FuturePrint Podcast
FuturePrint is dedicated to and passionate about the power of print technology to enable new opportunities and create new value. This pod features deep-dive discussions with the people behind the tech as well as market analysis, trends, marketing and storytelling!
FuturePrint Podcast
#222 Practical tips to use data and psych to connect with your customers and create demand with Philippe Assouline
This is episode 2 in a series of discussions with Philippe Assouline, an expert in behavioural marketing and consumer psychology, and the founder of propelloriq, a boutique strategy consultancy firm working with leading companies globally.
Philippe's intriguing journey started with a career in computer science, and then law to PhD studies in mass psychology and data to now working with some of the world's leading brands to help them better understand the emotional landscapes of consumer behaviour and develop their emotional and marketing strategies. The discussion includes a fascinating lens on how evolutionary biology and neuroscience can influence consumer buying decisions and help companies thrive in an increasingly complex world.
In this episode, Philippe unravels the profound impact of emotional intelligence on marketing strategies and consumer behaviour. Philippe shares insights on how brands can connect with their audiences by focusing on what those audiences need to feel, enabling deeper engagement and fostering loyalty. We talk about the practical ways to improve our deeper emotional connections with our customers, and potential customers in order to develop stronger relationships and more impactful results!
The discussion covers the following topics:
- Importance of emotional connection in marketing
- Why starting with the customer & listening to their problems is so vital! And how to do it. The answers are always here according to Philippe!
- Transitioning from logic to emotion in consumer choices
- The "Hearts THEN Minds" model explained
- Role of cognitive biases in shaping buyer behaviour
- Storytelling as a strategic marketing tool - how you can do it
- Value of continuous audience feedback and research
- Practical and accessible techniques for businesses to implement emotional intelligence
- How social media influences consumer dynamics
- The necessity for companies to adapt and innovate continuously - and how to do so affordably, today
- Final thoughts on creating authentic connections in marketing
Contact
Philippe Assouline: info@propelloriq.com
Website: propelloriq.com
Listen on:
Apple Podcast
Google Podcast
Spotify
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Speaker 2:Welcome to the FuturePrint podcast, marco Timpson here, really happy to have back with us today Philippe Asselin, who is an expert in behavioural marketing, among other things. He's joining us for a second installment and I'm really happy about that because this one's going to take the first conversation on to um. I'm going to say there I say a logical level because you give us a bit of a how-to and we talked about logic in the first one. If you haven't heard the first episode with philip, I urge you to look back and listen back, rather to episode 220. However, philippe kindly going to summarize 40 minutes um into a succinct kind of um set of words which will will help us kind of summarize where we started, maybe on the theory and the observations and and so on came out of that discussion, before we move on to the how-to, which I think is a practical way to tackle things. Well, listen, welcome back, philippe.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Thank you for having me again. I enjoyed our last chat.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's good. We covered a load of ground and really interesting content and so on. So, philippe, give us a little bit of a summary of, perhaps, what we talked about in the first episode, so that we can then kind of take it into the next level. Go for it. Yeah, give us a summary.
Speaker 3:I'll try to minimize how much I talk about myself here, but I'm a first born former lawyer. It might be difficult myself here, but I'm a first born former lawyer. It might be difficult. I decided to study this field of, like you said, behavioral marketing, the psychology of communication more broadly, because I was starting to be mesmerized at what I was seeing about how society was changing with social media. Movements were starting, brands were becoming popular and I decided to study it. I did a PhD and I've been working with companies and other campaigns around the world for 10 years and we talked about what I've learned so far.
Speaker 3:So social media has transformed the way people behave. When we're bombarded with information, we actually rely on information less. When we are bombarded with choice, we don't all subscribe to the same information culture, whatever it may be. When we were younger, you and I, we were watching probably more or less the same shows on TV, listening to the more or less same spectrum of music options, more or less same culture. Now people get to micro-aggregate into very, very specific niches and when they're bombarded with information, they rely on emotion and impulse a lot more.
Speaker 3:So that led me, through my work, to develop this model I call hearts and minds. We spoke about it where, for companies to stay relevant or, even more than that, to thrive and to get clarity on what their target audiences want, you have to start with emotion. After that you go to connection. These are two very, very powerful evolutionary signals. How do I feel about this, and does it make me feel like I'm part of a group I want to be part of? That's how we survived and I use evolutionary psychology to drive this. It's the most reliable thing we all have in common. Once you've covered those two, you start to get to the more minds part. You get to values. Does this align with how I feel If I'm the target audience? Does this align with how I feel? Right and wrong work. And then you go to is it logical to want this product? Is it something that makes sense to me? And then, are the claims they're making true?
