From Pixels to Perception: The Marketing Odyssey of Gee Ranasinha

Unlock the mysteries of marketing's impact on business success as Gee Ranasinha, CEO of Kexino, takes us on a revealing expedition into the heart of digital transformation and strategic branding. The conversation with Gary Pageau of the Dead Pixels Society travels from the early days of digital photography to the intricacies of crafting marketing strategies that resonate with consumers and outshine the competition.

Reflecting on his 16 years of early digital photography experience, Ranasinha enlightens us on the perils and pitfalls businesses encounter when navigating marketing waters without a seasoned guide. He examines the nuances of brand perception, the vital role of strategic insight, and the powerful synergy between marketing and sales—distilling the essence of what drives a business forward.

Step behind the curtain of marketing and strategy, where Ranasinha confronts the skepticism of C-suite executives and the tension between logic and creativity. Learn how the blend of art and science in marketing can be the difference between noise and signal in an oversaturated market. As they traverse the evolving landscape of advertising technology and AI, Pageau and Ranasinha dissect the relationship dynamics between marketing and sales, emphasizing the significance of maintaining their distinct roles for the benefit of long-term strategic goals. 

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Transcript

Erin Manning: 0:02

Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau. The Dead Pixels Society podcast is brought to you by Mediaclip, Advertek Printing and Independent Photo Imagers.

Gary Pageau: 0:19

Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pegeau, and today we're joined by G Ranasinha, the CEO of Kexino, and he's coming to us from France today. Hi Gee, how are you today?

Gee Ranasinha: 0:33

I'm doing very well, Gary. Thanks for inviting me on. I'm very pleased to be here.

Gary Pageau: 0:38

You're a marketing expert and that's really what we're going to talk about. But as we were chatting in the preamble, you actually started with medium and large format photography and you still have a deep, abiding love for that. Tell us a little bit about that, to start.

Gee Ranasinha: 0:54

Yeah, that's exactly right. I studied photography at college and university and ran a production company for five years, primarily large format studio based stuff. There were three of us at the end and um we it was mainly agency work um advertising billboards got one. One point was I was able to direct tv commercial, which was pretty exciting for me at the time for Nestle and otherwise.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:32

Yeah, I lived behind the inverted ground glass screen of a Sinar 4x5 or Broncolor with lighting, and that was my home. I got involved with digital image capture right at the very beginning, so I have intimate knowledge. Digital image capture right at the very beginning, so I have intimate knowledge with image capture systems from what was then called Leaf I think they're called something else now Also a company called Dicomed.

Gary Pageau: 1:58

Oh my gosh, You're bringing back memories now, yeah, yeah.

Gee Ranasinha: 2:04

I worked very closely with Dicomed a number of times and uh phase one for the scanning backs at one point in time as well, and um got into digital image capture right at the very beginning. I think we were the first, the first reseller of the original Kodak DCS um modified DSLR, uh digital camera back, I think we sold the first one in Europe way back in the early to mid-90s, I think it was. So, yeah, I cut my teeth on photography. I know the difference between the Scheinfluge principle and the inverse square law.

Gary Pageau: 2:45

And you can do it upside down with the glass right.

Gee Ranasinha: 2:49

Exactly, exactly, exactly, yes, Wow.

Gary Pageau: 2:51

That was a crazy time, that transition period. Actually I didn't know that. So I'm kind of interested in kind of your thoughts about you know, being a professional with these skills of you know, I mean, obviously working with large format, there's a lot of technical skill required, right, you're not just a happy snapper guy. There's, you know, there's a lot of you know not need to know about exposure and composition and those kinds of things. And then you see digital coming in and all the and in the early days, all the flaws with it. Right, I mean, capture backs are nearly like what they are now in terms of resolution and you know color matching and all of those fine things. What were your thoughts when you saw them coming in? Obviously you were excited, you became a dealer, right, and you you kind of did that, but did you think it was going to get where it is now, I guess, in terms of did you have that sort of anticipation and is that why you eventually got out?

Gee Ranasinha: 3:43

No, I think in the early days. I mean, firstly, I think there's a lot of misinformation and disinformation around what is and is not possible with digital image capture and too often, especially people in the photographic industry who've been brought up on film, they, they, can, they conflate scanning resolution with output resolution right um, and you know, in the early 90s I was doing 48 sheet posters from a 12 megapixel camera back, right, um, because the capture resolution and the bit depth that we're capturing, I mean sure we would talk about interpolation to get it up there.

Gee Ranasinha: 4:29

Right, and it only made sense for particular types of images, right, because obviously, especially if you're using vignettes, gradients, that sort of thing, interpolation, especially during those years, wasn't exactly, you know, cutting edge, um, but I I think the biggest shock has been the death of the point and shoot. Sure, right, you know, um, you know we, we had, we still got, we still got today, where we've got professional level cameras, where you've got you know large, uh, large sensor arrays going on the back of view cameras or medium format cameras. And then you've got high resolution mirrorless. Well, still got DSLRs, I suppose, but you know, mirrorless is definitely what we're talking about today. And then, of course, you've got phones, Right, and that middle ground has sort of disappeared. Sure, nobody buys that you know point and shoot type camera anymore.

Erin Manning: 5:28

Right.

Gee Ranasinha: 5:29

And I think what really surprised me was how quickly the in inverted commas good enough resolution came around. Yeah, you know, even for phones, right, right, but you know especially for let right, but you know especially for, let's call it, what professional quality imaging, right, and I think that was mainly to do with bit depth rather than actual resolution you know, the, the ability not just capture but actually output raw to allow people to start playing around with. You know, greater than 16-bit color yeah, and that's the thing.

Gary Pageau: 6:08

It's. Like you said, resolution is one piece, right, and then there's all the other color, science and other stuff built in around it, right. That absolutely that you know the human eye perceives it's more than just resolution. That's super interesting because that's that was a period that you know when I was living through that in my PMA days, there was a lot of assumptions made in the industry related to how consumers would behave and where the profit centers could be. People used to think I can make money off digital cameras. Make money off digital cameras, right, and you can, but only in the like you said, system cameras or higher end cameras, a point and shoot you can't make any money on because you're basically competing against a device, ie a cell phone, that carriers are subsidizing. You're basically people are buying a $700 camera every year practically through their carrier. So it's a whole different economic model. When you look back at that part of your career, what made you move on right? When did you move on and what was your thought process on that?

Gee Ranasinha: 7:17

Well, I got involved with these people.

Gee Ranasinha: 7:19

You know, leaf Dykemed and these sorts of guys because I was that rare breed of a film photographer who understood a little bit about digital, and what these manufacturers screwed up on, to be honest, was they figured that selling digital camera backs was something they needed to go to for photographers. Or you know studios, catalog photography companies, you know catalog catalog photography companies, you know which are like sort of, basically, they're, um, they're like farms, aren't they? They've got like 20 sets, room sets which are built, and then you know there's there's a consistent um set builders knocking down, rebuilding sets as they're doing different catalog shoots, those sorts of things um, but there wasn't anybody that.

