In the second part of this episode, Leonard Burger returns to discuss the growing trend of side hustles and their unexpected benefits for marketers.

Leonard shares how working on external projects, such as angel investing, has enriched his professional career, offering valuable perspectives that can be applied to his core role in product marketing.

The episode also explores future trends in product marketing, including the impact of AI and how companies can foster creativity by giving employees more flexibility.

Key points:

• Side hustles as a tool for career growth and creativity.
• The rise of AI and machine learning in product marketing.
• Encouraging a creative mindset by balancing day jobs with passion projects.
• How external perspectives can fuel innovation in the workplace.

Get ready to explore how you can apply these future-focused ideas to your marketing strategies.

About Leonard Burger

Leo is a product marketing specialist by day and fintech geek by night. Currently active in fintech marketing, his professional experience spans across multiple industries and countries. Besides marketing he also has a passion for startups, innovation and venture capital.

Links 

Full show notes: Unicorny.co.uk 

LinkedIn: Leonard Burger | Dom Hawes 

Website: Leonard Burger bio

Sponsor: Selbey Anderson 

Other items referenced in this episode:

Leda Glyptis PHD

Andrew Davies: The Unicorny Marketing Show

'Deeply sorry,' CrowdStrike boss apologises for global IT outage by Zoe Kleinman, BBC News

Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There by Rutger Bregman

Product Marketing Alliance

Chapter summaries

Introduction to part two

Dom welcomes listeners back for part two of the discussion with Leonard Burger, introducing product marketing’s relevance today and preparing for an exploration of its future.

The rise of side hustles

Dom and Leonard discuss the increasing popularity of side hustles among professionals, especially in the US, and how they can enhance career development.

Leonard’s personal experience with side hustles

Leonard shares his journey with equity crowdfunding and angel investing, highlighting how these ventures offer diverse experiences that enrich his day job as a product marketer.

Side hustles as a learning tool

Leonard explains how engaging in side projects can provide new perspectives and insights that improve one’s performance in their main career.

The broad benefits of side hustles

Dom summarises how side hustles build networks, foster new skills, and offer external cultural insights that executives can apply in their day-to-day roles.

The future of product marketing

The conversation shifts to future trends in product marketing, with Leonard pointing to AI and machine learning as key drivers of change in the next three to five years.

Cultural shifts and leadership mindsets

Dom and Leonard discuss how leadership must evolve to attract and engage young talent, emphasising the importance of fostering an entrepreneurial mindset within organisations.

Global product marketing and collaboration

Leonard explores the potential for European and UK companies to leverage lessons from Silicon Valley and work together to innovate in the field of product marketing.

Advice for aspiring product marketers

Leonard concludes with practical advice for those looking to enter product marketing, recommending resources such as the Product Marketing Alliance.

You're listening to Unicorny and I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Hello, Unicorners, and welcome to part two of our dive into product marketing with Leonard Burger. Now, Leonard is our first ever product marketer on the show and he brings a wealth of experience and knowledge as a dedicated specialism. Product marketing is still pretty nascent here in the UK. Sure, product has long been established as one of our essentials in marketing. Of course, it is one of the four P's, but we don't really have a focus on it in the same way as, say, they do in Silicon Valley. And the more marketing has become about promotion, it's as if we've got further and further away from product. But what we learned in part one of our interview with Leo is that product marketing is actually a bit of a throwback.

In fact, upon examination, to me at least, it looks, it sounds and operates exactly how I remember and how I was schooled in marketing. Lennon describes his four step product marketing process as one, understand not only how your product works, but what it solves to a customer. Two, convert your understanding into a message, a benefit led piece of writing. Three, identify where your customers are and use storytelling to drive them to four, fulfilment pieces like short films and demos. And throughout this process, Leonard sees himself as the link or conduit between all the departments and functions of his business, from product specialist to sales. And the customer, of course. Well, if that's not marketing, what is now in part two, we're gonna move things forward a little bit. I wanted to ask Leo where he sees product marketing going in the future.

Like, what trends does he see happening over the next few years? But also, how does he see the culture shifting? But first, I want to explore the modern phenomenon of the side hustle. Again, it's something that's more common in the States, but more and more, I think it's creeping into life here in the UK. Now, you might be thinking, what the hell does having a scientist have to teach me? I'm an executive markdown. What can it teach me about my day job? Like Dharma's? Well and truly lost the plot. Well, listen on. I think you're going to be pleasantly surprised. So let's get straight back to the studio. Something I'm seeing more and more, both in my day to day work, actually, but also in my wider networking these days. And I don't know whether it's necessarily a generational thing.

