Psychology in B2B Marketing
In B2B marketing, having a good grasp of psychological principles can significantly improve engagement and build stronger relationships with the target audience. Recently, experts have discussed psychology's crucial role in marketing; the difficulties marketers encounter as the landscape evolves, and the creative strategies they use to overcome these challenges.
Guests
Robb Taylor-Hiscock, Senior Content Marketing Specialist at OneTrust
Kev Johnson, Technical Marketing Architect at Rubrik, Inc
Welcome to today's episode of b2B futures podcast. Today, we are diving into a fascinating world of psychology in B2B marketing, exploring how a deeper understanding of your customers
psychological triggers can revolutionize our marketing strategies. So joining us today, we have two experts in the field. We have Rob Taylor Hitchcock, um, senior content marketing specialist at One Trust, and Kevin Johnson, technical marketing architect at Rubrik
Um, they'll share their insights on the role of psychology in creating more impactful B2B marketing campaigns and how they've navigated the challenges and opportunities within their respective roles. So would you like to give a sentence on yourselves? Yeah, uh, thanks for having me. Yeah. Um, Rob Taylor Hitchcock, I'm a senior content marketing specialist at One Trust, uh, which is a trust intelligence platform. We, um, um, offer businesses compliant management software and automation tools across privacy, security
ethics, ESG, try and create a more trusted experience. Um, as a, as a brand. Um, I myself, I'm personally focused on privacy and data governance, um, and creating content for, um, the privacy office and helping them understand, like, their legal requirements and how to adapt those into their
privacy programs.
Awesome.
Um, and yeah, my name is Kevin Johnson. I'm a tech marketing architect at Rubrik. Um, probably not the traditional kind of, uh, panel member for, for this podcast. Um, I kind of my focus is on the technology behind the products that we
uh, that rubrik, um, bring to market. Um, I'm specifically focused on our data security, um, suite. So things like detecting ransomware attacks, identifying overprovisioned data access, um, classifying data, all of that kind of stuff. Um, it's a super exciting
time to be in the industry, but I've been I've been in the industry as, uh, tech marketer for six and a half, seven years. Uh, before that I spent, I don't know, maybe let's just think 12, 13, 14 years on the customer side of things. Um, as an IT consultant as heck, I started out as a help desk monkey
So, um, you know, I've I've done all of those those awful, awful jobs as well. And I think the experiences that I got there really helped me in what I do now.
Amazing. And, Tom, uh, yes.
Uh, my name is Tom Gatton. I'm the chief executive
and founder of Ads Act, a B2B ad platform.
So let's start talking about, why psychology is crucial in B2B marketing
rob, how integrating the human touch in content marketing has shaped your engagement strategies. At one trust. Can you tell us a bit of that?
Yeah for sure. So a
lot of my work is based in in organic engagement. Right. So I'm creating content that I'm trying to connect with people. Um, so that really does just come down to psychology, uh, whether consciously or unconsciously, you're, you're looking at humans, right? And in content marketing, you know, there's the old sort of saying, like, you've got to excite and delight your audience, um, which is wildly overused. Um, but when you kind of get down to the granular elements of it, it's true. Right? You and and then you need. But that's where you need to understand
your audience. And I think as marketers, we talk a lot about audience demographics, and we like to neatly tuck these up into little portfolios of job titles. Right. We're going to target this at the data protection officer. The chief privacy officer, um, create personas. But
when you're marketing or externally creating content that somebody's going to engage with, there's a human at the end of that, trail. And, you, you almost have to start there and work backwards sometimes and understand that to
really create the kind of content that is going to engage people, it's going to, you know, excite and delight, which again, overused, but it does ring kind of true. So generally like when I'm approaching content in that sense, I like to try and put myself in a shoes of an individual, you know?
Yeah, it's really important.
Yeah. For sure. I mean, when I'm thinking of personally, I'm thinking of like gated content, right, in this instance. And. Is what I'm going to write is what I'm going to create. If I went to a website
put my personal information into that website, am I getting a good value exchange there? You know, if you put your if you put your personal information, which is a it's a lot to give up, right? Your personal information, it's valuable to you. You've got to trust the brand that you're giving it to to receive something that not
helpful or, you know, poor quality.