Gee Ranasinha: 8:01

The problem with selling digital cameras to photographers in those days was that, okay, the lighting was the same, exposure pretty much the same. You know, composition, uh, perspective, optics, depth of field, all of that sort of stuff was the same. You'd capture the image, create this rgb file and then the photographer said, well, now, what right? Right, um, and, and you'll be surprised with this, carry, or maybe you wouldn't, because you know from your pma days, but one of the stock answers from certain hardware manufacturers at the time was well, what you can do is give that file to your local photo lab, who'll create a transparency for you right, the old, the old film recorders were yes, we're a big business.

Gee Ranasinha: 8:48

The fire 1000 is the one I remember. I don't know that, I don't know if those come that that company's still around, but the fire 1000 could create that absolutely stunning 8x10 transparency, right, um, from a digital file, at which point you then scan it again, right, but that, that, that that was the answer for more. You know more than one manufacturer at the time, right? So what these manufacturers realize is that, okay, the real beneficiaries of digital image capture wasn't so much the photographers, it was everything that happened post transparency.

Gary Pageau: 9:24

Right.

Gee Ranasinha: 9:25

Right, because if you speak to what was then called pre-press, pre-media companies, or printing companies, or ad agencies, retouchers, you know whatever company was in the value chain getting up to the final product.

Gary Pageau: 9:40

Sure.

Gee Ranasinha: 9:41

They dealt with scanned data all day. Every day it was scanned transparencies, but they they knew what they were doing with an rgb file right put it, they'd put it into, you know, photoshop 2.0 or quantel paintbox or crossword mamba or um memory lanes of software there right, all all of those, all the good stuff back in the day, right, which I'm guessing most of your listeners wouldn't have even heard of these sorts of things.

Gee Ranasinha: 10:08

They probably weren't around, but they would use those things and they understood what was going on. So what these manufacturers were looking for is somebody who understood both sides of the fence the image capture side, but also things like not just color management but color conversions. Right, but also things like not just color management but color conversions, because if you're going to press, if you're going to ink on paper, you're in the world of CMYK, you're in the world of four color. You're no longer dealing with transmissive light model, color model. You're dealing with the reflectance color model. Right, it's a whole different set of headaches.

Gary Pageau: 10:43

Sure.

Gee Ranasinha: 10:44

And you've got you know restricted gamut. And you've got you know there's loads of things with color separations that you need to worry about, and when you get into the printing process.

Gee Ranasinha: 10:54

you've got another set of color separations. You've got things like undercolor removal, dot gain, gray component replacement all of this really cool stuff that nobody understands unless you're a printer. And there wasn't anybody who could span those two disciplines Enter G stage left, who was volunteered to get up to speed. So what happened was I got involved with printing, pre-media, retouching that whole world as the digital image capture person who understood what was going on. And one of the companies I was working with had other products apart from digital image capture systems, and they were pre-press software. They were really high-end workstations by companies, a company that was very worked very closely with the company called Silicon Graphics, for example.

Gee Ranasinha: 11:51

no, I remember those folks yeah, in the same way they're. Actually, their old building is where Google now lives in Mountain View, california okay and that's how I migrated away from photography into the world of print and publishing and started getting involved in those sort of systems. So it wasn't really a divorce as such. I didn't sort of really quit Right. I just sort of evolved really and just got further and further away. So yeah, that's the history of my photographic side of things.

Gary Pageau: 12:25

But that's, you know, it's fascinating because it is sort of like you said, it's more of an evolution. What happened there? Some of it was driven by technology, some of it was driven by the market. Right, a lot of it was driven by the technology, I should say, but you know there still had to be an application for it. You know, you and I have seen things over the years, I'm sure that was a great technology and there was no application for it. Right, you know, like we were talking a little bit before the show about you know TVs and you know 3d movies, right, great technology, not great for actually making movies. So so let's move on, cause I really wanted to have you on to talk about marketing, because you're very much a pragmatic sort of, uh, marketers, talk a little bit about, like you know, getting it, starting your business, what and what you focus on in marketing, before we get into the nuts and bolts piece of it um.

Gee Ranasinha: 13:38

So today, my, my, my new life, if you like um is uh kickzino, which is a marketing agency specifically targeted towards startups and small businesses. We've been going since 2008, which is actually just last month. We turned 16 years.

Gary Pageau: 14:01

Nice. So you're getting a driver's license.

Gee Ranasinha: 14:03

Yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. So in that time we've helped just about 400 or so startups and small to medium sized businesses.

Erin Manning: 14:13

Sure.

Gee Ranasinha: 14:14

And, with you know, implementing marketing strategy branding, design, website development, seo, copywriting, all of that sort of stuff. Sure, we even became software developers ourselves with a launch of a kind of SaaS, which was a solution to manage and control brand language assets out of language. And then also for the past 10 years, like you, I'm a teacher. I've been teaching marketing and behavioral economics to final year, finally, your mb mba students at at two different business schools.

Gee Ranasinha: 14:51

From a services perspective, to be honest, I'm not really interested in the in in the services aspect, because, you know, we're a marketing agency, we're as good or as bad as any other marketing agencies, because we're all doing the same thing in terms of services. The tactical execution, to be honest, is the easy bit. Every marketing agency has similar tactical capabilities. It's table stakes, right. Tactics is the stuff that comes out at the end. For me, what's more interesting, and certainly what's more important, is the stuff that comes beforehand, and by that I mean sitting down and taking the time to understand the client business. That I mean sitting down and taking the time to understand the client business, the either, the customer buying behaviors, segmentation, targeting, messaging, all the stuff that, unfortunately, very few marketers or marketing agencies bother with today right, yeah, or or your small businesses think they need uh in terms of like I need a TikTok, right, or I need an Instagram this comes under the general heading, gary.

Gee Ranasinha: 15:54

For me, of this comes down to self-diagnosing right and self-diagnosing is a very, very dangerous thing. Right, and let me give an example of self-diagnosis. So if, if I get up one morning and I feel like I've got a pain in my chest all right, a really painful pain in my chest, to the point where I need to go to the emergency room, right okay, now I may.

Gee Ranasinha: 16:24

I may have scanned web md or something else on the internet on the way there, right, I'm not a doctor. Okay, I don't have an MD. I'm not a qualified cardiologist, right.

Gary Pageau: 16:35

Right.

