Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube Channel
RSS Feed
Happy New Year! As we step into 2025, it’s time to reflect on the lessons of the past year and gear up for the challenges and opportunities ahead.
Rachel discusses her upcoming book, Rebrand Right, written with Sarah Robb, and its mission to simplify marketing while empowering professionals to fight imposter syndrome. Dom and Rachel discuss what’s coming up in 2025—and announce big plans for the show, including the “27 States” framework.
What’s covered:
• A sneak peek into Rachel’s new book and the challenges of writing it.
• The biggest lessons from the show's format experiments.
• Exciting plans for The Unicorny Marketing Show next year.
• What marketers need to think about in 2025.
Listen in for a thought-provoking, forward-looking conversation that’ll leave you inspired for the year ahead!
Links
Full show notes: Unicorny.co.uk
Watch the episode: https://youtu.be/zXT3GSSF8ew
LinkedIn: Rachel Fairley | Dom Hawes
Sponsor: Selbey Anderson
Other items referenced in this episode:
38. Secrets of a brandmaster: beating brand enemies
The Unicorny Marketing Show: Sarah Robb
Rebrand Right by Rachel Fairley and Sarah Robb, on pre-sale now in all bookshop websites- publishes on 22 April 2025.
95. Impossible to Ignore with Carmen Simon
The Unicorny Marketing Show: Geoffrey Moore
How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp
The Unicorny Marketing Show: Ben M. Bensaou
The Unicorny Marketing Show: Graham Wylie
The Unicorny Marketing Show: Leo McCloskey
The Unicorny Marketing Show: Peter Russell-Smith
The impact of changing episode frequency on audience growth – The Unicorny Marketing Show
00:00 - None
00:47 - Intro
04:18 - Rachel’s new book: Rebrand Right
10:15 - A year of experiments
17:13 - Expanding the podcast format
26:41 - 27 States… coming soon
40:18 - What marketers need to think about in 2025
Rachel Fairley
I don't know why it is with brand.
People don't really understand what it is and so they sort of make up what they think it is in a way that you don't do that with finance or with operations or with, you know, other parts of a business.
Dom Hawes
We're going to turn this into a book.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah.
Dom Hawes
27 states.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah. Let's do it. I've known, I've learned how publishing works.
Dom Hawes
You know how publishing works.
Rachel Fairley
Let's do it again.
Dom Hawes
I know how to make shit up together. It's going to be great.
Rachel Fairley
What the AI content is doing is based on everything that's been made before.
Dom Hawes
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rachel Fairley
So it's essentially a distilled read of the average point of view that's already been published. And so it just creates noise but no cut through.
Dom Hawes
Hello unicorners, Happy New Year to you. I hope you have a really big party planned for tonight with your friends and family.
Think about the dogs and cats though, if you're gonna be letting off fireworks, certainly Blakey, our dog. Petrified. Petrified of fireworks. Anyway, look, hope you have a really good night now today we have a special show for you.
I invited Rachel Fairley co back into the studio today and she and I are going to talk about the year ahead.
Importantly, I'm also going to talk about her book because when we first met Rachel she was in the middle of writing it and I was really pleased that she was able to come and host some shows for us because writing a book is no mean feat. Now that book is now written. It's called Rebrand Write.
It is on pre sale now by the way, on all bookshop websites and it's published on the 22nd of April next year. I've read it by the way. I was very kindly sent a pre draft to read it before it went to the publishers and it is fantastic. It's a really good read.
And we're going to talk about that book a little bit today and we're also going to cover what we're calling 27 states at the moment, which is a look at how different frameworks and playbooks might be appropriate for different companies based on the maturity of the product, the market and the company. That's all coming up. Let's go straight to the studio. Hey Rachel, how was your Christmas?
Rachel Fairley
Amazing.
Dom Hawes
You get up to?
Rachel Fairley
We went skiing. Cool.
Dom Hawes
I haven't been skiing in ages.
Rachel Fairley
You know, I used to love summer holidays but now getting to the end of the term, especially with the kids and get going into Christmas, getting straight out into the mountains.
Dom Hawes
Yeah, there's something about mountains, isn't there, in the air? And just like all of your troubles, everything melts.
Rachel Fairley
Because this is grueling. The slide from summer to winter, I find grueling, especially this year.
Dom Hawes
I mean, it has been the mother of all years, this one.
