The Emotional Side of Buying Decisions | Gee Ranasinha

The problem what economists, finance people, bean counters, engineering type background people are trying to do with marketing is they're trying to make it an exact cause and effect reactive closed system, which marketing is not. But the thing is, Their reasoning is sound because pretty much every other area of the business operates like that. If you look at procurement, you look at R&D, you look at, you know, sales, you look at all of these things, basically look at R&D, look at manufacturing, okay, supposing I'm making widgets.

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Welcome to another edition of The Profitable Creative, the only place on the interweb where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Joining me today is G. Ranasinha of Caxino.

Welcome, G. I'm delighted to be here, Christian. Thanks very much for the invite.

Thank you for joining me. So give the audience a brief rundown of what you do. Your bona fides, if you will.

Okay, 36,000-foot view. I've been in marketing a long time, um, long, long time, since days of black and white TV. Well, not quite, but certainly in the days of dial-up internet and AOL CDs. But today what we do is, um, we're a small business marketing, branding, and behavioral science agency. For the past 16 years, we've been working with over 400 startups and small businesses, and we help them increase their awareness, reputation, trust, and most importantly, sales. Because at the end of the day, sales is the name of the game, right? That's why we're doing it. You know, we're not a charity here. We're doing it to— if it doesn't move the needle, It's not marketing, it's fluff.

Okay. You talk kind of funny, so I'm assuming you're from the United Kingdom. Do you work in the United Kingdom or where do you work with businesses?

Talk funny? Well, I resemble that remark. Steady on. No, you would think, wouldn't you? I mean, it is a fair assumption, an educated guess. However, You couldn't be more wrong. Actually, I live in northwest France. Oh, of course you can. Obviously, as you can tell from my very thick northwest French accent. Yes, right. Yes. No, I, I'm originally a Brit. Yes. Okay. Mea culpa. But I moved to France 23 years ago. 23 years ago. I have to say it twice because I can't believe it.

This was on purpose. Not, not like you weren't I wasn't evading the police or anything.

No, all right. I was headhunted, not in that way, for in a good way. I was headhunted to be the CMO for a software company, and, uh, I, um, I took the gig. I worked at that software company for 7 years, and we did some wonderful things, but we got to a point where there was just growing pains within the organization, and I was sort of a little bit treading water for, for a while, and I needed to move and do bigger and better things. Um, and this was in the, at the end of 2007. So me and two now colleagues were looking around at the, uh, at the environment, at the industries, at what people were doing, and it was, you know, just at the time the iPhone had came out and people were just beginning to work out the potential of what the internet could be. But at that time, it was the larger organizations with their, you know, pretty much infinite resources and deep pockets that were taking advantage of all of this. So Me and my colleagues had the brainwave that we needed to start an agency that was focused on startups and small businesses, i.e., organizations who didn't have limitless amounts of budget, to leverage the power of what online could be at a time when it was still nascent and the big guys hadn't sort of carved up a large swathe of the market. And that's how Cixiño, the agency, was born. As I said, that was 16 years ago. It was 2008, which you will probably remember was not exactly the best time to start a marketing agency. It was not the best time to start anything, really. Not my best business decision ever.

But— Well, let me ask you that in that context. What were some of your financial roadblocks or struggles in starting up an agency?

The same financial struggles that beset pretty much every single new business, which is the C word. No, not that C word.

Not that C word.

The other C word.

Cash?

The other C word. Cash flow.

Yes.

Yes. Businesses don't go under because of lack of customers or because their product sucks. They go out of business because of cash flow. That's exactly right. Unless you can manage cash flow, you are royally screwed.

Can you say that louder for those in the back, G?

Maybe I'll say it slower as well.

Okay, go ahead.

So that they can hear it. There are only 3 reasons why a business goes under. Cash flow, cash flow, and cash flow. Perfect. Unless you— yeah, yeah, that's parroting Conrad Hilton, of course. Yeah.

