AI, Authenticity & B Corp: Why Being Human Still Wins in Marketing

AI is everywhere, but it hasn’t replaced what really makes businesses stand out. 

In this B Corp month episode, Julie Bishop is joined by fellow B Corp Leader Dave Hoch, CEO of Colibrily Crew, to explore why authenticity, transparency, and human connection are more important than ever in marketing. 

From building a B Corp to navigating the rise of AI, Dave shares how purpose-driven businesses can grow without losing what makes them different. 

They discuss: 

• Why AI should be a tool, not a substitute for your voice 
• How B Corp thinking shapes better businesses (not just better marketing) 
• Why authenticity is becoming a competitive advantage 
• The role of transparency in building trust 
• How to tell stories that connect with people 

If you’re trying to grow your business without sounding like everyone else, this episode is for you. 

Connect with Dave Hoch on LinkedIn.

Connect with Julie on LinkedIn  

Follow The Colibrily Crew on LinkedIn 

The Colibrily Crew website

Visit the IT Naturally website

Follow IT Naturally on LinkedIn

Transcript

Julie Bishop (00:00)
this month is B Corp month and I'm really excited to be talking to a fellow B Corp leader. There's always so much energy around in B Corp month. I've been to a couple of events, but it's really exciting to be hosting a B Corp leader who helps companies that are purpose-driven really sell the kind of organisation that they are to potential clients.

Julie Bishop (00:21)
Dave Haug is CEO and founder of the Colibrily Crew which is an ethically driven marketing agency that helps purpose built organisations like ours grow with clarity

Dave, welcome to the podcast.

Dave Hoch (00:35)
Thank you for having me here

It's good to see you, Julie.

Julie Bishop (00:39)
Let's start with your journey. So you've been working over two decades in digital transformation and marketing. What led you to pivot and start the Colibrily Crew?

Dave Hoch (00:51)
That's a great question. It's something I reflect on quite a bit these days. So I spent a lot of time in corporate America and big fortune companies. And I noticed a common trend when I was sort of like a junior employee there. There was no ethos. There was no ethics. It was profit, profit, profit, profit. There was always a theme which was extract as much wealth as possible, whether it's from your clients and customers or your employees. Did not matter.

And this is specifically in the U.S. And over time, I realised, man, there's gotta be a better way to do this, to support companies. And even more so, there's gotta be small businesses and people that wanna do good stuff, that wanna do good work, that wanna make an impact, that need help. So my journey was coming out of that, I thought, okay, let me see if I can't find that sweet spot of being able to help small businesses or medium businesses, really anyone.

who wants to do something good creatively, wants to do something good for society, but doesn't necessarily have the background or experience or understanding how to get there. So they got an idea, but they want to make it happen. And that was the reason I started the Kola  Crew was to step in and say, okay, well, I've got some marketing background. I've got a good team around me. How can we help move the needle for people that could make an impact, have big dreams, but need the support to get there?

Julie Bishop (02:12)
it's something we certainly struggled with was how do we tell people that we're different. ⁓ So when did you become a B Corp and why did you do that?

Dave Hoch (02:23)
Sure,

2023, I believe. So I went to program that focused on sustainability and entrepreneurialism.

for businesses that want to do good in 2010, I think. And that's where I first learned about B Corp, B Labs. And I learned about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. was very cool and I was blown away and I got to see a bunch of speakers by them. And I thought, man, this is crazy cool. here we've got someone who's talking the talk and they're walking the walk. They're not just saying, yeah, we're going to do good stuff. And, you know, that's it. A little bit of greenwashing in there. No, it was something that blew my mind. And so I thought, okay, when I have my own business.

Julie Bishop (02:40)
Cool. Very early days.

Dave Hoch (03:03)
100 % we are going to have a B Corp. And so right out of the gates, I launched my business between five and seven years ago, I started by myself as a solopreneur and then kind of grew it over time. And once I got to the point of thinking, okay, it's time to start a B Corp journey. I reached out to B-Lab, started the process, was certified within a year. And along the way, just learned.

