Life-Changing Books Podcast Episode 78. Drew Neisser: Author of Renegade Marketing

Well, Drew, welcome to The Book Thinker's Life-Changing Books Podcast. How are you doing today?

I'm doing great, Nicholas. Thank you so much for having me on your show and doing your show. It's so valuable to your listeners.

The pleasure is all mine. I love these books. So, before we jump in, I'd love to have you introduce yourself to everybody in the audience and tell everybody a little bit about sort of the 3 categories of your life and sort of your work history. You've got your experience in these bigger marketing agencies, you've got starting your own marketing agency, and then you've got interviewing over 400 CMOs. And so I'd love to kind of have you wrap all of that into a major introduction.

Okay, yeah. So let's start with, yeah, I've been in advertising my entire career, advertising and marketing, I had the opportunity to start. And I'll go back to, I knew early on in this business, particularly in the advertising business that, you there's an old saying that either you had your name on the door by 40 or you had to get out of the business. So I was very determined to be running an agency before I was 40. And I was lucky enough. And that's a really important thing is like, what's your goal? And that was a clear goal. I was lucky enough. I didn't know it would happen when I joined Dentsu. They wanted to start another group to go after Panasonic. I got lucky to start the agency with them. And I could position it as something special, which was Renegade, which was really designed— initially, we were the anti-gray. We were an agency that were going to compete and do everything that a big giant advertising agency wouldn't. So we had a very clear purpose at the beginning of Renegade. In 2008, good news, bad news, I bought Dentsu out. The good news was now suddenly I own the company. The bad news is One, we were about to go in the worst recession since 1929. Two, about half a million of our cash flow got wiped out when we got stiffed by one of our clients. And that started me on this road of, well, gosh, that's a crisis. What are you going to do about it? And I had always sort of started to think about crisis as an opportunity. And that's when I started writing a lot in 2008, started probably a little bit before that, but doing interviews with chief marketing officers for a couple of reasons. One, that was our target. And so I figured what better way to get to know our target than to talk to them. And so just started interviewing those. And after the first 100, there was a book. After the second 100, someone— it occurred to me I should have a podcast. And now we're close to 500 of those. And a second book came out last year. I'm sure that you will say this, the great thing, the best thing, and the unexpected part of interviewing folks is that you just keep learning.

Yeah, it definitely is. And I started this podcast for a similar reason. I mean, my target is to work with authors, and what better way to learn from them and to get to know them than interview them in a long-form way. And so we're sort of cut from the same cloth in that respect. Now, I know that a lot of your work has to do with B2B, and we're going to talk later in today's conversation about how some of these B2B principles can be applied to personal branding. But what does B2B mean to you? It doesn't mean boring to business, does it?

No, thank you for saying that too. I love that, that phrase. No, B2B is when one business is marketing to another business. And typically, the reason why that's so different than B2C is it's more complicated, there's more decision makers. And if you're an enterprise company, you have sometimes 15 people involved in the buying decision. Rarely is it something that happens, you know, you walk into a store or you go on Amazon, you just buy it. That's, you know, very transactional with, with B2C, where B2B is, is just more complicated. And honestly, 5 years ago, when we started focusing on it, it was mainly just, again, sort of thinking about, well, we preach focus, we better be focused. And so that was part one of it. And part two of it was, it's just so damn boring. I thought, well, the bar is very low, we ought to be able to do better.

Yeah, one of the early books that I had read, it was called Gap Selling, it was written by Keenan. And he put sort of sales on a spectrum from transactional to complex. And so I've been using those 2 words to sort of describe the differences between B2C and B2B for a long time. So Drew, in the foreword of the book, Brent Adamson talks about reading this book through an empathetic lens. He says that we should think about how you can change the way that your customers think about themselves. And so why is that important to the messaging in this book?

Well, first of all, it was—

you—

I don't know if you know Brent Adamson and his books, but he's just a brilliant guy. And I was so honored when he said yes. It's one of those things where you throw the Hail Mary and oh my God, he caught it in the end zone. And so just having him do it. And also, it was important that he do the foreword. And the reason why he was my first, second, and third choice was that a lot of his theories from Challenger Sale and Challenger Customer rippled through the book. And he also talks about the complexity of marketing and how marketers are missing so much by focusing on features and so forth. So empathy starts with the notion that it's really hard to be a chief marketing officer right now. It's really hard to make these decisions to get the sale through because, you know, the organization in many ways is designed to sort of stop it from happening. So the empathy is, how do you help them? How do you make it, as Brent will say, make buying easier? And so that was, I think where it came from. And then there's this second part that, to me, he didn't talk about, but empathy was probably the most important word of 2020. And the result of the pandemic and everything that— and I would say the book I wrote really because I saw this ridiculous complexity. We did some research about it, and my empathy was, there's got to be an easier way.

