Secrets of a brandmaster: beating brand enemies

PLEASE NOTE: This transcript has been created using fireflies.ai – a transcription service. It has not been edited by a human and therefore may contain mistakes. 
 

 
00:03 
Dom Hawes 
Welcome to Unicorny, the antidote to post rationalized business books. This is a podcast about the business of marketing and the entrepreneurial mindset. So join me as I talk to leading thinkers, leading marketers, and senior executives to discover how they create value, capture markets, influence audiences, and drive business success. This is unicorny, and I'm your host, Dom Hawes. This is an episode about the fundamentals of marketing and beating brand enemies. If you're looking for clarity of purpose in the year ahead, if you're trying to turbocharge your effectiveness, if you're building the case for budget, well, this is the show for you now. Since starting this podcast, we have aired 37 episodes. Those episodes contain over 250,000 words, which in ten point times new Roman runs to around 500 pages.  

 
00:57 
Dom Hawes 
That would take the average person over 16 hours to read or 30 hours to listen to. That same output took us over 400 hours to produce over that time. And out of all the podcasts we've recorded, this one is special. That's not to say, of course, that the rest haven't also been special, because there's a thing that as we get better at making shows, well, we kind of enjoy them more. But believe me, this one is really super special. I've met some amazing guests in this studio, many of whom are now firm business buddies. I've connected directly with many listeners just like you through LinkedIn, too, and I chat to them on that channel, and I've met some amazing fellow podcast creators, too.  

 
01:45 
Dom Hawes 
But sometimes you meet someone who just blows you away, someone who you make an instant connection with, someone who you feel like you've kind of met before. And such a person is the extraordinarily articulate and on it marketer that is Rachel Fairley. Now, before we record any episode, we meet the guests online for a quick 20 minutes introduction to the show. And just to have a general catch up. Now, when we met Rachel, well, we had to call an end to the call at 57 minutes and 48 seconds. But, God, we could have gone on.  

 
02:17 
Dom Hawes 
She is amazing.  

 
02:18 
Dom Hawes 
Let me tell you a little bit more about Rachel. Hailing from Edinburgh, Rachel developed an interest in business and marketing from a very young age. Right after university, she found herself in Brussels. Where as, she puts it, she got a.  

 
02:31 
Rachel Fairley 
Job working for a general counsel, mainly because I spoke English and could type at least ten words a minute. And he was selling the business. He was involved in selling the business, and so he asked me to help him work that through with his team. And that's when I heard the single brand, which had a value on the balance sheet and started meeting marketeers in the business and thought to myself, oh, I want to do that. That's how I got into it.  

 
02:55 
Dom Hawes 
Given that her starting point was so commercial, it's no surprise to find how overtly commercial Rachel is in her outlook. And when I tell you that she has worked on well over 30 business repositioning projects, you will understand where her fluency in the business of marketing comes from. And given how simply and powerfully Rachel explains things, I thought a good place to start today might be to explain as simply as possible what marketing should be. If you strip away all the noise, all of the buzwords, and all of the fattiness.  

 
03:29 
Rachel Fairley 
Rachel, over to you, really all it is about is that the customer has a need and you are there to solve it for them. And you have to be in their mind. You have to have that mental availability and be easy to mind when they're in a buying situation and it's too late to show up at the altar and offer to marry them. Right? I mean, it's just too late. So you have to be in their life even when they're not shopping. And then once they are ready to buy, you have to be very easy and straightforward to buy. So how easy is it to actually buy your products and services? And then if you don't help that customer use what they bought to the maximum capability to solve their problems really quickly, they will churn.  

 
04:13 
Rachel Fairley 
You will not know when they're going to churn, but they will churn. They've already decided because they will feel like they made a bad decision and they wish they hadn't, and they're full of regret. And so it's almost like there are three very simple things that you have to do to actually support a customer. If you focus on that, I think everything starts to make much more sense. And I think then the expectations from a CEO, those are the conversations you need to have. What is it that we want to do for these customers?  

 
04:42 
Dom Hawes 
And that's an excellent executive summary of the whole podcast. Is it because we're going to dive into each of those areas now? Yeah, I wrote some notes from when we last spoke. You alluded to it just now. Too many people are focusing on, because they're looking attribution models. They're focusing on the last click or the last thing customer did. They're all right down at the bottom of the funnel. It's like the whole of the sales and marketing department are there together trying to nudge someone over the line. And then take credit for it. And that doesn't help the business in the short term or indeed in the long term. You told me when we met, you said marketing should be a discipline with a methodology that is understood and practiced effectively.  

 
05:19 
Rachel Fairley 
Oh my God.  

 
05:20 
Dom Hawes 
I know.  

 
05:20 
Rachel Fairley 
This is like my soapbox.  

 
05:22 
Dom Hawes 
Let's dial up the rant scale and let's get on to where we're going wrong and why that methodology and why the discipline doesn't exist.  

 
05:30 
Rachel Fairley 
Well, I don't get it right. If you're an accountant, you have training that teaches you a methodology and models. Why isn't marketing like that? The last, like this really is a rant. The last of 20 od years working on repositioning businesses. I have either found that people are willing to tell stories or write books or whatever case studies that are so superficial and sort of like, look at us, we did brilliantly, or they are case studies in how business decisions were taken wrongly. Right. But they don't actually teach you what the methodology is and how to know when things are going to go wrong and how to plan for that eventuality. So first of all, why isn't that there? Why isn't that a thing that you have to do and you have to be certified and to be a marketeer?  

