44 AI Implementation Challenges and Considerations

20:33 Personal Reflections and Advice for Young Professionals

25:43 Final Thoughts and How to Connect

Connect with Neha!

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Social Capital podcast is sponsored by Keystone Click, a strategic digital marketing agency that believes in order to successfully market to your ideal customer, you have to first understand your customer. You can learn more at KeystoneClick. com.

The topic of relationships ties in very closely with marketing. That's why I like to bring on marketing experts with a variety of backgrounds for you to learn and grow from. Today's guest is Neha Bucaro. Her background, remarkable professional journey, spanning media strategy, creative, and research. Neha is a true believer in the power of transformative thinking. Throughout her career, she has worn some big titles, led inspired, brilliant teams, and collaborated with some of the biggest brands in the world. With an innate comfort with data and refined strategic and creative thinking skills, she has honed an expertise in her craft that is both broad and deep. She's helped her clients navigate shifting market dynamics, competitive disruption, technology and product evolution, and changing consumer expectations with grace and success. Over the last five years, Neha has applied her skills to benefit non profits, early and mid stage startups and investor backed businesses. Every client, no matter their size or stage, benefits from her unique blend of creativity, strategic acumen, and business pragmatism. Neha, welcome to the show.

[00:02:55] Lori Highby: Especially because marketing, of course, one of my favorite topics and one of the other things that I know that you and I really connect on is strategy. So let's, let's dive into that a little bit. What does strategy mean to you?

Everybody's got their own definition. What I believe is that strategy is the combination of clarity of purpose, and the long term roadmap to achieve that purpose, the two things together. So a lot of times I think in the marketing world, we think of brand strategy as one thing that is typically purpose or vision and then business strategy as another thing.

And. For me, I feel like they're both necessary. Brand and business strategy are two sides of the same coin. If brand is doing one thing, but the business is doing something else, there's a total disconnect for employees, for consumers, for everyone. So for me, strategy is that roadmap to a clearly defined destination.

It should be the decision making rubric for every decision that an organization makes from how they allocate resources, to how they might organize themselves, to their internal processes and teams, to how they might recruit and hire and how they communicate both to internal and external stakeholders.

And there might be roadblocks along the way. Exactly.

Yeah.

[00:05:09] Lori Highby: Yep, absolutely. Why is strategy relevant in today's marketplace?

Without a sound strategy, organizations that have a North Star, they can proactively address shifts in market and stakeholder dynamics. Without that, they're just not going to be able to do that. It's just going to be constant reactive.

And sometimes you have to, you know, realign the strategy because of that, but at least you're being strategic still.

And I think in so many organizations, they might have a clearly defined purpose, but the different functions within the organization aren't clear about their role in fulfilling that purpose. And so then you have a disconnect between the different functions. So like finance might be doing one thing, marketing might be moving in a different direction, HR is doing something else, and all of the functions are kind of on their own path.

And we, we see this all the time, right, where Marketing might say, Hey, we need to build a digital platform, or we need to build some machine learning into our CRM systems. And then finance is saying, well, we don't have the budget to do that, and we can't do that. And it's just, it's a constant disconnect and constantly challenging each other for resources.

And I think if there is clarity of purpose and everyone is aligned to that purpose, then decision making becomes that much easier because the question is, does this align with our purpose? Does it move us towards our destination or does it not? And if it doesn't, is it a detour that makes sense for us right now?

Because eventually it does ease that path towards our destination? Maybe. And I think those are the conversations that just aren't being had in organizations where they lack that kind of clarity of purpose and strategy.

It's like a lot of people are just focusing on what's happening today, that short term win and not necessarily thinking about the big picture and how, how even the actions that you're taking today will have an impact on the activities down the road that you're doing. So why take actions today that are helping to achieve a bigger goal.

They understand their role in it, and then they can fulfill it.

[00:10:20] Neha Bucaro: Well, I think generative AI is the big thing.