Rachel Fairley
I just want to put it behind me.
Dom Hawes
It's interesting.
When we got to the end of 2023, I did, you know, you do the big decks, you do your annual planning and I go and see the investors and say, all right, this is what we think the year ahead is going to look like. And we have the OECD forecasts and all that kind of stuff. And it's like, how are we thinking?
Because investors are super smart, like, what do you think about the economy? And we're saying, right, well, we think the economy is going to be flat. Yeah, maybe 0.5 to 0.9%. Sorry, something like that. We figured.
And we figured that we might then also, as a business, we might flat. And that's fine. Flatline, we can manage. God, I'd take flatline any day of the week.
Rachel Fairley
I think everyone would. I mean, the noise from everyone is what an awful roller coaster of a year it's been and so unpredictable.
What I wonder about is how I think all bets are off next year, because it really depends on how.
Dom Hawes
It's just too unknown, isn't it? I will say, actually, Q4, things started to pick up a little bit. Things started to pick up, particularly in financial services.
And sometimes I think that can be a bit of a bellwether, like if confidence is returning to the market, then, you know, maybe, maybe the money might start flowing and I think we're going to come back to that maybe a little bit later. But what I really wanted to do to start with today, you. I mean, you came in and did the first. The Brand Master episode, which was fab.
I really enjoyed it.
Rachel Fairley
When was that? Beginning of the year.
Dom Hawes
It was the beginning of the year, I think now. Yeah.
Rachel Fairley
I feel like I've known you for decades and we've not even known each other a year.
Dom Hawes
Well, that day, actually, I remember both of us saying, God, you know, this is this, you know, there was a chemistry and it's fun. Yeah, exactly. And Nicola, producer, new best friends. We all got on really well. So then we, I mean, I was really excited.
We invited you, came back, actually joined the project, so you're now one of the co hosts, which is great. But when we met you the first time, you were writing a book with Sarah.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah.
Dom Hawes
Who you then subsequently interviewed, which is great. So I think our listeners know part of the story, but that book is now done. It's finished. It's a way being, I don't know, printed.
They're licking the pages and sticking to the spine or whatever they do.
Rachel Fairley
I actually have in my bag the typeset version of it, which is as close as you get to real before that box arrives and you get to, like pull it out of.
Dom Hawes
That's great.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah. What an amazingly interesting experience.
I mean, I've learned about publishing, I've learned about writing, the discipline of doing something where you are the only person who's going to make you do it, you know, and holding Sarah and I, holding each other true to it, but also just how extraordinary, cathartic, like really cathartic it is to take everything you know and share it and share it in a way where people can actually do something with it. I mean, that feels. I feel really proud. But it's. Yeah. By April, it will be very real. But it's already on presale.
Dom Hawes
Is it really?
Rachel Fairley
It's on pre sale.
Dom Hawes
Fantastic. Wow. Wow. So April's. The published date was great.
When you went through the process of doing it, when you were codifying all those things you knew, did you discover any new things?
Rachel Fairley
There's about 236 or something sources in the book. Like, we've read every.
Dom Hawes
Bloody hell.
Rachel Fairley
And even at the point where we were on the final, final edit and something came out and we were like, I'm gonna have to put that in.
So what's been amazing is going through all the academic, all the thought leadership, all the books, as well as the articles and that, you know, and figuring out why. Why things work the way they work and what you actually need to know and then how to do that and what your options are.
And it's that connection between the intellectual, academic, and also analysis, like what makes for efficiency versus effectiveness and so on, and then taking that into thinking about how people actually execute their marketing. So what do you need to practically do?
And is there any difference between consumer and government and business facing marketing teams about how they do it? There isn't. But taking it all the way through and going, this is how you diagnose the situation. This is how you define what the answer is.
And then this is how you actually deliver it. Through the experience, through the marketing, through the engagement, through your people. Like the whole package.
So it's been fantastic because we've got to read some work from the most amazing minds. But it's that connection between, okay, so I get it. I just don't really know what to do with it.
Or I know what I do, but I can't really explain why I do it.
Dom Hawes
But I'm guessing a lot of those books you've had to read as well are not easy. Like, a lot of the academic, more academic tomes really take some commitment to each.
Rachel Fairley
They take an entire pot of coffee.