 
06:20 
Rachel Fairley 
The second thing is, I mean, increasingly now, thank goodness for the marks and the jenny's and the Byrons and all of those incredible thinkers, Les, and I mean, just brilliant people coming up with really good, quite academic, but also very pragmatic thinking about what it is and why and how you do it. But I don't know how many marketeers really lean into that and actually study it and read it and get to the point where they have understood it and can actually action it. So what you end up with in marketing is you end up with, because I've been in so many businesses now that they all have different models, they all have different brilliance and awful things. But what I find is that really is a big barrier to marketing, is that different people have different training.  

 
07:05 
Rachel Fairley 
Some people have no training at all. Some people have gone from business to business every couple of years and experienced different models and ways of doing it, but not necessarily had the full lifecycle of a company. And then other people have been the same company for years and years, and the politics is more important to them than the marketing. And then there's other things, like people almost coming up with a plan and then just dusting it off every year and updating it slightly and just going with it. And I think at the heart of this is actually quite a big fear. A big fear of being found out, a big fear of not knowing what the right thing to do is. Even the way it's taught in business schools is mbas.  

 
07:51 
Rachel Fairley 
I looked at doing one years ago and decided not to, because I kept finding that they were very single, subject specific, and that interdisciplinary nature that you need in a business because you're driving, it's a cockpit. You've got to know what all the levers are that you can pull. And they're also very inaccessible in terms of the price. Right. Lots of people can't afford them, and I don't know whether they actually produce a return. I think that marketing ends up, it's a module, and then within brand and repositioning, and how you do full funnel marketing and how you create that value exchange, it's almost like a section of the module. So I think ceos expectations of marketing is not what they should be. I'm not even sure marketing cmos are always in the frame of mind of what it should be.  

 
08:37 
Rachel Fairley 
And so you see this very kind of come in, do something that's quite obvious, which is where rebranding and visual stuff all comes in, because you can repaint the walls, but not actually change the house kind of thing. And I think that means that you're never really standing on the shoulder of giants in your job, because what you really want to do is nurture that brand for the period that you're there, nurture that business, and then hand it off to someone else. And so I think we need quite a shake up.  

 
09:07 
Dom Hawes 
What's really interesting about our rant today is that there are two sides. One is we're saying it's the CEO's fault because he or she doesn't have high enough expectations of the marketing department and therefore is not giving them scope. At the same time, we've got a body of marketers, and there are some brilliant marketers out there, we all know, and some really talented individuals. But there are an awful lot who are also not talented, who are the equivalent of journeymen, who are ticking the boxes, turning up, doing inappropriate, ineffective things. For a long time, I thought that every business gets the marketing department it deserves based on the scope they give it and the people they choose to lead it. And it is the prime value creation engine in any business.  

 
09:56 
Dom Hawes 
It should be, at least if it's not, you're probably working in something low margin or uninteresting. But in a normal business, it should be the value creation engine, and it gets my goat. It really irritates me that there doesn't seem to be any kind of structure at all in the way that we're getting our marketing done.  

 
10:14 
Rachel Fairley 
I think you're spot on. It's actually quite depressing, isn't it?  

 
10:17 
Dom Hawes 
It is a bit, but we could.  

 
10:18 
Dom Hawes 
Decide to do something about it.  

 
10:19 
Rachel Fairley 
Yeah, we could totally decide to do something about it. I mean, I've told my children if they become marketeers, they're disowned. So that's a start. That's like you can be a plumber, an electrician, a doctor, be useful. And they just look at me, do.  

 
10:32 
Dom Hawes 
You know what's going to happen? So my father said to me, my father's advice to me was, you can do anything you like, but make sure you're passionate about it. And if you really are passionate about having clean streets, go empty bins, go sweep the street. He said that if you are really passionate about it, you'll end up owning a company or running a company or building a company that cleans streets. Because if you're really passionate about it, that's what will happen. But you know what happens then, don't you? You end up in marketing anyway.  

 
10:56 
Rachel Fairley 
Yeah, you do. It's so true. Your father was right about you though, cleaning the marketing streets around us. It's a bit of a sort of dilemma, isn't it? Because I think you have to raise the expectations in order to get marketing to do its job properly. The reason that for me that's really important is then you have to set the expectations with the rest of the C suite about it. So if marketing is really going to listen and understand the customer, understand the market and create that sort of value exchange that comes from having the right product services and experience the right pricing, the right way of being able to service those customers, then the CEO has to get behind the fact that the roadmap needs to serve those market needs, not just be what people would like to make and sell. Right.  

 
11:45 
Rachel Fairley 
And also the operating systems, the way the COO runs the business has to actually enable all of that and remove all the headaches and the difficulty. And so many times I speak to people and they're like, yeah, well, I do the right thing by the customer, but essentially what they have to do is work around the system or in order to make it happen. And they describe using four pieces of software to get something to happen that you have to use a bug to get. And then also the finance. Is it a cost or is it an investment? I think that's hilarious, because if you can switch marketing off and it makes no difference to your business, then game on. Switch it off.  

 
12:24 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, exactly.  

 
12:25 
Rachel Fairley 
I find even the fact that marketing gets a question mark about whether it's a cost or not is extraordinary.  

 
12:31 
Dom Hawes 
This is an area I get stuck in quite often. For me, this feels like an enormous bog that we're just walking into. But it is an important subject because it doesn't have to be one thing or the other. Firstly, it could be a little bit of both. And actually, I feel like there needs to be a third category, and I don't know what that is. Well, some of it's a cost. If you're doing direct response or you're doing straight above the line, of course it's a cost and that's where it goes on your P L. But if it's anything else, then it's not going there. But is it an investment? Because as soon as you start talking about investment or return on investment and you go to the rest of the C suite, they will have other thoughts in their mind about ROI.  