Everybody's talking about it right now. Mm-Hmm. , you know, for me, all my clients, I mean, there've been studies published, right? That say, you know. 80 plus percent of CEOs expect to integrate AI into their strategy next year. Yeah. But what does that really mean? I mean, right now AI is just, it seems like such a buzzword and it's been around for a while. It's not brand new. Chat GPT has, you know, brought it to sort of mainstream. But it's been around. And now that it is mainstream, though, everybody's talking about it. And everyone feels like they need to integrate it into their business. I think how it will impact creative services specifically is frankly, I think it'll make great creative delivery more efficient.

You can use AI to narrow your concept pool or to even initiate creativity to start your concept pool. If you've got a road, like I often find myself with a mental block when I'm trying to write something and I will go to chat GPT for some stimulus for some ideas, but it is a great springboard.

And in this era of everyone needing to do more with less. Everyone's resources are tight. Everyone is trying to deliver more with less. I think there is a role for AI provided that you are being thoughtful about what you are using it for, and you're being hyper aware of the limitations of AI and how you can actually integrate it into your work processes as a creative.

Yeah. Now, as it relates to strategic services, I think similarly, there's AI can be a great jumping off point. For me, I find a little bit less so. It doesn't seem to inform my strategic services as much as it informs creative services, because with strategy, there are so many individual nuances for a company, right?

You know, they've got resource challenges. They've got people challenges, the size of the organization, the vertical, there are so many different things going on that when I'm developing a strategy, I'm not going to use a generative AI, but if I'm writing something, if I am trying to ideate around something, if I'm trying to be creative, it can often be a great jumping off point. But again, like I said, use with caution.

[00:14:17] Neha Bucaro: Yeah, I mean, some organizations have none, right? So they're not going to use it at all. But yeah, I think you bring up a great point is about AI as a tool versus a thing you have to do, right? How are you going to use it? It's one of the tools in our toolkit to solve Problems or challenges that we have.

So really clearly defining the challenge and how you might integrate AI into the solution is helpful. But AI is not the solution in and of itself.

[00:15:01] Neha Bucaro: Exactly. Exactly. That defeats the purpose.

[00:15:10] Neha Bucaro: Well, we can keep that topic too. There's so much. I mean, I have a client who earlier this year said, we need a chatbot. And I thought, okay, why? Why do I need a chat bot? Cause well, you know, we, we, we get questions, you know, into customer service and it would be so much more efficient if we had a chat bot thought, okay, that's valid. And then the next question was, are there other ways to address that challenge? Because it's not it's not a complex business. It's not complex questions that are coming in. And so we talked through, like, are there other ways to address that? And. We developed a facts page on their website. So people, if they had questions, could very easily find that could be redirected to that page.

And then we did eventually develop a chat bot for their website, but they were challenged with finding the talent to do that well. We made a lot of mistakes along the way because they thought they had the talent internally. They did not want to hire outside resources. And I think this is where people get into trouble.

Also with AI is there's, there's a skillset required.

[00:16:26] Neha Bucaro: And without the right skillset, and it is such a new thing that the skillset isn't readily available out there either. People are teaching themselves. People are trying to figure it out themselves right now. And, you know, we did go through a process of using internal team members who maybe did not have the right skill set to develop something like this.

It went very awry before we pulled in some external resources to build out something that was actually meaningful and engaging for their audiences.

[00:17:24] Neha Bucaro: Exactly.

But then I was chatting with the leadership team and they had commented they don't even know if anyone's using AI within the company right now. And this is a fairly sizable organization. And then some of the folks in the marketing team were like, Oh, Oh yeah, we've been, we've been using it. It's just like, I don't, I don't want to get anyone in trouble here, but this is why you need some policies in place. I mean, this is for everyone listening, anyone that if you have an organization and you do not have a policy that just says, Hey, let's talk to me if you're using this or let me know what tool you're using and how you're using it. You gotta have that initial level of awareness to realize that just because you, the CEO, aren't using it doesn't mean other people in your organization aren't using it as well.