As you can— well, I think a lot of people get confused, you know, all the statistics about business failures and startups, but you know, they, they go out of business because they run out of money. Now there are a lot of reasons why they could run out of money, right? Maybe, maybe their product sucks. But usually that's not the case. Usually it's— and I'm curious about your experience— I would say more businesses struggle with successful growth and cash flow than not having any sales at all. What would you say?

Yeah, I wouldn't say more businesses. I mean, you just need to look at the stats, right? 50% of small businesses go under in the first year. 75 go under in 2 years. It's like, if you look at it over like 5 years, 96% of small businesses go under within 5 years. That's not because, like you've just mentioned, that's not because all their products suck. No, the suckiness— that is a word I invented it.

You just made it up.

Yes, right. I'm patenting it. You can't actually use that now. The suckiness of a product is a symptom of cash flow, right? The lack of customers is a symptom of the cash flow situation. I would say more, well, let's sort of pull back a bit. I think there's also a case of especially startups spending the money that they have on stupid friggin things that they don't friggin need. Notice I said, I modified my language just in case there were people over.

He wanted to say stupid fucking things, but he edited himself for me. Yes.

You know, all of these people who think, okay, what we need to do is buy top of the range technical equipment and, you know, those Charles Eames armchairs and those super duper office chairs that cost 3 grand and the espresso machine that costs 5 grand, all of that crap, the foosball table in the corner. No. No, and no. Okay, you're spending your money on crap because you're believing the BS. And if you focus exactly what you need, and especially from the marketing standpoint, because there are plenty of vultures circling above you who can smell the green and would be only too happy to help you spend your money, of which 99% of the marketing technology software applications, the martech stack, as is the vernacular of today, is total horseshit for vast amount of small businesses. It is not necessary.

Okay, you caught me on a particular day, G, because I was sitting this morning in the shower, actually I was standing, and I was—

I was gonna say you probably drowned if you were sitting.

Yeah, yes, so, I have this disdain for economists, right? Because I think it's a pseudoscience, and, and I think it's a pseudoscience because it really is, is impossible to predict with any accuracy human behavior. And I, I had this realization this morning that my, my disdain for marketing and my frustration with marketing as a business owner is that it is in the same vein. Like the struggles that marketers have is because of the complexities of human behavior. And it's not just the human behavior of the buyer, it's the human behavior of the seller and it's the human behavior of any of the intermediaries like agencies. What say you?

Economists should be thought of as double glazing salesmen or aluminum siding salesmen. I said aluminum, notice, because—

Aluminum.

Thank you. But not necessarily. I'm sure your audience is more North American based, as indeed mine is. The vast majority of, let's call it classical Chicago-style heterogenous economics, okay? Makes ludicrous assumptions about buyer behavior and about cause and effect. It assumes perfect information, perfect utility. It assumes everything works. It assumes— I can't even remember the term in economics, it slipped my memory— but it assumes that by taking a sample of the average in the middle of the bell curve is representative of the entire sample. Yes. Which of course is totally friggin ridiculous. Yes. You cannot make a science out of human behavior because humans are irrational, emotional, contextually led entities. And more power to their elbow, that's how it should be. But the problem what economists finance people, bean counters, engineering-type background people are trying to do with marketing is they're trying to make it an exact cause and effect reactive closed system, which marketing is not. But the thing is, their reasoning is sound because pretty much every other area of the business operates like that. If you look at procurement, you look at R&D, you look at, you know, sales, you look at all of these things. Basically, look at R&D, look at manufacturing, okay? Supposing I'm making widgets. Now, the idea is to make as an efficient machine, a system to make my widgets as possible. By efficient, it means to lower input as much as possible to create a particular output. Now you can do that by finding cheaper raw materials or maybe creating, buying a faster machine or something that will increase the productivity and lower the per unit cost. And that way everybody's happy, pat on the back, pay raise, weekend in Carbo, whatever it may be. Okay, everybody's happy. Unfortunately, that logical, rational thought process works because you have total transparency over each unit of the logical progression of the manufacture, which you do not in marketing for two reasons. Firstly, because the targets of our marketing are not rational logic entities. They're human beings, and as human beings, as buyers, we are anything but rational. We are illogical, and our buyer behavior is totally context-dependent.