It it then breaks trust, I think, how can you measure the, um, quality of the digital experience in the early stages? So it should affect what happens next, right? It should. A better experience early on should make it a higher conversion rate from Mql to SQL. And I suppose it
should also, uh, increase the cost of an Mql in the first place. But other ways of actually getting leading indicators on measuring how how good the experience, what how positive the psychological effects are of your early stage, top of funnel content and design, etc.
I think there's something to be said for like longevity in good performance, right? Maybe not like a specific metric that you might be looking for, but, if you're creating some good awareness content that sits at the top of your funnel and it performs consistently
and for a long time consistently, I think you're safe to assume that it's probably being well received and good quality. It's.
So you're looking at engagement basically. Yeah, I would say engagement.
Right. And I think there's I think there's anecdotal
data you can take away from it as well. You know, look at social media and engagement there. You're getting comments on it. Are people talking about it? People sharing it. Um, we have a thing, uh, one trust recently with quite a few people. I mean, not in an ideal scenario, of course, but we've had we've
noticed people taking our gated content and sharing it publicly because they found it so interesting. Does this resonate with you, Kev? You mentioned the importance of, starting with the with the outcome in mind. For example, we were talking about
engagement. Is that a kind of outcome that you could have in mind? Yeah, definitely.
One of the things that we do as marketers, whether it's a conscious or an unconscious thing, is we do that thing where we
try to put people in boxes, we put them in swim lanes, and it's like, okay, well, we're going to build this piece of content that's going to target this swim lane, but you've got a whole range of different types of people that exist that have that job title or, you know, that have that degree of responsibility. So kind of figuring out what problems they have is
is, is one of the super important things. And another another thing that that really struck with me, there was, you know, this concept of gated content. And when I think from a psychological perspective, you know, if I'm building a piece of content that is designed to be gated, I'm looking at very specific
types of content that I'm going to be looking to deliver. So it might be a long form technical whitepaper, but a lot of the content that I build is really designed to be out there. Ungated it's to drive interest for other things. So, you know, we'll do, uh, we'll do a webinar and then if people are interested then cool. Okay, here's, here's a gated whitepaper that
you can get access to, but really kind of just just coming back to your to your question there the way the way I look at it is the first thing I need to do is, you know, identify what problem we're trying to solve for the person on the other end of that transaction. So you know, that that problem may be, oh, well
we've just been hit by a ransomware attack. How do we make sure that we're in a better position to recover in future? It could equally be we've got some business processes. And, you know, it doesn't always have to be about selling something. And in fact, probably 90% of the content I build doesn't sell anything. It just generates interest. And
it makes people want to leverage the tooling that they've already got, um, a little bit better. So we're talking about, you know, better arming businesses to improve their outcomes, particularly from a data security perspective where I'm standing. But then, yeah, as I say. So I look to identify a target audience and we'll put people in those boxes, but then we'll try
and draw, you know, draw a box around that specific subset that we're interested in and kind of figure out, well, where do these people hang out? How do we engage with them in a meaningful manner? It's not just about, well, okay, we're going to ship this white paper, because if we ship 5000 copies of it, this campaign's been a success. It's what happens
once they've got that asset. So we need to make sure we meet them in the channel that's relevant to them and whether that they have positive experiences.
You know, it's a bit like building absolutely B2C or otherwise you're looking to create. Yeah. So it might be the positive experience might be that they trust the.
Yeah. And
and I guess I guess a big part of that is you know, I work I work in the data security industry. There's a lot of fear that's used in marketing in that specific segment.
And balaclavas in the ads.
Yeah. Yeah. It's I mean I'm wearing a hoodie now, but my hood is bad.
So
I'm not one of the bad hackers.
Yeah. Um, but we, we see a lot of that. And that has a very emotional response. So, you know, I deliberately I do my best to avoid that kind of FUD that we see across the industry. And I think where you engage with people positively, you get much
better outcomes. You build that trust that you need within the industry. And that's how you get people to keep coming back.