[00:19:14] Lori Highby: Well, I mean, yeah, these are really big conversations, really big questions. And I think that there's a lot of either, what's the, I don't want to, I don't want to say ignorance. I think it's I feel a lot of the-

[00:19:27] Lori Highby: Lack, I mean, it's, It's all over the media, but they're not, they're not taking the time to educate themselves on it. And so it's important because it is having an impact, which is ultimately where we started this conversation that it is going to, it's changing business.

[00:19:48] Lori Highby: Let's be strategic about how we're incorporating it instead of just jumping in the deep end and hoping we know how to swim.

[00:20:04] Lori Highby: Yep. Yep. Yeah.

[00:20:24] Lori Highby: Yep. And I mean, I still even hear some of that today. That, you know, people, Hey, let's be on Tik TOK. Cause everyone's on Tik TOK. Well, yeah. Everyone except is that really where your target customer is hanging out? Because what I know about customers, they are not hanging out on Tik TOK.

[00:20:45] Lori Highby: Yeah, true. Very true. There's, there's that to take into consideration, which is probably a whole nother topic we can type into. But I don't have all day and neither do you, so we're going to keep moving on to some fun questions here.

If you could go back to your 20 year old self, what would you tell yourself to do more of less of, or differently with regards to your professional career?

[00:21:43] Lori Highby: Yeah. I love that. Fear is such an interesting thing, isn't it? And it's all in our own heads.

[00:22:33] Lori Highby: I love that. It's interesting that we have to live so much life before we kind of realize that. You know, we go through these stages when we're younger where we have all these head games because other people are having such an impact on how we think and feel and function.

Yeah, that's great. I've got a post a note on my computer and it says F fear in really big letters to just remind me to just do it instead of overthinking it.

I was working a job that was making me miserable at that time. And at four or five, she could sense it. And she wrote me a note one day and put it on my computer. And the note said in her like four or five year old phonetic spelling. It says, don't let anybody guide you, let you guide yourself.

[00:23:37] Neha Bucaro: And she is now nine years old and I still have that post-it on my computer.

[00:23:46] Neha Bucaro: I hope she has that mentality forever.

[00:24:03] Neha Bucaro: What would you tell your 20 year old self?

[00:24:54] Neha Bucaro: One more question for you. What advice would you give to someone who is starting on their entrepreneurial path?

So if you find others that have been in your shoes, it doesn't necessarily even have to be in the same industry. Sometimes that can be extremely beneficial though. I'm, I'm in a marketing agency owner peer group. I've had my firm for 15 years and I'm sitting next to someone who's, you know, their agency has been around for 80 years and they're the third owner of it. You know, and it's just like, wow, there's so much to learn from that.

So find someone, build your community, get your cheerleaders. Get the people that are going to help you when you're down, but celebrate you when you're up, you know? So that that's really important. Something took me a while to learn in my entrepreneurship journey as well.

[00:26:04] Lori Highby: It is powerful to have indeed. So any final words of wisdom that you'd like to leave with our listeners?

[00:26:21] Lori Highby: Totally. I love that. Right. If anyone was interested in getting in touch with you, what's the best way that they can reach you?

[00:26:41] Lori Highby: Awesome. We will include that information in our show notes. Neha, thank you so much for being on the show today.

[00:26:52] Lori Highby: It was super fun. I love the conversation. I'm sure we could definitely continue talking about a handful of these topics longer.

[00:27:02] Lori Highby: All right. This wraps up our episode of Social Capital. A huge thank you to Neha for taking the time to connect with us.

If you have a burning marketing question or relationship question, just reach out and I'd love to answer it on the show. As mentioned before, let's connect on LinkedIn. I'm looking forward to hearing from you and I hope you enjoyed today's show. Go out there and get noticed.