So let me ask you a question. Have you, have you read the book by your, uh, fellow countryman It was called Alchemy here in the States. I think it published in Britain in a different, uh, by Rory Sutherland. Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy. And if you're not ready to make that full commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now.

Yes, Rory's— I wouldn't call Rory a friend. We've hung out a few times together. You've had cocktails? Well, there may have been alcohol involved. Yeah. Okay. What are you saying?

Well, so, you know, his thesis in this book is that the Age of Reason where we live in, where, which, you know, started a few centuries ago with like you, you can, the scientific model where you can learn, understand, improve doesn't fit with human behavior and therefore marketing because of just what you said, that we're, we're not rational, but there are some themes or threads that, you know, can be tugged on, if you will, but at the end of the day, you probably are not gonna know why your marketing is successful.

Or why it sucks. Mm-hmm. If you look at the other side of the coin. Right. So how is it—

Right. Well, how as a marketer do you address that? You go in and you pitch a client that you have a marketing need, I can fill it, yet it's not like me who is dealing with numbers and my results are predictable. I have confidence in telling people what I tell them. How do you have confidence in telling them that you can solve their marketing problem?

Firstly, we don't know whether the problem is a marketing problem. What we know is there is a business problem.

Okay.

Yes. Because we rattled the piggy bank and there's not many coins in there. So we know there is a business problem.

Right.

Right. So any marketing agency worth their salt which unfortunately there are not that many, okay? I would agree with that statement. We'll start with— we call it discovery, but different agencies call it different things, but at the end of the day, potato, potato, right? We'll all talk about the same thing. We need to come— we need to do a diagnosis, okay? And we need to understand every part of the business, we have to understand the industry, the category, the other players within the category, how the product market fit is, to see what the hell is going on. Because quite often what happens is the business owner, the marketing manager, whoever else will come to us and say, I need X. And it's like, oh really? So you're a marketing expert, are you? You know what you need. Okay. 9 times out of 10, they haven't got a clue what they need. It's something what they want. We need a new website. Oh, okay. Why do you need a new website? Because this website isn't bringing us leads. Okay. So when they say we need a new website, what most people mean is they need a new website design. Now, the design of the web— of a website is of course extremely important. However, I think the number of buyers who select a vendor based upon the prettiness of their website is a fraction of a percentage of a fraction of a percentage and of no statistical validity. Okay, what sells is copy. What sells is text and narrowing people down when they're talking about the website. Most of the time when we see this, and I speak to a lot of business owners, okay, in my day job. Well, yeah, most of the time the problem with their website, yeah, okay, maybe it needs a little bit of a tickle here and there. Okay, who doesn't? So I certainly do now and again, right? I prefer it. Hey, but you know, what I get up to in my weekends is just down to me. Anyway, what usually happens is that yes, okay, the design might need a little bit of TLC, but the biggest problem with the website is not the design, it's that the words don't work. The words just insipid, vapid, mediocre, and don't speak to the buyer, the visitor, the audience member. The problem is usually that the company, the organization concerned, has done no real marketing. You know, real marketing, the stuff, the 9/10 that you— that is, are below the waterline, that nobody knows it even exists because they think marketing is all about promotions, it's all about tactical stuff, it's It's webinars and ads and SEO and podcasts and video and all of that crap at the end of the, which is at the end of the stuff. What's much more interesting is the strategy stuff that we do right at the beginning, the strategy, the positioning, the messaging, the segmentation, the targeting and all of that sort of stuff, which nobody bothers with because it doesn't sound sexy. It isn't. It's very boring. It's very tedious, but it needs to be in place because if it's not in place, what we have, what we have today, which is messaging that doesn't resonate, which is instantly forgettable. We're spending globally as an industry, we're spending $1.1 trillion on marketing and 86% of it is being totally ignored by our target audience. So how can that be when we have all of these highfalutin martech solutions, AI, goodness knows whatever else coming around the corner? How is it that we're doing that? Because the effectiveness of marketing is going down instead of up because we're automating the wrong shit. We're automating the productivity We're automating the ideation when the creative aspect is being exercised out of the equation because we can't quantify it as a cost. We can't look at a marketing campaign and say, okay, we're gonna spend $200 on media spend, we're gonna spend $100 on design, we're gonna spend $50 on, I don't know, printing, Okay, but we're going to spend $273 on creative. Well, what does that mean? We can't quantify it. So what we do is we automate it and we think, well, okay, if we throw enough brown stuff at the fan, something is going to come back. And if you, if you can't hit the target, hit what you can and call that the target, right? That's what we're doing.