Again, I'm picking it up in the states, particularly less so over here, but increasingly is where I, executives or people who are working for one company are engaging in side hustles of one form or other. Quite often that can be angel investing of some sort. But I've also seen a number of people who are involved in other businesses outside their core business. And back in the day when I started in your contract, that was all forbidden. These days that's not the case. Can you share some of your experiences maybe, of how that might work or how it might help?

I like to call them side hustles. I'm not sure if it really is a side hustle. It's not really hustling, in essence, what I've been doing myself. So my personal experience with that is very early on, again, being the curious individual that I am, I started investing very small amounts through crowdcube and cedars. So equity crowdfunding. And the main reason I was doing that is because out of curiosity, I wasn't doing it for the potential return. And obviously there's a big risk warning that you see everywhere, 95% of startups failing. So it was a tenor here, a tenor there. You know, this is like nine years ago.

Yeah.

And throughout my career that has been a red line. And I think it's one of the reasons I became a product marketer as well, because I've seen so many different pitches and products out in the market. And equally, as you were saying, I see that with a lot of executives, founders, because I'm quite active in startup ecosystems. I talk to a lot of founders and they're doing that, as you say, in the US it seems to happen, but also in the UK and in Europe, you would see them maybe being an advisor, a non exec director, but equally angel investor in various businesses and being very successful at the same time. I think it's a good thing.

One again, for the knowledge that you obtain, for stepping out the daily grind of your own venture or your own job as a CEO and seeing it from someone else's perspective. Often, obviously what you would see is that these CEO's are then angel investing in their industry, or potentially they're the CEO of a larger company and they're investing in maybe angel investing in a fintech that would maybe one day become a competitor or be a service or a product that could be complementary to whatever it is the company is doing. For me. Coming back to my personal experience, it's a bit much maybe, but I've invested in over 250 startups across 300 plus rounds. Again, 80% of that is below 50 pounds. Right.

So I'm by no means a rich investor but obviously the amounts have gotten bigger as I also perfected my own methodology as looking at product and pitches and having conversations with various founders with people within the industry. Consultants also led me to go to more conferences as a side hustle. So this year was a bit crazy. I've been to many EU startup summit we make future the next web and I've been to some of those before but always kind of one per year or maybe two per year just to keep those relations fresh. And this year was a bit crazy. So I think someone in the company actually asked me are you still working for us? Are you working for someone else? But then I explained it to them as well.

Coming back to that like it doesn't have to be a hustle obviously if you're geeky and curious enough you will find it interesting. So you do this maybe in my case when my son goes to bed I'm my wife did her PhD so shes quite geeky and curious as well so shes writing her articles as an academic that is necessary. So id just go on id look at some of my core investments. What are they up to? Some of the investor updates I read through that it takes maybe 30 minutes, maybe 40 minutes and I dont do that every day. Then on the weekend whenever I have a bit of time or when I get an email its two minutes here three minutes there. It keeps you informed.

It makes sure that your network has a very diverse my LinkedIn is one of the core things. I apply a methodology to how I use LinkedIn. I don't post too much. I post once a week, maybe once bi weekly to make sure that I keep my network fed with information what I'm doing. But equally that means that I can engage and have conversations and see the knowledge that other people are sharing again through all of these things. And I'd say you can control it. And if you can control it and I assume that these CEO's and these founders that are also doing it, they're smart enough to control it but they're hardworking people right? So they could do this on the side. You definitely need to control it because those contracts potentially have changed a bit.

But I think they are changing. I'm not trying to give licence to anyone that works in our company to go out and start companies on the side necessarily. I think what's really interesting about your approach Leonard is that you're taking a broad approach and what you're seeing and the different cultures and the different businesses and the different sectors must bring enormous power to the day job. I mean, enormous power to it. And one of the constant reasons that in house marketers hire agencies is they want an outside perspective. But of course, you can get that yourself if you're prepared to make that extra commit. And if, in your words, you're geeky enough to want to spend the time yourself, to look at what's going on elsewhere, how has the activity that you've been doing externally helped inform your day job?