Speaker 3:Now, a lot of companies start on the wrong end of that. They start by trying to argue how their product is better, but if you don't push the evolutionary signals, your brain is just not going to be into it. It's like think of it, like being on a date, unless you're like Brad Pitt and you're on a date. If you try to argue your way into somebody's good graces or their bed, you're going to get a restraining order. You don't start with facts and logic. You don't start explaining how great you are as a product. We just don't like that. We irk at it. It's just not natural. What you have to do is make the other person feel good in your presence, create a nice experience and then create a connection and then everything else will flow. Now the companies who seem to do somewhat well are trying to target values. Now. A lot of companies talking about climate, a lot of companies talking about woke or whatever else may be popular, but it feels like pandering if you haven't touched the core things, and the iconic brands and the companies that are going to thrive in the future know how to create a connection to people's emotions, their target audiences, especially young people, and the sense of belonging to a group they want to belong to.
Speaker 3:Now this is true if you want to sell and drive loyalty and build a brand, and it's also true if you want to do B2C, if you want to position yourself in a place where other brands want to rely on you, and it's also true if you want to hire young talent, you got to do more than just offer them a good setup. It's not. It used to be so that's, that's it in a nutshell.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of examples to talk about how companies can apply this, not apply this. Have applied it, how I've been able to give companies information that really helped them strategically. And the secret sauce and hopefully this could lead to the discussion today is, I think you always have to look to target audience for the answers. You need to have a kind of myth, methodic, empathy, and that's not a cheesy term. I'm not talking about just, oh, feeling good, and I mean really like a systematic way of trying to understand what your audience needs, not just to buy, but to feel, to project, and it's kind of complicated, but it's doable and it's a very very big advantage for companies that pull it off.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and what you used that, you used the word logic quite a lot and what I liked about the first conversation was, you know, I kind of brought up logic and said, yeah, as as a you know, we're left with the operating system in a way of what you know, that kind of cold war period where everything was kind of like features and benefits and logic and you buy this because you need it and there isn't a lot of choice. So it's not really emotional purchase and I guess the consumer world hadn't developed in the same way. But the point I think you made before was actually humans tend to use logic to align with how they feel, yeah, or to argue about or convince themselves of making the right decision once they've already made the right.
Speaker 3:A decision. Yeah, so we've got to talk to you about what logic is. I don't want to get too theoretical, so put me back on track if you need to. But logic is just what we've seen happen a number of times. If something happens over and over and over again, your brain, which is a prediction tool to prevent you from getting hurt, is basically saying okay, this goes together, because it's all it's trying to do is predict these things go together and at one point we decide that's logical. Right, if somebody jumps up, they're going to come down. Might not happen that way.
Speaker 3:You know, gravity could change somewhere. I mean, that's an extremely rare case but also things we're told. The world is flat. The world is flat. The world is flat. Logic itself, it's round. Logic itself. Now people are saying it's flat again. There's no real.
Speaker 3:It's a controversial thing to say, but there's no real measure of what's logical fundamentally Like if you think of quantum physics and things that make no sense are actually true. So you have to limit how much you rely on logic. You logic is, uh, kind of a permission we give ourselves after the fact to make sure we're not making a mistake. It's an error correction mechanism. We actually make decisions before we realize them. Now, this is not to say you can't make logical decisions. You can and you should, but you have to understand that your brain, and definitely your customer's brain, has probably already decided, and certainly that's the case. If you're making a purchase that's not life altering, you're going to think a lot less about buying sneakers than you are about buying a house. You're going to think a lot less about buying some packaging that looks really nice as opposed to buying a car right, the bigger the stakes, the more you're going to try to do the error correction. Does that answer?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, definitely, and I think the kind of I'll just give you an example Every Christmas we do this thing called a present game, right. Example, over christmas we do this thing called a present game, right, and you've got these presents and you kind of roll the dice and you each get the chance to kind of win a present. But what happens is once you've got the presents, at the end you're able to steal off one another and it's quite interesting. And then you open them and you can see the objects inside it. And it's interesting how the values of an object go up the more other people show an interest in that object, if that makes sense.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes. So there's all these biases that reveal how we actually function, and the whole point I'm trying to make in these meetings with you is that these are an opportunity. There shouldn't be this mysterious thing. You can actually use a lot of tools today to benefit from this and it'll make people happier. But there's all kinds of biases's. Do other people value it? We actually flee from loss much more than we are attracted to gain.
Speaker 3:I did some research recently that if you can make people feel you have a shared, a sense of shared connection or group belonging with a company, with a campaign, with a person, with whatever, your rational evaluation of what that subject does completely changes. So if I can convince you that some company comes from your city, or the owner has the same background as you, or even the letters in the name are similar to letters in your name, your brain automatically starts to favor whatever that company is selling. Oh, yeah, you know it's a better product. Yeah, the computer is better, it has fewer viruses, or it's a better shoe, it'll last longer. And you don't even know you're doing this. Your brain is just fighting a war of 200,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago, where being in groups was super critical for survival. So it's always looking to make teams. It's called the minimal paradigm, the minimal group paradigm, something I forget the exact terms of how they call it in the science, but your brain is always looking to make connections.
