How to Build Marketing That Feels Human Again

We live in a time where businesses have more marketing power than ever before. More tools, more channels, and more automation. Yet, we have less impact. I mean, despite spending more money than ever, our marketing today seems to be less effective. Why? Because somewhere between The spreadsheets and the social ads. We forgot the most important element of marketing— the people. And that's what we're talking about today on Marc Haine Live. Welcome to this episode of Marc Haine Live. This is where small business owners and entrepreneurs pick up scores, score, rented lips, core skill sets to create the show-stopping, jaw-dropping experience that our customers and our employees deserve. I am your host, Customer and Employee Experience Strategist Marc Haine. And I'm so glad that you are here with me today. Can you tell that I've said that many, many, many times? Today, my guest is Guy Ranascina, founder and CEO of GESINO. And today, we're going to be diving into why modern marketing despite all its tools, tech, and automation isn't working like it used to. It's become so much. It's so more available now than it's ever been. And yet now, it just seems to be less effective. And so today, we're going to be talking about how to stop marketing to things like algorithms and to start connecting with actual humans again. And we're going to look at strategies that hit the heart, Not just the head. So, I appreciate it if you'd stay with us. And if you haven't done so yet, please make sure that you subscribe to this channel. That way, you get notifications when I bring you fresh new content each and every week. I'm here for you with great experts. You know that sinking feeling when you've just spent thousands on a marketing campaign only to hear, well, Crickets. You tweak the ads. You update the graphics. Maybe even switch platforms and still nothing. It's not that your tools are broken necessarily. It's that you might be speaking to the head when your customers really buy from the heart. And that brings us to our Question of the Day. So, when you look at all you've achieved, is your marketing really resonating or is it just reaching? That is, are you just getting impressions or people actually looking at what you're doing and responding and engaging with you? Go ahead and share your experience on social media. Take this link to this episode. Share it on your favorite social media platform. Hashtag it #ExperienceLeadership so I know you're part of this conversation. And let's get into a conversation about this because this is going to be awesome. As I mentioned, my guest today is Guy Ranascina, the founder and CEO of Kexino, a marketing agency that believes businesses don't need more marketing. They just need better marketing. Guy is one of those rare marketers who doesn't just talk about customer psychology. He lives it. His approach blends marketing, neuroscience, and behavioral economics to help businesses create campaigns that move people, not just the data. And known as the guy who's not afraid to say, the king's not wearing any clothes, Guy challenges the hype, exposes the nonsense, and helps brands rediscover what makes them human. Guy, welcome to the show. It's marvelous to have you.

I'm delighted to be here, Marc. One little thing. It is G, not Guy. Minor currency.

Thank you very much, G. So you have said that marketing today is broken. I read your notes. And what do you mean by that?

Well, I think there's a number of points here. Firstly, I think marketing is broken because The people who are recruiting marketers don't know what marketing is. They have an idea what marketing is, but it's the wrong idea. It's a flawed premise. And so what's happening is that they are recruiting people who are actually asked to do promotions or communications rather than marketing. Now, don't get me wrong, promotions and communications are part of marketing, and they're a very important part of marketing, without a doubt. But they are a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage of what marketing is all about. And from the strategic element forwards, really, we're hiring the wrong people for the job.

Hmm.

And then we're surprised when The tactical execution falls down because there is no strategic initiative put in place further upstream. So that's number one. Number 2, I think the people who are being employed in a marketing role haven't got a clue what marketing is either. And the reason is because they have a feeling of what marketing is. They have no real experience or education in marketing. And so they think all you need to do to be a marketer is to have a MacBook Pro and a Canva account and off you go. And so the whole idea of Strategy, objective, targeting, messaging, positioning, market orientation, qual, quant, all of the basic homework stuff that you need to do before anything is done from a tactical perspective is lost on these people because like I say, they have no idea. You can't blame these people.

No.

And I'm not blaming them in the slightest. But we're recruiting the wrong people, the wrong people are being recruited, and then when the rubber hits the road, we're complaining that our marketing is ineffective. And it's no wonder because we're not doing the basic homework that needs to be done further upstream before we get into any tactical execution. I also think that There is an issue with the way marketing is perceived within many businesses, especially larger businesses, you know, where you would have like a C-suite or a sort of board-level position, level executives. And that comes down to the way that the rest of the organization works. Compared to marketing, if we look at pretty much every other core area of the business, you know whether it's engineering, whether it's manufacturing, certainly whether it's finance. Okay, we're dealing with something which is very defined, very finite, very logic-based, very. Rational in its approach, right? I mean, you know, in engineering, two plus two is always four. It's very Newtonian in its approach. So when we're looking to affect change within such a process, since we know all of the cogs in the machine and their interdependence on one another. We have a level of transparency and cause and effect engineering logic that works, right? You know, if you're making widgets and you have a widget-making machine, then the ways to increase the efficiency of that machine is to, you know, run it quicker or, you know, upgrade the machine or you know, run another shift of operators to run that machine or, you know, source cheaper raw materials to run that machine. It's all very logical and matter-of-fact. It's nothing that will raise any eyebrows. The thing is that within marketing, the targets of our efforts are human beings.