The side hustle being equity, crowdfunding investing, but angel investing as well, is one of the main reasons I'm interested in fintech and fintech being at the core, similar to the early days of Google, you want the access to knowledge. That was essentially Google's mission, making sure that everyone has access to knowledge. How much we want to bash the big tech companies, that's fine. Maybe. Obviously, as they've grown into the mega beasts, as they are now, maybe some stuff has become more dodgy or on the side, what they're doing. But equally, if you look at the essence, fintech is the same. Democratising access to money management. One of the core examples that everyone in marketing loves is Monzo in the UK, right?

Everyone's looking at marketing, and I've been following Monzo from a very early point in time because I invested in their round in 2016. Not a lot of money, but they had a crowdfunding round, which obviously, it's a brand ambassador thing, it's a marketing trick, technically. Equally, you can get some funds, there's some VC's out there that might, in the early days, might have said, because they couldn't raise funds with VC's, they're going to the crowd. But now you're seeing these big rounds. Monzo has done multiple rounds over the past years and that early base of customers, you know, not all of them had invested, but a lot of them wanted to invest. So I think they broke the record at the time. In 90 seconds, they raised? 1 million from the crowd.

And Brewdog did much the same, didn't they? They won customers by running crowdfunding.

Exactly, yeah. Brewdog is one of the early examples that Luke and Darren, so the two co founders of Crowdcube, I think they knew James was and Brewdog, also raised funds. Revolut is another example now, finally got their banking licence, which is a source that was a long journey. And Revolut also raised funds in Crowdcube. Seeing all of those things happening in fintech, seeing all of those things happening in various other industries or verticals that I have invested informs my day to day. Maybe in my case, I've seen too many pitches. That is possible. And I'm not saying that everyone should go out and invest in 250 companies in the next couple of months, but why not try equity crowdfunding? Or why not try alternative asset investing?

Or read a book on if it's ETF's you're interested in, why not just go out and do it? Even if it's a summary, if you're struggling for time or you've got your day to day all planned out, there's various ways. Listening to unicorny, for example.

Unicorny is a very good use of tool advice. The good news is, because it's an audio only podcast, you can listen to it while you're doing other things.

Exactly. So maybe even invest in crowdcube into a pitch while you're listening to unicorning. Right.

Yeah, that's the way forward.

No, definitely. That's definitely. It's given me a very broad perspective. It's given me the opportunity to go out to a conference. It was Money20/20, I was talking to someone from currency cloud and were talking about a lady doctor, Leda Glyptis. I'm not sure if I pronounced that correctly and I apologise. My Greek isn't what it used to be. And she's just written a book. And I didn't know that at the time, but that lady told me that she's written a book. She went to the book launch and eventually I wrote to Leda and said, are you Money20/20? Yeah, I'm here. And then she gave me a signed copy of the book. So there's a very human element of knowing people in various.

And knowing what they're doing and knowing the products that they're selling, and having that initial icebreaker to have a conversation with anyone again, I went to a random masterclass at Oxford, Saïd Business School, it was the ex CEO of Barclays, and I was there and I just randomly joined the conversation. And then I talked to the. At the time, he was working at the financial regulator in Turkey, which was very random. He was there. So the random connections you can make just go out there, I would say just do it. Because that gives you that context. It gives you the icebreakers for networking, it gives you the context for your day to day work. Whatever it is you do in marketing or in any other department, I'm hoping that engineers are listening to this as well. And I'm going to go out there now.

And all the engineers in my network should listen to this, so they like marketing more.

Let's just summarise very quickly. I think what we're talking about is, I don't want to sound pompous about it, but I think it's kind of important, that kind of. That approach to side hustle, that doing stuff in your spare time, getting involved in other businesses. Fantastic for building a network. Number one. Really good for staying ahead of trends and issues and spotting technology things early. Really good for picking up new skills, whether those be analytical or financial or. Really good for that. Really good for being able to bring external cultural and other influences into your organisation to help inform your day job. What have I missed?

You're obviously a very good host, so you've summed it up quite well. I don't think you've missed anything. I think those are all of the things. What people will notice that if they engage in those side hustles, and it doesn't necessarily have to be investing, it doesn't necessarily have to be anything else. It could be yoga or running. You know, if you're part of a. You know, if you love running or. I don't. I'm not the biggest fan of running, but, you know, you're too big to run. Probably too big. I love swimming. Maybe there's a swimming ideal for swimming. Yes, exactly. So go out there. Maybe you find a swimming club somewhere, have those conversations, post about it on LinkedIn. Why not? That interest might just trigger someone in your network to say, hey, I love swimming too.