They take sitting in my office in the window with the sun streaming down on me, I have to make myself feel like I'm somewhere really fun and lovely and I'm doing my homework because if I try and do it sitting at a desk, I get that sort of, you know, A levels feeling, sixth form kind of, you know, end of school, where you're just, oh, I've got to do this, got to get through it. But I've learned a lot. And what I absolutely adore about working with Sarah is that she is. I mean, she is so bright and she's so knowledgeable.
And we don't always agree. I mean, we genuinely don't always agree.
Dom Hawes
With a bit of dissonance.
Rachel Fairley
And we have to talk it through to the point where one of us says, I mean, literally, you have to keep going, keep going, keep going until one of us goes, yeah, yeah, let's do that. And it's like, we've got to convince ourselves.
But it then makes it quite straightforward to write because you've already gone through that rigor of almost arguing against yourself.
Dom Hawes
When you get to the right, you're capturing the stuff that you've already discussed and debated. I think what's also really interesting is on the podcast that you recorded with Sarah, you.
You made a lot of imposter syndrome and how language is one of the things that creates it. And I think now that you have a body of work, particularly one that is so well researched and sourced, and you've written it in a language.
Thank you very much for allowing me to read.
Rachel Fairley
I know you were a beta reader.
Dom Hawes
I know to lead one of the transcripts, really. I mean, it's amazing. It's written in a very easy to understand language. I think it's going to do a lot to help fight imposter syndrome. If.
And it's a big if you can help with this. If marketers can resist the temptation to create more acronyms and just start, you know, continue chasing shiny things.
Rachel Fairley
Yes, I completely agree, but I think it takes bravery to not use the latest language for the same thing that you've been doing for 10 years. But in a way, it makes you stand out because you don't sound like you're just, you know, it's not marketing. Bingo.
You're talking about something that is fundamentally, like, very straightforward. So, for example, Sarah and I are both interviewing people at the moment for a project.
And our first question is, what is the greatest market opportunity for the business?
Dom Hawes
Okay.
Rachel Fairley
And the fact that these are interviews about brand, and that is where we're starting. It's really interesting watching people's reactions because they're like, oh, you don't want to talk about the color of the logo.
Dom Hawes
Yeah. What's the market opportunity? Commercial bank. There you go, right between the ice.
Rachel Fairley
If you know where you're headed, then you start to know where you're playing. And you know it's the Martin stuff. Right. Where to play. And.
And you start to understand how you're going to have to show up and who you're competing against. And then you can start working out what the brand needs to be. But if you don't start there, you've no idea.
Dom Hawes
That's good point.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah. Right.
Dom Hawes
Good point. Yeah.
Rachel Fairley
But yeah, I'm so proud of the book. And it'll be out April, and there will also be a course and there will also be coaching available.
Dom Hawes
Okay, so talk to me about the course.
Rachel Fairley
The motivation is scale. Like, you know, I would like to go to my grave having passed on everything that I have learned to as many people as possible.
People, they learn in different ways. They appreciate things in different. They have time to learn in different ways.
So for some people, having a book where the spine is broken and they've got the post it notes in and they've highlighted it and it's just. It sits on their desk is one way to do it.
But what I found often when you go in and you've got to drive change within marketing and within a business around its brand, is that you have to get everybody to understand the methodology and a sort of common way of thinking before you can even get on with the work. And so thinking about what Sarah and I have had to do to kind of educate and get everybody's heads in the same place.
If you can put a team on a course where they all get that and they can keep going back to it. And also it gives us a chance to give all the tools and templates that you wouldn't normally get because you can't put them in the book.
So being able to download the research guides and, you know, the presentation templates and things like that, and then you know, there are some amazing agencies and they're amazing brand strategists and marketing strategists. There's fantastic people that you can work with. So just really thinking about how we can help and add value. I think it's more to do with coaching.
So either coaching the leaders to help them sell in what has to be done and the best way to do it because that's quite nerve wracking when you're facing off against finance, operations, product kind of mindsets, right, versus the teams who are actually doing the work and want to problem solve. Like we could do this or this or we've run into this roadblock or this isn't working.
So we're going to offer coaching both to support the leader but also to support the teams to do it themselves and to choose the right agencies and partners and so on to work with just to encourage them and support them. But you know, for me, success is people going, I totally get this, I get it, I know how to do it. I'm good. Thank you so much.
Dom Hawes
You know, it's interesting.