 
13:06 
Dom Hawes 
RoI is, in my opinion, more traditionally associated with investing intangible assets, not intangible assets, and therefore it's difficult for them to get the concept. Like, how are they going to measure the return on investment and how are they going to attribute that return? It's a difficult thing.  

 
13:21 
Rachel Fairley 
Yes, it is.  

 
13:22 
Dom Hawes 
I find it really hard that any business wouldn't understand that it pays to invest in those things that make you memorable. The long term stuff, I just can't.  

 
13:31 
Dom Hawes 
Get my head around it.  

 
13:32 
Rachel Fairley 
You know, this whole thing about what should you measure? It's almost like a red herring, because if you know who your buyer is and then you know what you want your buyer to know, they can buy from you and that they would like to buy it from you, should they come shopping, then you need to know whether or not that's working. And if it's not working, why is it not working? That's perception. Right? And then if it is, then it needs to be really easy for them to buy. Then you need to look at, well, how do they go shopping? Whether it's through a partner or retail, or whether it's on your website or whether it's through an event, whatever that journey is, how easy is it for them to actually find what they're looking for and buy?  

 
14:19 
Rachel Fairley 
And you can look at so many different data points, but with that as the exam question, where are people falling off? Where are they disappearing? Where are the leaks? Basically. And then same thing. When you get to contract. Like how satisfied are they if it's contract or if it's payment, that they got exactly what they wanted for a fair price, that they feel like this.  

 
14:39 
Dom Hawes 
Is a good deal and that's the value exchange.  

 
14:41 
Rachel Fairley 
And that's the value exchange. And then after that, do they feel that they've got the most from what they've bought? If, for example, that's what you want to know, then you can work out what all the leading indicators are to check. You can look at heat maps on web pages, you can look at how many people turn up for events. You can look at whether the pipeline going into the room is different from the pipeline coming out of it. You can find all those different levers, right? But essentially, that's what I want ceos to start asking cmos, who's the buyer? What do we want to sell them? How are we going to sell it to them and ask those questions and then figure out. But ultimately, the only measure is revenue. Just going back to that thing about training, right?  

 
15:22 
Rachel Fairley 
If you have to go and teach an accountant trained CFO that there's a measure for marketing that he or she has never heard of and that they can't actually see on a balance sheet, I just think it's just your noise. You're not valuable to them. Right. You're having to teach your own colleagues something they don't understand and therefore they don't trust.  

 
15:44 
Dom Hawes 
Okay, I'm going to throw something in here. Why should we care? I mean, why should a CFO need to understand absolutely everything about everything to do with someone else's job? Shouldn't they be trusting their professional colleagues to be doing a proper job?  

 
15:59 
Rachel Fairley 
I think that if you're sitting at that leadership table and you don't know how your colleagues think or what keeps them awake at night, or what they've got their eye on or what they're happy with, then you're not really that great a colleague, because the danger is that you end up at the top of your ivory tower, and that when that CEO looks out across the table, there's just a bunch of ivory towers.  

 
16:23 
Dom Hawes 
Sitting at this table.  

 
16:24 
Rachel Fairley 
Right. For me, with my teams, I expect them to get on with each other, even if they hate each other, I expect them to get on with each other, care about each other's work, be there for each other, be a sounding board, figure out how to cover for each other's holidays, just kind of have that feeling of being a team. Right. Well, that sort of expectation, why would that dissipate as you get to the C suite, and the best C suite teams I've seen are the ones where they'll go, how did it go the other day? You know, you were worrying about that. How did that go? What happened with that? Because they are running a business. They are not running a department.  

 
17:01 
Dom Hawes 
I feel we're talking about value exchange today, and I feel sometimes, though, that there's an unfair exchange there in that what marketers, I suppose, is its simplest level, understanding the customer and creating the appropriate channel to market and price. All the kind of stuff that we do a lot of. It's fairly simple to explain, I suppose. And if our argument here is that we're having to train them in what other people call vanity metrics, then I think I'm probably with you.  

 
17:25 
Rachel Fairley 
Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah.  

 
17:26 
Dom Hawes 
But I'm not necessarily sure the level of detail that a CFO or any of the other C suite would need around a table into the precise details of what's going on in the department. Like I wouldn't dream of taking a print out of, for example, our analytics, our own analytics into a board meeting. They're just not interested.  

 
17:46 
Rachel Fairley 
I see what you mean. Okay. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that you should be able to articulate that we want these buyers to buy these things from us. Our job up front is to make sure that they know that we are a choice within the market and they feel favorably to us. And I can tell you that is correct. That is happening if you want to know. There's about ten different things we look at, but we can dig into it if you want to. But basically they know we're in this market. They know we have the relevant things for them and they are favorable towards us. They will look at us when they come shopping. It's like, there you go.  

 
18:20 
Rachel Fairley 
Because otherwise you end up talking about awareness prompted or unprompted awareness, what the relationship between awareness and familiarity and favorability are, and how you have to build those at once. And then what drives consideration? Is that intention to purchase, or intention to purchase in twelve months, or intention to purchase because you asked me and I wanted to be nice. Too much detail. I care about that as a marketeer. But they just need to know, because I often work with companies where the biggest issue they have is that they're known for something, but the market's changed. And the reason they're not getting any traction is nobody knows they're in that market. It's like saying, but we sell skiing goods and you go, yeah, but everybody thinks you're an outdoor company, so they don't know they can come and buy that.  