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I think this is a fascinating insight and I will— it's kind of analogous to the finances. And I hope this isn't too tortured analogy, but, you know, the financial processes and systems in a business aren't sexy, but it's impossible to do any of the more valuable things like analysis, projections, forecasting without good processes to give you good data. And I think that it's one of those things that because it's not sexy, no one wants to do it and no one wants to pay for it. But then they want what they can't have because those things aren't in place. And so then the analogy to the marketing is what they want is the sizzle, but they don't want to pay for the frying pan. Oh, I just made that one up. I don't know if that's a good one.

That'll work.

I'll take it.

Okay.

All right. So what would you say? That's a good analogy. Would that Would that track for you?

I think it's very much so. What we're trying to do is make marketing, we're trying to look at marketing like we're looking at Newtonian physics. Like 2 2 is always 4 and the only way to get to 4 is by adding 2 with 2. The problem with, now that works within a finance world, within an economics world, within an engineering world. 2 2 is always 4, never anything else, right? Unless you're in base 5 or something, okay, just to be awkward, right? But otherwise, it's always the same. The problem with marketing is that, to quote Rory Sutherland, who you mentioned earlier on, the opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea. What I would say is there's more than one way to skin a cat, which is probably less politically correct. There is a number of ways to get to the outcome it's which is not necessarily the most obvious and is totally conditioned upon the behavioral drivers, the levers we can pull to influence a buying decision by the audience from an emotional level. Anything we as consumers, as buyers, whether it's B2B or B2C, makes absolutely zero difference. All of us buy from here. No, not from the nipple. We buy from the heart.

That would be awkward.

It would indeed, yes. Yeah, it gives a whole new meaning to touch and pay, doesn't it, really? But anyway, let's move on. That's for another podcast, clearly. Right. The point is we buy emotionally and then we post-rationalize logically. We tell ourselves a story to justify it. Okay, we buy something from our heart, from our emotions, whatever that emotion may be. You know, it may be pleasure, it may be fear, it may be regret, it may be— there's a hundred different reasons why we buy. And then, you know, imagine you buy something, you treat yourself to something, and you get it home and maybe, you know, you suddenly get the realization is, you know what, I spent a shit ton of money on this. How on earth am I gonna— why the hell? What was I thinking? What was I smoking for goodness sake? Right? And what happens then? You tell yourself a story. Oh, but yeah, but you know, look how well this thing is made. I mean, it's been engineered within an inch of its life. This thing is so durable, it's gonna last so much longer than the thing it's replacing. You know, it's actually gonna save me money because I won't have to buy a new one every couple of years. You tell yourself a story, right? Now, if it's a believable story, you keep it. If not, you're back the next day and returning it, right? But that's what we're doing. We're all, we're all post-rationalizing. Now, I would contend that that would be the same for anything we buy, with the single exception of a commodity product, okay? If you're selling a commodity, the reasons for buying because there is no obvious differentiation between vendors, hence the term commodity, you're buying on price. I personally don't care which brand of paperclips I buy. I'm sure you're probably of the similar persuasion there, Christian.

I don't really care. Paperclips are pretty important.

Well, there you go. Now, if you're a commodity, then you got a whole other set of headaches to worry about because if you're a commodity, then you'll know that no matter what you're selling, no matter whom you're selling it to, there is always somebody somewhere who's going to sell it to them for less. So I'm going to get into a price war and then you're in a downward spiral. And if that's a race you do not want to win.