Mm-hmm.

And human beings are anything but logical or rational entities. They cannot be— they are not predictable. Their output, their decision-making varies by context, by environment, by emotion, by 101 things. And that imprecise, unpredictable nature of marketing is something that people who've been brought up within an engineering, economics-type background find very uncomfortable. Because the fact that something worked once in one particular situation There's absolutely zero guarantee that it would work again, ever.

It's interesting because your metaphor of the cog in the widget-making machine. When we hire people in small organizations, we hire somebody to do the marketing. And so, that's like hiring, getting the widget-making machine. A widget-making machine makes widgets. That's all it does. But when we hire a communications person, communications is what they do. Marketing is a completely different animal. Even for a marketer, things like social media, the actual generation of the physical or the graphic assets, it's more than just, oh, we have the Canva account as you mentioned. And it's like, okay, you're a communications professional. You're a marketing— you say that you do marketing. You say you do social media. Go with it.

But part of it is that we're building these Well, you know, I think it's more serious than that, to be honest, Marc, and it's more endemic. I think the issue is we're still talking from a tactical execution point, and I'm talking much further upstream. Communications, promotions, it's just one of the 4 Ps in marketing. And to be honest, it's a very small P. You know, the price, the product, the price, the place are just as valid and should take as much of your time as the promotion side of things. And what's worse than that is that they're multiplicative. So if you get one of the Ps wrong, further upstream, it doesn't really matter what you do from a tactical point of view because anything multiplied by zero gives you zero. And this is what we're doing. We're going headfirst without having done any strategy, without having done any research, without having done any positioning, done any messaging, any identification of our ideal customer profile, any quant or qual analysis, nothing. And we're just going blindly in. to using martech tools, marketing automation tools, whatever they may be, and then wondering why our marketing doesn't work. This year, 2025, is set to be the, the year where we spend more on marketing and marketing-related activities than in any year in the past. Something like $1.72 trillion globally. Okay, so we're spending more and more on what we class as marketing, tactical marketing, right? Ads and social and videos and goodness knows what else. Yet the effectiveness of our marketing continues to fall. So why would that be? And I contend that one of the reasons is that we've, well, we've certainly exorcised creativity out of the equation. That's gone for a burden a long time ago. But also we're looking to make the process more efficient rather than more effective. Efficiency and effectiveness are very different things.

Mm-hmm.

And what software and systems try to do is to create a highly efficient process. But marketing isn't about efficiency, it's about effectiveness. Marketing is about experimentation. It should be looked more in terms of R&D rather than, I don't know, manufacturing. Which is what we're trying to make it. We're trying to make it into a manufacturing machine that'll consistently deliver results day in, day out, year in, year out. But we have too many moving parts and too many variables that influence the effectiveness of our marketing that are constantly changing. And not only that, the units that we're using To to analyze and to measure are not standardized units of information that they are in economics and finance, for instance. Okay, in finance, you know, 100 cents is always a dollar, right? 1,000 grams is always a kilogram, and that's the same whether you're in whether you're in Sydney or Saskatchewan or Singapore, right? It doesn't matter. The thing is, in marketing, there are variables that contribute or influence a buyer's decision-making, which are anything but standardized or exchangeable in units, right? There's no such thing as a standardized SI unit for fear. for anger, for regret, right? Yet these are all variables that have profound influence on buying decisions. I mean, just think, the entire insurance industry is built on fear.

Mm-hmm.

What if?

Mm-hmm.

Right? So if we try to rationalize this into some kind of Newtonian model, we're going to get what we've got, where we're just throwing more and more money at the wall and getting, and getting worse and worse results because we're not standing out. The, the point of marketing, the only point of marketing, all that marketing can ever do is to bring our brand to mind When a buyer is in a position to make a purchasing decision, that is it. We cannot do anything else. At the point of when a buyer moves from out of market to in market, they will have. You know, I today I need to know. I you know I've decided that I'm going to buy a an X or whatever. Okay, and I think okay. There are a number of possible options that I could buy, and I will rattle off 2 or 3 providers that I know from that particular category because of my familiarity with those brands in the past. What I'll probably do after that is maybe I'll ask a colleague, maybe I'll reach out to my peers, maybe I'll reach out on social. Oh, well, you know, I'm looking to buy this? Does anybody have any ideas? Generally speaking, it's the same category players that come up again and again, right? Even if that category is particularly saturated, there could be 1,000 or 5,000 providers within that category, but it's the same old names that keep on coming up again and again, right? Occasionally, you know, maybe You know, once in a blue moon, somebody will come up to you and give you an idea which is an outlier. But generally speaking, it's the same people that come up again and again. Now, if when a buyer is making that initial consideration set, if we are not top of mind to go into that consideration set at that point in time, the chances of us actually winning the business are virtually nonexistent because by that time the customer has already decided the limited consideration provider list that they're going to work with, right? And I don't care whether it's B2B or B2C, nobody will go off and come up with some Excel sheet with some you know, gazillion fields with a matrix with every single, you know, 2,357 providers and with like little dots with features. Nobody does that, okay? Nobody does that.