 
19:03 
Rachel Fairley 
You just need to tell them.  

 
19:04 
Dom Hawes 
Let's talk about churn. You mentioned that in our exec summary at the top, we talked about the importance of as soon as possible post purchase, helping people feel good about what they've bought and then keeping the promise that's been made to the customer. Because I think in many cases promises are not kept. I have a very personal example. I'm not sure I'm going to go into it on today's podcast yet. I canceled a subscription service yesterday because the promise made by that business is incongruous with the promise that made me buy it in the first place. And it's a really small thing. Actually, I am going to talk about it.  

 
19:36 
Rachel Fairley 
Go on.  

 
19:37 
Dom Hawes 
It's the dog food company.  

 
19:39 
Rachel Fairley 
Okay.  

 
19:39 
Dom Hawes 
So they deliver cooked frozen dog food once a month to your door and it's good quality and they've done their branding really well. They draw you in and they make you feel like your dog is one in a million and the most important animal to them. Today we're recording a podcast they wanted to deliver today. They sent an email out and only gave me an eight hour window to say, can I change the delivery? And I didn't see the email in time, so I didn't get to do it. And on the call center, when I got through to the call center to try and rearrange, they said, I'm sorry, we can't rearrange. What you need to understand is this. They said there are tens of thousands of packages going out that day and yours is just one. So we can't change your delivery.  

 
20:23 
Dom Hawes 
And you were like, oh God, you mean I'm not special to you? Oh, in that case, would you mind canceling my service, please? And I canceled it. It's exactly the same product I bought last month and I'm very happy with the product. But that promise to me, the way they made me feel, they broke it. Yeah.  

 
20:38 
Rachel Fairley 
There's also this trickiness around marketing being something that I think is always seen as being sort of upfront before the customer walks through the door, because it's not at all. I actually think it's the relationship your business has with the customer. So if you don't act consistently and tell the same story consistently and deliver on that consistently all the way through the business, then that's exactly what happens. I'm not surprised. It's really tricky though, isn't it? Because I don't think many businesses really understand how it feels to be a human being and you see all these different bits of this business delivering to you and speaking to you, but they don't see it themselves.  

 
21:18 
Dom Hawes 
That's a very good point. Actually, they don't because they're too close in probably. They probably just see their functional bit. And the poor people who are on it was one of those little chat things online. They'd probably set some productivity targets so they can't go too deeply into any individual conversation.  

 
21:31 
Rachel Fairley 
But also, will anyone know that is the problem?  

 
21:36 
Dom Hawes 
Only if they listen to this podcast.  

 
21:38 
Rachel Fairley 
Well, of course they will be. I mean, I'll ping them and tell them to. That's what really troubles me is if you start a small business, like think of all those amazing businesses that are born out of entrepreneurial starts, right? I mean, Britain is full of them. And at the beginning that would have got back to the person who runs the business or is in charge of it and they would have gone, oh my goodness, right, well, we can't do that. It's almost like as you get more successful, you get more deaf and you can't see you're sort of working with a blindfold. I think that's why if you get a really great strategy that's really market oriented and everybody actually understands what the strategy is, right. You have got to make sure that delivers all the way through the business.  

 
22:20 
Rachel Fairley 
That's why I end up doing brand work, because I think brand can be neutral enough to walk through every single door in the business and say, look, this is what we're trying to deliver for the customer, so I want them to choose us. This is how our partners and our suppliers fit in. Can we look at how you take decisions and deliver against that? But if marketing doesn't do that job, who is going to do that? And even all the customer experience sort of roles. I mean, I know some amazing CX people. A lot of the anxiety about it seems to be that you end up sorting out things that are actually to do with troubleshooting when things go wrong.  

 
22:55 
Rachel Fairley 
If you have a sort of accelerator model of you sign on the line or you purchase and then from that moment onwards about making sure you get the most out of what you've bought and that is actually a program and that it's a program which delivers on why people came to buy from you in the first place and what drove that decision and is aware of what the barriers were that were holding them back, that they were like, yeah, but will it be okay for this or will I regret it for these reasons that you actually have that as a kind of corporate memory that people can go and check on, then you should be able to help people get the most out of what they bought very quickly.  

 
23:32 
Rachel Fairley 
I think academically, from everything I've read, churn rates are basically the same for everybody in a category apart from the market leader, because there's always a perception that if you're the leader, therefore you're the best and there's nowhere better to go. So actually the churn levels go down. But I don't know that churn is the most important thing. I think often the most important thing is if you've got that customer in and they bought something, could there be more you could do for them? And actually, maybe the metric shouldn't be about whether they're going to churn. If those levels are fairly standard, maybe it should be about how much you've managed to grow the share of wallet, cross sell and upsell. Do those customers know what their natural upgrade path is? Do they know what goes with what?  

 
24:18 
Dom Hawes 
Oh boy, I hope you're keeping up. I am, but only just. I told you this one was special. So what have we learned so far? Firstly, we need to change how marketing is taught in universities, in business schools and in the workplace. Other professions have a more coherent approach to professional development standards and certification. So why don't we? We have chartered institutions too. Of course. Maybe it's because they were born in a completely different era. So maybe it's time for the chartered institutes to collaborate or consolidate to present the industry with a more useful and joined up approach to CPD. A common complaint from those who do enter marketing after studying it at university is that the coursework doesn't prepare them for real work. They learn strategy models at university, then get chucked into the deep end of tactical execution as career starters.  