Gee Ranasinha: 16:36

So the last thing I do when I go to the ER is tell the attending I've got angina. You need to give me angina medication, Right? That's not my job. My job is to tell the physician my symptoms. It hurts when I do this. When did it start hurting? What kind of pain is it? Do you have any underlying medical issues? Sure, Right. And then the physician will probably run some tests, take a bit of blood, right, Maybe take a bit of various other bits and pieces which may not be as pleasant, and then, after a few hours, they'll come back and they'll say to me okay, well, based upon my professional opinion, based upon, you know, years of med school, years of being a junior doctor and years of actually working at this ENB, what you actually have is gas, right, You've overdone it on the spicy food yesterday and that pain that you've got is gas. You don't have angina.

Gee Ranasinha: 17:44

You don't need angina medication. You need some Tums, mm-hmm, right, right this is the danger of self diagnosis. So when a business owner comes to us and says I need this, I need a new website, I need a social media presence, I need a, no, you know you don't need because you don't know what you need, right, you just think you know what you need based upon the last person you spoke with. Right, right, right. It's.

Gee Ranasinha: 18:13

Your job is to tell the professional that you're engaging with what the problem is, what the ideal outcome is what the ideal outcome is, and then your contractor, your services provider, outlines a plan of how they think is the best way to get there Right. You don't go to a garage and say I need a new transmission when all you need is a new oil change. Right, right. You're putting your trust in someone who does this for a living, right. It's their job to do this sort of stuff, right?

Gary Pageau: 18:51

so if you can, and if they don't do it well, they won't be a business much longer right now.

Gee Ranasinha: 18:56

If they don't do it, well right, then you know they can. They can only live or live, or, uh, or die by their, their own, their, their own work. That that's a different matter. There's plenty of sucky contractors out there. Sure, there's plenty of cowboys who do plumbing or roofing or whatever. Right, that's in any industry, including the photo retail industry, right, right. But if you're entrusting your problem into the hands of an expert, or certainly someone who's got more experience in their particular area of expertise than you have, Right then it's not up to you to self-diagnose, because you do not know what you do not know because you know it's interesting.

Gary Pageau: 19:44

You say it because, um, uh, when I talk to my students that I'm in my entrepreneurship, students is one thing I talk about is you know, get help for the things that you know. You didn't get in business to do the books unless you're being a cpa right, but if you're running exactly you know a food truck or something like that, that's why you got in the business. You didn't get in the business to be a CPA or be a marketer. In some extent, I mean, you may be naturally good at it as part of the skills, because you know your customers, you kind of know how to talk to them. That's great, but getting help in those areas is certainly a good idea.

Gee Ranasinha: 20:24

I think the small business CPA analogy is perfect. Right, you don't want to be a qualified CPA and I would say you shouldn't be marketing your business, even if your business is marketing, because you can't be objective, because you're now on both sides of the counter and the instant you become a vendor, the instant you become a vendor, your view of the value exchange, your view of the market is tainted because you're looking at it from a sales perspective. You're no longer looking at it from a customer's perspective.

Gee Ranasinha: 21:01

So, you need to have somebody that much removed who can come at it from a customer's perspective, because, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what you like. I don't care if you don't like your website. All I care about is whether your customers like your website, because it's the customers who are paying your bills, it's the customers who are paying your salary, who are paying your mortgage and paying your car payments, right, right. So those are the people you need to please. I don't care if your CEO doesn't like it, because he's not the one who's paying me His customers are.

Gary Pageau: 21:37

But the challenge is, from my observations from the marketing world, is that it's still very ego-driven. It's not customer-driven. Right, you have marketing agencies who are out to win awards and they talk about how many awards they win and everything else and how great their creative is and all that. It may not be effective, right, because that's sort of like fourth thing down the line as opposed to that sort of thing. Right, because that's sort of like fourth thing down the line as opposed to you know that sort of thing. If you're talking to an agency you want to engage, right, let's say, I'm you know, you know, you know G's cameras or G's digital backs or something. What are some of the things I should be talking to these agencies about to kind of evaluate them, to make sure they're going to be effective?

Gee Ranasinha: 23:01

Very good question. I do feel sorry for any startup and small business shopping around for an agency partner at the moment, because the industry like many industries certainly, but certainly the one I know best and that's our industry is full of sharks and snake oil sellers and what I call marketing bros, who seem to turn up on social media and crouching in front of Lamborghinis for some reason. I don't quite understand what that's all about, but people right, you know, you know the sort of yeah, yeah and they're usually throwing up a gang sign of some sort exactly they're doing?

Gee Ranasinha: 23:39

they're doing all the gang sign stuff standing in front of a Lamborghini who they, their dad's, borrowed from the dealership. It's not even theirs, right? Okay, so they're doing all of this stuff because they think. You know, for some reason people think marketing is the next pyramid setting. Get rich quick, affiliate type scheme thing. That's going on and it drives me crazy.

Gee Ranasinha: 23:59

Um be crazy. Um, I think the there are some telltale signs to listen out for when you're having those initial discovery conversations with potential agency partners, right? What one of them are? The questions they ask if, if, if you're doing most of the talking, that's a bad sign. They should be asking a gazillion questions about your business and they shouldn't be asking too much about the tactics that you're currently deploying right right right, it's it.

Gee Ranasinha: 24:34

They should be finding out about your business, how long it's been around, what your customers look like, how that customer evolution has changed over time, where you see the business going over the next year, three years, five. You know, maybe you've got an exit plan right. Maybe you want to say yeah five years ten years right.

Gary Pageau: 24:53

You should have an exit plan.

Gee Ranasinha: 24:55

Not necessarily. There are plenty of people who just want lifestyle companies, right, they don't want, you know, to sell, they just want a vehicle, sure to, to, to, to pay their bills and get them in standard living, and there's absolutely no, no what I was getting to with with.

Gary Pageau: 25:13

That was when I talked to my students about it. I said you should know what you're, how you're going to get out, and that might be part of it. Right, I'm just going to operate the business and pass it on to the family. That's a legit exit, absolutely at the door, right that's legit, yeah, I'm going to sell it. So I mean but you should kind of have that in your mind what your objective is. Absolutely, absolutely not everyone's going to go public people, it's not happening no, exactly, and very few people do.

Gee Ranasinha: 25:35

I mean just speak. Just speak to any vc, right for every successful vc uh, ipo, there's probably 500 that crashed and burned right and vc um private equity companies. They're just playing the numbers because they only need to have a couple of good ones right in five years right mitigate all of their dumb bets that they've had all the rest of the time yeah if yeah, if I mean, their hit percentage is so bad.

Gary Pageau: 26:07

If they were a baseball player, they'd be, they'd be, they'd be out of the leagues, right. So so getting so, getting back to that uh discovery process with the marketing is where they're evaluating them. What if you are new? Let's say, for example, I'm just starting. I've got this great idea for an app to make photo cubes. I'm going to put photos on cubes and you know I'm going to produce, and I think you know I really have a gut feeling that there's you know, 300,000 people who are going to pay me the first year for those cubes. But I don't really know. Right, I'm more of a I'm not necessarily a startup, but maybe just you know I, I don't have the customer base that you're talking about. What are some of the thoughts that you should talk about? Because most people go to I need marketing, I need customers, I need blah, blah, blah blah, but you may not have a a history to share. So what are your thoughts there?