Yeah. Do you think that empathy is a learned skill, or do you think that it's something you have to be born with?

Okay, great question. And I interviewed the CMO at the time of Deloitte who had— and I talk about this in the book— she had been in charge of Deloitte University. And Deloitte University is a place where every member of Deloitte, new recruit, goes to be trained. And one of the 4 things that are characteristic of a Deloitte is empathy. So, yeah, they teach it. And I was sort of shocked at that and thinking, no, you can't. But no, you can. And it's really important if you're in the service business and you don't have empathy, it's a problem.

No, I think so too. And the reason that I asked is because I feel as though I've learned empathy over time. I was not I was not a very empathetic kid growing up. I think I struggled with a lot of anxiety and ego. And so empathy wasn't at the forefront of my thinking. And so I graduated school, I took a sales position, and I read a lot of sales books that just pushed the hard sale, the hard close, how to objection handle, but none of it had to do with empathy. And running the Book Thinkers community, I've been able to step into a place of service, and I'm serving people, and the lens totally flipped for me. And over time, I've been able to strengthen that skill. And I think it's something that a lot of CMOs or anybody who has a personal brand really needs to lean into the empathy side of things.

It's funny you should say that. First of all, one, it's amazing that you've gotten that insight so quickly in your career. It takes some people many, many years before they get there. Two, chapter 9 of my book is called Selling Through Service, which we will get to. But 3, and this'll sort of make you laugh a little bit, I'll remember early on in 2020, I started gathering CMOs then, because again, speaking of empathy, I had no idea how our business would survive the pandemic, if we would or wouldn't, but I knew that there was an opportunity for us to be of service, and that was by bringing CMOs together. And I remember in April of 2020, a couple of CMOs saying, oh my God, I have to be so empathetic now. And it was clear that this was a skill that was a premium. And I would say that that premium has only gone up in the last, you know, with the great resignation and all of the other things that have happened in the last 2 years because of the pandemic, it's even more important.

Yeah, and I think it's a good buzzword. I think that it's good that it's circulating. I think it's good that people are more aware of it, that it's top of mind. I mean, if everybody on planet Earth was a little bit more empathetic, it would only be a better place to live. So I'm a big fan of that. Now, sort of stepping back a little bit, a question that I didn't ask, but I meant to at the beginning of today's podcast is, who did you decide to write Renegade Marketing for? Who is the target audience for this book? And why did you decide to write it?

So, the answer is chief marketing officers. Again, I've been focused on them and it's for them and by them in many ways. If you think about the 450 interviews that I had done, they really informed the book. But what I saw happening, and this was sort of the process that became the book, and I highly recommend this for other folks who or at least mature in their business practice and ready to think about a book. So, we noticed that marketing had gotten ridiculously complicated and that these CMOs were just— the matrices of things that they were thinking about was crazy and brands were being lost. So, we did some research quickly in 2019 that proved that, yes, they agreed with us that marketing had gotten ridiculously complicated, but it hadn't gotten more effective. So then created this 12-step process that literally has an outline. And I went on the road speaking to CMOs and I went to 5 dinners. This was part of the CMO Club back then in 2019 and 2020, and sort of started to get validation of this process that I talk about and the framework, the CATS framework and the 12 steps. And then after having done, tested it sort of by speaking about it, I wrote 45,000 words of what I thought would be a great book. And then, you know, March 2020 came along, I was done, but the pandemic happened. And I went, oh gosh, I don't want to release this now because I want to make sure it'll work for the pandemic. So, at that point, I took the 45,000 words, reduced it to 15,000, literally took all the stories out. Put it on the website, mother of all blog posts, 15,000-word blog post that has been incredibly popular and has done amazing SEO. So again, I had validation and it gave me another 6 months to 9 months to keep researching, make the book better, and finally decided after, you know, a year of the pandemic that The theory applied, I just needed some new cases and some revisions. And that's sort of the long-winded way of getting to Renegade Marketing. So for CMOs, about CMOs, to really find a way to address this radically simplified B2B.

Well, in a few minutes, for those listening, we'll talk about how we can apply these to personal, you know, these principles to personal brands, because I know a lot of us listening are not always CMOs. So we'll get to that in a couple of minutes. But the framework for the book, the CATS framework, these are the top 4 characteristics that all top marketers have in common. So how did you come up with these and were they part of that blog post?