 
25:12 
Dom Hawes 
Of course, behavioral psychology, statistics and social studies might be more useful than strategy models at that stage of our careers. Then at business school, of course, those strategy models are retaught. But few of us make it to business school because, as Rachel told us, business school is in no way accessible to ordinary people. It's hellishly expensive. Maybe that's why marketing week, the Ehrenberg Bass Institute and others now offer mini MBA courses at a more affordable price. And God, are they popular. Marketing education needs to evolve, and it needs to do it like yesterday, both for practitioners but also for non marketing executives. Because the effect of good marketing is to enhance both power and profit. So secondly, businesses should be considering marketing across the whole customer lifecycle, not just the end stages of customer acquisition.  

 
26:03 
Dom Hawes 
As Rachel told us at the top of the show, that means understanding that the purpose of our business and marketing within the business is to identify customer need and then solve it. Now, to do that effectively, you have to be in their mind at the time they want to buy. But that starts way before they're anywhere near your funnel. Put another way, it means you have to build yourself into their mental ability way before they're ready to buy, so that when they are in a buying situation, you are the business that springs to mind. You have to be in their life when they're not ready to buy, or you'll miss the boat when they are. But your work also doesn't stop when they've bought.  

 
26:45 
Dom Hawes 
You have a duty to your customer to fulfill the promise your brand made, or they'll churn as quickly as they chose you. Finally, we've learned that marketing in a business is not a linear path. It's not a linear thing or a siloed department. To work, marketing needs to be a web of interconnected functions and activities, all of which must be aligned with the business's core strategy and its leader's vision. There are plenty of people without the word marketing in their job title in your company who do marketing every day. Embrace them, help them, equip them, and your work will be more effective. Rachel, customer success is such an important function, but it can be complex, too. Upsells, crosssells those sorts of things. They're essential for any business that want to maximise customer value.  

 
27:34 
Dom Hawes 
Now, in the old days when individuals had buying responsibility, I feel that might have been easier. Where are you on this?  

 
27:41 
Rachel Fairley 
I mean, it's a bit like you go into a Russell and Bromley to buy a pair of shoes and they still try to sell you the matching handbag. I mean, that's been going on since I went with my grandma like 30 years ago. Right? But it's that, it's. If people who bought this, it's the Amazon thing. People who bought this went on to buy this as well. Well, except that in b to c, your buyer's group includes all the people who influence their decision, like their children, their partner, their friends, et cetera. And then in business, it's procurement and finance and the naysayers and the yay seers and all that kind of stuff. So there's always a buyer's group. It's almost sort of shameful that you can sell people's stuff and then not really care whether or not they get any use.  

 
28:21 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah. So immediately technology companies spring to mind, and some do it really well. Like the customer success person is genuinely vested in you making successful use of their software. And then there are those that do it really badly. And as soon as you've got a signature on the dotted line on your B to B SaaS contract, it's a 24 month contract. They couldn't give a monkeys.  

 
28:41 
Dom Hawes 
See, we got your money. Oh, can we sell you some more seats?  

 
28:44 
Dom Hawes 
And that seems to be as much.  

 
28:46 
Rachel Fairley 
As much they, or they go after you for seats that you haven't bought, but that you seem to have people logging in. I mean, it's sort of weird, isn't it? But there was a big shift that happened in tech. I would say like sort of 20 13, 20 14, 20 15 that I saw around that period, which is where it went from being buying licenses to almost pay as you go to subscription models. And if you think about how you behave as a consumer, if I can't find anything on Netflix or now or something like that for a period of a month or so, I basically decide that we don't need it anymore. By the time I get round to actually switching it off, my mind was made up quite a long time ago.  

 
29:27 
Rachel Fairley 
And actually there's no amount of money you can throw at me because it's not worth paying anything for when there's nothing to watch. So I think the problem is that thing of put it in the books and after 18 months, get back in touch with them, see whether the clients changed, go and visit them in the car, start preselling in the next sale kind of thing. That's gone. And I think the other problem is that we think that they're buying every month, but actually they're buying every day. They're deciding every day whether what they've got is useful or not. And you will find out too late. And by the time you find out, they've probably already lined up whatever they're going to replace it with, which might not actually be another similar product. Could be something completely different.  

 
30:10 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, it's interesting. I was just thinking, we need to talk about brand enemies. And as we're talking about some of these companies, they're brand enemies themselves. I know there are three companies who we're currently working with at the moment, who I will cease working with when our contract ends, and I will never work with them again in my natural life. I don't care how good they get again. I don't care they've made it so miserable to work with them. Maybe that's why I know Mark Ritzen hates it when people do this. But they added an extra three p's to the P's, didn't they? People process and physical evidence. But that does allow you to take it beyond the transaction, actually, and extend the life of how you're looking at the marketing mix.  

 
30:49 
Rachel Fairley 
Well, and that's why your finance colleagues are really important, because even though I think marketeers should set the price with finance, often they don't get to. I mean, in many companies that I can see, they don't even barely influence.  

 
31:01 
Dom Hawes 
The price I reference, 15% of companies are taking marketing's input on pricing. From the research I've done, which is not statistically robust.  

 
31:09 
Rachel Fairley 
No, but it is really low. Right. Every now and again, you'll be like, oh, you work on price. Oh, brilliant. Oh, my God. And you're like, oh, I haven't met somebody like that in months. Right. That's really important because the price that those people are charged is part of the value exchange in their head. Right. And also the margins that business expects are part of how well you can service that customer, how much time you have when things go wrong, how much you're able to go, oh, don't worry about it. I'm going to give it to you for free this month. Let me press the button that gives you that bit of software for free this month. That's why all of these relationships have to really matter, because otherwise you've got colleagues pulling levers for you that you can't control.  