Gee Ranasinha: 26:59

well, any, any, any business has an idea of where their customers are right.

Gary Pageau: 27:04

Okay.

Gee Ranasinha: 27:05

Very basically they should, they should do, yeah, but quite often, like you mentioned just now, it's a gut feeling rather than anything that's tangible, that's based on reality. If somebody came to me and said I've got a really good feeling that you know photo cubes are going to be, you know the next big thing, I would question how they came to that decision, because I need to buy into that.

Gary Pageau: 27:36

Right, yeah, yeah.

Gee Ranasinha: 27:37

I need to understand that from a pragmatic perspective. Sure, I would want to do some kind of my own market validation within that. Okay, and it doesn't have to sort of cost huge amounts of money. You can do a sort of very small localized test to approach the target ICP. Sorry, ideal customer profile is ICP Marketing lingo. I didn't want to go down that road. Ideal customer profile is ICB marketing link.

Gee Ranasinha: 28:02

I don't want to go down that road and question a section of the possible target market for the product or service, to get their feedback not just on the idea but how they would see that idea actually being delivered.

Gee Ranasinha: 28:17

What the tangibles are and the whole buying experience for that. Is it an internet purchase type product, or is it something that you would buy in store? Or is it both? Is it something that you would ship directly or is it something you would go through distributors and resellers? What about support? What about upselling? What do you do after the first 12 months? Is there something? Is there any other recurrent revenue that you can depend on? A service contract or something?

Erin Manning: 28:49

Right.

Gee Ranasinha: 28:51

And how to maybe adapt that base idea to fit into other particular verticals. Maybe there's a pro version that you can sell to agencies for, or I don't know right, yeah right To actually understand the full potential scope of that business, which is something that maybe that business owner hasn't actually gone through.

Erin Manning: 29:08

Right.

Gee Ranasinha: 29:10

Because they've just come up with that Edison aha moment and they haven't actually sort of expanded it further out. And from there it's then looking at putting together positioning and messaging, and the messaging will be different depending on those target audience groups yeah, the.

Gee Ranasinha: 29:26

Way you message to an individual is going to be different the way you message to an organization. To be very blunt and only once. You've come through all of that, and obviously part of that is looking at the business model, okay, so what's the end sell, what's the profit on that end sell?

Erin Manning: 29:45

Right.

Gee Ranasinha: 29:46

What numbers do you need to hit in the first 12, 24, 36 months of trading? So how many units are we selling? And then we have to work out, okay. So if we're using, for instance, if we're using digital advertising which doesn't mean that we are, because there are plenty of other ways to advertise without using digital mediums right, media right. But if we are, we need to work out what the cost per acquisition is right. So how many eyeballs do we need to show your product to to get interest? And out of those, once we get interest, how many interested parties on average need to see it to the point of getting a conversion?

Gary Pageau: 30:28

Right, that's a huge issue right now, cause I mean? I'm hearing from like people in the photo business, the online photo business. Right, they may have a site or an app or something you know. I can toss 16, $18 to just get a get a customer.

Gee Ranasinha: 30:42

Sure.

Gary Pageau: 30:42

Yeah, sure, yeah, I mean that's absolutely that's not inexpensive when you think about it, when the old days, if you could just send out a postcard and and get customers well, you know, I think there's, there's, there's lots of other things, there's lots of other moving parts involved with that right, sure?

Gee Ranasinha: 30:56

here, um, and there's, there's targeting, there's personalization, and you know you, you know there's still too many people out there who think, you know, if we build it, they will come. Sure, unfortunately, right, and that whole idea of targeting doesn't seem to be. Nobody spends much time on that sort of stuff beyond whatever the parameters are within a digital advertising platform, whatever the parameters are within a digital advertising platform. So you know, you may be using Google Ads or Facebook, Instagram advertising and you've got various customer criteria for creating targeted profiles. Sure, but you'll do that, but then you won't change the creative accordingly.

Gary Pageau: 31:43

Right.

Gee Ranasinha: 31:45

And you may not even be targeting using the right medium.

Erin Manning: 31:48

Mm-hmm.

Gee Ranasinha: 31:48

Right For a ludicrous example. Okay, and it's a sweeping generalization. Sure, if you were targeting 85-year-old retired pastors, it's probably not a good idea to use tiktok, right? I think I can safely say that I don't think there are too many 85 year old retired pastors using tiktok my gut feeling right and yet there are plenty of people with marketing in their job title which will look at these channels as being ubiquitous, and the process of going through the creation of the target audience profile in the media is the same.

Gary Pageau: 32:33

Right.

Gee Ranasinha: 32:35

Right, and there are very, very different vehicles, each with their own pluses and minuses different vehicles each with their own pluses and minuses, and unless you actually understand the vagarities and the idiosyncrasies of the particular channels, what work and what doesn't work, you're basically flying blind and, as an agency, you're playing with your client's money.

Gary Pageau: 32:56

Right, and speaking of playing with clients' money, one of the things I've noticed a lot of is, on certain media types, whether it's short videos or whatever, there's almost like a visual, like a trend. Somebody does something and then other people start copying it. I think the classic example that comes to mind while we were talking was remember when Dollar Shave Club came out and the guy did the video. The CEO did the video of walking through the warehouse and he did various antics, but he was talking about the product and the service and this is why they can do it send you a razor blade for a dollar, right, but it was cute and I swear for the next six months all I saw were knockoffs of that and the agency finally thought this is great, because people kind of saw that they like that. We can do that too. What do you? I mean just just that that to me, is because we're going to get to bad marketing at a point. I think that is the epitome of bad marketing is copycat because it's trendy.

Gee Ranasinha: 34:04

Kokin tobacco grad filters. Okay, Back in the 70s there was a square acetate filter system called Kokin.

Gary Pageau: 34:14

K-O-C-O-K-I-N. Yep.

Gee Ranasinha: 34:16

Right.

Gary Pageau: 34:17

They were French actually.

Gee Ranasinha: 34:18

Right french, actually right for a while every landscape photograph you could see used a graduated tobacco filter on the sky right, chocolate box photos right, and coking sold a ton of um. Tobacco grad filters, yeah, right, and any anything that's novel and and gen and generates generates a positive emotional response is going to be copied. It's like you know, any ideas, right, photo books, right. Right at the beginning there was Apple and Google doing photo books. Now you've got third party photo book software and third parties creating photo books with nice web to print interfaces and you interfaces and doing very well out of it it's a me-too product. I mean, okay, there may be sort of minor differences in terms of maybe quality or in terms of turnaround or pricing or whatever else, but at the end of the day, photobook, so there's always going to be copycats. Right, it's photobook, so there's always going to be copycats.