So funny enough, they weren't part of the blog post, but after— so I wrote the first book after 100 interviews because someone said, hey Drew, there's gotta be a book in there. So I created the CMO's Periodic Table and it organized these into 64 interviews. And it was a good book in terms of giving you an overview of all the elements of marketing at that moment in 2015. But what it wasn't was prescriptive. And what it didn't do was sort of identify the characteristics of truly successful ones. So when I went out on the road to speak in supporting the book, people kept asking, hey Drew, what are those sort of characteristics? And that's where I came up with the CAST framework from the last book.

Yeah.

Because all the stories, and then as I started thinking about the CATS framework and had a lot of years to sort of live with it, it just kept getting more and more profound. And so, for this book, and by the way, when I did the blog post, I pulled CATS out because I wanted to have something that when I had it in the book that wasn't already on the website.

Publishing a blog before a book is a really interesting way to do it. And I'm seeing that that's becoming a little bit more common because it's almost like releasing an MVP product. It's partially finished. You can collect real-time feedback. You're making less assumptions for the end user. And so, were you able to collect feedback from that article after you posted it in order to kind of change things around?

It's funny. I didn't get a lot of feedback other than, oh my God, people are spending 20, 30 minutes reading it, which gives you a sense of the content is valuable. I mean, we are still getting anywhere from 200 to 400 visitors a day organically to read the post and they spend a lot of time with it. So it was validation that the content had value. It didn't really help in terms of refining that. And what I did for that was I just sent chapters and in some cases the whole book to a number of CMOs who kept giving me input on it. And that's where it really got Yeah, no, that's fantastic.

And then I'd like to have you tell everybody the Tough Book story. So that was something in the beginning of the book that caught my attention. And I think it's a good, it's a good way to introduce some of the subjects in this book. And then after that, we'll go through some of the first 5 chapters, and I'll have some more specific questions about them.

Very cool. So the Tough Book, this is a, this is a wonderful story. And you talk about sometimes about making What is it? Lemonade out of lemons. So when we started working with Panasonic Personal Computer Company, pretty long time ago now, they had a magnesium-cased laptop that was the first one built with a CD-ROM drive. And that was a big deal, but it weighed a ton. And we looked at this thing and tried to figure out, okay, this is a beast, but And it was called like the CF, I don't know, 41 or something like that. Anyway, we realized that this magnesium case made it pretty strong. And so we went to them and said, this ruggedized marketplace could be really interesting. It's a niche. You could focus on it. And they came back to us with a new product called the CF-25. And we said, okay, well— and they asked us, can you name it? So we came up with a name, which is the Toughbook. So that's kind of cool. We got to name the product. And the interesting part of that is it's a product name that has a promise, and it has a promise that you want to simply test all the time. So when we launched the Toughbook, we wanted to have the ultimate test.

And they—

by the way, we had just gotten these laptops. I mean, they literally were flown over by 2 engineers. They hand-carried these things. And we convinced the marketing, head of marketing to run it over with a 6,000-pound Hummer on live television, on like Good Morning America. It was kind of a big risk. You talk about courage. And sure enough, they run it over this thing.

And the laptop survived.

They turn it on, they open it up. And, you know, but the sweat was just dripping from the engineers and the marketing manager. And there's no doubt in my mind that if it had broken and not worked, we would've lost the business. He would've lost his job. But instead, we ended up getting well launched, got covered, and then every single laptop and personal computer magazine in the world put it on the COVID introducing the Tough Book. So it was a big risk, but it was also hugely successful and set up this proposition of the Tough Book.

Yeah. Well, it was courageous. Wasn't it Elon Musk that maybe a year or two ago had a live product demonstration on stage where he went to smash a window and it actually smashed or something like that? And he was totally embarrassed. So It could definitely go south in those live filmings.

Yeah, you know, I think in some ways, and that's happened over the years, there's some famous other situations like that. In my mind, most of the time, the bigger risk is not taking one. And I've seen that over and over again, where they just, they lost their courage at the last minute, and the product never launched with the same sort of fervor, it just popped the balloon. And it's a shame when that happens. And if you're in the marketing business long enough, you'll see it and you know it. I can remember several moments where that happened. They don't end up in the book.

Yeah, yeah. No, very true. And like Robert Greene might say, seek attention at all costs. And sometimes that controversy creates more eyes, all eyes on the product. So either way, the outcome is better than if you didn't shoot for it anyway.