Because some people come, some people talk about fear based marketing as being a very positive, very useful thing, chimp brain and all that. There's a I think there's a book about it trying to create kind of yeah. You know. Yeah. Negative. Yeah
Based. There's, there's there's all, there's, there's, there's more than one way to skin a cat. You know, there's, there's definitely many, many different ways of approaching these things. I'm much more of a fan of, you know, trying to keep things as positive. I have a strict policy that I do not talk down about our competitors. We're all operating. We're all trying to
solve problems, um, for our customers. Um, you know, how we go about that might be different, but I, I'm not I'm not interested in, you know. Oh, that that that competitor is terrible because X, Y and Z, I really just want to sing about, you know, the stuff that I'm working on and why I think it's the best way to solve those problems
Um, but, yeah, you need to just kind of coming back to we need to we need to kind of start with that outcome in mind and, you know, then then kind of work backwards. And, you know, the other thing that I find is, you know, start with that outcome in mind. And that outcome might require more than one piece of content. It might require an entire campaign that
takes 18 months. So you need to break down those outcomes into, you know, how how are we looking to address those things? Um, and then eventually you get all the way back to the beginning and then you can kind of start work.
That's really interesting. And it's, um, I think it's a perfect introduction to to see how important it is to
understand psychology. In, in B2B marketing, we talk about making structural decisions of how you create the whole strategy of a campaign if you gate or not gate the content and also how you understand your audience and and the content that you create for that audience
Um, so let's start talking about the challenges that you face as B2B marketers. Rob, you mentioned, how mature is, is your organization and, and
and, and the challenges that you are facing today are not the same that you had in the past. So what kind of challenges have you faced in this evolving, content marketing strategy?
So one, trust is a young business, relatively speaking.
Seven, eight years old now. We hadn't really been focusing on good content marketing practices. Um, we've been blogging and writing ebooks and white papers and wonderful resources for everybody. But not very well for like, you know, SEO
for example, so there was a real push to begin with to build that foundation, and meeting people there. And we had to build that foundation to be able to go beyond that and start like breaking out of, like this, this content marketing playbook. It's given us the opportunity to kind of test content and, and see what lands, see what engaged people. And it's kind of with, with the sort of safety net of it's kind of all right. If it if it's not performing.
And do you think SEO is a little bit against that experimentation
kind of mindset?
In terms of like the playbook of
content marketing, I think SEO goes against creativity. If you Google like one of your keywords, you know, if you've got your list of keywords that you want, if you Google that your top five results from your competitors, from everybody, it's probably going to be the same content, right? It just is. Everybody's answering questions, the same H2 tags. And you know
more or less verbatim actually on a lot of this stuff. So there's a need for it because you have to be in those top five result, or you're not going to get the clicks through search engine. But to take that to that further is then to work out, how am I going to deliver this content
make it visible, but also not deliver what everybody else is saying? How am I going to add the value that, like we have at Onetrust, for instance, we have a range of like brilliant experts here. How can I introduce that in here? What can I do to make this experience better for our audience or
or those people that don't know that our audience yet, and they're trying to make a selection as to who to trust. If we're in that top five results and we're answering a question they need to know the answer to, but we're giving them, like, not the standard SEO based response stuffed with keywords
I'd like to think they're going to come to us and then click through to the next page and the next page. And you know, that's the idea of the marketing funnel, right? So you've got that once they're in, we can start moving them around in it. But you're not going to get in there if you're just the same as everybody else.
Have either of you used um, um, cultural
tropes or sort of psychological patterns, consciously, to break through that kind of barrier and get people to, um, you know, pay attention to this rather than the flood of other content on LinkedIn or whatever, things like, we were talking about hoodies earlier
it's very clearly a visual metaphor, isn't the same thing would be like the concept of disruptors versus people in suits like, you know, Apple versus Microsoft or, you know, that's a pattern, isn't it? It's a kind
of established. It's basically drawing on a psychological or a societal understanding of generations. Older people and younger people. Are there other really deeply embedded cultural or psychological patterns or narratives that you can deliberately exploit to kind
of tell a story?
We were speaking with someone this morning who was talking about the use of, um, neuroscience, basically in B2B marketing, the idea of going so he'd
created a trade show, store, which was, uh, you know, it had a, it had a distinctive scent. So he came actually got some sort of sense generating device, I don't know what it was and gave people chocolate because chocolate, you know, scientifically releases dopamine and water receptors
all of that stuff.