Gee Ranasinha: 35:23

The issue is for the layperson, the average person who's subject to that communication, what do they think of when they see your copycat piece of content? They think of the original, for example, samsung and Apple cat piece of content. It's thickly original, for example, and all right, uh, samsung and apple, okay, samsung's tv ads are well, not just samsung. Pretty much any telephone, non-applephone tv ads are very apple-esque, in in, in their, in their art direction, uh, and in their editing right. So it make it, make it. Doesn't make you think of samsung it makes you think of apple right right.

Gee Ranasinha: 36:14

So you know, is that the best way of samsung using their budget, or is it better to actually come up with a new type of idea, a new type of expression of the value they're creating with them? And I'm not, I'm not, I'm not knocking samsung's phones or tablets or telephones, or um wash, uh, washer dryers or whatever else they do, because, I mean, there's a huge company they make almost everything right, but but if, if you're, if you're aping your competitor, your audience is thinking of them instead of you.

Gee Ranasinha: 36:50

So what you need to be is is differentiated and, if possible, distinctive, right in the turn, in the ways that you choose to articulate your value, which is, as certainly is, about features but, it's also about use cases and it's also about execution, art direction, color palettes, photography, video, all of that stuff, so that the only way people can see a piece of creative for your product, they can only think of you, they can only think of you, they can't think of anybody else.

Gary Pageau: 37:25

And that's hard. I mean, one of the challenges that I reinforce about marketing is that. You know it's a discipline like almost anything else. It's not just the creative side. It's a discipline in the sense that you have to say no a lot.

Gee Ranasinha: 37:42

Strategy is about what you say no to more than what you say yes to. And you're right, and that's the. The problem is and you know we're talking about cpas earlier on. Right, you cannot be a qualified accountant without passing an exam. You can't be a lawyer unless you pass the bar. Right, you, you can't go into a hospital. Nobody will allow you to cut somebody open unless you have a medical degree. And yet anybody and his dog can be a marketer. Right, you buy they are and they are.

Gee Ranasinha: 38:11

You buy yourself a laptop all right, a creative cloud subscription and you sit down at a starbucks with a flat white and you think you're a marketer.

Erin Manning: 38:20

Yeah.

Gee Ranasinha: 38:21

Right, this is the problem. The barrier to entry is non-existent, and so what you have are people who haven't got a frigging clue what marketing is. They think they conflate marketing with promotion or communications.

Gee Ranasinha: 38:35

They have no idea about call or quant analysis, segmentation, targeting, positioning. They don't know anything about market orientation. They don't know what they don't know. To be honest, gary, and it's very frustrating because somebody like me, and there's plenty more of my peers who are in the same position we're the ones who have to pick up the pieces, because we're the ones where small business owners come to us and say you know what? I believe the bs by this particular company and I'm out, I'm not in substantial amount of money, what, what can we do?

Gee Ranasinha: 39:10

right so not only does that is that not a nice conversation to have? But it also it also taints the entire industry, right? Because you know people sort of look at oh marketer, all right, do you stand in front of Lamborghinis? Is that what you do?

Gary Pageau: 39:29

Or you just shoot TikToks all day, right.

Gee Ranasinha: 39:31

Right, exactly, and that is. It's a real issue, because it's deception there's no other word for it. You know there's no regulation right? People can get into this without any experience without any education and call themselves a marketer. What is a marketer? What does it mean? You know, creating Facebook ads does that make you a marketer Right? Designing a website does that make you a marketer Right? What is the definition? There is no definition right Right.

Gee Ranasinha: 40:07

Yeah, because it can be almost anything. It can be almost anything exactly, and therefore it means nothing, and therefore it means nothing, and that's that, that, in essence, is. You know, I've just described pretty much my day, every day, gary, that's, that's, that's what I have to go through, and I, you know, I speak to business owners every single day right and they're usually pleasantly surprised and refreshed when the first thing out of my mouth isn't a tactic right right, we don't start talking before we've even you know, exchange finished exchanging pleasantries.

Gee Ranasinha: 40:34

We're talking about um facebook ads, or we're talking about new websites. It's like, no, no, no, let's talk about your business, right? Okay, what? What are you trying to achieve? All right, what's your average customer order value? What's your recurrent revenue per customer? Do you know your top 20 most profitable customers? Why are they more profitable than the bottom 20?

Gary Pageau: 40:55

And if you don't know, what are you going to do to find out about it?

Gee Ranasinha: 40:58

Right.

Gary Pageau: 41:08

Because I think out about it. Right, because I, because I you know, I think you know you're talking about strategy, which is super important, and what I've discovered, especially in my segment. Right, you get like photo retailers, uh, labs, people like that, they're just buried in production. Right, they? I mean in terms of I need to get this thing done, out the door or whatever, and they don't have time to think about strategy. And so, talking to those people who could benefit from better marketing, but they seem to be very, very daunted when they are approached the idea that, hey, I need to work on strategy, I need to think about that, as opposed to, hey, my print tech didn't show up today so I've got to sit at the printer all day. They're worried about those issues. So, what are some of the things? Like somebody who is in that position, what are some of the things that they could do to kind of jumpstart that process? Because it's not an easy fix, for one thing, but it's also something that you need to start. And so where do you start?

Gee Ranasinha: 42:02

It's a very difficult conversation to have for the vast majority of business owners, and the reason why, I think, is the entrepreneurial nature of the average business owner, and I mentioned it before. Strategy is as much what you say no to as what you actually say yes to. It's actually more about what you say no to.

Erin Manning: 42:28

Right.

Gee Ranasinha: 42:29

And the entrepreneur mindset is anti-saying no, right, you want to say yes to everything. You want to say yes to absolutely everything, exactly. So they're nailing somebody down on strategy and saying, okay, who are we? What do we sell? Who do we serve? Right, why does it matter? Basic marketing questions. By actually putting sticks in the ground about these particular ideals, these pillars of what the business is, by inference it says what the business isn't.

Gary Pageau: 43:08

Right.

Gee Ranasinha: 43:09

At which point the business owner starts backpedaling hugely, saying oh wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. But yeah, that doesn't mean to say that we're not going to go after this type of business. And I say, yes, it does Right, it does mean saying no to that type of business. Yes, but there's a huge opportunity in that type of business. Then start another business Right, serving that customer profile.

Gary Pageau: 43:32

Right, business right, serving that customer profile right. Just this week it was announced uh, apple has said no to making an electric vehicle. Right, you know they were going to. They were spent on 10 years on project titan I'm doing air quotes for for those who can't see and you know they thought they were going to. You know people thought they were going to. You know people thought they were going to disrupt that's my least favorite word they were going to disrupt the market. But clearly they realized, you know they had to say no to that. And this is Apple, probably one of the most successful companies in the world, which you would think would could do anything they want. But actually Apple is a very strategic and a very disciplined company because they say no to a lot of things that they could be in that they're not.