And that person might well be your next career opportunity. Or it might well be the CEO of one of the biggest prospects that you've just lost. And then one thing leads to another.

Side hustle learning makes perfect sense to me. As I said to Leonard, what companies want from external consultants and agencies is external perspectives. They want the things they can't see. They want to benefit from what's been done for other companies and the lessons that they learned along the way. And essentially, that's what side hustling does for you. It gives you another perspective that you can bring to bear on your day job. And there's a huge scale here, from bigger, broader financial lessons like Leonard's, to fine detail lessons that are no less important. For example, let's say you're running a small jewellery business on Instagram. You'd learn a hell of a lot about social campaigns, customer relationships, product presentation, influencer power, even partnerships and tie ins with other brands. All of that is massively relevant.

But I think the biggest part of it for me is that you'd be entering into an entrepreneurial culture and that does two things, or at least here are the two things that strike me about it. Firstly, number one is the mindset you're going to tap into. We've talked about the power of entrepreneurial thinking before on this show and it's a huge part of our game that we don't leverage enough, in my opinion. And if you agree, go back and listen to the two Andrew Davies episodes. They are about how we can all use an entrepreneurial mindset to unlock growth and innovation in a larger, more cumbersome corporate world. Now, number two is about the people you're going to meet. Ultimately, our careers are governed by who we know.

Now, what we know, of course, is critical, but like the tree that falls in the forest, what you know doesn't count if nobody else hears about it. Not only that, a side hustle is a great way to expand your network beyond job similarities. It takes you into a world of passions for business that can truly connect you to other like minded people. Now, there's a health warning that comes with this, though. This is all good food for thought and I genuinely believe that in certain circumstances, the right kind of side hustle can be enormously beneficial. But that's the rub. It's got to be the right kind. It shouldn't detract from the work you do in the daytime and you've got to make sure that you're up to speed on your day job first.

So I'm not talking about going and starting a rival like limited company or something that's a ticket to get you fired. What I'm talking about is finding something that you can get passionate about, that is business connected, outside work that is going to teach you things that you can bring back. Right, let's rejoin Leo and let's talk about the future. Where is product marketing going next, and how does he see trends and culture shifting? Let's find out. We were talking just a minute ago about some very feels like future focused behaviour. It's the antithesis of what life was like when I started my career. But I can just so see why it would benefit organisations like ours for us to allow our people, encourage our people, to go and play in other markets in their spare time.

Speaking about the future, it feels like we're in a moment of enormous change at the moment. I think the AI revolution has brought that to everyone's attention and the interconnectedness of everything. We're recording this a week after crowdstrike brought half the world to an end. And this morning I heard that 800,000 people couldn't get to the Olympics because of a technical failure in Paris today. Obviously, we got you, Leonard, and you're a product marketer thinking about the future next five to ten years. Maybe that's even too far to think these days. Let's go with three. What trends do you see shaping the field of product marketing and or product.

Obviously AI or machine learning. I like to say machine learning. It's a nice way to put it. Obviously, that's affecting all of us, and it's on top of our minds. You've got these obviously bigger companies that are doing highly computing power intensive ways of AI. But then there's new, innovative ways, like gaussian processes, for example, that you need less data and then hence less computing power to do all of those things. So I think that is one of the things that will shape at a more kind of niche level, that will shape the ML AI revolution. Because in marketing, what we'll see is that certain things will become easier. As marketers. We all have our mundane tasks of having, like, for example, the other day, I had to change a few terms within the messaging document and find and replace.

It's a great trick, and it's an old one. And coming to crowdstrike, I mean, it's essentially, you can see that a lot of our technical infrastructure is still underpinned by fairly basic things. Working in banking, financial services, you still have a lot of systems that run on cobalt. Cobalt developers, if anyone knows, they're basically either retired or they have sadly died. So people are being like, people that actually know cobalt are being flown in from wherever they need to be flown in from. They get paid hundreds of thousands of pounds or dollars to fix things. So I think seeing the future, as you say, is harder. Five to ten years. That's why we bring it down to tree. You will see that there will be very niche products that will help product marketers, but particularly marketers, do their jobs better.