No.

So if we're not thought of at the right time for that buying decision, then we've lost the sale. We've missed it. So the point of marketing, well, there's 2 streams, but the point of marketing is to be remembered at the point of purchase. And the only way that we can do that is to be remembered when buyers are out of market. So that they think of us when they are in market. And this is one of the reasons where people go wrong. Because what they're doing— sorry, go ahead.

Sorry. It seems to me that what they are actually doing is they're actually doing a great deal of content almost. And to your point, nothing about it is memorable. But what they're hoping to do is at some point, there's going to be a crossover. If we keep posting all this stuff, if we keep putting ourselves out there, at some point, somebody's going to cross over when they are We are in market and then we're going to become top of mind. Is that fair?

Which never happens because of the nature of the communication is incorrect. The nature of the communication is factual and logical and rational. Its features is a bunch of bullet points, which I'm sure floats your boat if you're a manufacturer and is important in part of the buying process. But it's not what makes memories.

Right.

Bullet points don't make memories.

Right.

Emotions make memories. The point is that we've taken the emotional component out of the initial job of marketing, which is to be remembered. Now, the way the human mind works is that to create durable memory structures in the brain, There needs to be a strong emotional component to make a memory stick. That's a technical term— stick in the brain. And, you know, you can just look at, look at your own experience. Think of a memory that you've had in your life, either the recent past or when you were a kid, whatever. Okay, 10 will get you 5. I'll bet you anything That, that memory has a strong emotional component around it. Okay, it could be a positive emotion, it could be a negative one. It could be happiness, joy, it could be grief, sadness, could be fear, could be anger, whatever. But there's a huge emotional component that's, that's part of that memory and, and is part of you that you feel. to a certain extent when you replay that memory again in your brain. And it's the same thing with evocative marketing. You look at any, for instance, an ad, an ad that you remember when you were a kid, or an ad that you saw recently, an ad that people start talking about. Super Bowl, for instance, Super Bowl Sunday, right? You watch the game, but the next day, you know, the water cooler conversation is about the ads. Oh, did you see that ad? That was a really funny ad, or that was a really weird ad, or that was a whatever else. It invoked an emotion, and that's why it was remembered.

Mm-hmm.

So if we are industrializing the marketing process, the tactical side of things, by feeding software and machines data without applying insight to that data, it's no wonder that none of this communication is resonating at an emotional level. Machines don't do emotion, right? Well, not yet anyway, right? All they're doing is the bullet point stuff. Now, like I said, the bullet point stuff is important. Because the bullet point stuff, let's call it the performance-based marketing. What we do in marketing terms, we talk about brand marketing and performance marketing. Performance marketing is a bit of an oxymoron because why would you do unperformant marketing? All marketing has performance, even if it's like no performance, right? It's still a performance. But the point is you have brand awareness marketing, brand marketing, which is the emotional component. And then you follow that up with the performance marketing, the feature-based stuff, the buy one get one free, free delivery, only available in blue, all of that sort of stuff. Okay. And that's where you have your bullet points, where you make your feature comparisons. You need to have that because that part is the story that we tell ourselves to justify our decision. Because no matter what we're buying, whether it's B2B or B2C, whether it's $20, $200, or $200,000, the way that we buy is we buy from the heart. We buy emotionally. And then we post-rationalize logically.

Right.

We give ourselves the excuse of of why we bought it, right? And if we tell ourselves a good enough story, then we keep it. And if we don't, we give it back.

Mm-hmm.

That's why we need the bullet points, right? You know, if I'm walking along the high street and I see a pair of shoes in the shoe store and I look at those shoes and I go into the store and I have a look at these shoes and they're the most wonderful pair of shoes, Marc, you've ever seen in your life.

Okay.

I decide to buy the shoes. Okay. I take them home and then I look again at the price ticket and it's like, is that the price or is that a serial number? It's like, oh my goodness me, how much have I spent on these pair of shoes? That's ridiculous, right? Instant buyer's regret. So what do we do? We tell ourselves a story. Oh, but feel that leather, Marc. How soft is that leather? You know, it's been made by artisans who've had decades of experience. Look how well-made it is. Look at this quality of craftsmanship. Look at the style. It's going to go with so many things that we wear. It's like, you know, basically it's so long-lasting and durable. It's going to last 3 times longer than our cheapy pair of shoes. I mean, to be honest, pair of shoes have paid for themselves, really. We see, we tell ourselves this story.

Right.

Right? And what, as marketers, that's what we're doing. We're giving buyers permission to want to buy something.

Yes.

We're giving ourselves or our customers permission to want to buy something. We're giving them the excuse. And if we understand that, I think the way that we communicate, the way that we choose to articulate our value proposition, suddenly becomes not about features and bullet points, and it becomes about emotion.

Mm-hmm.