Gee Ranasinha: 44:20

Firstly, Apple have neither confirmed or denied the existence of such a project.

Gary Pageau: 44:25

That's true.

Gee Ranasinha: 44:26

So what we're talking about is water cooler, gossip Right.

Erin Manning: 44:31

Okay.

Gee Ranasinha: 44:32

It's nice gossip, don't get me wrong right but it is no more than gossip right I say that because um in my previous job I worked quite closely with apple okay um been to cupatino many times, met steve jobs twice um I well in. In those days I knew a little bit about how things worked within the organization.

Gee Ranasinha: 44:56

Obviously I wasn't privy to very much, you know right confidential stuff, but in in terms of process and in terms of um teams, small teams working on particular um products, it is very strategic and I don't want this to be a sort of a dissection of Apple's business model. The Tim Cook Apple is a very different animal, which is primarily driven by profit centers and profit making Sure Over and above anything that I would call innovation Sure. But, as I said, I don't want to go down that road because I'm sure there are plenty of Apple fanboys and fangirls out there.

Gary Pageau: 45:48

Well, I don't mind pissing them off, that's fine.

Gee Ranasinha: 45:50

Yeah, well, I need all the friends I can get, Gary, so I'm not going to piss anybody off.

Gary Pageau: 45:55

I guess I want to use them as an example, because they are well in terms of strategy, you're absolutely right.

Gee Ranasinha: 46:00

Okay it's about? It's about saying what you're not going to do, what not what you are going to do, and that the hardest thing is to nail somebody down, to accept that, to recognize that as the only way forward. You cannot be all things to all people. People are looking to pigeonhole you and you should let them pigeonhole you. Oh, xyz company? Yeah, they're the guys who do that.

Gary Pageau: 46:28

That's what you want to be known for. Okay, that's interesting. Let yourself be pigeonholed. Yes, because some people would think that's a bad thing.

Gee Ranasinha: 46:38

Well, look at the Fortune 500. And there are probably 90% of the companies in the Fortune 500 are companies that you can pigeonhole.

Gary Pageau: 46:48

Right.

Gee Ranasinha: 46:49

They have a very clear articulation of their value. What we do is X, and we do it very well, maybe the best in the world at it.

Gary Pageau: 47:02

When I have my discussion on branding with my entrepreneurship students that's one thing I ask them what is a brand? And they always say it's a swoosh, it's a you know a logo. And I said, no, it's what the customer thinks of you, that's your brand.

Gee Ranasinha: 47:18

Jeff Bezos says a brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room.

Gary Pageau: 47:23

Right, exactly, right, exactly.

Gee Ranasinha: 47:35

But again I guess this one, because you really don't have any. I mean, you have control over your business process and you have a control over a lot of things, but you don't really control what people think of you.

Gary Pageau: 47:41

Customers are in control of your brand. Your brand is what customers say about you, right, which?

Gee Ranasinha: 47:44

is why reviews and things are super important. Now, right, you can influence a perception, but ultimately the brand is controlled by your customer.

Gary Pageau: 47:52

Right.

Gee Ranasinha: 47:53

And it's like a tree it takes a long time to grow, a very, very short time to cut down.

Gary Pageau: 48:00

That's interesting. So I had not thought of it that way. So when you talk about, like, when you get into these situations where people come to your business and they've said we've had a bad experience with XYZ marketing agency, you know they had us shoot a bunch of tin cocks in front of a Lambo and our CEO is 50 years old and it was not working but it won them an award. So that's great, right? So, and the sad thing is, in the marketplace they've already kind of polluted customer perception. They've already kind of polluted customer perception. So how do you work with that? Where someone may have made some mistakes in marketing that are maybe not in line with what their brand, value or proposition actually is, what do you do in that situation?

Gee Ranasinha: 48:48

It's a very, very difficult road forward, to be honest, gary, and there's no easy answers. It's a long, drawn-out, humbling process. It starts at the very beginning In extreme circumstances. Obviously it depends on the particular instance. It can mean a total review of everything customer facing in terms of the distinctive brand assets that's been built up for perhaps years. We've just completed something with a company which is 25 years old and, for various reasons, after doing a deep dive in terms of customer quality of analysis, the only real way forward was a total ground up rebuild of that company 25 year old company, basically starting from scratch on the face of it, looking like a brand new company. Okay, you know, certainly they've got sort of some history to that. There's no recipe, there's no hard and fast fail-safe answers to get you out of that. It is very much dependent on the particular situation of that organization and the business results that they're looking to get and the budget they've got available. Obviously, sure, yeah, because all of these things, the way I refer to it, is a three-legged stool, right?

Gee Ranasinha: 50:24

So you have the business result that you're looking to achieve, the time you have available to achieve it and the budget that you can apportion to the efforts right, and usually what happens is at least one of those legs come up short I leave you to guess which one that may be right right and then it's usually the job of people like me to fit a quart into a pint pot, you know, to actually sharpen our pencil and make the whole thing work.

Gee Ranasinha: 50:56

It's people underestimate how much budget is required to do a good job at stuff, right, because they see, oh, marketing automation and ai and this and that it's all you know. Press a button and stuff comes vomiting out the other end and it's like vomiting is the right word, because it is actual vomit most 90 of it. Yeah, yeah, and the the skill is actually finding out, finding the gold from the dirt, isn't it right? Yeah and uh, that's, that's, that's what really is.

Gary Pageau: 51:28

Is is missing so so so you mentioned something earlier about ai. I want to touch on that because there's a lot of VC money as you said, private equity money going into these, what in our industry we call the generative about that where, for example, you know, based on the demographics of the viewer, the graphic on the ad may change right, if I'm a young person, I'm looking at polo shirts, I'm going to see a younger you know, maybe somebody, you know my ethnicity or something like that, and what do you think about that? Do you think that is a good application of that technology to try and reflect the viewer in that? I mean, I'm just curious what your thoughts are, because it's relatively new and it's getting a lot of attention, but it's like 3D TV Is it really going to make a difference?

Erin Manning: 52:35

Well, the technology is new.

Gee Ranasinha: 52:37

But the idea behind it is far from new, Just like 3D TV. Right Go back to Vincent Price and the House of Wax in 1955.

Erin Manning: 52:45

Right.

Gee Ranasinha: 52:45

That was 3D. Right, you had to wear those funky red and green glasses Right and go to the cinema. Right, that was 3D. The idea of marketers or advertisers targeting specific audience groups on their creative is pretty much as old as advertising. There's nothing new about that. What is new is the technology to get there and Right and the speed of production.