I think that is 98% true. And I would— that, you know, the old saying is all PR is good PR. I think for the most part, brands that have some awareness always do better. This is a truism. Brands with awareness do better than brands without it. It's just absolutely true. There is such a case. And, you know, I talked to a CMO from a quantum computer company who had a reputational issue. They had awareness, but it was negative. And they had to work very hard to get rid of that reputation. It didn't help them. So there are times where that awareness is so connected with negativity that you can't—

it's a problem.

But most of the time, it's worth it. Take the chance.

Take the chance. Yeah, I like that. Now, this is probably one of those subjects, Drew, that translates to personal branding. What are your thoughts on sort of being remarkable with personal branding? Should you always shoot for the stars? Should you be doing crazy things? I mean, I see these TikTok stars and these Instagram stars doing wacky things all the time. What are your thoughts on that?

Well, first of all, let's talk about what it means, what a personal brand is. This is choices, right? You're going to be something, you're going to stand for something. And Is it— are you going to be the wacky sort of tic-tac? And if that's part of your personal brand and you can deliver on it over and over and over again, knock yourself out. I don't think— there is an old expression, you can get attention by putting a gorilla in a jockstrap, but you won't always get— they'll remember the gorilla in jockstrap, but there'll be no association with anything else. So I think as you think about your brand, you do want to have distinguishing characteristics. You do want to be distinctive. I'll never forget, it was a woman I ran into years ago who was an insurance person, and everything she did was purple. Everything. I mean, her pens, her clothes, her signature in her emails. And so, she was just the purple insurance lady. It was something.

Yeah. No, it is.

Right? And it worked for her. I mean, Joe Paluzzi always talks about— he's the guy who wrote Content Marketing and talks about he always showed up in orange whenever he spoke. And it got to be the point where everybody brought him orange things. And obviously color is just one aspect of things, but the key point from the Joe Paluzzi story is consistency, right? Always wearing orange when when he is on stage. So, I think as an individual, you need to pick a swim lane and be everything you can be within that. And that's, if it's being wacky, knock yourself out.

Yeah, no, I love that. And going back to the corporate side of things, you talk in chapter 2 about how corporate strategies normally begin with the normal stuff, right? Mission, Vision, core values, and you like to start brand strategy with differentiation and talking about novelty and things of that nature. So why do so many companies make the mistake of defaulting to those core values, the mission statement, the vision statement?

Oh God, I don't know. And you know, this is a terrible thing to admit, but I can never keep them straight. Yeah, I simply can't. Is it mission or is it vision?

Which one's the future? Yeah, I hear you.

So I prep, and this is again about simplification. No one ever remembers a mission statement. No one remembers a vision, but people can remember a purpose-driven story statement that's 8 words or less. And again, we got back to this awareness thing and recognition. You want to be known for something. And so, in the book, when I talk about daring to be distinct, I talk about really finding this very specific part of your brand that you can own. And it's hard for some big companies, I mean, because they have so many products or services. But for most, you can be this one thing against this audience with this promise. I can't answer the question about mission and vision. I think it just makes people feel good. And I do want to say that values are important and they do help inform. And one of the things I love to do with executives is to do a value exercise. But what I do is, one, make them as a team get it down to 4 to 6, and 2, try to articulate it in a way that is fresh and that the company people can remember. So, we'll use acronyms a lot, right? Where they could— or we'll use alliteration like the 5 Cs, just something so that they can become operational. And I wanna say one last thing, which is make marketing that is brilliant is real. It's not fluff. It's actually business transformation. And that's why I get so excited to talking to CMOs and so forth, because the great ones are transforming their organization. And it's more than words, right? It's more than 8 words, but it is the fulfillment against employees, customers, and prospects in a way That is distinctive in everything that they do and consistently towards a very clear, you know, some people use the word North Star.

Well, we'll unpack the 8 words a little bit later in today's conversation, but I wanted to go back to chapter 2 again. And earlier in our conversation, you mentioned how you wanted something prescriptive. That was what you wanted with this book compared to the last book. And what I like is you actually give frameworks for writing positioning statements and things like that. after you talk about the importance of them. So, that was really cool. Could you tell us the hallway restoration story? Because I think in terms of differentiation, that's a great way to look at it. Yeah.