Speaker 3:That's number one. So you and I now are talking to each other. If we step out in the street, we're a group. Our brains are going to start favoring each other. I'm going to judge more positively what you eat, what you do, your work. It's got all kinds of consequences. So that's logical, right, it's logical. Suddenly, it's got all kinds of consequences. So that's logical, right, it's logical. Suddenly it's going to seem to you logical that if somebody else has all like you're saying some people have a lot of people want something, you're going to want it to. It's not rational, but it's going to seem illogical to you. There's all kinds of biases like that and they're based in evolution.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because the desirability all of a sudden goes up and you start why is that?
Speaker 3:think about that. Why would that be the case? The fact that everybody has something doesn't mean it's good for you. But 150 000 years ago, if everybody wanted something, it probably meant it was safe. They're not dying. And if they wanted, it probably was a survival imperative. It's a very logical thing to say I, I want it too. Today it doesn't make sense, but it still works that way.
Speaker 2:No, exactly, and, like you said, a lot of it's fear, I suppose as well, isn't it? It's kind of like safety fear, fear of missing out on something, but equally fear of making a mistake. Fear is just such a bigger driver than inspiration, sadly, isn't it, unfortunately?
Speaker 3:in a way, inspiration, sadly, isn't it, unfortunately? Yeah, in a way, because you know you're better off not dying than you are, you know, uh, maybe getting more food and and and stuffing yourself. That's basically what it comes down to if you, yeah, statistically, you're better off not taking a risk you mentioned social media changing the landscape.
Speaker 2:I guess, in a way, what you said what we're talking about here is the rise of the social media influence really plays to that kind of building, desirability, validity and so on and so forth. Huge, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Social media is. It's like your evolutionary psychology at the gym, but also on drugs. It's crazy how it pushes all our buttons. So first of all, there's this constant fight for attention that you know. You're looking at what, some people looking, 1,000 posts a day, 2,000. In nature, we're supposed to see how many things change on a day-to-day basis. Five right. So your brain is constantly trying to filter out what's relevant, what's not, which means all these signals like colors, noise, faces you. It's like I remember when I was young. I'd go shopping. I hate shopping, I'd go shopping. You ever have these experiences. You walk at the mall for like a half hour. You come out you're exhausted, like you just ran a triathlon or something yeah, yeah, yeah, you're kind of sensory overload.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so multiply that by by. Multiply that by 10 000. So that means the number one you're trying to find ways not to listen. Number two you're exhausted. Number three your emotions and quick, quick reflexes matter a lot more. Then there's the whole side of you know, when we were growing up at least I can speak for myself I was comparing myself to four or five guys in the neighborhood. I was, you know, competing with maybe 10 people for a job, 20 people. Now you're competing with a billion. Imagine what that does to you. And they're all photographed, photoshopped and they all look wonderful. Everybody looks rich. That has an impact on how people think, on what they want to work in, what they want to get out of their work. We're not going to change nature. People need to feel good and they need to feel like they're connected and you have to navigate that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is obviously front of mind for consumer brands, but I also think it has a role for B2B too, because we don't stop being consumers when we're doing our jobs right. So it's the same. You use the word a lot signals. I think that's a word that's used a lot in psychology, isn't it? Signals and branding. It's used a lot in psychology, isn't it? Signals and branding.
Speaker 3:They're used differently. I use it in the data sense. It's used differently in psychology, somewhat differently. Yeah, it's basically information that your subject is sending you. So for B2B it's definitely the same, because you're dealing with individuals who have the same needs.
Speaker 3:I said last time you should try to align whatever you're selling not just with a sensical decision for your customer, but give them some kind of feeling of an advantage. Give them a feeling you care, give them a feeling you have their back, give them a feeling you're devoted and give them a tool to advance their career. You, if you check these boxes off, their brain is going to be much more inclined to make a deal with you. But also we spoke of I think I highly recommend this to my clients, the companies I work with. Give value, become a guide for the B2C companies you might serve. You know, at the end of the line, somebody is going to have to buy a product, that you're part of that chain and if you can become a guide, then you've built a lot of the trust and foundations that lead to positive relationships, more than just giving a valuable product.
Speaker 2:And that's sort of got a guide, is like a storyteller or a thought leader or a guru or whatever, and that on a social media level or a digital level. It's the same principles on a social media level or a digital level. It's the same principles. And again, I researched a little bit on storytelling and there was this study done on tribes and they found that storytellers were more popular, had bigger families, were more sort of like revered within the structure. Yeah, yeah, they were just sort of like people, not not necessarily, I don't know. I don't't know about how how good they looked or anything like that, but it was more a more a case if they were somebody that was trusted, able to entertain, um, visible, maybe confident, probably a leader, I don't know.