Yeah. It's like when you go into a supermarket and they've got the smell of fresh bread piped through.
Yeah.
It was like that sort of thing. Maybe what you're doing is that maybe providing a feeling of safety, if it's a more positive kind of yeah, versus the competitors that are being scary and hoodies.
Yeah.
I think from, from my perspective, the, the one thing that I do very, very consciously try to do is
really focus on empowerment. So if the person, you know, picking up whether, whether it's, you know, a person on a webinar, um, whether it's a person watching a YouTube video, if it's someone attending, you know, a speaking session at an event, I want them to go away feeling like
they they are empowered to do something about, whatever the reason was that they came to the content. I want them to go away feeling, yes, I've got good value out of this. I know what my next steps are and I'm going to write them down. So I really I really want people to feel, um, they're empowered. The other thing that I always try to do on things like, um, where there is two way conversation and, you know, in a lot of cases that's not that's not there. But if I'm doing a webinar, I'll always try to leave, you know, ten, 15 minutes at the end of it, just for completely open questions
ask me whatever you like. Um, I might not know the answer. And I find that's that's, you know, that's that's a thing that I've kind of picked up from other people in the industry is if you don't know the answer, put your hand up and say you don't know the answer because nobody knows all the answers. So, you know, and again, that that helps to build engagement as well
Yeah.
And is that related with your brand as well. That feeling of empowerment is is it part of your brand.
When I first heard of the company I work for, um, it was a back up company. And, you know, that was like, okay, backup is interesting. It's an important thing, but it is not a sexy thing. It's just a thing that you need to have. And this whole pivot and the creation of this, this new category, um, um, yeah, I think it is. It's about empowerment
It's about giving organizations the capability to deal with the bad stuff that's on their doorsteps.
Now, I think the openness is an interesting idea, the idea of ask me any question. Yeah. Also, if I don't know the answer, I'll put my hand up because it's in it's certainly there's probably
a tension there between being more open. Absolutely makes people trust you more. But also possibly there is, uh, sort of prestige in being and being inaccessible and sort of, uh, you know, being portraying yourself as just for the elite.
And yeah, I'm on an iPhone.
You're not
really one of the elite, but if you play your cards right, maybe I'll speak with you.
I guess both work. Um, I find this I find that approach works, uh, for me as, as a consumer, um, as a customer. But also, you know, that's that's the approach I've taken, to engagement
with customers and prospects, etc., etc.. Control. I mean, I certainly think uncertainty is scary. So where you are, where you're simplifying things for people, where you're saying, you know, at the event, trying to give people bullet points, trying to, you know, reduce. Yeah, complexity. You're
removing uncertainty. And yeah, that also give people a feeling of control. I'm just trying to relate it back to kind of what could loosely be called psychological principles or kind of social tropes, narrative kind of patterns.
I think there's some stuff that can be said there for like, like the feeling of safety. You're in a safe space, in a safe space to share ideas and
you know, let your unknowns be answered from from our perspective. Right. The business is built in, uh, like the advent of GDPR, businesses generally didn't really know what they were doing, so they almost needed that, like arm around the shoulder, like it's a scary
world. But look, let's, let's let's get through it. Let's guide you through it. Let's show you how it's done. Um, and that's kind of that's matured for us as well from, from that like compliance piece that you were saying and, and it's moving on now into this like there's value to be had here. It's not about, you know, appeasing the regulators and staying off their radar. It's about
using personal data properly and responsibly and creating business value with it. Not not just hiding from not just hiding beneath, you know, a record of processing activities. And, you know, I'm compliant with the law. So I can't get caught out here. There's
value to be had in the data and you can use it responsibly. And this is how you can bring privacy function, which is always sort of been quite. And I'm sure this is the same for security. Right. It's always sort of been seen as well. You said it like the no function. No you can't do this. No you can't do that. This is moving into let's unlock this
Yes, you can use this data because we're confident it's protected properly. It's changing that narrative. So maybe people the feeling of safety and then value.