I mean people say this all the time because it is B Corp month. know like this is a good idea. We want to be certified. The thing that blew my mind and still blows my mind is it just makes my business better because we're constantly evolving and whether it's the way we serve our clients.

or whether it's how we serve our internal staff. Like I'm constantly looking at, okay, how can we have one of the most progressive agencies or marketing agencies on the planet? What can we do? And I can go off conversations with B-Lab and get guidance, right? It's always saying, the marker to improve is a little bit further ahead, a little bit further ahead. So you're constantly evolving. It's not just to set it and forget it. We're certified, we're done. Hey everybody, look at us.

Julie Bishop (04:05)
One of things that I love is people that would naturally be your competitors, if they're a fellow B Corp, you kind of work together. So we have a little community of ⁓ B Corp MSPs and we do webinars together. and we meet and we've been known to say to clients, well, we're not the right company for you, but we've got a fellow B Corp who's the right company for you to work with.

Dave Hoch (04:13)
or 100%.

forgot someone. Yeah.

Julie Bishop (04:31)
And I love that. I love that we're colleagues rather than competitors.

Dave Hoch (04:35)
We're

on the same boat. Yeah. that's at the end of the day, you're part of a Crew, right? And that's why we call ourselves the Colibrily Crew. You're in a larger situation there with a tribe of people that you want to support, right? As opposed to like traditional business, which is you're kind of frenemies in that regard. No, no, no, no. This is everybody, you know,

We work with other digital marketing agencies that are B Corps all the time. We trade ideas, we do round tables, we speak together, you name it. Yeah, we're all here to do the right thing. And I think at the end of the day, that's the point.

Julie Bishop (05:06)
Absolutely, absolutely. And one of the big changes in your industry at the moment is the implementation of AI, isn't it? It's having a big impact on your industry. AI. ⁓ You see, my father was a vet and as a child, AI was artificial insemination. And it's basically the way that, yeah, you've got sheep pregnant.

Dave Hoch (05:16)
What's AI? Never heard of it.

Very different situation these days. Yeah, yeah,

it's everywhere. It's nonstop in the news, ⁓ in investments, in real estate, in water, in energy,

Julie Bishop (05:39)
But for you,

for a digital agency like yours, it's really changing the way that people look at SEO being top of the Google, page one on Google, it's all different now. So tell us a bit about what's different.

Dave Hoch (05:57)
Right, so it's got so many layers ⁓ when we talk about it from just a business perspective in general. If we open up the onion and we look at the layer with respect to digital marketing, it's another tool.

That's how we utilise it. We use it with our own ethical policy that we've developed in-house. We've shared it with other colleagues, other organisations. We talk about this all the time. It's another tool in the toolkit to help you get the job done. The thing I always caution people on when using AI is you can't teach ethics or at least responsible human-centric ethics to AI the same way we naturally have values built into us, right? Or we've developed over time.

So do we use AI as an organisation? Absolutely. Of course. It's another tool gets the same thing. When spell check came out, I'm old enough to remember when we didn't have spell check, right? Like, boy, I made a lot of mistakes. That's cool. I've, I've still make a lot of mistakes. Thank goodness we've got spell check, right? And just, helps me improve the quality of work that I'm doing. It's not a substitute for the work that I do.

or anyone on our team, but we utilise it. The thing about AI right now, at least when it comes to digital marketing, is you think about it as, okay, it's another tool in the toolkit. How can I utilise it to either be more productive, speed up some tasks that I would utilise otherwise? I use it for proposals. I say, hey, am I missing something on this proposal that I'm putting together? Is there some area I'm not looking? Another set of eyes doesn't replace me. It doesn't replace the work that my team does, but it definitely gives us another point.

of you. You just have to always put an asterisk on it and know that it's not a one and done button. I push the button and now I send it off to the client. Everybody's happy. We're not there. We're not there. And I don't know that we ever will be there. There are some businesses that are completely comfortable just producing a lot of ⁓ machine written boring content. You see a lot of that on social media right now.