I'm going to circle back and force you to answer my question. How do you, how do you, or at least I'm going to restate the question, whether you answer it's up to you. When you're pitching to a prospect of being able to solve their problem, how do you do that knowing that you're either unsure of what the problem is or whether the solution will work?

Well, we have a process. Now, it changes obviously for every client, but it's a process. So like I said, discovery. Which starts with diagnosis. We work out what the hell is going on, what's working, what's not working. We need to find out what and where the pain points are. Now this is absolutely crucial because until we know the real problem, you can't come up with a solution, right? You need to have insight to drive your approach because otherwise you're not in marketing, you're just running around waving a wet finger in the air. Now diagnosis is a practical thing. It's not rocket science, okay? It's low-down, dirty, hands-in-the-mud kind of work. There's a standard way of generating insight and data within our world, okay? You may start off by doing qualitative research, which is customer interviews, focus groups, ethnography, whatever particularly works for that particular organization. Organization to inductively understand the market and the business's place within that market. Once we've done that, then we channel those insights, the qual, into quant, quantitative data, which is usually some kind of survey with a list of questions. I'm sure you've seen those sorts of things. They ask you a bunch of questions and you say, you know, how much do you agree with this from, you know, zero being no friggin' way to like 5 being absolutely, friggin' lutely, yeah? So you ask a representative sample of the market, confidence intervals, you know, all that kind of stuff. And that's probably about as standard as it gets in our industry, okay? Now there's other things you can do to get that. You can partner with publications, you know, industry groups, conferences, seminars. Often they create reports and stuff. But, you know, if you're a really small company, you could probably get away with just doing the qual. If you know what you're doing. Once you've moved on from that, traditional next steps after research and diagnosis are ST&P, which is segmentation, targeting, and positioning. So you segment your target audience because there's always segmentation, um, to understand what those segments are, because the targeting and positioning will lead to the types of messaging that you're going to push to those different segments. They're based upon— there are commonalities in why people are buying your product or service, or products or services, and it makes sense to structure your messaging according to a particular segment, right? So you do market orientation, okay, which is identifying the needs and desires of your ideal customer profile, your ICP. And making sure that there's proper product-market fit, whether the product and service that you're offering actually satisfies the problem they identify as having, which is something 99% of businesses don't know, even though they think they do, because they think they are their customer when they're not. But obviously that's for another day, won't go in there. Anyway, you gather your research data and then you complete your market segmentation, the drivers, behaviors, commonalities, you know, 3 phases of diagnosis, right? And then you get to the strategy stage. So you evaluate the targeting choices we have and we have to make some decisions on, you know, what we do phase 1, who are we going after? And we position ourselves to those targets, what our objectives are and come up with the strategy. And the strategy to be honest is very simple. It's, well, it's not simple. It's simple as a, to write down. It's usually like a couple of paragraphs maximum, maybe not even that. It's quite hard to do, but it's because it's as much what you say no to as what you say yes to, which gets very difficult, especially when you're talking to small companies or founder-led CEO type companies who just want to say yes to every possible opportunity, right? The answer is yes, now what's the question? And the problem is, if you want to, if you want to have a certain type of customer You need to be working only with those type of customers, even if that means turning away business for customers who do not fit your ICP. Because we've all been there where we've acquiesced and said yes when we should have said no, and we've been bitten on the tushy, right? We've come to regret it. It's very simple. It's not very simple. Again, it's listening to that little voice because we, you know, when you made that decision, there was your little voice saying, you know what, we shouldn't be doing this, but you went ahead regardless because you just saw the zeros at the end of the proposal. The problem was the zeros didn't make anywhere near enough of an impact as it turned out to be because you were hand-holding the client for more than necessary, or it was just impossible to please them even when you bent over backwards and did over and above what you could be expected to do. They still left unsatisfied, which meant they're never going to sing your praises after the event, right? So hiding to nothing, you were never gonna win that game.

