A gift on Monday

The sole purpose of marketing is to make a change, this is a big statement. Marketing is what we do when we want to change culture and behaviour, when we want things to be different. I think marketing is the work of telling a story that’s true to someone specific to help them see the world differently and take a different action, and if this change doesn’t happen then there is no marketing. Marketing is the generous act of leading people to get them to make things better.

To begin the marketing journey we have to be specific and ask ourselves two questions:

• Who is it for? (Target audience)

• What are the changes we seek to make? (How would they like to receive this content?)

---

The right competencies

I recently advised one of my clients that digital marketing is an excellent way to reach a large audience. And I also told them that using Google Ads - especially if they can use specific keywords - will help reach the right people and it’s easy to budget because you only pay for results.

What about influencers?
An influencer is someone who has a large following on social media and can influence what people buy or where they go. When a brand partners with an influencer, they usually get free products and services from the brand in return for posting about their experiences favourably. I think that linking up with influencers that align with your brand is a relatively simple way of boosting your social media marketing strategy, and it’s a great way to gain exposure on platforms you may not have a huge following on.

---

Don't hustle

If someone is interested in going where you are going, you don’t have to hustle them, you don’t have to say this is where we are going. For example, you don’t need persuade people who you think might want to go to Cape Verde. What you need is to find the people who want to go to Cape Verde and then let them know, that’s where you are going.

---

Sharing information across your campaigns

The idea that we can look somebody in the eyes and engage with them is scary for many people. When you work in sales and marketing this behaviour is the bare minimum of expected of you. Many organisations spend loads of money marketing their various products yet often their marketing strategies aren’t connected to one another, instead they use isolated campaigns without any formal unities. Why are they doing that? I think you should start correlating all of your marketing activities by streamlining your marketing strategy and messaging, as this will increase their effectiveness and put you in the spotlight for potential customers. Contact me via e-mail if you would like an evaluation of how to create a more unified marketing message for your organisation.

---

L is for language

What does the EBITDA abbreviation mean to you?
EBITDA means ‘earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation’, and this is how an organisation’s overall financial performance is measured. Do you use the language of business and of value creation? I think it’s time for marketing teams to move away from marketing jargon and encourage more discussions. Marketing teams should use their insight skills to communicate more effectively with the internal stakeholders, as this is about building relationships.

---

Do you know the difference?

Demographics are an old-fashioned method and is only used by people who don’t want to understand psychographics. Demographics is all about what do you look like on the national census form, whereas psychographics are about what do you believe? What do you want? What do you dream about? I think that if I know that you drive a cabriolet, this far more informative for me than knowing that you are 45 years old and a woman. We need to find the choices people are already choosing to make and then help them make their dreams come true.

---

Focus on things under your control

Often, we focus on things that don’t matter and things that are beyond our control. In times of crisis, organisations often forget about their sales and marketing strategies because there’s so much else to focus on and this results in wasted time and wasted opportunities. For me it’s all about customer satisfaction, giving good advice and solving customer problems to improve their customer’s lives. 

I think knowing which things we should focus on is key to getting what we want. From my perspective, customer loyalty is truly satisfying and many of my customers have become real friends. Focusing on the human side instead of the sales and marketing side helps because visibility to attract new customers is key to expanding my customer base as I work in human-to-human industry. 

---

The feedback loop

The world is changing to compensate for our lack of focus and SoMe deliver endless feeds of bite-sized content, bombarding our brains with dopamine. Are you actively seeking out and welcoming customer feedback? Do you have systems in place to incorporate feedback? Are you familiar with the term “Feedback Loop”? It’s a system that helps organisations gather information about their products, services, and performance from people outside of their organisation. What feedback loop approach works best for your organisation depends on your structure and culture.

There are two components of a feedback loop: an action and a reaction. What makes it a “loop” is when the results of the reaction feed back into the process. The ways in which organisations design feedback loops makes a difference in whether or not responses actually get incorporated. Every business has to find their protocol. The challenge is to make sure you empower employees to make and embrace change. 


I think there are 3 Feedback Loop approaches:
1. Role Based Feedback
2. Direct Outreach
3. Social Listening
Following are three that can apply to any organisation of any size.
Contact me via e-mail for a deeper dive into your organisations feedback loop.

---

Awareness can travel

c/o Getty Images

In psychology, a heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows people to make decisions quickly and efficiently. It is the way you feel (your affect) toward a particular stimulus that influences the decisions you make. No one likes to be outwitted or to be tricked, I wrote a little about “affect heuristics” on Tuesday because advertisers are perpetually after our attention and politicians after our votes, both of them employing as much inducement and enticement as they can muster. With heuristics, the brain can make faster and more efficient decisions, albeit at the cost of accuracy. Do people in your organisation exhibit curious, predictable biases?