Speaker 3:But all those perfect perfect example because one there's evolutionary roots, the storytelling right. It's how we conveyed information. You tell a story about one person and the lesson passes and you're not making these big abstract claims. So when people hear stories, something ancient kicks in. It actually changes our body chemistry. It's also very calming because it's predictable. And then you lose a bit of predictability, you create suspense and then you come back talking about the shows we were talking about that didn't do so well because they didn't do that at the end of the season. If you look at tv shows that ended in a without resolving a lot of uncertainty, people kind of stay bitter at them. We like stories that bring us back to a place of resolution. Live happily ever after. There's so much importance to storytelling and it also guides your thinking. If a company has a strong story that connects ideally is drawn from the audience, it also helps guide what decisions they're going to make in the future to stick to that story or improve it.
Speaker 2:So, in terms of navigating this world, this digital world, if you're a consumer or a B2B brand, this, this world, this digital world, if you're a consumer or a b2b brand, so what I'm, what I'm getting from you is that one, one of the the keys of how to win it, like you say, hearts and minds and the battle of for attention, but ultimately, trust and persuasion and, let's be honest, sales, of course. What, what kind of? What kind of key key should you do? So you've already said thought leadership, storytelling.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So the first thing is the mindset right. You have to have a mindset where your customer is first, and you're trying to for lack of a better term, you're trying to give them therapy, right? Somebody buys shoes. They feel better about themselves. They buy packaging that they get to open and makes them feel like they're treating themselves. Can you create a sense of excuse me, can you make people feel what you want them to feel through what you're doing? Hearts, then minds. That means there's a hierarchy to it. You start with feeling and connection. Okay, how do you do that? The secret sauce for me, with all the clients I've worked with, is letting the audience tell you. So you need tools to check into the audience.
Speaker 3:I remember I did a I consulted on a big, big cosmetics company, international. They were about to launch a series of products a few years ago to compete with a huge rival, and they had it all set up and they were ready and they came to me and said what do you think about this? Now? I ended up advising against the whole thing, but the reason I did so which is also what they found convincing wasn't all the statistical analysis and all the other stuff I do to make sure I'm not making a mistake. It was. I showed them discourse, what young people were saying about beauty products in general, about themselves, and I did a lot of open source research. I just looked for articles about how young people at the time was millennials and early Gen Z how young people were relating to beauty, and it was changing a lot.
Speaker 3:You can get a lot of information from basic tools. If you hire people, even on a project basis, who know how to look for these things. It doesn't have to be high budget. That's the good news here is you can get a lot of very relevant information, ended up changing their strategy, and they were very happy and it worked out based on very little new data, just open source studies and knowing what to look for. If you want to do it more systematically, where you always have your finger on the pulse of the audience, they're going to tell you everything you need to know. Imagine you could sit at a cafe and listen to somebody you want to do business with without them knowing all day what they're talking about. You would have everything you need to create a real connection to this person and create a thriving business. Now the data we have access to today makes that exponentially more true. So if you're not going to just rely on somebody who can do some open source research and advise you on a case-by-case basis which is a great start you can also start building your own data. One way to do that is market research, but smart market research.
Speaker 3:A lot of people do surveys and polling and focus groups. They don't really know what they're looking for. I don't think when you do that you should just look for the answers. You should have a way to analyze who the people are. So not so much what do they want to buy, but the people who want to buy this also happen to like that and also happen to have this feature and they're this age and they're this gender. You start to develop profiles again, trying to understand the person.
Speaker 3:So, number one open source, whatever you can find, discourse analysis get somebody to do that for you. I think it's a no-brainer and it can create tremendous value for not a lot of money. Number two do your own research, but do it well. Know how to ask the questions. Know how to analyze it properly with a behavioral angle, because people don't know what they like. If I ask you, what are you going to eat at the restaurant next week. You can answer me super sincerely. I'm not sure I can rely on it, but if I look at different things you've said and I know that people that answer that I do sports three times a week and I like this kind of music, blah, blah, blah and answer this about food actually like steak and they'll eat steak three times a week, right, so if you do the market research intelligently, you have a lot there, a lot of value.
Speaker 3:If you want to get more developed which I recommend, this is for, like more innovative companies who have a lot of data coming in from potential leads and clients you have a CRM. You can start to build smart BI and try to gather some data that is more emotional, more psychological, not just okay, lead, not lead, we spoke, we didn't speak. It's kind of easy, but you don't get much about that. It's like saying, oh yes, we spoke to each other on the phone. You don't really know what happened. Try to get into what was in the conversations. Try to get into who these people are when they did what they did, why they did what they did.