Creating those durable memory structures in the brain so that when we are ready to buy, our brand is thought of. by the prospect as well as of course, the others.

I think at the same token, in order for us to start doing that, being on the other side of the buying decision, I think something needs to happen in our mindset, doesn't it? To explore how we could start looking at our marketing in a different way. And so, when we come back, I'd like to talk about some actionable strategies on how to shift the mindset of what we're looking at so that we can create that emotional connection with our audience. And we'll get to that right after this.

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Welcome back! I'm speaking with Guy Ranascina. I apologize again. My rented lips today. I'm gonna have to turn them in for a tune-up. So, Guy—

You're doing a good job. You're doing a good job.

So Guy, I think it's really clear how we're focusing on our marketing is skewed because we're trying to find that magic bullet of putting all this content out and somebody tripping over us. But from what you've been saying now, there's actually a kind of behavioral science around how people can connect to our messaging. What needs to shift on our end for us to start looking at marketing differently so that we can start thinking about kind of the emotional connection we want to make?

Well, you mentioned the term behavioral science. And I think that's probably a very good place to start. Behavioral science sounds very complicated. Sounds very scientific.

Okay?

But actually, it's pretty much a rebrand. It's customer psychology. It's the stuff that marketers and salespeople used to know way back when. And something happened along the way, probably around 10, 15 years ago. It was really with the growth of online marketing, digital marketing, where all of a sudden, for some reason, we don't hold the quality of communication to digital marketing anywhere near as a higher quality level as we do with marketing going out through other channels. I've never quite understood why that is. It's almost that because it's digital, because it's low cost, it can be crap. And I don't see the correlation there. But behavioral science, primarily what it's looking at is the details of how and why people make buying decisions rather than how they think they make buying decisions, because the reasons why we buy things are not the real reasons we buy things, okay? So behavioral science looks at the fact that humans often act based upon what we call unconscious biases, cognitive biases, okay? And also mental shortcuts, which we've learned over time through experience and also from sort of education and cultural and socioeconomic reasons. And obviously the emotional side of things, instead of just from a purely logical and rational analysis. Okay, so what we do with behavioral science is we use the principles in addition to the problem-solving thought processes that we're using already. Um, which has the effect of increasing the possible solution space to solve a particular problem because we've now got a psychological dimension that we can add to the logical, rational process. Okay, the way I flippantly describe behavioral science is it's a marketing cheat code. Okay, if you were a gamer back in the day, There used to be a cheat code where you went up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start, right? And depending on the game, you'd get like unlimited life or unlimited health, or you'd get, you'd get the, you know, the super duper weapon in level 1 and, you know, all of that sort of stuff. And I think, I think behavioral science is, is, is like that because it gets us much further along the process. to get to the point of creating effective marketing, effective messaging without waving a wet finger in the air. Okay. And I think it also applies in terms of AI because the better you can prompt AI, as we all know, because we've all done stupid prompts and got stupid answers back, right? We can think of behavioral science as the missing link between the technical capability and the actual practical value of AI. Okay, so, you know, if we think of AI as being the tool, then behavioral science is the operating manual.

Hmm.

Okay, so ignoring behavioral science means building systems that may be technically brilliant but are practically Well, useless, okay? But it's also important to remember that behavioral science is not neuroscience. You may have heard the term neuroscience, Mm-hmm. which is very different. Neuroscience looks inside the brain. It talks about secretions, chemicals, and enzymes, and how the brain chemistry alters mood, perception, this sort of stuff, okay? Behavioral science isn't like that. It's much more practical. It's about what people do. Okay. So, for example, wine tastes more expensive if it's drunk from a heavier glass. Right. Price isn't just a number. Okay. How we present pricing. If you're walking down the street, same street, you're walking down the street and you see a jacket in the window and you see a price tag that says $249. That gives you one particular perception on the price and the quality and the, and the value of that jacket. But if that pricing ticket said, was $699, now $249, that now gives you a different perception, right?

Right.

How we present a discount, for example, right? Then we could say 50% extra free, Or we could say 33% off. It's the same thing, right? But it drastically changes its perceived value. Notice we haven't changed anything in the physical characteristics of the product.

Right.

Okay? All we've done is shift perception. And this is the point of marketing. Marketing is really magical in that we can create GDP out of thin air. without actually touching anything about the product, right? We could take a, a 25-cent can of a generic soft drink and turn it into a $3 can of luxury product without changing anything about the physical characteristics of the product.

Right.

So a big part of behavioral science is an area called cognitive biases.

Right.

Cognitive biases are these errors in thinking that we make, which we think are logical and rational but are not. And by understanding some of that, there's a ton of these things. There's about 200 cognitive biases, which most of them are actually variations on one or the other. So it's not as bad, but it's not like you have to learn all of these things. But the point is just to understand that we miss We, we give reasons to ourselves as why we decided something which are usually full of BS. And if we can understand the underlying reasons why we're making those decisions, we can position and communicate our marketing message in a way that best complements the way that human brain is working. I mean, a famous one in cognitive behavioral science that people talk about is a thing called the IKEA effect, which you probably know. So the IKEA effect is we don't value what's easy as much as we value something that we earn.