I think one of the things I really liked about this isn't just an advertisement for it obviously, but I really like the work because the work is going to be very helpful and I'll explain how I think or why I. I'm very excited about it in just a minute. But I think what I love about your approach is, is how doable things are as a result.
So because there are other well known branding, you know, brand management courses out there where it gives you like a very quick or a comprehensive introduction to brand management and you finish it and then it's like, and now what?
I can take my learnings in, but there are no tools or playbooks or outcomes, all that kind of stuff that you've put in your book, people can, particularly if they can then through a course can kind of download and use those tools, the presentation templates and that kind of stuff, I think it's really, really helpful.
Rachel Fairley
I think when you work in an organization, you know, it's idiosyncratic, it has politics, it has, you know, things come out of left field at you.
And if you feel uncertain about what you've got to do and how to do it and why you're doing it, then it's really hard to also cope with the fact that you're on quicksand. Because often when a brand is suffering, when a business is not growing, it feels like you're on quicksand.
And so if you can feel like you really know what you're doing, but what you're trying to figure out is the best way to get it through the organization and make it happen. I just think that's a much easier place to be than if you not really sure.
And also the problem is when you get advice from people, it can be very particular. And so you always feel like you've got to say yes or no to it.
Whereas if you understand what all the options and the whys are, you can take your own view on it and you can help shape it. And so you're not beholden to anyone else. You're part of making it happen. And I think that's more satisfying.
Dom Hawes
So I'm engaged in two or three projects at the moment. They're kind of consulting type brand.
Brand consulting type projects where the clients have a portfolio, quite a complicated, complicated portfolio of brands. Different geographies, different positionings, different price points. All three have grown aggressively through M and A.
And so what they're now in that consolidate stage. And in each case, part of the role is to get an internal team up and running an internal team in a business to business.
I don't like that categorization. But they're not selling consumer goods, they're selling services and products to other businesses.
And they haven't had a traditional brand management training like you would if you went to a FMCG company as a marketer. So. So this material allows us very quickly to get everybody internally to exactly the same place.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah.
Dom Hawes
And then we. And then suddenly the team can use the same language and all that kind of stuff.
So I'm really excited about it because for someone like me, when I've got to go. You mentioned politics earlier.
Often the job when an external consultant comes in to talk about brand is to start with is getting the naysayers and, you know, the old sweats, you know, who've been there and done it for years and years trying to get them on board. And I think that the work you've created be really helpful to people like me.
Rachel Fairley
I think if you can disarm and educate in a way that does not put people's backs up, then you can start to have real conversations where you're. You're understanding what levers you have and the. They're the same levers. I don't know why it is with brand. I think it is with marketing as well.
So people, people don't really understand what it is and so they sort of make up what they think it is in a way that you don't do that with finance or with operations or with, you know, other parts of a business. I still haven't got to the bottom of why that is.
Dom Hawes
That's a subject you and I have discussed a lot this year on both on episodes and obviously offline. But, you know, this misunderstanding of what marketing is, I, I got my statistics completely wrong.
I think when you and I talked about it for show 100, you know, when I mentioned the growth of in house marketers. Yeah, but, but, but the, actually the trend wasn't wrong. The actual numbers were wrong. And someone. Thank you very much.
Rating and, and, and pointed out the right numbers.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah.
Dom Hawes
I can't remember what they were.
Rachel Fairley
But it's grown. Right. But it's almost doubled.
Dom Hawes
Almost doubled. Yeah. We're teaching people to believe what marketing is because they see and they think that's marketing.
Rachel Fairley
Yes.
Dom Hawes
What they don't see is all the work that goes behind it all the strategy that goes behind it all the thinking, all the planning, all the kind of stuff, actually that you've, you've written about in the book. I'm really excited to see the final thing. I cannot wait.
I may even push myself or one of one or two of our other people through the course, particularly if we're going to recommend it to you.
Rachel Fairley
You'll definitely be at the launch, though, won't you? I'm sure there'll be champagne. Has to be.
Dom Hawes
I'll definitely be at the launch. Yeah. I'll see if I can find something other than a blue shirt for that. So we've, we've learned a lot on the show this year as well.
And I think in the year ahead, I think I quite like to shake the format up a bit. And a couple of our listeners have written in with some really good ideas. Yeah. For how we can shake it up.
I think one of the interesting things to start with, I'm, you know, I'm always very transparent about the experiments we run on this podcast because other podcasters or other marketers I think, can learn from that. So we did a whole load of experiments in the middle of the year where we went to two shows a week.