Speaker 3:So you can build BI on tools you already have. That is very, very smart and going to give you a lot more value from tools you already have. Tools you already have and you're investing and you're spending on Salesforce or whatever it may be. You can get a lot more out of it and build graphs and charts and dashboards that help you a lot more. And now you can get to the really juicy stuff, which is what I like to do the most.
Speaker 3:When the clients want it and they want it more and more, you start to do advanced analytics, you start to do AI on these things and you can identify opportunities that our brains are not capable of identifying alone. Right, there's too much math. So I was working with an education company recently very complex operation working with all kinds of universities around the US, targeting millennials, gen Z a lot, a lot of churn, a lot, a lot of people on the phone, a lot of ads and it's very hard to know where to put the money. But if you factor in some of the psychological variables and you build a nice little smart AI model which didn't cost them that much, we reduced the cost of acquisition per client, which was $1,000 to between 600 to 800, depending on the school, just by using the data they already had. You know we built together data and if you look at it in the right way and you use data sophisticated way, you can really get a lot more bang for your precious marketing dollars.
Speaker 3:So that's the whole spectrum. You can start with a little bit of spot check research, open source, somebody who understands how audiences and customers work and you know, sound off on a strategy or propose a strategy to doing your own research, to starting building ongoing data, to applying ai to the data. There's just it's the level of depth of how much you want to get to know your audience. But you can never lose. In my experience with all the companies I work with, crisis branding, whatever it may be, performance you can never lose.
Speaker 2:By letting the audience speak to you, so to speak, you can never go wrong and then it's really about making sure it's it's you're truly listening to them as opposed to selling to them, right? So it's that's right that's how you sell.
Speaker 3:The best way to sell is to listen to your, in my opinion, to listen to your audience, connect to what they want, and you could do it on one by one b2b and that's critical and there's a whole world of things to do there and you could definitely do it b2c by segments and do you find working with clients that I mean so you're obviously talking about, I guess uh, helping them truly improve their sales performance and their marketing um roi and so on do you find that at any point it actually also impacts on product development as well?
Speaker 3:so sometimes the product changes, or yeah, that's some of my favorite work. It does sometimes because it's hard to disconnect completely from how the product works, how it feels and what the audience is telling you it likes. So I have had times like that for technology. I think there was one time probably was it was a hair care product we definitely had touched upon a lot of on visuals, which is not exactly the product. It's a bit more of the, the wrapping, which I guess is very relevant now. But yeah, sometimes it does touch on the product. You want the whole experience. Look, you think of mac.
Speaker 3:Mac is obviously an extreme case of success, but but they were selling an identity. Basically, I'm a Mac, I'm a PC. If you remember, in the 90s they were selling you exactly what I'm talking about, like a feeling and an identity and a connection. But the product to fit that had to be super sleek, it had to be super fast, it had to be super easy to use, it had to be super simple and elegant and cool. So, yes, it does get into things like that at times. I honestly wish I would do more of that. I have done a lot of product development where it's been more experiential products, where you're talking like, for example, the courses I just talked about, or some content people want to put out. That is the product, but it would be really cool to do it on a physical, tangible product too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because I mean, I guess we all assume certain things and we, if we have a product, we have an idea, you kind of sometimes fall a bit over in love with it and you're so over convinced that it's right. And it may not be quite right, it might be pushing the wrong thing in the wrong direction, but I guess maybe in a way it's simpler in B2B I don't know or compared to B2C.
Speaker 3:I think it's just a question of scale. Obviously, I'm not saying anything particularly intelligent here, but B2B I apply the same principles. You map people in the same way. You try to provide them Look, and you can apply the data in the same way. You try to provide them, look and you can apply the data in the same way. It's just that you have to find the individual benefit as opposed to more general emotional benefit, right? So I think we spoke last time. I did a big case with dentist equipment and the conclusion was these are your audiences. This is what they need to feel and hear, and it's about their experience in the office on a day-to-day basis and what they need to feel advancement, but also what they need to feel like what they're doing matters. How can you connect your product to make them feel what they do matters? It's a need we had identified, so it's the same thing, but very focused on particular individuals.
Speaker 2:And really, if you're the work you've done, which is, like you say, very analytical, and you're providing a lot of data that would help people perhaps unravel where they need to move their either their sales strategy or marketing strategy, and so on and so forth Do you actually go into detail in helping them form the strategy, or is it more a case of you do that too?
Speaker 3:No, look, this can be applied anywhere in the broader sense of communication. So obviously there's crisis, which is something I like to do because it's immediate and the stakes are high. But, for sure, the sales process at every step is very important. Conversations on the phone there's a way to analyze conversations. Again, I've done it manually when the client didn't have so much budget to deploy data tools. Or I've done it with data tools, where you look at a vast number of conversations and you can extract the flow of a conversation. You can extract what people need to hear and when, what their concerns are. Obviously you can get all the answers if you and when, what their concerns are. Obviously you can get all the answers if you know what to look for.