Julie Bishop (07:47)
Yeah, I know it.

bland

isn't it's just bland yeah

Dave Hoch (08:02)
It's just bland

and it's, know, rules of threes. It's not this, it's this. Like it always has the same sentence structure. And I just find that you lose that authenticity. So when people talk about, yeah, AI is being used in digital marketing. It is, but the companies that are using it as they substitute for their work, they're losing authenticity. And that goes for their clients, right? If you lose authenticity, especially if you are an impact driven organisation, people see through that.

Julie Bishop (08:28)
Exactly, exactly. And from your experience so far, how are the ⁓ AI tools deciding which brands to bring up?

Dave Hoch (08:41)
meaning as in which applications to use or

Julie Bishop (08:44)
No,

sorry, no. So if I'm using AI, so somebody came to us the other day and said, we did an AI search and you came up as one of the top companies, so we want to talk to you. I mean, that's lovely. But what did AI do to find us?

Dave Hoch (09:01)
I

see. Yeah. So it's interesting because people talk about AI is this, and we do a lot of work in this right now, this, this new tool for having to replace Google, as you mentioned on page one. And at the end of the day, I even, I stopped saying AI, oh, artificial intelligence optimization or generative geo. just say SEO because it's really the same thing. Your foundation that you built for Google and

Julie Bishop (09:11)
Yeah.

Okay.

Dave Hoch (09:25)
and SEO in general, it's the same foundation that's used by AI. AI just has more tools to search out there, right? So what really matters right now is just our authority. It's kind of old school style. It's if you see someone's name everywhere.

then chances are they're a well-run business or they got a good marketing budget, right? Like they're, big enough. You know that they're there. They're in advertisements. You see them in the store. You see posters, like in the old people talk about them. You see commercials. It's the same way. Now you have to be everywhere and you need to be at least an expert or an authority or trustworthy. That's the acronym that's Google uses eat. That's their thing for telling you, Hey, we want to know that you're on LinkedIn. We want to see that you're posting real content. We want to

see that your website's well optimized, it doesn't load in 25 seconds. We want to see that ⁓ you've got a Google My Business page, that maybe you've written some articles on a blog, you're published in some places, maybe you've run a few ads. We want to know that you, in your evolution of business, it's happened naturally. You can't just buy that tomorrow, right? And this is what I talk about with our clients now is...

Julie Bishop (10:33)
home.

Dave Hoch (10:36)
Right now is a good time to try and improve your AIO, your SEO rankings, because imagine if you were, you know, last year, two years ago, trying to rank on the top 10 for something on Google versus 20 years ago, it was a lot easier, right? Or in the early 2000s than it is now, right? You don't want to be playing catch up. So just do the basics, Have a digital marketing plan, have a strategy and execute upon it.

Julie Bishop (11:00)
No thank you, that's really ⁓ helpful I think for people. So it's basically do what you were doing and carry on but be really thorough and be authentic. Yay!

Dave Hoch (11:09)
and just be everywhere if you can. Like I say, be everywhere, but be in the right places.

you're not, I'll show my age again, you're not gonna be on MySpace posting content on an old social media application from early 2000s. Go to LinkedIn, write some articles, get published in some places, create a blog, be present, be active, just be active.

Julie Bishop (11:33)
Yeah, no, thank you.

Many of the companies I understand that you work with are trying to create a positive environmental or social impact.

How are you helping them share that side of their story?

Dave Hoch (11:46)
That's a great question. So two ways. One, when we ideate with them. I'm a business person first before I'm a marketing person. I talk a lot about operations with them and how they're doing things. And we talk about things like with your workforce development, is it possible for you to hire in staff people that don't have traditional backgrounds, for example, or different educational backgrounds?

or Jedi or is there are there different ways for you to look at running your business in either a more impactful way or more sustainable way? Then when we talk about the marketing component of it, we look at it through the lens of the same audience we have, right? What's important? What does ethics mean to them? What values are important to them? And can we tell that story to them so it will resonate with them?