So maybe maybe insecurity where you know, I was talking about that tension between kind of making an aspirational exclusive club that people might potentially want to be a
part of. Maybe that was just massively overdone in security, as in there was this elite cadre of of security CIOs who would say no to everything, basically. And that was a way of being exclusive, and companies would come in and help make it easier for them to say no. And then a brand that actually does the opposite is not oversaturating
the market. It's kind of telling. It's giving people what they want, which is more of a feeling of, actually, we're on your side, we're in your tribe, we're in your group, which is just different. So maybe it wouldn't. Maybe there are other worlds in which it's the other way around. But, you know, yeah, security is very much exclusive to inclusive maybe.
Yeah. I think from, from a security perspective
if I, if I think back maybe ten years, um, one of the reasons that data security, information security teams had that reputation of being the big red, I said no, is because they didn't have the tooling to deal with the challenges that were trying to address. And now the industry
has moved on. It's, you know, it's identified what those challenges are. So now instead of just having to have a blanket, no, it's a case of, okay, well, we've got this tool and we've got this tool. And actually one of the challenges, um, that that we face as a company is there are hundreds and thousands of security companies
out there. And, you know, many of them get gobbled up by the big guns. And that's that's all cool. But just getting face time with those people who work in that security function can be challenging. So it's like, well, we it's it security is the one industry that I've seen where a company is happy to just
go and pick up point solution after point, solution after point solution. Um, everything else that I've worked in from from a technology perspective, what I've seen is you have that happen and then you have this consolidation. So Microsoft will come along and they'll either buy or they'll build their own technologies around that sort of thing. And then Cisco will do the same. And
so you see a lot of that happening, but it just doesn't seem to have happened as yet in security. And that's something that interests me about the psychology of, I guess we call them the buyer persona. But, you know, the, the people who are actually at the coalface dealing with these problems. I think
I would be I would be suffering, um, decision paralysis, you know, which tool should I use to deal with this particular type of incident? So, um, there's a lot to be said for simplification on there as well.
Yeah, but maybe that's a thing around privacy. Perhaps there
is. Perhaps people believe that there is some advantage to keeping your own special mix of security tools a secret, basically, and not buying the a single monolith it's possible everyone else is using.
Definitely possible.
It's like Apple don't get viruses or whatever just because there's many fewer of them than the hackers. Don't bother to write
there's a yeah, there's an interesting piece of psychology around that as well. Right. So I say that as a massive Apple fan boy. So you know.
And Rob, you mentioned using Informed Instinct, to
know your audience and, and how they want to consume content. Um, we talk already about breaking out from SEO, but do you have more examples of, of successful, campaigns based on this human centric and innovative approach
in the background for a little while is, um, this idea of like an eight bit video game where one trust nothing to do with really the business, purely engagement, purely getting people on our site, sitting there, sitting there for 20 minutes if they want, play the game cool, join the leaderboard. Just fun, nostalgic, kind of fun and
that's kind of born out of like knowing our audience, you know, are in a certain age range who likely have been, you know, around at a certain point in time where, you know, space invader type games may have been very popular. Right. Um, I'm not generalising
our audience, but it's just using that information to be able to know that it's like that. You know, that that is probably going to be a hit if we can get it done. There's lots of challenges in the background for actually making it. Right. I, I mean, I was talking to you earlier about, um, I tried to start writing
it myself on a, on a program and found it wildly difficult. Found out the program was for, uh, 5 to 8 year olds, and decided I would maybe leave it to the experts to actually write the game. But, you know, going back to that idea of, like, the informed instinct, it's using the information you have
but not making a decision solely on data. Right? Like love data, love getting all the input I can get factual. You know, this is this is it's performing well. It's not performing well, but you have to have a human element to it. It has
to be there has to be some instinct. It has to be creativity. Otherwise you like, especially when we're talking about psychology of marketing. Psychology is fundamentally a human, you
can't get that through data. You can't you can't engage that through data.
I think there is there is some value in just a brand purely demonstrating that they understand the demographics of the characteristics of their audience. Full stop. I mean, we had, um, the CMO paddle, uh, which is a very fast growing unicorn payments company recently
on, they had understood from data the demographics of their audience, their ages. They tended to be running mid-sized startups. You know, they weren't startups anymore. Scale ups, just going abroad into their first 2 or 3 geographies, and they put on a blink182 concert and invited. But I think there was blink 182 concert happening, but they brought
up like several hundred tickets and a whole a lot of their audience, uh, turned up again. You've got the nostalgia factor that you're talking about, Rob, with the eight bit video game. And, um, apparently it was very successful. Yeah. He also mentioned all they were doing was just purely demonstrating. We know that you share something and
and, and we know we understand you. And that was kind of enough to get people engaging a lot with their brand.