And I'm so glad. Thank you for asking that. So, part of the reason why I love sharing that story is it's about a construction company, right? I mean, that's a pretty basic thing. We're not dealing with a sophisticated thing. And I think lots of People can relate to this story. So, it goes back to, I was on the board of our co-op and the building was 40-plus years old and the hallways had never been redone. And not one of the 7 of us on the board had ever done a hallway restoration project. So, we had 3 construction companies come in to tell us what they would do. So, we asked them the question, so, tell us about yourself and The first 2 companies came in and said, well, we're a construction company. We do hallways and we do restaurants and we do lobbies and we do all sorts of different things. And we said, oh, okay, that's cool. And what's your process? And they say, well, you know, we start at the bottom and work our way up. And we said, oh, okay. Anything else you want to tell us? No, no, that's all good. So we get to the 3rd guy and he, he says, So, we asked him, well, what do you guys do? And he said, we only do hallways for co-ops and condos. And we went, wait, what? He goes, yeah, we only do hallways for co-ops and condos. And by the way, here are the 10 emails and little posters that you're going to want to put up in the building throughout the course of the process. And we said, what do we need these for? And he said, well, here's the big deal. The thing that you are going to be dealing with is complaints, and these complaints are going to be around dust and noise and dirt and stuff around the thing. So we put 10% of our budget into cleaning up. We even have these sanders for the doors that have this vacuum on the top of it to suck up all the dust. So every day we'll clean up, and so there will be— Won't be really any problem with the dust and dirt. And what we realized was that he reshaped the conversation into, we're in the complaint mitigation business. This wasn't even about a hallway project. This was about us managing 113 different co-op owners and having them not chew ourselves, complain about to us whenever we see them in the hallway. At the end, it was an easy decision. Oh, by the way, another key point, you always start at the top and work your way down because gravity is your friend. So, afterwards, but the easiest decision we ever made, we hired him pretty much on the spot. I asked him, I said, so, have you always only focused on these things? And he said, no, we used to be a general contractor. We do everything. And I said, well, how was it at first? And he said, it was really hard because we were turning We had to let some business go. We didn't do certain projects. And I said, well, how is it now? He said, it's incredible. We win 70%. We get invited to every pitch and we can never be underbid because we have these crews that go from building to building. So, we built this engine. And the code of the story is there was one aspect that we didn't do with them because it was going to cost us like an extra $10,000. It had to do with the locks of the doors. And that was a disaster. We tried to do it ourselves. It was a disaster. So, the moral of the story is being distinctive requires focus. These guys had focus in spades.

It does. And this was probably my favorite story from the book, just because of how it resonated with me. And I know that before we pressed record, we were talking about what were my biggest takeaways from the book. And I'm in a place where I want to continue to differentiate Book Thinkers, and I think that it's going to take sort of like a branding strategy overhaul. I think I've got to find a way to create a new category, which we could talk about in a few seconds. But that story also reminds me of the point that I was attempting to make in the beginning of our conversation about Brent Adamson and his foreword for your book. You want to change the way that your customers think about themselves. And now all of a sudden you go, wow, they're helping me They're helping this board think about problems that we weren't even aware of, complaint mitigation. Now, that's a whole nother level. It's like an Inception level of marketing. And it's not that hard to achieve. Maybe it's a little bit harder to articulate, but that's what they did for you. They made you aware of things that the other companies just totally blew right past because they didn't want to educate you. Yeah.

They thought they were just building something, right? That was just a bunch of contractors and that they were going to do, put up wallpaper and, you know, do the sanding and fix the lights and all of that. And no, what they were really doing is helping us deal with what could have been a terrible situation. And, and so, yeah, I think the interesting part of that is it takes the empathy that you talked about and a lot of work and digging to get beyond the functional and the features and the things that you think you're doing into this territory of what do you really want in this thing? And it's sort of the old saying, people don't want a shovel, they want a hole. They don't want a flashlight, they don't want a candle, they want light. And so, how do you, as a business or personal person, sort of think through and get to that? And that's, again, part of that is these conversations. It's interviewing people and digging and digging and asking why like a little kid. Well, why?

Well, why?

Well, why? When you finally get to that unique insight.

Well, Drew, let's jump into the category creation piece because like I said, I just read your book and it touched on this. I just read another book about online writing and it talked a lot about category creation. And it's a big part of my thought process right now. The book space is continuing to grow and grow and grow. And there are more accounts popping up all the time. And so I'm thinking, how can I differentiate Book Thinkers? I mean, plenty of pages now are just focusing on personal development or nonfiction business books. So I've got to take it to the next step. And so what are the— what are some of the characteristics of category creation that can be used to create something unique and different?