Speaker 3:But my job is not to get all that data. That data is for me. Part of it is because I want to make sure I'm right. I don't want to be just another guy relying on intuition. So intuition matters a lot, but it's not enough. But my job is to come to a human story to the client. Look, this is what's happening. This is why, and in a way that they can relate to that, they can understand. These people know their business more than anybody else, but they're also humans and they understand how humans work. And to refocus them in a way where they don't feel they're losing anything, but on the contrary, wow, you just opened up something that I get and I know how to use it and it's exciting. I get to be excited about my business again. That's when it works really well. But absolutely every step of the sales funnel from ads to conversations on the phone to, obviously, texts you're sending out emails. Whatever it may be super, super relevant.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's end-to-end, isn't it? It's like you can have a fantastic social media campaign and then the phone calls that are going out just don't match. The tone is different or the style is wrong, or the manner isn't right, and so on. Sometimes, working with clients, do you unearth something that to them they can't see, but is actually quite simple that's what I strive to do every time.
Speaker 3:There's a little wow moment where I feel like, okay, I've done, I've done my job, I'm bringing value, and you try to do that every time. So again, going back to this education company I was working with so they're selling, they were selling certifications for people to become, uh, it professionals and they were really good at it and all the education. But something was happening between the email and the sales call, exactly like you're saying, where something was breaking. And what I found and it just made things clear for them is that people were dropping off and, citing all kinds of logical reasons, were actually dropping off because they were losing confidence they could succeed. It was not about the cost. They were using all these excuses, but fundamentally, you could read under the surface that people needed a boost in confidence. They needed to feel empowered. So you're selling X, but really it's the emotion X. Think about Nike. Right, nike sells shoes, but it's really not selling shoes. It's selling you like almost a religious statement just do it. And it's selling you identification with a superstar like Michael Jordan. It's selling you a trend where you can be elegant and show that you have a bit of means, but you're still humble and street wear it's not wearing suits. So I love when I can identify that and people get it, because it opens up a whole host of strategic possibilities. And it's also not just about sales, it's lifetime value.
Speaker 3:I found that in a lot of these places people drop off months later for something that happened at the beginning that could have been very easily fixed right A delay that lessened excitement or some little thing they needed to hear that stayed with them.
Speaker 3:And again, if you look at what the audience does, you have to be. It's not going to shout it at you. You have to know how to read between the lines. Then it's really, really, really powerful. And just the last thing I'm able to do this when it comes to businesses. Sadly, I'm not as good at it in my personal life, because if I were, I think things could be a lot better. If you're able to do this in your life, where you know how to read people and they could be saying x, but really they're trying to imply something else, then it's a skill you can definitely take to your marketing. And if you have the tools or you work with somebody who can give you the tools, you have an advantage over anybody else and I suppose one of the key benefits of you is your experience.
Speaker 2:but equally, you're independent, right, you're not as invested emotionally as in the business and the brand and so on, so you haven't bought the PR, so to speak.
Speaker 3:You have an objective. Look, that's true.
Speaker 2:I get to work in all kinds of industries and countries.
Speaker 3:So it keeps you fresh, keeps you able to identify things.
Speaker 2:And so with with the like we said in the first episode, where we're living in now, I mean, it is changing all the time, isn't it so? So I I guess it must be a. Can you know a client must want this on a annual basis really, or does it? Do? You tend to go in and say, okay, this product needs work and that product needs work. Or you tend to kind of look at the whole business, because I don't know if you're a consumer brand that's trying to influence gen z or you're trying, yeah, one one. You know they're well, not values, but I would imagine their interests change quite quickly given the velocity of the speed of social media and and all of that is it must be. You know, to what extent are brands, I guess, trying to catch up with that change, and I guess the ideal is the brand's leading. That is it yeah.
Speaker 3:So it's an excellent question. Look, you can make. Do I make do with whatever commitment clients can make, if they can make, on a project basis? Tell us what you think about this, or we need to know what to do about that. Okay, ideally you have a constant pulse and so you can help a client on an ongoing basis. You have a relationship with them where you come back, you acquire a lot of knowledge about their business, about a lot of knowledge about the people in their business who make decisions, how to talk to them.
Speaker 3:While you're learning more and more about the audience, things change, seasonality happens, social media is changing, stimulus from outside is changing. So to have an ongoing relationship is what I like the most, and at one point, the companies are on their way well enough that you can take a step back and they know what they're doing. But you can work with a level of commitment. I think it's the mindset of the company that matters, where it really has a focus on its clientele, making them happy, and they have an appetite for innovation. Nothing stays the same. We're in a crazy world now, since Corona in particular, and it's true of demand, it's true of what's trending, but it's also true of what young people need to feel, and if you have a business that has a lot of interaction with people, a longer sales cycle then even more so because you're learning more stuff all the time.