Mhm.

So the very fact that we have to assemble the flat-pack furniture gives us, gives greater value to the end product than if we had bought it already built because we had actually made it. Okay, the big, you know, the famous marketing story is Betty Crocker. If you're familiar with the Betty Crocker cake mix from the '50s, And it was the time when they discovered how to make powdered egg. So they were able to make an entire cake mix in a little sachet that they put inside a carton.

Mhm.

And all you needed to do is— I think it was to add water because they used powdered milk as well in there. All you needed to do was the right quantity of water, give it a mix, throw it in the oven and hey presto, you know, yeah, 30 minutes later out came a fantastic, you know, sponge cake or chocolate, whatever. The thing is they found quite soon afterwards that stuff wasn't selling and they couldn't work out why. So behavioral science to the rescue. They did what all behavioral scientists do.

What?

They spoke with buyers.

Yeah.

And after looking at the buyers and looking and speaking and doing surveys and everything else, what they discovered was that the average— unfortunately, I need to say housewife here, Marc, but, you know, we are talking about the '50s, right? So, you know, no disrespect to people listening here, but, you know, we are talking about the early '50s. What these people deduced was that baking a cake in this way wasn't baking.

It wasn't a real cake.

Because it was— it wasn't a real cake. It was made too easy. The effort involved in creating it wasn't big enough. Yeah. So what they did which sounds counterintuitive, is they took the egg component out and they redid the packaging and said, just add an egg.

And the water.

Now what happened— and then what happened was that the people who bought the cake mix, since there was the actual job of physically cracking an egg into this, somehow made it feel more like real baking than it was before. And of course, the rest is history.

Mm-hmm.

That's the story of Betty Crocker. And there's tons of other behavioral-based observations which we can use to our benefit. For instance, Speed cameras. You know, obviously nobody likes to see a speed camera and see the— we don't see the flash anymore. Lots of speed cameras there, you know, you don't even see a flash. But have you seen those speed— well, they're not really cameras, they're like warnings where you know what the speed is, right? And you pass it and you'll see the number, or sometimes you see like a smiley face.

Yes.

Right? Okay. Those cameras are actually 3 times more effective at reducing average speed than the things where we get penalties.

Yeah, threatening.

The ones that actually flash, right? Actually, Sweden went further with this and they decided to have a bit of fun with it. Okay, so what they did is they set up a speed camera which it still fined you if you broke the limit, okay, but if you were under the limit It read your number plate and your car, your, your number plate, your car number plate details went into a lottery, okay, to win a percentage of the money collected from the speeding.

Wow.

Right. And in just 3 days, average speeds dropped from 32 kilometers an hour to 25 kilometers an hour.

Amazing.

Right? We can influence with a stick or we can influence with a carrot, right?

So, so, gee, when we're— so, we talked about this and it sounds brilliant that when you have people within the realm helping define this. But for entrepreneurs without a master's in psychology, how could small and mid-sized businesses start using what you're talking about to help compete against the bigger players and to compete against their current practices?

4 words. Listen to your customers.

Yes.

Businesses don't spend anywhere near enough time speaking with customers, right? I read an article, I think it was Harvard Business Review earlier this year, and they said that 80% of marketers hadn't spoken to a customer in the previous 6 weeks. Which I think is a travesty, and basically they're not doing their jobs. You should be speaking to a customer at least 2 or 3 times a month. And the thing is, customers will tell us what we need to do. Now, we don't do verbatim what they tell us because—

Right.

Because customer centricity, the idea of customer centricity, I think is a load of BS, right? And for a number of reasons, and we can talk about that later maybe. But as a point of reference, as one of the data points of reference to come into when you're actually putting insights together, speaking with customers, customers will tell you what their problems are, what their hopes are, what their aspirations are, what their fears are. They will tell you the channels that they frequent, who they listen to, what they read when they get up in the morning, all of their online or offline habits. And we can deduce from that how best to present our information, our content, our information, our education, our entertainment, whatever it may be, in a way that we're most receptive. to our ideal customer profile.

Right.

We don't have to wave a wet finger in the air, right? They will tell us, right? Now, like I said, we have to temper that and take a large dose of sodium chloride along with that because the problem when brands talk directly with customers is that human nature dictates that customers often tell us what they think we want to hear rather than the true motivations for making a particular decision.

So oftentimes it's good to have an inter— Or when they're upset, if they're very upset with something, they'll chastise.

I think criticism or complaining in general is an interesting opportunity for businesses. And it's also From the customer's perspective, the fact that they bothered to complain isn't a reflection on our business or our product. It's a cry for help.

Right.

It's a cry. The customer is saying, I want you to be better and you're not. And I want you to be— I want to help you. That's why they're bothering to complain. Otherwise, what do you do? You just never go back there again, right?

Yeah.

There's no point wasting your breath.