 
31:48 
Rachel Fairley 
The enemy is often for businesses, the enemy is often themselves and their own kind of. I don't know whether it's lack of care. I mean, that's what I woke up this morning thinking is like, you have to care to do the right thing. You have to actually care.  

 
32:02 
Dom Hawes 
And I think people do care, but I think when they start to scale, they get to a point, as you say, I think you hit on it earlier. It's like they're blindfolded. And the further, particularly if they're running a very hierarchical organization, they get so far from the customer, they stop realizing what people care about, or indeed stop caring, because actually then for them, it's just about a process they're involved in, a daily process that involves the things they need to do to run the business. And that, wouldn't life be great if it wasn't for customers? That's where that kind of mentality comes from. I think scaling is part of that problem, that as you scale, you need to be developing processes and playbooks and that kind of stuff.  

 
32:36 
Dom Hawes 
But if they're not developed sympathetically to the brand and they're not using the right lexicon and they're not using the right drivers and all that kind of stuff, it's pretty easy to see how it can go completely wrong. But flip side is we all know, particularly I spent a lot of my life in agency, and you've been there. The best relationships are the ones aren't the ones where everything went right all the time. The best relationships are when something went catastrophically wrong, you turned it around, you put the effort in, and you got things back on track, because that's the stuff that builds trust, and trust is what long term relationships are built on.  

 
33:09 
Rachel Fairley 
That's exactly it.  

 
33:10 
Dom Hawes 
You and I have talked a little already on air, but quite a lot off air about brand enemies. I think it's time to look into that concept in a little bit more detail. Rachel, talk to me about brand enemies.  

 
33:22 
Rachel Fairley 
You were saying earlier that the brand enemy for most businesses is probably themselves, which I agree. I think the brand enemy for most buyers is inertia.  

 
33:31 
Dom Hawes 
Okay?  

 
33:32 
Rachel Fairley 
Because if you're in a business and you are buying on behalf of that business and you are buying from a company that your boss bought from or your predecessor bought from, or you brought from, unless they have monumentally screwed up, like monumentally, and everybody's like, get rid of them. Your risk profile is probably quite risk averse because you're thinking to yourself, well, why would I take this out and replace it with something new? I'm going to have to persuade everybody, train everybody. So much work, and then it's going to be on me as an individual. Which is why I think buyers groups are interesting, because often they're about making sure that you have almost like political support for your decision more than it is about whether or not those people can help you get what you're buying. Right?  

 
34:20 
Rachel Fairley 
But I think that inertia becomes the safest bet. I find it fascinating because whenever the world looks kind of bonkers, I think people actually, that's what's kicking in, is that inertia born out of just wanting to be confident that you're going to be seen to be doing a good job, that you're not going to have made a mistake. It's what keeps people awake at night. So if you're in the buyer's head when they come to market to shop, then you stand a chance, at least of being compared against the inertia candidate. Right. And then if you can help them buy very straightforwardly and you can make sure that they know that they've got the best thing for them and they can make the most of it, then that will give them confidence.  

 
35:05 
Rachel Fairley 
And I think that people are even more loyal and vocal about how brilliant you are. If they feel that they embarked on a journey where they didn't make the safest choice, they made the choice they felt was the right choice and that it turned out to be brilliant and that company really knows them and has listened to them and that they feel. And I actually think in consumer life it's exactly the same as, well, you repeat part. I mean, so many people say things like, I didn't realize I had 14 blue stripey jumpers, because they always buy the same things and you buy the same things from the same companies.  

 
35:40 
Rachel Fairley 
And so actually, if you say to yourself, I'm not going to buy from them this time, I'm going to buy this other thing with my money, that will solve the problem in a different way, then it's the same thing. It's when the people that surrounded you turn around you and go, that was a good choice, wasn't it? It was a great find. Oh, my goodness. To give me the details, or they turn around, they go, what on earth were you thinking? Right? It's exactly the same. And so that's why I think it is really human. Is that the motivator? Most people are risk averse, change averse, because they don't want to be kicked out of a job or they don't want to end up in political kind of damaging situations. I think you have to understand that.  

 
36:21 
Rachel Fairley 
I met this guy from just eat years ago at a conference, and this is dated now because we're so into the deliveries and the just eats and all that. But I asked, what's your brand enemy to him? And he said to me, it's the phone. Because essentially at that stage, it was that you would call your local takeaway that you always called, rather than go online and find what was available and buy through the platform. So again, that's exactly the same thing. And then the other type of brand enemy I think exists is where you have an amount of money and you could spend it on different things. You could spend it on a holiday or you could spend it on a new bike, or you could spend it on root canal treatment. Do you know what I mean?  

 
37:02 
Rachel Fairley 
Situations where people are in, where they're not actually comparing a hot holiday to a skiing holiday to a time on the beach, they're actually thinking about what that money could do for them. And I think that businesses at some level do that too. They think about, well, we could upgrade that, martech, but we could actually just buy more reach and frequency to get hold of our audience. Which one should we do this year? I think actually we need more revenue, more pipelines, so we're going to go that way. So, you know, when people start their marketing with like, who's the competition and how are they positioned in the market, I think that's really useful. But I want to know what drives those people into market and what's the alternative to buying from us. It's not always from a competitor.  

 
37:47 
Dom Hawes 
That's interesting. As you were talking then, I was picturing at least three bits of spend that we've got planned for next year. And the pot of money, as you say, is exactly the same.  