Yes. And so, you know, one of the things I do is I look at the numbers at a macro level and I say, okay, I spent X dollars on marketing efforts, not trying to segment that spend at all, but I spent X dollars and what happened to my bottom line? And I do that on a rolling 12-month basis. So it's looking at the previous 12 months. And if that number is going the right direction, I don't interfere with the marketing efforts. I say, okay, this is working. I don't need to understand why it's working. Or how it's working, uh, it is. But if those numbers start going the wrong direction, I don't, I don't know what is going wrong, but I know that the marketing is not effective. Is there, if from, from an owner's standpoint, is there some better way to make that analysis or a more detailed analysis that isn't, that you would recommend?

I'll give you the marketer's cop-out answer, which is it depends. Yes. It depends on the type of business. It depends on the industry. It depends on the, for instance, it depends upon the customer buying frequency. It depends upon the sales cycle. If your sales cycle is 18 months, right? Then whether it's 18 months or 18 days, to be honest, there, there is always a latency in what you're doing today with marketing and the effect of what that marketing is, right? Just as the effects that you're getting today with your marketing are based not about, you know, you posting that video of you dancing on TikTok, right? Which I'm sure you do very often.

It did not, that did not happen, G. I don't, that was not me. "It was jacked by AI, it wasn't me." Must have been AI, right, okay.

There is latency both ends, okay. The way to measure the effective, now if, hang on, I'm jumping ahead of myself. The way to measure the effectiveness is not at a super granular level because that's not what Habari is by, okay. You can't say that the reason why we closed this piece of business 'is because of this particular tactic that we did for this particular campaign at this particular time.' It can't be done at that sort of granular level. And that is because there is no single channel of engagement that is influencing the customer to the point of purchase. It is a combination. This is why they call it the marketing mix, right? Just like, for example, If I go to the gym and I decide to work out my biceps and I suddenly notice while looking in the mirror that my biceps have got larger, I can't say that my biceps have got larger because of the gym session I did on the 22nd of March was the exact reasons why my biceps got bigger, right? The reason my biceps got bigger is because I used a particular channel, a particular medium over the longer term, which may or may not have brought results. And that's the way I think you look at any particular tactical execution. You have to look at it from a channel level and not at a content level. So you can do something, supposing you want to try TikTok, try TikTok for 6 months, see if you can actually reverse engineer the attribution to what you're doing specifically to TikTok as a channel, and then make the decision whether TikTok is a viable outreach channel for your marketing mix.

Yes, and, and I, I'll give you a practical example from my business. Uh, I decided to write a book last year. Uh, I published it, uh, this March, And it's— Congratulations. Well, thank you. Uh, the title is Profit First for Creatives. Well, you know, my analytical brain thought that, okay, X number of people are going to buy it. X number of people are going to read it. X number of people are going to sign up for additional resources. And, you know, a certain number of them will, uh, eventually become clients, right? I thought that there would be a direct cause and effect. And the reality is that just the book being out there, whether someone read it or not, that they know it exists, affects marketing. It affects their buying decision. And that's not the quantifiable result business owners are looking for. Uh, you know, this book it has a, has a very long tail, to use the parlance, you know. And, and, uh, was it worth the time and money invested in publishing it? I'm not going to know that for some time. And, and I think that's, that's what the frustration is with dealing with business owners, is getting them to understand that Yeah, is it gonna help? Yes. Is it gonna help enough to justify the time and cost? We don't know.

On its own, probably not. But what you've stumbled upon actually is a very interesting effect, which is called costly signaling. And it's something from evolutionary biology. And I won't go into the depths for two reasons. Firstly, it'll take up a long time. And secondly, I probably don't know enough to be able to talk it. At a knowledgeable level. Costly signaling. If, if you're going to market or advertise a product or service, the very fact of you advertising it across a medium or channel which is perceived as being either expensive or extremely public has a positive effect on the perceptional value of what you're selling.

Okay, so I'd agree with that.