I think it's I think it is totally that, you know, and it's, it's we're a company. You're a human being would like you to buy a product. Probably. I'll meet you in the middle. Okay. Let's meet you here. Yeah. And we can have
a conversation there.
Mhm.
Um, however that is through the different teams, there's obviously going to be different ways of looking at it. But from my perspective it's what content can I, can I put forward that you as a buyer or a person fundamentally are going to come to me and there we can have that discussion
because again, it goes back to that value exchange. Right. Um, if it's it's got to be fair on both sides.
Yeah. I think, I think one of the things I've been, um, really trying to learn a little bit more about in the past, past few months is, you know, identifying the best channel
to engage with specific personas or, you know, specific people. Um, with. And so one of the tools that we, we obviously have is there's, there are there are 1,000,001 channels that you can, you can look at. So just kind of like pick some at random and then just do, just
do some testing. So if you if you want to get a piece of messaging out there, put it out for free on YouTube or, you know, maybe put it behind maybe, maybe put it behind a gated website, maybe also just send it out by email. See see what you get. Um, I think certainly from a, from a technical
marketing perspective, because I'm generally not as exposed to the metrics side of the business as, um, some other areas of the, of the company are I just kind of I have historically had a tendency to build something, toss it out into the world. Okay. That's it. It's done. Move on to the
next thing. And there's no there's not really been any analysis of, you know, well, how what was the impact of that? Did we get you know, we sent out these emails. Did we get any any responses back. Did people read those emails? So I know we're kind of saying that, you know, metrics aren't everything, but metrics can help you
learn a lot of stuff, um, that, that you, that you just wouldn't be able to, uh, to do you can, you can subscribe to all the email newsletters that you like. It'll tell you, okay, well, this is the best channel to be doing this in, but you can bet that your competitors are doing the same thing. So all of a sudden you're now just shoving into the same channel. How do you stand out there? So
So I really love the idea of the eight bit video game. That's that's awesome.
That's a beauty of marketing, I think. Of course you need to you need to make decisions based on data and some decisions just by pure instinct. As as you were mentioning, Rob and
and sometimes those things that are totally out of the box are the ones that have the the best ROI, very frequently the best.
I mean, they do also run the risk of wasting a lot of money as well. If your instinct is this is not always right.
Yes, but you need support in something and that thing could be your brand, for example, that that's why I was asking you before
uh, Kev, about if that feeling that you were talking about it was related to your brand. Because if you really believe in something, uh, and your brand believes in in that feeling. Okay, let's do something related with that. Maybe you don't have the data, but your brand believes in that. So you have
the support that you are building a brand and that's at the end is more powerful than one specific campaign.
Yeah, I think the the whole branding thing is, is, is another thing that's that's kind of super interesting. Uh, you know, how how do you how do you build that, that story brand? It's all all of that stuff is you can have all of the technology
all of the products that you like, but you have to tell a story and your brand is part of that story. So how you, you know, how everything kind of ties back into, into, into into the brand. So you know how how you engage with your customers, how you engage with your competitors, the rest of the market
how you differentiate yourselves and you know, you do different things. If I think back to the first time I heard of, um, the company I work for, they, um, I was at a trade show event and I walked past the booth there and they gave me a pair of socks. And at the time, it's like all
of the all of the other vendors at that trade show, they were handing out t shirts and hoodies and stickers and pens and little lumps of plastic junk that immediately went in the bin. But the socks really stood out to me. It was like, that's that was a super original idea. And it's it's an idea that the industry has then gone, oh yeah, socks are popular
Yeah.
So now it's kind of like all these other things, but it was just, you know, doing something a little bit different, which is one of the, you know, you have that power, um, as a start up in the industry to just try something that a little different when you're it's kind of a humble thing, isn't it.
The socks. Because it's. Yeah. I don't know, it's just a humble piece of clothing and
therefore it's sort of slightly, slightly quirky. Maybe it's a bit too easy. Which is why, yeah, everyone ended up doing it. Yeah. But it does align with the openness and the inclusivity. I guess the low key nature of everyone needs socks, right?