Gary Pageau: 53:14

Right.

Gee Ranasinha: 53:15

That whole aspect is new. Now, if the creative is relevant and generates a positive emotional response to the point of making purchase, then that's the idea of advertising Great. Making purchase, then that's the idea of advertising Great. My issue is that we've sacrificed better for fast.

Gary Pageau: 53:44

Okay.

Gee Ranasinha: 53:45

Right. So we're creating noise, more and more of it, but with less and less signal.

Gee Ranasinha: 53:53

Right Right more and more of it, but with less and less signal, right, right. So generative AI models, llm's doing things like imagery, great, or even movies, sora, the new thing that OpenAI have done. I don't know if you saw the videos that have been flying around social media the last couple of weeks. All very well and good, but think of that in the professional aspect, in an agency aspect. So you, you, you create something in one of these, um, uh, photo ai engines and supposing it's um, three puppies, okay, on on a street, lit at night, um, and it creates that image and you say, okay, that's that, the look, the feel, thepping, the, everything is absolutely perfect. But actually one of those puppies, instead of it being a Labrador, I want it to be an Irish Setter. What happens? It generates a whole new image.

Gary Pageau: 54:44

Right.

Gee Ranasinha: 54:45

That has probably very little to do with the image that it just created, right exactly. There's no experiment, there's no iteration going on.

Erin Manning: 54:53

Right.

Gee Ranasinha: 54:53

It Right, exactly. There's no experiment, there's no iteration going on. Right, it's starting from scratch each time, right, it doesn't learn from what it just did, right, right. And so you're getting more and more frustrated and over time, your iteration is getting further and further away from the in adverted commas, brief, which is what you needed to create in the first place. Looking like you know you'd have a layout pad, maybe sketched out of what type of the image was. So what we've got is now we're getting to the point of that'll do.

Gee Ranasinha: 55:22

It's close enough to what we had in our mind or what the art director briefed us to actually create for the ad, but the AI is driving that. We're no longer driving that. No, in if you think about things like product shots or modeling or even video. Okay, in in in the, in the, in the real world. And the way that most production is done today, especially when there's montage stuff, is that you have 3d animation models rendered within live action.

Gee Ranasinha: 55:52

Right, so there's geometry within within the shot, which doesn't exist in an ai model right right, so you can't tweak the model's orientation on the x, y or z axis within the frame. It has to go off and start all over again right so, so that iteration, that that tweaking, that art direction, that video direction isn't there yet right now, of course, like all of these things, and probably it's just time right they don't happen eventually it's, it's, it's like, uh, the way that, uh, these models try to handle things like fingers and arms, they just, they just look like bunches of sausages, don't they?

Gee Ranasinha: 56:33

they just look like weird. Yeah, right, but it's it's. It's. It's early days, it'll probably get there, right, but it, but we're it. What are we? What are we using it for? Is it to create more low quality stuff faster?

Gary Pageau: 56:49

well, I think that's exactly what's happening, right that's exactly what's happening?

Gee Ranasinha: 56:54

or is it supposed to be to be able to create really awesome stuff?

Gary Pageau: 56:58

right faster, better and with a greater result right, but I think it's more of the one with the former. Look at this great thing. I can do 17 iterations of this and, like you said, exactly it's uh, it is. I mean, like I said it's, it's. I think it's going to be refined, certainly to a point, you know, where the fingers don't look like sausages and you know will be, because it does have sort of that dead eye. Look, um, yes, on certain things, and I think, especially right If you want to use AI to generate text.

Gary Pageau: 57:33

Absolutely, it's crazy. I mean, I posted something on my personal Facebook the other day where I get subscribed to some newsletters and they're clearly written by AI. It's about my, you know, the Detroit Lions, and there was literally this article about how re-signing the third string quarterback was going to be key to them winning the Super Bowl, and it was just so enthusiastic, you know, and it was just like, oh my, you know, it was just the way it was written. You could just tell no human being wrote this. It was just clear that it was, you know, ai and it's just some sort of tool they were using to just populate this thing and just send it out. Hopefully, maybe I'll click on it and get an ad in there, but it'll get better. Obviously, tools get better over time. I mean, remember the early Photoshop you were mentioning, right yeah absolutely Sure.

Gee Ranasinha: 58:23

I mean, I started using Photoshop before they had layers.

Gary Pageau: 58:25

Yeah right, Exactly.

Gee Ranasinha: 58:27

We didn't have layers in Photoshop 2. Right, I came with 3, 3.0, I think is when layers came.

Gary Pageau: 58:34

Well, now you're dating yourself and you know I was going to draw to a conclusion here. Just you know, do you think marketing is in a crisis in a way, because, like you said, the barrier to entry is so low and yet so much damage can be done now in a lot of ways, right? I mean, we've all seen, you know, cases where you know a message gets out it's not, it's not, it's just sort of a you know, hey, somebody, somebody, the intern or whoever used put something on the LinkedIn post or the Instagram post or whatever, and it was not brand consistent and there was actually a backlash to it. So what is your, you know, perception is the state of marketing today.

Gee Ranasinha: 59:22

Crisis is not too strong a word? I don't think, gary. Okay, I think it's absolutely right and I think there's two reasons well, at least two reasons, probably more than two reasons of why marketing is in crisis, because I firmly believe this that marketing is ideologically disliked in the higher echelons of business, and the result is that we do effective marketing. Well, effective marketing doesn't happen. We do efficient marketing instead of effective marketing.

Gary Pageau: 1:00:12

Right, okay doesn't happen.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:00:17

We do efficient marketing instead of effective marketing right? Okay, the c-suite ceos, cfos, coos, have an inherent distrust in marketing, I think consciously or unconsciously, because it goes against the way they think. It goes against the sequential, rational thought processes that accountants finance people economists love so much right. I mean because if you look at business right, much of business is founded under. You could call it like an engineering model.

Erin Manning: 1:00:52

Sure.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:00:53

Most management consultants, for example, come from an engineering type background. Right, okay, in fact, you could even look and say that economics is based on an engineering model, because it looks at economies and markets as though they operate under Newtonian rules right. One plus one always equals two. Okay.

Gary Pageau: 1:01:12

Well, most companies start with engineering Absolutely Some form.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:01:17

Right. And the thing is, in pretty much every other area of business, that business unit is overwhelmingly driven by rational logic-based thinking. Sure, overwhelmingly driven by rational logic-based thinking. Sure it's about trying to find ways to reduce costs, reduce effort, increase productivity, increase efficiency and all the rest of it.

Erin Manning: 1:01:39

Okay.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:01:44

But what's happening now is that that line of thinking is being extrapolated into marketing, with the goal of reducing effort and cost by mechanizing the process. Mm-hmm.