Right? So a simple way is if we're going to talk about the work that we're doing, we need to talk about both all the unintended consequences. Sometimes there's work that we do and we benefit other communities. We should talk about that. Or we talk about how we benefited our own personal team. Or we talk about more than just metrics. Right? Hey, we had 600 % new leads and growth. That's great. But how did it affect people's lives?

That's the question. It really is at the end of the day. How are you affecting people's lives? And if you start to talk about that, it's easier to tell a story about someone's life than it is to talk about percentages and numbers.

Julie Bishop (13:15)
yes it's not well it's easier but it's more ⁓

It's harder sometimes to

of yourself rather than to share numbers. I think some people find that quite difficult.

Dave Hoch (13:25)
You gotta do all of it. You can't just go heavy into one area. But I think people can relate to being human beings, right? And that's the thing. If you're relatable in what you're talking about,

someone maybe has a shared experience or can imagine themselves in a shared experience like that, then I think it's easier to break the ice or at least knock the walls down.

Julie Bishop (13:43)
And do you think transparency

has started to matter more now? Yeah.

Dave Hoch (13:47)
More than ever. Yeah, mean, more

than ever. I'm originally born in the States. We can talk politics all day long. There's the important thing about transparency there and how heavy that feels right now globally, right? And it's not just the American thing, but it's a business problem, right? It's, we're at this point in my personal opinion where unfettered capitalism has brought us to this place of astronomical wealth, right? And productivity. Oftentimes that's on other people's backs.

you know, climbing to the top. And you have to acknowledge that. And you have to acknowledge that, I mentioned before, unintended consequences, the work that you're doing and how you're doing it. Because at the end of the day, everything we do consumes on some level, right? So it's important for us to acknowledge what we're doing, where we're trying to go, but how we got there. And if you don't talk about that how, I mean, you always have to talk about the why, but if you don't talk about the how and you're not being transparent about

Julie Bishop (14:31)
Sadly.

Dave Hoch (14:42)
just think people want honesty right now. There's too much untrustworthy content out there that doesn't have that human feel. And if you don't come across as being human, the immediate reaction is rejection.

Julie Bishop (14:49)
Yeah.

And I think it feels to me that if you're not authentic, it's so easy for someone to find contradictory information about your brand or what you've done or whatever now. So there's no point in pretending. You have to be honest in a way that you've got away with before maybe.

Dave Hoch (15:07)
That's right.

Yeah, and do the right thing. Sorry,

Julie, if you're doing the right thing, then transparency is not a problem. Right at the end of the day, you're just telling your story.

Julie Bishop (15:23)
yeah

yeah yes but if you have got a past you're ashamed of that's harder

Dave Hoch (15:32)
That is very hard. Hey, I worked at a corporate bank in the States for many, many years. Not a good place, not a good company that I would recommend working for now, but is also part of my journey. And that's what led me to doing good work now. But yes, I hear you. mean, we've all, our journeys are all different and they're always different to talk about or difficult depending on the day.

Julie Bishop (15:43)
Yeah.

in.

No, definitely, we've talked about what you do and influence, but tell me about your company. Tell me about how you run your company and how your values come through in the way that you run your company.

Dave Hoch (16:03)
Yeah,

that's a great question, Julie. So we are a digital marketing agency. We do things a little bit differently. We've taken on sort of a human centric slash holistic approach. I like to talk about creating resilient digital marketing systems. That's kind of the phrase that stuck with me and the resiliency being that marketing today is really just about the story you tell and where you tell it.

So the way we run our organisation is we are a team of six of us. We're dispersed throughout European time zones. We hire people that don't have traditional backgrounds in the workforce. They may not have a formal degree or studied a particular topic, or they may be self-taught. They may be neurodivergent. They may be refugees. They may be in different parts of the planet that are in war zones right now.