 
37:56 
Rachel Fairley 
Yeah.  

 
37:56 
Dom Hawes 
And the three competing projects are in completely different areas of the business. It's a value judgment, it's not a category judgment. So there's a really good book called the Jolt Effect, which I'm going to link on the show notes, which deals with this indecision. It deals with the concept of the brand enemy. I think if they called it the brand enemy, they may have sold more books because it's a much more catchy and memorable title. But I would recommend that to anyone if you're out there now facing indecision, and boy, are we seeing indecision in our market as well. Start, stop, start, stop, start, stop. Here's the project. Oh, no, we've just had the budget pulled or the people get fired or it's everywhere at the moment. So anyway, I'm going to link that on the show notes.  

 
38:40 
Dom Hawes 
Speaking of books, though. You're writing a book?  

 
38:43 
Rachel Fairley 
Yes.  

 
38:44 
Dom Hawes 
How far have you got through it?  

 
38:45 
Rachel Fairley 
So I'm writing it with our friend Sarah, who runs brand lateral. She's a brilliant strategist and we've known each other for years and I think we're about four chapters in, so I'm not sure I can call it a book. A book yet.  

 
39:00 
Dom Hawes 
A book project.  

 
39:01 
Rachel Fairley 
It's a project. So I just wrote the diagnosis chapter, which is very long and very thorough.  

 
39:06 
Dom Hawes 
Tell me why you're writing it.  

 
39:08 
Rachel Fairley 
It goes back to this problem of methodology and actual practical how to do it. I have spent 20 od years trying to piece together what the methodology is end to end, to actually diagnose what a business's situation is compared to what their strategy is, and understand how to then define the strategy and then how to actually make that the reality. And I now have a methodology and I've used it repeatedly over the last few years. And it's agnostic. It doesn't seem to care what industry you're in, what customers you are with, what products you're selling, what services. It's just a methodology by which you get to answer. So we're writing a book that writes that down. It's not a textbook, but it's not kind of lovely stories like a workbook or something. Yeah. It's really pragmatic and practical and has lots of.  

 
40:03 
Rachel Fairley 
At this stage, it's really likely this will go wrong.  

 
40:06 
Dom Hawes 
Okay.  

 
40:06 
Rachel Fairley 
So you're going to need three options and they will be this. And you need to think of it now because in three weeks time, and also when you have to go and talk to different people in the team about what. So at this point, you need to go and talk to the CFO and explain X, Y and Z and line that up for two months time. Fantastic. Because I think that it's almost like a game of snakes and ladders. And you have to really understand how you're going to get from the beginning to the end. But you have to be able to react and take roots based on what you understand as you go through it, rather than already having made your mind up.  

 
40:43 
Rachel Fairley 
So I want it to be something where you have it on your desk and the spine is broken and you've got your highlighter pen, there's bits of postit notes stuck into it and that you dip into it because you know that there's something there that you can just pull out and use really practically, but also that you can walk into a job or walk into the planning cycle every year and go. Right, well, let's just do an update on the diagnosis and see where we are compared to where we want to be and get started that way. So it's a pragmatist guide. It's so cathartic to write. I can't tell you. There's moments where I'm writing stuff and I'm like, oh, God, I just feel relieved having written that down. So it's the book I wish I'd had.  

 
41:21 
Dom Hawes 
Don't ever be so cathartic that you lose the anger.  

 
41:24 
Rachel Fairley 
Oh, no, I'm still crossed.  

 
41:27 
Dom Hawes 
Okay.  

 
41:27 
Dom Hawes 
It's that time of the show where we now look a little bit to the future. Earlier in the show we talked about, like, it would be really cool if we could do something about what we see as the crisis, the looming crisis in marketing. And you are doing such a thing. You're writing a book to help people do the job. If you're going to give advice before your book comes out to marketers out there now, something that's going to help them either improve in the daily work they do, or help them regain some of the intellectual or strategic influence they have in their business, what would that advice be?  

 
41:59 
Rachel Fairley 
So there's two things I would do. The first is, before this season is over, I would hoover up from within the business every bit of research that you can find, anything that tells you how the buyers are behaving in the situations where they are either looking into who you are or trying to buy from you, or trying to use what they bought. And I would sit down with a cup of coffee every morning until you have read all of it. And I would be looking for the clues. What drives them into market? What are the barriers to purchase? What do they feel satisfied with after purchase? What are they unsatisfied with? You will have a rich source of information within the business without even commissioning anything. So that's the first thing I would do.  

 
42:43 
Rachel Fairley 
The second thing I would do is I would take a course. I would do one of the mini mbas in marketing. I would read the key texts byron and Jenny and led the long and the short. I would do that sort of refresher and get yourself back into what is a logical methodology to use. That means that you are neutral to what the answers are and that you can really hear and understand what is working and what is not working, and then start fixing things.  

 
43:14 
Dom Hawes 
Talk to me about AI and marketing. Everyone rabbits on about it all the time. We're all using tools. We've been using tools for years without knowing about it. It's not new, but it is in vogue and we're marketers, so we better talk about it.  

 
43:25 
Rachel Fairley 
Yeah. So I'm just going to tell you one quick anecdote, which is that a few years ago, I was interviewing some cfos and one of them said to me, look, can you just tell me that the solution that I have has got blockchain in, it is cloud based and has some AI and machine learning? And I was like, yes, it does. It has all of those things. He was like, oh, thank God. I just need to be able to tell the board we're doing something with those technologies. And I said, but what are they expecting? And he said, I have no idea, but I've already got it. It's part of your ERP. You're fine. Don't worry about it. Right.  