In 1974, behavioural economics researchers Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman identified a specific mental process used to simplify decision-making. They showed that humans rely on a limited set of heuristics when making decisions with information about which they are uncertain. The three key heuristics are as follows: 

1. Representativeness - allows people to judge the likelihood that an object belongs in a general category or class based on how similar the object is to members of that category.

2. Anchoring - allows people to estimate a number by starting at an initial value (the “anchor”) and adjusting that value up or down. 

3. Adjustment and availability - allows people to assess how often an event occurs or how likely it will occur, based on how easily that event can be brought to mind.

---

You decide for yourself

c/o Harvard Business Review

How do we balance the need to be rational, cautious, and sceptical with the benefits of being curious and open minded to new ideas?
I think our emotions influence all types of decisions, both big and small. By nature, we are wired to pay attention to our emotions whereas we only listen to our thoughts, so when we feel something, it engages so much of our body. We are emotional creatures by nature, we are not the rational thinking animals we like to think we are. Marketing gurus know how to communicate and appeal to the animal in us, as people buy things based on emotions and not based on rational decisions. Consider how advertising can sometimes make unhealthy activities such as smoking or eating unhealthy foods seem both positive and appealing. These ads can sometimes influence the emotions of consumers, which can lead to poor health decisions and risky behaviours that can have serious, long-term consequences.


What can you do to prevent emotions from contributing to poor decision making?
Heuristics are efficient mental processes that help humans solve problems and learn new concepts and these processes make problems less complex by ignoring some of the information that’s coming into the brain, either consciously or unconsciously. The affect heuristic is a type of mental shortcut in which people make decisions that are heavily influenced by their current emotions, in other words, your emotional response plays a critical role in the choices and decisions you make. I think the next time you need to decide during an emotional moment, take a moment to talk silently to yourself using the third person. It might help you stay calm, collected, and level-headed, a strategy that may prevent bad decisions made in the heat of the moment.

---

Everyone is looking for answers

Yesterday an accountant asked me a question, “What is marketing for?”

My answer went a little like this: “I think marketing is about making change happen. Marketing works, therefore, as marketing professionals then each and every one of us are responsible for the effects and side effects of what we do.”


Accountant: “Who do want our customers to become?”
Me: “Marketing is the act of going into the world with intention to make a change happen. I use marketing to convert non-customers into customers. Sometimes, I help my customers become the person(s) they seek to be, and I help to create an environment that I think my customers want to see happen. Turning people from this to that!”


Accountant: “What are you going to spend all this time and money trying to do?”
Me: “I seek to help you become somebody who can make the change in the world that you want to be responsible for and be proud of. I seek to make an impact and clarify to the market the direction you are heading, leveraging the activity by using marketing tools to make a change happen.”

You are reading this because you are a passionate and caring human being. Contact me via e-mail and tell me about the change you are trying to make for your organisation.

---

What's your story?

Story is the oldest human technology, it is the way that we communicate an idea to someone else. The story we tell ourselves, it’s the story we tell others about ourselves and we don’t have to tell it in words. It’s a story about oneself, it’s a story about health, sex, commitment. All of those pieces add up to the narrative we have about who we are and how we want other people to see us. Contact me via e-mail and tell me your story.

---

I travel light

I don’t think that complete objectivity is possible! That’s a massive statement, but in reality If I led a media channel, for example, even if I didn’t mean for it to, it would naturally reflect some of my passions. So, when you have similarly educated people with similar backgrounds running all of the main media institutions, even if they don’t intend it, the outcome will obviously be biased. This week’s UEFA EURO 2020 Semi-Final between England and Denmark showed the problems with nationalism and how it makes people delusional and ugly. It’s hard to get better until you become humble.


I think the beauty of an action comes not only from when it becomes a habit, but also from its sensitivity, consciousness, clarity of perception and accuracy of response. The older I get, the more I realise that I am not compelled by any conditioning or programming from my past experiences or from my culture. Jamaican parent, British societal values and Danish awakening has stamped everything on me, fortunately, I am now in a position where I no longer react on the basis of my upbringing. I have learned how to experience things fully, both good and bad experiences. How to learn from them and then drop them, and move on to the next moment, uninfluenced by the previous ones. I travel light as I am uninfluenced by labels and titles, I just treat people with respect. 

---

There's nothing wrong with you

The general consensus for creative people is that discipline stifles creativity, I’m not sure that is the case. I think that in reality discipline allows you to focus on what matters. And when you to focus on what matters, you get more clarity and space in your mind to be creative. You should be seeking to solve the problems of the people you seek to serve. And the only way you can solve the problems of the people you seek to serve is to know what their problems are. 


I think that marketing is not the same as advertising, marketing is not about hyping lousy stuff. Marketing is about telling a true story to people who want to hear it. In my experience marketing at its best is when we make things better that are seen and understood by the target audience. I think that if there is a person, cause, organisation or brand that you care about it’s because they do good marketing. Contact me via e-mail for a non-binary meeting about your organisations marketing engagement.