Especially in a small business realm, it's too bad that as entrepreneurs, we'll take criticism like that and then we will start blaming the customers. I mean, Microsoft when they first started way back with Windows at the very beginning, there were all sorts of problems with the way that people were interfacing with the windows. And all the programmers saying, well, people are stupid. People are stupid. People are stupid. And it wasn't until they got the programmers behind a glass to actually watch people using the software that they realized, oh, wait a second. We've got huge design flaws. Because all of a sudden, they started watching how people were going through their mind trying to figure out and solve the problem. And all of a sudden, the customer wasn't stupid. The customer, they, the programmers had programmed based on one mindset, not in the mindset of the customer.

It doesn't, even if the customer is stupid, the fact is the customer's the customer.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

It's, you know, it's not your boss who pays your salary.

Right?

Yeah.

It's the customer. The customer pays all our salaries.

Yeah.

So there's no such thing as them using it the wrong way, right? It's just we don't know our customer as well as they should do. And just to be, just to be on balance, okay, singling out Microsoft, then you may remember way back when with the Apple iPhone 4S where Apple complained Well, there was an issue with reception. Nobody was getting a signal. And Apple's excuse was that users weren't holding it right. How about that?

Yeah.

We weren't holding it correctly. The point is, like I said, you know, the customer's not always right, but the customer's always a customer. I think that's a famous quote by somebody.

Now, you were talking about how customers will lie when you go to them for feedback. Can you unpack that a little bit?

Yeah, because they— 2 reasons. Firstly, they want us to know what they think we want to hear.

That's number one.

Secondly, because Quite often, whether they're conscious of it or not, and there's two groups of people there, but customers lie. They lie about the reasons why they bought stuff. They say, oh yeah, well, I bought it because of the features or because the pricing was very competitive. At the end of the day, they say, well, no, actually, I like the color. They won't tell you that. Because that sounds irrational and illogical, and they want to sound rational and logical about the reasons why they bought things. But it's not the case. It's not the case, right? If we just listened to customers, right, and did nothing else, we'd never have the iPhone.

Right.

There wasn't a customer who said, you know what, I want to have an iPod and a phone and a this and a this and a this and a this all in one. Nobody's— nobody said that. Nobody said that they wanted that kind of a device, right?

Right.

If we just listen to customers, right, Dyson wouldn't produce a vacuum cleaner that looks like something from the Starship Enterprise that costs $800, right? No customer said, you know what, I want to have something that looks like it's from 2001 and costs $800. Right? Nobody said that, right? You know, Henry Ford is supposed to have said, if we just listened to our customers, they would have told us they wanted a faster horse. Now, he didn't actually say that, but it doesn't matter because it's a good quote and it gets the point over about customer centricity. Okay? So listening to customers is important, but only as a single data point to the other research and the other surveys and the other interviews that we're doing with other people, to be able to base our longer-term strategic decisions on what the customer will want tomorrow. Because when the customer tells you about their problems today, they're exactly talking about that today. They want their inbox gone by the time they leave the office. Now, if we just built for what they want today, tomorrow, their problem may have changed. Right? So, you know, like, you know, in the words of Wayne Gretzky, we have to, you know, skate to where the puck will be. And this is what we need to do with not necessarily our product, but certainly the way that we choose to describe and articulate the value of our product so that it makes sense for tomorrow's customer. Because like I said, today's customer is gone.

Yeah.

Because if they're not thinking of us, it doesn't matter. Right? So we need to think about tomorrow's customer because what we're doing today is what's going to get in their head tomorrow.

Right.

Just, you know, there's latency, right? The result of our marketing efforts today is what happened, what we did in marketing one week, one month, one year ago. You know, depends on the sales cycle, depends on the industry, all this other stuff.

Right.

Which is another reason why attribution doesn't make any sense, which also upsets the accounts department because they want to see that, okay, based upon this particular marketing effort, we realized this revenue event, right? But it doesn't start and stop. It's not a square wave, right?

Mm-hmm.

What we do bleeds into previous quarters and bleeds into the next quarter and, to a certain extent, is cumulative. The more we do, the more we're remembered, which increases the effectiveness of our marketing because we're not starting from ground zero each time.

So it's almost like an evolutionary journey, not just a one-off.

Absolutely, yes. It's cumulative. It builds. The more we're known, our reach is extended, the easier it is to get that business because we're known.

So, once we talk to our clients then and we get a sense of where they're at, what becomes the next step? Because what we've talked about, this idea of innovation like with Apple or even with the When you're in a particular space in market, being able then to look forward and saying, well, we're seeing that our problem right now will solve this. How do they start that whole role of becoming more innovative to look at the data today and then expunge kind of what the future need is going to be? It's a little question.