Speaker 2:I imagine it's difficult as well, isn't it? You're sort of talking to, I imagine, c-level people that are probably middle-aged, aged, um, and I suppose there's been a lot you can. You can point to lots of examples in business history where the kind of c-suite doesn't know what's going on really in terms of their you know, the way they're selling the business, how the products receive and stuff. Blockbuster is a great example, I think, isn't it to some extent, um, kodak? Kodak and digital cameras oh yeah, what happened there? Give us that, give us your view of that. I I saw it.
Speaker 2:I saw it come out on social media and saw these kind of didn't look like much like jaguar, frankly, but I didn't, I didn't form a judgment.
Speaker 3:Tell me about, tell me your view I've worked with two car companies in the past. I have not worked with jaguar. I would have. I would have loved, loved to, and I'll tell you why. What I found and I think this is going to be intuitive but when people buy a car brand, beyond just basic functionality, they're buying a sense of themselves. They're buying a sense of what they want to project, how they want to feel in the morning, what it says about their place in life, about their level of refinement, about their taste. And that's true from the hybrid Toyotas all the way to if you're buying a Range Rover or a Porsche and everything in between. So Jaguar is somewhat at the upper end of that. I have no research to back this except my own experience and my work with other companies.
Speaker 3:When I think of Jaguar, I think of understated but not too understated, british elegance, sportsmanship or a sporty car, a fast car, but not too much. In your face. There's really subtle magic that British culture has, sometimes Forest greens, tan, leather, something elegant but somewhat accessible. It's got that host of values that people who bought Jaguars that I know always had. They wanted to project refinement, but not shout it. They wanted to project wealth, but not shout it, and they wanted something quality, whether that matches the car quality or not, I don't know. I've always liked Jaguars because of that set of elements.
Speaker 3:Maybe I'm wrong. What I don't think I'm wrong about is that they didn't want a hybrid that was shouting loud pinks and orange with a very, very clear political agenda. That's not the Jaguar way, right? Jaguars probably don't talk about your politics, right? It's the kind of guy who likes to keep and I say guy because I think when I think of Jaguar, I think of men. You think going back to the E-type. It's a long tradition and I think, if I have to summarize what they did and I'm sure they have data, but it was bad data Good marketing, when this is more than marketing, it's the identity.
Speaker 3:Good branding is empathy, it's listening to the audience and giving it more of what it wants and adapting it to how things change. What Jaguar did as a rent. They had this vision that they were so proud of and they just wanted to like, I'm sure, like the board just needed a solution, and so that also explains psychology when you want a solution, you're willing to accept anything if somebody says with confidence but fundamentally, what they did is a rant and it's an outdated rant and it's a rant that I don't believe is matched to what people who are attracted to the Jaguar brand want. It's like look gonna, we're gonna show off about our values in a way that's a bit outdated. We're gonna shout these colors at you that are not the feeling that we usually have, and it just complete disconnect with the audience wanted or felt, I think so in a way they were trying too hard.
Speaker 2:They.
Speaker 3:They were not just trying too hard. I think trying hard is a good thing sometimes, but they weren't at all interested in what the audience wanted. It seems like they wanted to just tell the audience what it wanted. It doesn't work that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was a manifesto.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's kind of this is what we'd like to be and we think you should come with us, yeah and if you don't?
Speaker 3:there's some kind of subtle undertone of if you don't do something, you're doing wrong. You're not as evolved as we are, and that just doesn't work.
Speaker 2:Oddly, it probably outperformed any of the PR metrics that they set beforehand, but probably for entirely the wrong reason.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, you say good press, any press is good press, but I don't know if people go buy an expensive car based on that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that was Malcolm McLaren in Sex Pistols and that was a very different product offering and a very different time. Right, he said that, didn't he? All press is good press, yeah, and that makes sense if you're sexist. But I say Jaguar is like this classic brand that really really meant something. I suppose it can be modernized. I mean there's a little bit of a link, I think, with some of the printing brand or the printing technology brands in the industry. I'm in in that, of course they've been around for hundreds of years some of them and are extremely proud of that and so on. Is there a point to which they just if you get a printing company and the owner of a printing company who buys the machines, they're sometimes quite different to the kind of people, the corporates that are serving them. Is there a risk in a similar kind of risk is suddenly not modernising or modernising too much or just being a little bit too safe and not really linking with the customer base? I don't know. I mean maybe it's not quite the same.