And I think, interestingly, we've already talked about a future trend, the side hustles. I think we'll have more time on our hands. You see various trials of OpenAI. That's probably the most popular one about universal basic income and the impact of that. I'm not saying that everyone should just go and do whatever and then get a universal basic income, but it's something that can help create more time, and that's the most precious resource we all have, because with more time comes less stress, and we need people to be less stressed and have more time because that makes people more creative.

And those side hustles, I'd see that as a future trend in work life in general, because people can then do what they really like and that can then be translated into work that they're still obviously doing, because coming back to trends and people, and I noticed that especially in younger people starting off their careers, again, I have the occasional conversation and they're feeling overwhelmed. They're feeling like a lot of them are not investing in startups like I do. And I talk about innovation and how much I like it. And they would say, sometimes I've had that conversation where someone said, just, what's the point? Will we still be here as a human race in five to ten years?

And then I say, of course you can have your doom scenarios, but we're living right here, right now, so why not be a bit more optimistic? Why not just, you know, enjoy the day? If you want to enjoy the day as it comes, why not do something that I think a lot of people want to create for this world, which is value.

Yeah.

And if all of those things kind of come together and obviously anything that involves humans becomes messy, but even in the mess, you can see something beautiful. So I think, again, side hustles, being creative, doing stuff that you love. And again, also the leaders of organisations need to be open to this as well.

Yeah, well, that's a big one. It is a big one. You know, we hinted at it in the first half of today's show, but there is a mindset change needed. You talk about universal basic income. I'm not that many years away from an established universal basic income known as a pension, but I certainly don't want to do. I don't want. I want the time. I really enjoy working, so I'm not looking for extra time to do, I don't know, go gum bits of rubber chicken at a garden centre or play golf with a bunch of other bald people. I don't want to do that stuff. I really like the idea of side hustles you've talked about. I do think there's a mindset change needed in leadership, because attracting and recruiting young talent is really hard.

And I sort of sniggered a little bit when you mentioned that. Nihilistic of what's the point? I've heard that so many times, particularly when it comes to things like saving for a house. Right? What's the point? Because the houses are so expensive now, in this country compared to income? Well, the key to that, I think, is in the first half of this show is if you can't afford to save for a house, don't go invest in other stuff. The reason in my generation invested in houses, actually, rather than in stocks and shares was it wasn't very accessible. I think what you're talking about is important because how we engage and motivate the generation that's arriving in work now, they're the ones that had their lives, like, really weirded out by Covid.

How we get them into work and engage them, I think, is really important. It sort of leads me to a cultural thing, I think. And, you know, at the beginning of our first conversation, you mentioned that, you know, product marketing being a discipline or something that, you know, originated in Silicon Valley and then came here. And I think globally, people are trying to emulate that the kind of innovative culture that there has been in Silicon Valley for the last 20 to 30 years, I think it is starting to influence businesses in Europe and beyond. What do you see next? We've got product marketing now as a nascent role here, working for a tech company. What do you think the next set of influences are to come from there?

I think, yeah, one of the. One of the things we see, obviously, product marketing coming from silicone, I'm not sure if it really originated there, but I presume so that's a good story.

They will run with it. It seems to make sense to me.

As a product marketer. I love storytelling.

So there you go.

We're on with the story. I think the thing we're seeing now is that you'll notice, obviously, you've got Europe and then UK. Yeah. And they're still, like, on the business level, on the startup level, we're besties, you're besties. And let's leave the politics to one side. Let's stay besties. Right. Me being Dutch myself, having lived here for a long time, I'm a dual citizen now, so I can feel as much british as I can feel dutch.

Poor you.

I think we've always been close. I think at some point you had a dutch king as well. We did.

Williams, indeed.

Yeah, but, yeah, I think one of those things I'm seeing is that obviously, DLSC is trying to revive its image. Similar story in Amsterdam, similar story in Frankfurt, Paris, France is doing very well on the startup front. Again, some political influence there, but it's also people working together, having those connections. I would say that in the US, obviously, there's many states. It's a massive beast. But as Europe and UK, we're probably bigger. So we can take those learnings from the US and what we've seen, take them and say, actually, if in France someone says we want to be the next OpenAI, sure, let's work together, let's open up some offices. And then I would say that in the next couple of years, with product marketing at the heart, because essentially those are the connecting bits.