If I'm selling a bunch of chef's knives and I run a bunch of ads on Facebook, and these face— these chef's knives are, I don't know, $1,000 for set of chef's knives, okay, you're gonna scroll through Facebook or Instagram, TikTok, whatever, whatever, whatever your whatever your chosen method of parlance is, right? You'll see it and you'll say, how much? What? It's very expensive for a chef's knife and scroll on, right? Now, if we did the same thing with a 48-sheet poster at a major intersection in a particular city, the very fact that we know that putting the creative and production and advertising costs together for a 48-sheet poster at a major intersection is a lot of money, we're going to look at the perceived quality of those Chef's Knives in a different way. They have to be worth the money, otherwise these guys wouldn't spend the money to advertise it. Okay, it's sim— it's similar to the way flowers— this is why I say it's got its roots in evolutionary biology— it's the same way as flowers have very ornate petals to invite bees in to collect their pollen, right? Now they need to be able to deliver on that pollen, otherwise bee ain't gonna come back. Peacocks' tails, same thing, right? From an evolutionary perspective, it's a total waste of time, money, and effort. Well, time and effort. Okay. But from a reproductive perspective, from a mating perspective, it clearly has value because the female of the peacock species is looking for a jacked-up peacock who's going to be around to cater for her Who are young? What's a young peacock called? I have no idea. A pea chick? I don't know. Whatever. See, there we go. That's something we should look up. What's the name for a young peacock? Anyway, you get my point. It's the fact that we're demonstrating the value of our product ostentatiously increases the value, the perceived value of what we're selling because clearly we're not selling some crap. Because we wouldn't put ourselves out there if we were. And what we're doing by ignoring, let's call them the more traditional channels, and pushing our wares purely from an online tactical perspective is we're not creating value in the minds of our buyer. They see it in the same way as they see the 50 cents crap that you drop ship from China.

I really like that insight. And unfortunately, gee, because I feel like we could talk forever, I'm going to have to draw this session to a close.

How do you— I did warn you, Christian, didn't I? I did warn you.

You did. But it was—

So it's on the scene.

It was pleasurable. So, you know, that's fine. How do people reach you if they want to learn more about what you do?

The best way to get hold of me is on LinkedIn. Amazingly enough, you'll find this a fascinating fact, Christian, I know you will get this. I am the only G. Ranacina on LinkedIn. Can you believe it?

Yes, yes I can.

Okay, yeah, you can. So yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. I spout this kind of diatribe on a regular basis on LinkedIn. I do little 60-second videos twice a week, which I've been doing for a couple of years now. About particular things about marketing, business, sales, behavioral science, or just shit that's pissed me off that week. Yes. Um, various things like that. So you can find me there. Feel free to reach out and let's have a conversation. Talk is free, at least the first time anyway. After that, let's see. And if I can help, I will. If it means that help is to push you in an opposite direction to where I am, That's fine too, because the object of the exercise is to be the right fit for where your organization is in its— at its particular level. And it's to save you as a business owner dodging a bullet, because unfortunately our industry is crammed with charlatans and snake oil sellers who are promising the earth and cannot deliver. And I spend a lot of my time Speaking with business owners who are crying into their beer after having spent a lot of money in the wrong direction by listening to what I call marketing bros. Okay, you know the guys, the guy, the guys who crouch down in front of Lamborghinis throwing gang signs, right? And they're talking about marketing today, but you know, yesterday they were talking about Web3 and the day before that they were talking about NFTs and you know, tomorrow they're talking about AI and you know, they, whatever shining object they think they can pull the eyes over some poor unsuspecting victim. So if I can help you dodge a bullet, I will, because marketing agencies of repute are unfortunately very thin on the ground. And I think it just makes our jobs that much easier if you're pushed in the right direction. You know, a rising tide lifts all boats, right? And it needs to be that way. So that's the way I'm doing it. I've got— I haven't got a podcast to plug, I haven't got a book to sell, Nothing else. I'm doing this purely, Mr. or Ms. Business Owner, to save you a shit ton of money by going in the wrong direction. And that is it.

I love it. Listeners, if you like what you hear, uh, click subscribe, rate the podcast. Uh, if you don't like what you hear, uh, send us a message and tell us, uh, that you don't like G and, uh, we'll get somebody else on. Until later. Ta-ta for now.

And that's a wrap for today's episode of The Profitable Creative. Until next time, you money lovers. And don't forget, Profit First for Creatives is live via Amazon. Link below.