Yeah, just a tiny one, minor detail. Yeah, I, I, I think we shouldn't be spending any more marketing— only money on marketing until everybody within the business understands a few things, okay? Such as the top pain points that our ICP faces, the biggest problems that our customer faces, the everyday frustrations that these pain points cause. Okay, also to understand the triggers that prompt our target customer to go out and seek solutions in the first place. There may— this may be a niggling problem that they've had for years But something's happened to the point which has triggered an action. To understand what those triggers are, it's also important to understand the gravitas of solving the customer problem. Why solving this problem is so transformative for the customer. What's at stake if they don't do anything? The— like, for example, the biggest reason in a B2B space why a customer doesn't end up buying from you is because they end up buying nothing. They revert back to the status quo because they can't see a clear leader in the solutions that they provide, and they know it's going to be a major pain in the butt to change systems anyway, so they'd rather suffer with what— better the devil you know, right? They'd rather suffer with what they've already got rather than chance it by going with something else. So it's important to understand what's at stake and communicate to them, because they might not actually understand the full breadth of what they're talking about by not making a decision, right?

Right.

It's also important to understand the channels The channels that they trust, the channels which they look for when they're researching products and services like ours. It's important to know about what they think about our category, how they view our market, how they view the competition. And obviously, it's important to know their buying process, right? And who holds the budget.

And we can find a lot of that just by looking at reviews, don't we? I mean, if we just look at our competitors, look at their websites, look how they're talking about the products, look at the reviews in the industry as a whole, and we're going to get all that.

We're going to get a lot of it. It's not like we've got a blank sheet of paper, right? That initial work is quite easy to do, right? But in terms of the actual marketing plan, there's— depending on the industry, there's probably 5 or 6 steps. You know, it's quite simple. It's not easy. But it's quite simple, right?

Right.

So number one, we start with diagnosis, okay? So we do qualitative and quantitative diagnosis of the situation, right? Taking the time to find out what on earth's going wrong, right? Now, for every business, for every industry, for every category, that's unique and different, right? Once we've done that, then we need to go to define clear and strategic objectives. Okay, not too many of them, and each one needs to have a benchmark and it needs to have a goal, something which is measurable so that we know when we're winning, we know what success looks like, right? Then it's a combination of the long-term and the short-term stuff. You know, I mentioned brand building and performance marketing, right? So there's the long-term mass audience None of this targeting nonsense, right? We want to go as wide a category as possible. Long-term mass audience brand building work, okay? It shouldn't be targeted or restricted, well, beyond whatever industry or category the business is in, of course, right? A plumber is a plumber, but other— right. And the point is because that's aimed at as wide a possible audience as possible. Right? Not the weans who are just looking to buy in the next 30, 60, or 90 days. We'd combine this long-term brand building work with the shorter-term targeted performance-based work, which is designed to deliver the short-term big hit results, right? Because we need the performance stuff to tick us over the edge. All of the brand building, touchy-feely, you know, emotional stuff is great, but unless there's a call to act, a trigger and a call to action, then we just sit on the fence all the time. So we need to have the performance-based stuff. Like I said, buy one, get one free, free delivery, whatever, whatever it may be. Okay, there needs to be a tight, clearly defined differentiated position of the brand at the heart of everything that the business does. Okay, so that what we create can't be mistaken for somebody else doing it.

Right.

Right, we need to be seen. We need to stand out. Right, there's already too much sea of sameness. You know, you look at any, especially digital, unfortunately, and especially within B2B, you look at 2 companies, who are selling to broadly the same audience and you look at their communication, right? It's all identical. And you had— imagine you had 2 side by side. If you covered up the logos for those 2 pieces of communication, I guarantee you can probably exchange the details of the information between the 2 and it would make just as much sense or nonsense as each other. That's a problem, right? So allied to that, there needs to be a heavy and consistent codified execution so that everything is grounded and distinctive in the minds of the audience. So we've got the differentiation, right? Why choose us over somebody else?

Mm-hmm.

Then there's distinctiveness. Now, distinctiveness are the assets, the brand assets that we have, which make us uniquely us, right? So if I show you a a red background with a yellow curve, you automatically think of a particular fast food chain without me having to show you a logo, right?

Right.

Everything is grounded, is distinctive in the minds of the audience. It sounds obvious, right? But in practice, it's not quite easy to pull off, right? Keeping your brand consistent, your logos, typefaces, colors, tone of voice, you know, all the elements that make up your distinctive brand assets requires constant attention, right? But it builds memorability. And without having that consistency, those structures weaken. It also builds trust, right? People naturally gravitate toward what feels familiar, right? So when a brand's assets and messaging, if they're shifting too often and the color's not quite right and typography looks a little bit suspect, then trust takes a hit. Okay. It's usually a good point, depending on the size of the business, to document your distinctive brand assets, right? It's not enough for you to know it in your head or in your heart, right? You need to document it clearly so that everybody's on the same page and you can scale because otherwise you've got a single point of failure, right? You've got like Julius Caesar giving it a thumbs up or thumbs down. That's obviously—

And you have to constantly test against it with intentionality, right?

Absolutely. And it can change, it can evolve. Absolutely. Because customers evolve, markets evolve, the industry evolves, but you need to put a stick in the ground somewhere.

Yeah.