My goal has always been with the Colibrily Crew is saying how can we create something totally unique and different that it gives us a complete different perspective.

is when you're thinking about marketing, a lot of it's ideation and creativity, right? And having different opinions and bringing them from different places. ⁓ That's always been our goal. When I say I try and have one of the most progressive agencies, that part of it's being a B Corp, we're 1 % for the planet. We have unlimited paid time off. We have ⁓ unlimited vacation days, complete work flex schedule, menstrual cycle time off. We do an annual. ⁓

on site together, sort of like a retreat. We've been doing a mind body stipend for the last year and a half where, here's some money every month to go work on yourself, to help your mind or your body or however you need it to improve your personal life. It's a challenge to run a business these days. There's a lot of different global factors at play. But I think at end of the day, I always think about this. We have our clients, but for me, I serve my team.

That's my job. My job is not my clients. My job is to empower my team so that they can do the best job for the clients. If that means, you know, someone has to take time off because of an emergency, cool. Or they need an emergency loan or they're traveling and it's a, they're in a war zone and it takes 35 hours to get across the border. That's what it is. We bring hugs at the end of the day.

Julie Bishop (18:22)
Yeah.

How do you manage to keep that level of energy when you're all remote from each other?

Dave Hoch (18:34)
a lot of coffee ⁓ checking. It's challenging. We do check-ins. We do regular check-ins. We do one-on-ones. I have one-on-ones with all my staff.

We have an open door policy. We have a separate application. We use Signal for business chats and we communicate with each other. We don't have anything personal like our WhatsApp stays over there in a different place or text messages. ⁓ We have a Monday kickoff morning where we all get together and we say, cool, what's going on? And honestly, we do some fun stuff. We have something called big ups where every week we recognise somebody in the company who's done something well and we all take turns. We do big ups for our clients as well. We talk about small wins. We have a little time for small gripes.

and

big gratitudes, right? So we, we're way more, I always say this to my team, we're humans first, we're worker bees second. Our personal lives are way more important than our professional lives. That foundation allows us to be personable, allows us to become, we're all friends, right? At the end of the day. And so I don't find motivation as a challenge.

Julie Bishop (19:14)
Yeah.

Dave Hoch (19:35)
And we're all in this trying to improve things. So we're very selective when we hire, right? Because it's about company culture and finding the right fit and the right type of person. And we spend a lot of time going through those motions before we bring someone on board. So I would say ⁓ it's not hard if you're doing it the right way.

Julie Bishop (19:54)
And how do you keep that culture?

when you're working with clients. if you end up working with a client that doesn't share your culture, that doesn't treat your people in the way that they feel that they should be treated, how do you cope with that?

Dave Hoch (20:09)
a tough one. It is a tough one.

And to be honest, I struggle with this. I'm smart enough to know when I don't know the answer and I don't know the answer to this. We have clients like this today and the best we can do is offer suggestions, ideas, and coach and recommend. ⁓

Julie Bishop (20:18)
and

Dave Hoch (20:27)
especially when it comes to management, there are clients that I've worked with where individual staff members of them will come to me and ask for coaching or advice. And I have an open door policy with everyone we work with and we'll sit down and I'll give them career advice, I'll give them personal advice. I'll talk about ways they can improve their jobs at their own business or where they're working. I think it's about

just trying to do the best you can in every situation and knowing when's the right time to push and also knowing when it's not the right time to push. Meaning I can give recommendations all day long. My job is just motivate, right? And if I can plant seeds, and we've seen this happen with clients, you plant seeds and over time, you you repeat it, you repeat it, you repeat it. And over time it starts to become what they.

they see as normalised, right? And we talk about living wages, for example, and I keep mentioning that with clients and startups and the UK is great. They've got a whole programme dedicated to this and certification with living wage and.

Julie Bishop (21:23)
Yeah, we've done

that, yeah.

Dave Hoch (21:24)
It's

phenomenal. You just kind of talk about this stuff and you sound like a broken record, but at the end of the day, you impress upon people what you talk about. They look to us as experts, right? Whether it's digital marketing or how to run a business. So if I can just drop some hints casually and then start talking it up and talk about how it's benefited our organisation, it helps move the needle for sure.

Julie Bishop (21:48)
Thank you, Dave. I've really enjoyed our conversation today. I've loved talking to you. Hopefully we'll keep in touch and I'll talk to you some more.

Dave Hoch (21:51)
Thank you.

You bet.