Well, there's certain litmus tests for what is, you know, you have a category. Now in the B2B world, these are defined this way. But I can get it back to you and what you're thinking about. So for most businesses to be a category, one, you need competition. So someone else agrees, right? You've named it. Second, you need validation from a third party. So in the case of business-to-business, if a Gartner or Forrester analyst says it's a category, then it is a category. Until they say it, it's probably not. And then Third, there's a community. So, I'll give you an example. Tableau, years ago, I interviewed Lissa Fink, who was then CMO. She was like employee number 30. And she talked about how, you know, I mean, Tableau sort of created this data visualization category, but it wasn't a category initially, but they started small. They brought together some users. Their first conference, they had 100 people. Well, you know, 7 years later, they had 10,000 people. You know, you have a category when people want to show up and relate to it and identify with it. They participate in it. And, you know, in the book thinkers world, I mean, there's Douglas Burdett, who has the Marketing Book Podcast. And I will say to you, more than any podcaster I have ever known. He works to build community. He's reaching out to every one of his guests. First of all, they're only marketing and sales books, so that's his niche, right? But he's built community literally one person at a time. He finds the things that they have in common. He tags you on LinkedIn. And he, by the way, he makes you— one of the ways that you find out you're approved to be on the show is he tags you on LinkedIn and wants to see if you're paying attention. And I'm telling you, for your playbook, pay attention to what Douglas does. It's really good. So, for you, it's defining either the category of books that you're going to cover and/or the target that you want to— one of the things that's interesting to me is You were doing this very young relative to when I started writing and doing podcasts, and I admire that. So, and if I had one regret is I wish I started writing earlier. And so, is part of what your niche is about your target?

Yeah.

Are you part of that sort of, are you the whatever? I don't know if you're Gen Z or millennial, but Is that, you know, is that part of it and why they need to, you know, what books do they really need to do to sort of be up, to be informed, to participate in the world in a way that has a common vision? And this is again giving back to the community, right? Is that we have this shared vision that we're, you know, part of this and they identify with it. So, first of all, you're doing it. And, The second thing I want to tell you is you don't always know where that niche or thing is going to arise. Like, I didn't know exactly that CMO huddles would become this thing in 2020 as a result of having interviewed hundreds of CMOs. But when the pandemic struck, it struck me that there was this opportunity and I was uniquely suited because I'd already done all this work. So I'd put my 10,000 hours in, if you will.

Yeah. Well, the Tableau example is great. I mean, you go from 100 people at your conference to 10,000 and a big Salesforce acquisition. And now data visualization has its own Gartner chart or whatever. So that's really cool. And thinking that far ahead, I mean, I am a young guy. I think I'm technically a millennial. I'm a millennial. I'm 28. I just turned 28. And so I've got a lot of time to figure it out, but my hat's in the ring and I'm reading books like this and having conversations like this so that I can continue to figure it out. And you mentioned audience. Yeah, Instagram is nice because it gives you analytics, and I think 90% of my audience is ages 18 to 34 or somewhere within that age bracket. So brilliant.

Yeah, brilliant. Now it's, you know, what is it about them And your relationship with them, and how do you nurture this community beyond just what you're doing? And are there ways to involve them in your process? And do they become folks that help read the books or select the book? Any way that you can involve them in a less passive way, in a more active way, the stronger that relationship will be.

And I want to continue to take more steps towards the prescriptive piece, which again, we talked about before. I want to understand from an author's perspective, what can somebody expect to implement? And I want to be able to convey as fast as possible to a potential reader, what can they expect to implement? And I think that's probably the gap that I need to continue to close, to use that metaphor. But Drew, let's go on to chapter 3. Chapter 3 is all about purpose. Tell me about the differences between the big P And the little p.

Yeah. So people hear purpose and Simon Sinek made it famous 10+ years ago. The thing that I want to distinguish and make sure that's clear in the book, not every company can save the world or needs to save the world. I'm not against any company that wants to, God bless them, and we need more because the world needs saving. But there's still a role for companies with little p purpose. I mean, take the Toughbook. There's a little p purpose, protect your data, to keep you road warriors, your information safe. So no matter what happens, the military uses these things, and they are really difficult, rugged situations, or police. So the purpose is little p. It's still protect the data. It's not save the world. But it's a fine purpose. In their case, they're lucky enough that was built right into their brand. And it's funny, in the book I talk about, and this is a later chapter, but the difference between a tagline and a purpose-driven story statement. And this might help. Maybe I'm getting ahead. But anyway, so other examples of little p purpose, let's see.

Well, you can bring up the tagline. I mean, we're giving everybody a good introduction to the book, and I know that we've already been talking for over 30 minutes, close to 40 minutes probably. So, feel free to bring up whatever you'd like.