---

Intentions mean more than actions

I believe that intentional action sometimes called design thinking saves a lot of time and energy. Part of what we do as a creative is to look at who do we seek to change and what change to we seek to make for them? And then we have to make it for those people.


Design thinking in a nutshell is encapsulated with these three questions:

1. Who’s it for?

2. What’s it for?

3. And how will I know if it’s working?

These questions are essential, and if you don’t ask yourself them then you’ll probably end up stumbling around in the dark looking for solutions.


If you want to learn marketing you do it by doing marketing, by taking action. Reading marketing books and an internship is all well and good, I think you would be better off to figure out how you want to make a change happen and then do it. This is because if you get good at marketing there will be a lot of people who will want you to help them. 

---

Lock arms with the right people

© McGill Media

After watching the football yesterday evening, I had a long discussion with my friends, Sophia and Oscar about the masculine and feminine roles in society. We concluded that biologically women are nurturers and men are providers, like it or not this is programmed within our DNA. Traditionally, women were seen to be soft and men were perceived to be hard, tough individuals. The big question is why is society communicating to men that they should be more feminine, and at the same time telling women to be more masculine?


Throughout my career I have worked with inter personal communication, whether it be sales, marketing or branding. I love the concept of writing to the voice in your audiences head. Broadly speaking, I learned that relieving pain is what we want and maximising pleasure is what we crave. It’s all material and it makes sense to turn over the worst moments in our lives into great lessons, not only for ourselves, but also for the people we seek to guide along their journey.

The second habit Stephen Covey covers in his wonderful book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” is “Begin With the End in Mind.” According to Covey, before you can live a good, meaningful life, you have to know what that looks like. When you know how you want people to talk about us at the end of our life, you can start taking action now to make that scenario a reality later. As I do not chase people anymore, I have learned that I am here and I am happy, and I am not going to run after people to prove that I matter. So, what do I want you to do after reading this, what is my call to action? I think the the end product isn’t as important as the process, contact me in confidentiality via e-mail to arrange a meeting about your processes.

---

Pleasure & Pain

The two P’s of motivation are pleasure and pain. I think that people buy products or services for one or two reasons and there are hundreds of books out there around the psychology of selling. In my experience, people buy products or services either to move closer to pleasure or to move further away from pain.

Nowadays it appears that marketers focus all their attention on marketing towards the pleasure, it may also be extremely effective for marketers to target solutions which moves the consumer further away from pain. It’s unrealistic to think that we are going to live our lives in a solely pleasurable way, so brands need also to look at their consumers pain points. Contact me via e-mail for an introspection into your buying process.

---

Gone are the days of one size fits all

I think that all the stories we tell ourselves about others are only partially true. What do you think? We use negative stories about others to justify self-serving behaviours and people judge you by the stories they tell themselves about your motives and actions. Remember, people may hate you for being different and not living by society's standards, but deep down, they wish they had the courage to do the same.

Generosity is scarce and generosity scales! Generous does not mean that you gave it away for free, it means that you showed up with emotional labour to make things better. Everyone wants is to feel seen, they want products and brands to serve their needs, and they choose brands and products with transparency. The purpose of marketing is to serve people and help them solve their problems. Contact me via e-mail for a deeper dive.

---

Turns on the lights

Consumer behaviour considers the many reasons why people shop for products those reasons could be personal, psychological, situational or even social. Knowing and understanding customer needs is at the centre of every successful business, whether it sells B2C or B2B. You can't persuade anyone that they want or need to buy what you are offering unless you clearly understand what it is your customers really want. As marketers we need to know what makes our consumers take action and why they buy.


I don’t think that your consumers buy from you because they care about you, they buy from you because they care about themselves. Ask yourself if you would drink that brand of coffee if George Clooney wasn’t endorsing it or if you would take that advice if it wasn’t coming from Oprah. It’s for you that you are doing it, and yes it has something to do with the celebrity, but it’s not because of the celebrity. It’s because of your own narrative - how it makes you feel in the eyes of your friends, family and colleagues.

Authentic leaders don’t see helping people as a pain, they see it as their purpose. Don’t be shy, contact me via e-mail.

---

Time for change

When you need information that you don’t have, you are usually not aware that you need it. If you only have partial information, you will make the best story possible with the information you have - and your confidence will be determined by the coherence of that story.


Marketing is what we do when we want things to be different, for example, to change the culture or to change the behaviour of our target audience. When you are comparing brands with each other, you may have generated external preferences by association or memory, not only because of what you see in the given moment. What you see in the moment may make you think of the other brand, therefore, you be aware that the influence of context is really powerful and extremely easy to exaggerate.

I think marketing is the work of telling a story that is true to someone specific. And this story will help them to see the world differently and/or take a different action. This is because the only purpose of marketing is to make a change. Nowadays marketing should be a generous act of leading people towards the change you want to make. Contact me via e-mail for specific guidance on:-
a) Who’s it for?
b) What are the changes you seek to make?

---