 
43:56 
Rachel Fairley 
To me, that's it is if you're a customer, what you care about is that company knows you, has sold you the right thing, and is helping you get the most out of it, and that when you need them, you can get hold of a human being. I don't care what technology you use to make that happen. So I know that inside businesses, AI is like the hottest topic of the year. It's actually quite funny because you talk to any AI experts and they really desperately try not to roll their eyes because they're like, this has been going on for a while. Welcome to the party. But from a customer, from a buyer standpoint, it's just another way for that company to actually make sure that they understand you, and that doesn't mean they're going to care about you.  

 
44:37 
Rachel Fairley 
So you still want to see all the normal things from a business, which is that they've retained the knowledge and they're using it to help you and.  

 
44:43 
Dom Hawes 
That it is there to serve.  

 
44:45 
Rachel Fairley 
There'll be something new next year, Metaverse, that might come back. Metaverse will be interesting, I think, in medical settings. I think that really could be, it's.  

 
44:53 
Dom Hawes 
Too early in the adoption lifecycle for Metaverse and I think it's too clunky at the moment. I don't know whether you've actually spent any time with one of those things on the neck gets. Maybe it's my age, the neck gets sore, but I think, look, as the wearables become less obstructive, and I think metaverse, it's not done yet. I don't think.  

 
45:09 
Rachel Fairley 
No, I think all of these things just need to find their purpose, because I don't think people buy technology.  

 
45:15 
Dom Hawes 
No, they don't.  

 
45:15 
Rachel Fairley 
I think they buy what it does.  

 
45:17 
Dom Hawes 
Exactly. Well, there are people who buy technology, but they're the visionaries right at one end, and they're the guys that were playing with AI 25 years ago, but.  

 
45:24 
Rachel Fairley 
They'Re working out what it does.  

 
45:25 
Dom Hawes 
Pow. Bloody hell, that was good. I'm going to get a transcript of that and link that off the show notes as well. That's my daily to do list sorted. Wow. Thank you very much. Rachel's been a joy. Thank you very much indeed for coming to us.  

 
45:38 
Rachel Fairley 
Yeah, thanks for great chat.  

 
45:42 
Dom Hawes 
There you have it. The amazing Rachel Fairley. How good was that? Now, this has been longer than our average show because I really didn't want to edit any of the content out, actually. So I'm going to keep my summary short. Maybe I'm going to put a little bit more meat into the show notes.  

 
45:57 
Dom Hawes 
Than we do normally.  

 
45:58 
Dom Hawes 
You can find those at Unicorny Co. UK. Now, there are only two things I feel I need to highlight before saying so long today. Firstly, and this is a drum I bang quite often, we need to talk about pricing. Now, I know there are some businesses where product has been commoditized by things like comparison engines. Insurance is one that springs to mind. And instances like these, pricing there is so dynamic, it changes so often that it's not unusual to find a.  

 
46:24 
Dom Hawes 
Whole pricing department made up of really specialist experts.  

 
46:28 
Dom Hawes 
But even then, price is such an important part of the marketing mix. It seems really strange to me that marketers don't have any input whatsoever. Marketers, as their name suggests, should own deep understanding of the market. That includes competitor pricing, customer expectations and of course, the value they perceive in a product or service. And secondly, I'm kind of related because price is such a direct reflection of a product or service's perceived value, and marketers are tasked with communicating value propositions to customers, like how can they be disconnected? You know, these days, no one expects pricing to be the sole preserve of marketing. But you really must involve marketing in the decision if you expect them to support price through communications. Apart from anything else, we often segment and target based on criteria like willingness or ability to pay.  

 
47:20 
Dom Hawes 
Knowledge of market segments therefore kind of informs differential pricing and that, well, that helps you maximize margin. Finally today I want to talk a little bit about indecision and inertia. As today's major brand enemy, be under no illusion. In market conditions like these, no prizes are awarded for buying or acting early or taking risks. So whatever you're selling, whatever deal you are trying to make, inertia is your enemy. Now, I mentioned a book a little bit earlier called the Jolt Effect by Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna. You should read it's so important. I'm going to try and get one of the authors onto this show. Now, the book really deals with inertia in sales, but now that we agree that we're not siloed, well, sales problem is our problem and we can help solve it.  

 
48:08 
Dom Hawes 
Based on research, the authors identified that around half of all deals end up stalled in a no decision limbo. That's because buyers are more scared of messing up than they are of missing out. Now, as marketers, if we understand each customer's fears, we can address them with our sales colleagues and increase our business's success rate. There's more on this subject to come on this podcast, but I think that's probably enough for today. See ya.  

 
48:41 
Dom Hawes 
You've been listening to Unicorny, the antidote to post rationalized business books.  

 
48:46 
Dom Hawes 
If you've enjoyed the show, why not hit follow? We'd love you to rate or review.  

 
48:51 
Dom Hawes 
Us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and.  

 
48:54 
Dom Hawes 
It only takes a few seconds, but it means a lot to us.  

 
48:57 
Dom Hawes 
Or if it's easier for you, please recommend us to a friend or post on LinkedIn. Tagging at Unicorny, I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Nicola Fairley is the series producer, Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant, Pete.  

 
49:10 
Dom Hawes 
Allen is the editor, and Ornella Weston and me, Dom Hawes, are your writers.  

 
49:15 
Dom Hawes 
Unicorny is a Selby Anderson production.  

 
49:18 
Dom Hawes 
Now go win the future.