Well, there's a story in the book that I like to tell because it's one of these moments where— so, Family Circle is a magazine that was around forever, probably close to 100 years. And they came to us, this was 10 years ago, I think. And they came to us and wanted to sort of reposition the magazine. And they wanted a— Renegade at the time was known as a guerrilla marketing agency, and they wanted a guerrilla idea. And pretty much like I talk about in the book, always believe that marketing is about a series of actions that you can do that are aligned. So in the meeting, the first meeting, literally as they're starting to brief us, I wrote down four words, and I wrote down these four words, thinking, okay, I nailed it. It's done. I'm done. I'm feeling really good. This is kind of my sort of little magical moment, and I know I can't do anything with it. I mean, I have to put it away. We have to go through the process and everything. But the words were where family comes first. It's a great little tagline, and and in and it's a tagline, and in It could have been a purpose-driven story statement. And let me tell you the difference. They ended up putting where family comes first on the spine of Family Circle. And it was there for 8, like 18 years. I mean, just as that's amazing, right? You have a tagline that is on the magazine. So we said to them, look, where family comes first is a really interesting idea. It's not a tagline. You could become the family-first magazine, meaning You could have the best family leave policy for employees. You could put together a symposium on where family comes first and what that means. You could do research on what is family, what is the modern family. There's so many different ways for you to activate this idea. And I mean, literally, we laid out 10 to 15 of them. And this was before people were talking about purpose. They didn't. Oh, by the way, they have a chapter in their magazine called Family, and it was the second chapter in each of the magazines. And we said, maybe you should put that first, literally, right? So anyway, brilliant line, just a tagline, sat on the magazine, could have been transformative, could have been operational. I mean, it's so interesting. Meanwhile, another company that we worked with, Case Paper came up with a wonderful tagline called On the Case. It's a pun, On the Case, but it became an operating principle for them. Every single employee understands it. They're going to be rewarded by being on the case. They know that being on the case means being reliable, resourceful, and responsive. And it has a sense of humor because it's a pun, and they bring that sense of humor to everything they do. So, the difference between On the Case and Where Family Comes First is kind of huge. They're both great lines. They're both wonderful expressions of a brand, but one of them was fully activated and still being used, and the other magazine went out of business.

Yeah. No, it's a good story and it helps differentiate the two. Let me read you a line from the book, and I want to see what it means to you. It says, anything is possible if you don't care who gets credit. So, what does that line mean to you?

So one of the challenges with marketing is that everybody thinks they're a marketer because we all watch the Super Bowl, so we've seen Super Bowl ads, so we're a marketer, right? Um, it's kind of a silly idea. It's like saying everybody's a CFO because they write checks. But anyway, they're in the world of business. There are a lot of folks that think they are in marketing. And so one of the ways to fight that is to get everybody involved in marketing, at least to get them have a voice. So one of the things that the book Renegade Marketing talks about multiple times is target number one is employees. And you got to get them involved. You need to do a survey once a year at minimum where you get their point of view. You want to know what they think of the company and you want to know, do they understand the brand as you put it forth or will be putting it forth. And so this notion of welcoming we says you're not an island. You can't do this on your own. You have to get everyone involved and at least pay lip service to listening. Ideally, you really are listening because here's the flip side. Let's say you come up with a new idea like On the Case or Where Family Comes First. If employees don't know how to speak to it, if they don't know how to activate against it, if it doesn't touch them and they don't want to take this and make it part of them, you— again, we're going back to community, right? They have to believe because they're the ones talking to the customers. If they don't believe, you're done, you know, go home.

Do you have any tips for internal communication? I mean, there are probably a lot of people listening today that are part of a larger organization and either are in a management position and feel like they can't effectively communicate with their employees or their customers, or maybe you're an employee listening to today's conversation and you can't effectively communicate up the chain. So do you have any tips for that? I'm sure it's something that you deal with all the time.

Yeah, there's so many different ways to engage employees. And there's one story to tell in the book about Jeff Perkins and ParkMobile and how they create these innovation innovation weeks where everybody in the company is invited to participate and help the company come up with ideas or solve a particular problem that they identify. That's just one of the ways, because what you're saying to employees is you have the ideas that can push this company forward.

Right.

It's not, hey, we got it all done. Then we got this innovation department just came up with the idea. No, all of you can innovate. So part of it is, let's go back to empathy. Right now is really hard to be an employee of any company. And so, because you're at home and you don't feel connected, so what are all the ways that you're helping your employees feel connected and thinking about that? And it may be less meetings, not more. It may be less happy hours, not more, or it may be better kind of ways of engaging. But there's a lot, and I talk a lot about them in various ones in the book. The key thing starts with recognition that employees are brand advocates, can be brand advocates, want to be brand advocates. We all want to work for companies that we believe in. And so assuming you are a brand that has a little p purpose, or better yet, a big P purpose, And you've shared that information with employees and they understand it, maybe that's even the reason they came to the company in the first place, then it's just making sure that you're listening and giving them forums where they can participate.