Speaker 3:It's a very different set of you know industry buying needs et cetera, but I'm not sure, I'm not sure it's different because look I with humility I don't know that much about printing, apart from how actual packaging affects consumers. I don't know much about the machinery. But if what you're selling to this person making the decision is a machine, okay, you'll have a certain success and it'll make sense and it's the right investment. They can justify it. If you're selling them a sense that they are on top of the market and they are one of the companies that is doing what's right for the future, and they are one of the companies that is doing what's right for the future and they are one of the companies that is in touch with what's happening and they're going to stay relevant, then you're doing a lot better. You're still on the same machine, and that's what you have to do in terms of connecting with people. And then if, on top of that, they feel that this is the right decision, such that it will advance them in their own careers, then you really nailed it. And we can't ignore those ingredients, you can't ignore those elements. So, even for the B to B, you have to be aware of what do they want to feel now? What is their brain going to use to make decisions in terms of emotional signals and it's a bit harder to give you a general and fast rule here.
Speaker 3:But I think what I've spoken about is relevant. It's not just about selling a machine. They need to then print stuff. It's why is this machine the right one in the climate now? How does it make you be the company you want to be? How does it make you the individual making the decision to the kind of executive you want to be? How does it help you? That's necessary to add to the conversation.
Speaker 2:I think it's important. I think in the industry we're in, certain parts of it are making fewer buying decisions and investing less than they have before. I imagine going forward this year, hopefully 25 will be in Europe a more positive economic um climate and that might change sort of buying behavior and increase um lots of buying decisions and so on. But yeah, I think fundamentally then this kind of discussion for the industry we're in makes makes a lot of sense. So really interesting stuff. Any sort of final thoughts you might want to leave people with with sort of what you should do really if you're looking at trying to, you know, understand how to improve your marketing in essence, yeah, and so it's not.
Speaker 3:first of all, people are welcome to send me questions by email if you want, if that helps you, if you're cool with that. But, in a nutshell, it doesn't have to be a huge shift in how you operate. You can hire people who do what I do or something similar, for spot checks to get comfortable and slowly start to change the mindset of your company, to put the client first, b2b included, to start to think in terms of what is this person perceiving now? What do they need to feel about themselves, about their business, about their career, obviously, about your product? You can do it with data that's available, open, if you know what to look for. You can do it a bit more sophisticated with your CRM data and things of that kind and, depending on your commitment, you can do it small and you can do it big, and I think that's a very, very important thing.
Speaker 3:It's not a gigantic change of culture and you can even start with workshops. You can get into the practical change of culture and you can even start with workshops. Right, you can be like get into, like the practicals of this. I used to give a lot of workshops. I miss it when you're just showing people based on their day-to-day practices, how they can integrate this into the work, from the emails they send to how they think about a tactic or a strategy, about how to think about their sales cycle, what even they want to develop in the future. It's just a change of mindset, and a lot of companies have money on training that they have to spend every year. Spend it. I would recommend you spend part of it on that, on on a philosophy of looking at this psychology that people are not conscious of, on their behavior, that they're revealing things they're not conscious of, because that's where we make most of our decisions.
Speaker 2:that's also what makes us really happy as customers when it when it aligns like you say, it's not rocket science, but equally it does require fundamental shift in mindset, weakness and openness and actually that's confidence as well. It's kind of going we can be better. Is there ways that we can discover, you know some, some clues that that would improve our general kind of? I think it makes the work more fun.
Speaker 3:I think it makes the work more fun. I think it makes the work more fun when you're like a psychological detective or you're really trying to understand the other side. It just makes work more fun and meaningful also. So for a little bit of investment you can actually get a lot of return. And, you know, hopefully it becomes a bit of the culture that you're always keeping your pulse on what your customers want and want to feel.
Speaker 2:Excuse me, what your, your customers want and want to feel. Excuse me. So, philip, this really interesting. Someone wanted to reach out to you. Is there a website? You're obviously on linkedin. We're going to put. We put that in the show notes, but and what's your website?
Speaker 3:thank you for that. So my website is propeller iqcom, so that's p? P ro p e l l? O-l-l-o-r-i-q. You can write it with the E-R as well. Excuse me, bad timing, a little bit of a dry throat these days. Propelleriqcom it doesn't give all the depth that I'm sharing now, or you know, there's a lot more to it, but hopefully it'll be enough for a start and you can email me at info at propeller iqcom. Um, the idea is to propel you forward. That's why I chose that name, and I will actually be starting to upload materials, perhaps some of ours, to that website, to create it, to make it more of a resource for uh, for people. So thank you very much for that, marcus brilliant, super thanks.
Speaker 2:So much again interesting stuff. Looking forward to the next one. So yeah, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Marcus. Happy New Year to everybody.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe now for more great audio content. Coming up and visit futureprinttech for the latest news, partner interviews, in-depth industry research and to catch up on content from Futureprint events. We'll see you next time on the Futureprint Podcast.