It's, um, it's it's kind of cool, but yeah, it's just like it was. It was nice to see
a start up doing something a bit different. Um, and you know, I've, I've seen, I've seen, seen startups doing things like. Okay, well, if you'll come and speak to us at the booth, if you'll take a demo, if you'll fill in this form, we're not going to give you something that you don't want. We're not going to give you a t shirt that's too big for you or too small for you, or, you know, you don't really want. Anyway, um, here's a list
of ten charities. If you come and talk to us, we'll donate $100 to that charity. Yeah, you know which? Whichever one means the most to you. So there's all kinds of different ways of doing that. And and again, that kind of all ties back to, um, to, to to the brand, you know, whether you've got things like, um, social consciences, um, all of, all of this stuff is, is super
super important.
And things that are not only paper, you know, that you are showing real actions. If that's really important for you, for your brand, you it's like, show me what you really are doing about charity
for example. Mhm.
Yeah.
Very much, very much helps if that, you know, the story brand, if the story of the brand aligns probably with a, just a very, very common narrative, like a parent child relationship with Apple and Microsoft and Apple Rebellion against whatever
traditional gray box or whatever or um, yeah. Kind of the where your tribe, where your friends they're, they're too exclusive. They're the big Red. No or whatever anything that's as primal as you can and as common as you can is probably probably helps. That's what politicians do, after all. Depressingly
appeal to our lowest instincts.
Why do you have to drag us down there?
Sorry, but you're right.
It's, you know, from from a psychology perspective, if you think of if whenever I think of focus groups, I think of politics. And that always makes me feel a little bit sick inside. So, um
you know, I try to learn stuff, I ask questions, I try to be curious about, um, you know, why people would make decisions that they make without saying that's the wrong decision. Just why would you make those decisions? And then you learn more about that person. You learn more about other people like them. Um, and that's that's, uh, that's
something I find super interesting. There was was something that that you mentioned a little earlier that really kind of resonated with me, which was, um, it just kind of really made me think about how marketing really is a team sport. And I don't know how how big, you know, marketing teams, you you
guys work with. Um, but, you know, I'm a very small portion of a whole bunch of experts, right? I know, I know very specifically where my strengths and weaknesses are. And knowing where my weaknesses are is super important from a psychological perspective, because I know if I need a killer piece of messaging
I am not going to write that messaging. I could spend all day writing stuff on a whiteboard, and it's not going to happen. But I happen to know that I've got a really, really kick ass, uh, product marketing team. For example, if we need to turn around something that requires input from industry experts outside of the company, our content marketing team, they've
got access to all of those kinds of people. So don't try and do everything yourself. Don't try and boil the ocean. Know what you can, what your superpower is. And, you know, be really good at that superpower. But don't hesitate to to reach out to others because you'll be much more successful if you do
and just on that as well, I'd say like just listening. Like as much as it's engaging, just listening to people's ideas, you know, uh, where I sit, very creative part of the marketing business. But like, care of what you do, I wouldn't be able to go near. So
you might have different ideas. Like, I imagine your your brain works in a different way to mine. So if you're going to say something, it might click and I can add my flavor to that. And then that's where a great idea can be born. If yeah, this idea of just listening and just taking on different ideas and different skill sets because they come from different perspectives
but they're all aiming to that common goal, right?
Yeah, I find that whiteboarding is a superpower. You know, just get a pen and just start writing stuff down, get a bunch of people on a call or in a room, scribble all that stuff down, do that brain dump, and then kind of take a photo of that brain dump and then refine it and refine it and refine it and
you're probably going to get a whole bunch of ideas that you wouldn't have come up with. Um, otherwise. I guess the one thing that we've we've kind of not talked about, um, that is something that that kind of really hits with me is this kind of the, you know, the 20 ton elephant in the room of, uh, generative AI and
and you know, how how present that is in some marketing and how absent it is in some cases as well. And I don't know about anybody else, but on on a given day I will open my email and I can probably discard 30 emails because you can tell they were not written by a human being.
Yeah
you got a lot of that, I think.