Yeah, right now that makes me think of my audience and I need to, I need to do a better job at including them and helping them innovate my page and the types of content that I create both on the podcast and on other social platforms. So that's a good reminder.

Yeah, good, good.

Yeah.

I mean, you have built a community.

It's clear.

I mean, I was on your Instagram feed, I saw all the comments. I mean, that's an indication of community. You know, what would be interesting is to see, what are they thinking about? What are their challenges? What are their— what role does your podcast play in their lives? And How can, you know, you help them more?

Yeah, I need to do an innovation week. No, I like the idea. And it's through conversations like this that I make progress in my own life. And I selfishly like to use these conversations to get a personal coaching session. So let me ask you a couple more questions. And I can't believe we're already through like 50 minutes of our conversation. Chapter 5, and we've already alluded to this, you talk about the 8 words. So the 8 words is important to you. And it was shocking to me to read how many businesses can't articulate their 8 words. So tell everybody about what the 8 words are and why they're important.

So that goes back to the purpose-driven story statement. I've given you the example of Family Circle, you know, where family comes first, where it could have been a purpose-driven story statement. For Case Paper, on the case is their purpose-driven story statement. In the book, I talk about this little company in California called YouTak. And their purpose-driven story statement is control freaks, which is just a fun— they happen to be in a business that they actually make something called controls for labs. It's highly technical. But what I love about the purpose-driven story statement for them is it's not technical. It's about how the people feel about the work that they're doing. And they're sort of sharing this. They're control freaks. Their customers are control freaks. And it's just It's a fun way of engaging the customer. You know, for Renegade, it's cut through.

2 words.

If we're not cutting through, we failed.

And so, let's back up though a little bit at a macro level. What are the 8 words and why are they important? Like, you know, why? Yeah.

It's really your call. It is a way of saying, you know, people talk about their elevator statement and They can be— it could be the how, it could be the why, it could be the what, it could be a combination of those, it could be something completely different. In the book, I talk about how you frame it and I give you all sorts of different examples of different ways of looking at it. And part of this is it's got to be right for you. So, I can't tell you what those 8 words are without knowing who you're talking to and where you want to go. you know, the sort of the goals for the business. I can simply say that if you say our business is too complicated to describe in 8 words or less, you're just not thinking, you're not doing it. And when I'll ask, and this is a thing I'll do before I interview CMOs, can you describe your business in 8 words or less? And, you know, they're still 2 paragraphs later and I think that's not gonna work. It's not gonna work on the— it's just, Not going to work because no one can remember all those words.

Well, earlier you sort of answered this question, but I like to ask this of people like you. So I described that my audience is mostly young professionals, and it's a lot of young, energetic people, big goals, big ambitions. So what's one thing, what's one lesson that you wish you learned earlier in life other than what you said before, which was you wish you started writing earlier and producing content, podcasting earlier.

So, one of the things I think is really hard during the pandemic in particular is that it's easy to confuse activity with accomplishment. And I've got so much to do. It's like in college where the kids who were saying, God, I've got so much to do. I've got 17 papers due, and all of that. And it was As if the amount of work was what was really important. And so, at the end of chapter 1, I actually have something called the Clear Away the Clutter. And I think this applies to anybody in any business, in any situation right now, which is— and I'll give you the pledge and I'm going to read it from the thing. I will focus relentlessly on a handful of strategic Priorities. I will have the courage to say no to distractions. I will delegate everything except the things only I can do that move the organization forward. I won't add to my to-do list without taking something off of it. I will block off 30 minutes a day for thinking big. That's all the advice I got.

Well, for those listening, uh, We also have this available on video. And I just showed the little pledge with the little checkmarks in here. But Drew, I think what we did today was a good introduction to the book. And I think anybody that's listened this far knows whether or not it's going to be a good fit for them and if they should check out your podcast. But for those that want to learn more about you, where should they go? What should they do?

It's pretty easy. renegade.com. You'll find the book, you'll find all sorts of bios on me, you'll find the 15,000-word blog post. Yeah. And you'll find links to my podcast, which is called Renegade Marketers Unite, or my live streaming show, Renegade Marketers Live, and all those other good things.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Nicholas, thank you so much. And thank you for, you know, I think trailblazing in terms of just jumping in and producing a podcast. If people don't know how much work it is, It's important that they know, and you're doing such a great job. I, I can really— congratulations.

Well, I really appreciate it. Thank you.