Erin Manning: 1:01:54

But the thing is, we're in manufacturing With the goal of reducing effort and cost by mechanizing the process.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:01:56

But the thing is where, in manufacturing, you know if you're supposing you're making widgets right Right, unless you reduce the cost so that the widget no longer has a is no longer working, right Right? Reducing the cost of marketing reduces its effectiveness because the arbiters that we see as judging effectiveness are more than its constituent parts. Let me explain so. If you're thinking about a business process that's based on rationality and logic, it presupposes a fixed and rational target right that always behaves in a certain way under certain conditions right the problem with marketing is that our target are human beings, and human beings are not rational objects.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:02:48

They aren't machines that always think or do something in the same way. We don't behave logically, we don't behave rationally. Which means effective marketing involves I don't want to use the term out-of-the-box thinking, but essentially it's creative experimentation. It's stuff which finance people see as being superficial and irrational.

Gary Pageau: 1:03:10

Right, Well, that was the word I was actually going to interject was irrational. That's exactly the word.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:03:15

Absolutely so. That's number one. There's a fundamental disconnect between every other area of the business and marketing. Okay, to get to that ultimate sweet spot of effectiveness requires experimentation, and what a finance person would deem as being waste, right, okay, but that's the only way that we can get to that point.

Gary Pageau: 1:03:48

Right.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:03:49

That's number one. The second reason why I think marketing is in crisis and it's related to the first because the people. That's number one. The second reason why I think marketing is in crisis and it's related to the first because the people who are hiring marketers don't know what marketing is Right. And the people they're hiring don't know what marketing is.

Gary Pageau: 1:04:05

Right.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:04:07

They think marketing is promotions.

Gary Pageau: 1:04:10

Right.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:04:10

They think marketing is doing a dance on TikTok.

Gary Pageau: 1:04:13

Right.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:04:13

They think marketing is posting an ad on tick tock right.

Gary Pageau: 1:04:14

They think marketing is posting an ad on facebook right, okay you know, promotion is part of marketing, sure, but it's a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage of what marketing is actually concerned with, right, if you think of it as a primary business function I had a question there because because he kind of tapped on something that I think is interesting, because I see a lot where you see an executive c-suite right where they take there's a vice president of sales and marketing usually try and join those two together. Yeah, why, why do you think they do that and why does what, and what are your thoughts on the effectiveness of that?

Gee Ranasinha: 1:04:57

usually it's because the person and also the person who's to sales and marketing has come from a sales background. He's never come from a marketing background. Has right, it's always a salesperson who thinks they can do marketing, never the other way around, right?

Gary Pageau: 1:05:10

we notice that. Yeah, yeah, no, I exactly.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:05:12

That's why I asked the question, right and the reason is because a sales guy is only ever looking at the next 90 days right the marketer is looking further down the road right right I.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:05:26

I used to use the analogy of car headlights. You know you've got dipped headlights and you've got full headlights. So dipped headlights allow you to see the next 20, 30 feet right, and once, once you've got nobody, you know, in front of you and you can, you're driving the night and you can put the full headlights you can, you can see like a few hundred yards right ahead. Right, that's the difference between sales and marketing. Sales is concerned with what. Can I close business in the next 30, 60, 90?

Gee Ranasinha: 1:05:58

Because, based upon that, it knows whether I've got a job.

Erin Manning: 1:06:01

Right.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:06:02

In most cases, right Marketing's looking further down the road. Marketing's looking at what do we need to do today to keep that funnel filled in six months, in three years, in 10 years time? Where do we need to start making our investments, our planning, our distribution, our pricing, our innovation or whatever else?

Gary Pageau: 1:06:23

So you wouldn't recommend those people being the same person is what you're saying.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:06:28

They cannot be the same person, because their goals are different. Their goals are totally different, and the reason why it's always the salesperson who thinks they can become the marketer, it's the poacher becoming gamekeeper. Right, they're controlling both sides. The reason why they're doing that is because they've had run-ins with marketing throughout their professional lives where marketing hasn't given them what they want. Right, because marketing can't give them what they want Right. Right, because marketing can't give them what they want. Right, because marketing is looking further down the road.

Gary Pageau: 1:06:59

Because they're the ones who say no.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:07:01

Because they're the ones who say no, because marketing is looking at the strategic and salespeople don't like to hear no.

Gary Pageau: 1:07:04

They like to hear yes.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:07:07

Salespeople like to hear when Exactly Right, exactly right, um, so yeah, it's, it's, it's. It always sort of amuses me that these sales and marketing people are always promoted sales people. Marketers don't think they're sales people. Now, the best marketers may have been sales people. Right, because I don't think you can be a marketer unless you've had sales experience, right, right, I mean, even like retail, I mean you could be waiting tables, right, but that face-to-face human connection sales experience. There's no book or course that you can do to get that, I don't think. But most marketers don't pretend to think of them as being salespeople.

Gary Pageau: 1:07:56

Right? Not at all.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:07:57

But salespeople think that, well, everybody thinks they can be marketers, right, right, oh exactly.

Gary Pageau: 1:08:02

How can it be? Come on, well, they want to be an influencer, right, influencer, yes.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:08:07

That's the thing I think. It's more like effluencer, isn't it?

Gary Pageau: 1:08:10

Well, that's the whole thing is. I thought I I've seen some backlash with with people responding to influencers, because it's like you realize that you're the influencers are promoting the brand, they're promoting them, they're using the brand to promote themselves so again, influencers have been around since the 50s oh, yeah, wait maybe even earlier

Gee Ranasinha: 1:08:31

yeah exactly when we know when, when tv ads were live, they weren't recorded, right, yeah, these people would have.

Gary Pageau: 1:08:41

I mean, you had, you know, you had, uh, you know, just look at a lot of the early cigarette manufacturer marketing. Yeah, laramie, yeah, that's all that was right, very cool. Well, listen g. It's been great talking to you. If people want to connect with you and learn more about the crazy things you're espousing, how do they reach out to you?

Gee Ranasinha: 1:09:02

They can go to hell, gary, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's not true. No, it's not true.

Gary Pageau: 1:09:05

Because you're going to say no.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:09:07

You're going to say no, I'm going to say no, because I'm all about strategy. If any of my inane ramblings has made sense to anybody and they want to reach out to me on LinkedIn, you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm sure you can post my LinkedIn link on the show notes.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:09:23

That's probably the best way to get hold of me. I'm on various other social networks, including TikTok, but I promise you I do not dance, but LinkedIn is the one I use most often. I don't touch Twitter anymore since it became a dumpster fire for fascists, but otherwise I'm pretty much on everything else.

Gary Pageau: 1:09:42

Awesome. Well, listen, it's been wonderful talking to you. I hope we connect again in the future. And best wishes. Thank you so much.

Gee Ranasinha: 1:09:49

Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.

Erin Manning: 1:09:52

Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at wwwthedeadpixelssocietycom.