I think Gen AI has, um, has some great capabilities, um, particularly when it comes to, you know, if we start thinking about the psychology of people who don't necessarily think in the same way that we do, you tell Gen AI that you want an outcome from a specific point of view
Um, that can really that can that can really help as well. But that's, that's, that's an initial that's a starting point. It's not that's not the finished product. There's the human beings in the marketing industry. And I'm I'm not personally concerned about Gen II taking my job. I
I don't I don't think that's something that's likely to happen at any point in the near future. But I think it's a super important tool in the arsenal of anyone who's working in the industry.
Yeah, I think you're right. I think we have started to get, uh, defenses against it now, kind of standard stuff.
Like I was going
to say, um, like job security from my point of view as a writer, you know, with the advent of ChatGPT, you know, shook a lot of fear into me. But like, all of a sudden, anybody can do what I can do in seconds. Almost
like you were saying, Tom, there's defenses against it now. Audiences kind of know and know they're they're being written to I. It looks lazy, but you never you never lose the human side of marketing. And I think it's personally I think it's unwise
to strip humans from marketing or any, any business I'm speaking to. I'm speaking to a business, um, just last week and they were really going all in on AI. Like, um, this is totally separate to any actual, like, meaningful work conversation, but they were going all in
on, um, AI and I've sort of taken a bit of back because it was like they were leaving no room for human intervention, no human editing or anything. And you think there's a place for it in the efficiency? Great. Like, if I can put a thousand words on paper
in five minutes, cool. You save me, like two hours of time. But I've got to go and edit that. I've got to edit that well.
It's the. It's the infinite number of monkeys with infinite number of typewriters. You know, how how do you get from the output of that to the complete works of Shakespeare? Um, I guess the other thing is it's
um, it's garbage in, garbage out. So the outcomes that you get from generative AI are driven by whatever you train those models on. And in some cases, that has not been high quality data. And you get things like, you know, you get the hallucinations
So from a technical perspective, um, you know, people are using it to write, write code and then the code is being executed and it's like, well, I'm expecting these constructs to exist and they don't exist. So, you know, it's it's it's super interesting. Again, I think as a, as a tool that kind of helps you get
started for the brainstorming, all of that kind of things. It's really useful. It's also really helpful at kind of gathering different viewpoints as well. But yeah, you cannot just go, okay, there we go. Job done. We've saved. Saved.
I like the idea of the the, you know, million monkeys with a million typewriters idea as in, yeah, like you don't even need generative
AI. You just need a random character generator with enough time and you will generate everything. What an AI is quite good at is. Yeah, it's basically reducing the number of potential, you know, combinations of letters down to, uh, in a relatively small number, which are much, much, much, much better. But actually to get the right one, you then need a human being
to be able to select from the ten different outputs and then edit it down to, you know, absolutely, absolutely but that combination and that balance of as you mentioned, garbage in, garbage out, but if you feed with good information generative AI, you can get
an initial good result that then another human being can edit that, that sandwich. It's really interesting and and yeah, it's very good at missing the point, I think.
And
if you kind of know what the, what the, the ideas are that you want to be getting goes. I think a lot of we've, we've come across a lot of different kind of patterns on this podcast. Things like safety, you know, the idea of exclusivity, inclusivity, uh, tribes, um, nostalgia. There
are certain patterns that we know exist. So we can probably tell the AI what we want. You know, we know the audience which the generative AI system won't know. So if you can kind of combine those things and say, this is therefore what we need, of course it can then produce good stuff.
Could be an interesting next few years, let's put it that way
definitely. Well guys, we are coming to an end and I want to say a big thank you. We've had a great conversation. In my opinion, understanding the psychological triggers. Triggers in in B2B and that we can it helps us to to connect with with our audience
And I think that's the most important thing, understanding our audience and and giving good content and good experiences, creating brands, etc.. So it's been a great conversation. I don't know if you want to say a few words. We still have a minute.
Thanks for having me on. Um, there's a bunch
of stuff that I was kind of trying to keep notes on, because there's some ideas that I, I hadn't thought about. So I'm looking forward to listening to this and, uh, uh, yeah, I'm I've got some more reading to do. Apparently, I need to buy some more books.
Yeah, likewise. Thanks for having me.