Right. You know, consistency is not a set and forget thing, right? You need to take the time to audit these key touchpoints, right? Like social, like proposals, like anything customer-facing to make sure that everything aligns. Right, and well, yeah, I mean beyond that there's other things we can go into if we're getting into advertising and I mean talk about share of voice and share of search and this sort of stuff, but that sort of gets into generally speaking larger organizations who are usually spending, you know, serious budgets on marketing execution which You get into the law of diminishing returns then because you're having to spend like double to get an incremental uptick and it doesn't really matter.

For the entrepreneurs and small business owners who are tuning into this podcast, are there any cautionaries or pitfalls they should be aware of when they're trying to refocus? They're looking at their brand. They're trying to refocus their messaging. Is there anything Is there anything they should be concerned about as they try to do this reinvention?

The biggest risk for this whole thing unraveling is not getting buy-in from everybody within the organization. And it usually unravels because of somebody at the top echelon of business, right? Often what happens, especially for organizations where you have like the CEO founder, You know, the person who actually created the company and the company is his or her baby now, right? Quite often, having somebody external, because it's usually an external exercise because this sort of thinking is very unusual to have within the organization.

Right.

To have somebody external to come in and say, oh, well, we've got to change what you've been doing, we've got to do it in a different way. It's tantamount to saying your baby's ugly. Nobody wants to hear that. So it needs to be a certain type of person who's open and accepting and acknowledging the fact that what got us here won't get us there.

Right.

There's also the issue of complacency, because when you're just starting a business, you're more open to risk-taking. Because it's, you know, whatever we need to do to get the business off the ground.

Right.

But once you've built the organization to a certain size, all of a sudden you're— there's a risk mitigation aspect going on, right? We're risk-averse.

Right.

But that isn't what built the business in the first place.

Yeah.

And that's very scary place.

Being out there doing something different and Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

And that's a very uncomfortable place for many people. It's a characteristic, it's a personality thing, right? It's very difficult for certain people to get on board with. So it's far easier, you know, as people, as human beings, we're resistant to change. We'd rather carry on doing what we're doing because that's a place where is comfortable and we have a known outcome. Where we have an unknown outcome, which can be positive or negative, right? And unless we take that chance, we're, you know, it was Stephen Covey who said, if we keep doing what we're doing, we're going to keep getting what we're getting, right?

Yeah.

And that's the point. It ends up being a downward spiral. And then we have to start doing things like competing on price and that sort of thing, which is a game That you don't want to win, right? Because that only ends in a very bad place.

Yeah. Yeah. Gee, this has been such an amazing conversation. If people are really connecting with what we're talking about today, how can they get a hold of you?

Best place to get a hold of me, Marc, is on LinkedIn. Would you believe, right? Fascinating fact. Would you believe there is only one G. Ranacina on LinkedIn?

No.

Can you imagine? What are the odds?

Absolutely stunning. So you can find me on LinkedIn.

You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm sure you'll post links in show notes and all that sort of stuff after the fact. So you can find me on LinkedIn or obviously you can get in touch with the agency, kexino.com. It's K-E-X-I-N-O. LinkedIn is probably the best place for me. I post 1-minute videos twice a week on things like the sort of subjects that we've talked about today, those sorts of things, as well as things that maybe have pissed me off that day or I just need to use from a ranting perspective, and I just take it as a probably cathartic exercise. Nice.

We all need that too, though.

We need an outlet, don't we? So yeah, I use LinkedIn for that sort of thing. But yeah, let's get in touch. We'll have a conversation. You know, conversation's free. You know, even if your business is not ready to make that sort of jump at this point in time, I'm sure I can give you some ideas about quick wins that you can implement within your business in a very short period of time, which You know, it doesn't have to cost the earth. It's just expanding that solution set to encompass these behavioral, psychological, and emotional drivers, which customers are adopting, whether they know it or not.

Right. As we wrap up today, do you have any last thoughts? Anything that we've talked about that we've— did we miss anything? Well, I mean, we could do a whole masterclass on this, I'm sure.

But do you have any last thoughts? Well, yeah, as you can imagine, there's a There's 101 different directions that we could go on this. But if there's one takeaway I would say to small business owners is spend more time with your customers, right?

Yeah.

Take them out for coffee or for lunch. Pick their brains. Find out where they think their industry is going. Find out what they're fearful of, what they're hopeful for, what they're enthusiastic about. Get a lot closer to how they're thinking about their business because that's where you need to be for your business.

Great. This has been absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us today. It's been phenomenal having you on the show.

It's a pleasure. Thank you very much. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

If you have any questions about today's episode or you would like a complimentary 30-minute brainstorming session with Myself, or even with Ji, take a look at the show notes. All our links are in there down below. For mine, you can book time on my calendar. It's the one that's marked meetwith.marchaine.com. As always, I am at your service. And if you haven't done so yet, please make sure you subscribe to the feed. That way, you'll follow me on social media. You follow my feed. We'll connect. We'll share our stories because life is about stories.

It is.

Thank you so much for joining me today. My name is Marc Haine. I hope you stay safe, stay healthy, and I hope you dare to be the exception. Bye for now.