And the product marketing alliance will probably play an important role there as well. It's a massive community of product marketers across the globe, but a lot of them sit in the UK, Europe and US. So they working together, sharing learnings. I think the world has become smaller over the years. Coming back to your point of how much the world has changed and influencing younger generations, I think if you are an optimist, I would say go out there bi weekly or monthly, or if you can just have a conversation with young people, right, just have a conversation. They're out there, they're in communities, have that conversation, try to rub off some of that optimism on them, and eventually that starts affecting all we do and sharing those learnings and making sure that it's applied in a way, in a cultural context.

Because the UK is different from America, many European countries, you know, it's a small place. If you ask an American to drive from New York to LA, that's a long drive. You could do that. And in Europe, if you do the same amount of driving, you could drive from the very west of Europe to the very east of Europe and beyond and cross 20 different cultures, or 25 different cultures, but essentially making sure that everyone works together, making sure that everyone is talking to each other. And I think that's one of the things we're seeing coming over into product marketing, connecting those dots and making sure that we all stay creative, create the time. That is one of the things that we'll see from Silicon Valley as well.

With OpenAI now again leading that charge in UBI and, you know, doing this research, there's been many trials. The most famous example is on the Ronald Reagan, which most people won't expect. There's a Dutch author who wrote about this in one of his books, whereby I think it's utopia for realists. That's the book, which is a very interesting title.

It is.

And the Dutch title is slightly different, which sounds a bit worse, but it's free money for everyone. It's just slightly different.

I like the sound of that.

Yeah, free money for everyone. That's quite good. But obviously a lot of, you know, if you would ask people that are slightly more conservative in their views, they would say, why would you give money to everyone? The point is there, even on the Reagan, there were trials like this. Again, there are trials like this, and often what comes out of it's not necessarily a very Nordic thing or where everyone gets everything and works till three and then hangs up the phone if they get a work call. These will be things that will emerge in the US. You would see that with the side hustle trend, with the creative problem solving that is needed. Because again, they are seeing smart people like Sam Altman.

They're seeing that actually by creating more time for people, they become more creative, and that's what we'll need in the future. And the creative problem solver is the heart of any industry, any place, anytime, with any product. If you're listening to me and listening to Unicorny, I hope you are and you feel like you have a similar sort of journalist mindset, geeky, curious mindset, definitely go into product marketing. That will be my last point on that.

Cool. And how would you advise people? What do they need to study? How do they get into the field?

The number one article that I always send to people is, what is product marketing? By the product Marketing Alliance.

Product Marketing alliance?

Yeah.

Okay, well, we're going to link the product marketing alliance on the website and we'll put a few other links of the things we talked about today. I love an industry organisation, by the way, or an alliance that creates a Venn diagram with them in the middle. It's brilliant. We all do it, but it makes perfect sense.

We're all the centre of the universe.

Well, that is our show, folks. And wasn't it a good one? I want to leave things on the positive note that Leo just left us with. And this goes out to all of our listeners. It doesn't matter if you're just getting into marketing and you're feeling a bit lost. It doesn't matter whether you've been doing it your whole career and you're feeling a bit jaded and sceptical. It doesn't matter if you are the founder or MD of an SME and you are responsible for marketing. Hold on to what Leonard just said about creative problem solving. It is the key in so many ways. It's what our business is all about. Creativity and dynamism are the currencies of marketing. These energies are what give us the special source to do what we do.

And by that I mean taking a business, a product or a service to market in the service of creating happy customers. And they are what makes us different to other functions of a business. So if you feel like you have creative DNA within you, then marketing can offer you a job that feels like home. It's the solution to many of the challenges we face in our life and careers. As King Lear's wise fool said, nothing can come of nothing. We all need to do something in the face of a problem and creativity is what gets us started. Its also the link to the customer, our understanding of them as real people, not targets or numbers. Thats what gives us a huge edge in business and it takes a creative human approach thats highly empathetic, verging on telepathic.

If youre ever thinking like whats the point of marketing? Try and start a business without it. Try solving a business problem without marketing. You will end up solving it from your perspective, from your business's perspective. But in the minds of the only people who matter, your customers, you've probably solved the wrong problem. Their behaviour won't shift one iota and that business will fail. So bring your creative chops to work my friends. Not only will it get you started in a career or help you crown one, it will sustain you through the bumps of the long road ahead. And as far as I can see right now, AIn't gonna replace the creative thinker. Not yet anyhow. You have been listening to unicorny. I'm your host Dom Hawes.

Nichola Fairley is the series producer, Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant, Pete Allen is the editor and Peter Powell is our scriptwriter.