By effectively splitting the show in half and doing a Tuesday and a Thursday, we are publishing or have published by the time this goes out, will be published the analysis of that experiment, what we wanted to do, what we were trying to achieve, what the effects were. I'm not going to talk about them today, but that's published.
Rachel Fairley
Brilliant.
Dom Hawes
Towards the tail end of this year, we also did another experiment.
So you will know because you and I had the blood, sweat and tears when we were writing episodes with the lovely Pete, who was writing our, doing some of our copywriting for us, the intro, mid roll outro approach. So there was quite a lot of editorial in our shows.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah.
Dom Hawes
And a couple of our listeners wrote in to say, while they like it, it's a bit scripted and what they really want to hear, what they tune in for is the guests. So we've run an experiment where we get rid of the beginning, the end and the middle, and we just have the interview. And I'm ashamed and.
And so sad to tell you that each week the numbers are getting smaller.
Rachel Fairley
It's really interesting.
Dom Hawes
And smaller. You're a marketer, Rachel. Yeah. Help me understand.
Rachel Fairley
Because if you like that person or you think that what they do for a living is relevant to you, you'll listen. And if not, you won't.
Whereas if it's a unicorny show in which the topics discussed get chewed over and thought, like, almost like you hear the reaction of the people listening to it.
Dom Hawes
Yeah.
Rachel Fairley
If you get that, call it editorial, but you're chewing it over. Right. Then you know you're gonna get that anyway. And then you might learn something as well. From the.
Dom Hawes
There's a reason.
Rachel Fairley
I don't know. There's a reason. Well, it's almost like a comfort. I know I'll get something from this podcast.
Cause they're gonna chew over whatever's discussed and I'm gonna learn something, even if the guest is not, I don't know, a name I know or from a company I care about or in a sector that suits me. I think there's just more dynamism to it, really.
Dom Hawes
So interestingly, when we did the show on neuroscience, one of the great takeaways was that only 10% of your content ever gets remembered.
Rachel Fairley
If that.
Dom Hawes
If that's right, 10%. But.
Rachel Fairley
But actually, should we do that 10% now? And then they could just say, so.
Dom Hawes
If you didn't tune in on Christmas Eve, you won't know that we discussed this thing then. And I'd suggested actually that we only do the 10%. So we decide what the 10% is and we do like a five minute show. That's it. Yes. Yeah.
Anyway, that's not going to work. Right. But if we take the Premise of the 10%, it may be that people are tuning and listening to the show only for the summary at the end.
It's like, I don't need to listen to the previous 45 minutes. I can just listen to the five minutes at the end and I get all my key takeaways. That could be a thing.
Rachel Fairley
That's a digested read. So the Guardian did that years ago. I don't know if they still do it, but they did like they do the book review.
Dom Hawes
Yeah.
Rachel Fairley
And then they would do the digested read which was like the paragraph. And then they do the digested. Digested read which would be one sentence, like a tweet, you know, kind of thing.
And I just think that was so funny because I wanted to almost look at where people's eyes went when they read to see. I mean, you know, obviously I can't, but I see. I think it's the dynamic.
I think it's hearing from somebody and understanding their perspective on how you add value and then having someone or having two people ideally chew over what you take from that. Like what does that mean? Why might you agree or disagree?
The challenge is if you do one or the other, I suspect from your experiments actually the listening figures would go down and not up.
Dom Hawes
They do, yeah, they do, yeah. Yeah. So I think what we're going to do this year is we're going to introduce some more voices. So which is good, I think.
I mean I've really enjoyed, I've really enjoyed sharing the episodes with you and you know, I'd like to continue you and me anchoring these things.
But we've got, I mean we got deliberately, we got a little bit conceptual and we talk about marketing leadership and organizational design and culture. We've talked about that stuff a lot.
And I think I'm being asked to get a lot more hands on type content to like to talk about creativity and effectiveness and what it actually looks like. Particularly now that we're on video.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah.
Dom Hawes
Like we could be showing ads and talking about them. So I'm going to invite a few of the creative and other voices that I know.
Rachel Fairley
Brilliant.
Dom Hawes
From my day job to come and to. To come and run their own show and interviews, I think.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah, brilliant.
Dom Hawes
And then someone else came up with a really good idea. I was away with some friends last week and he said, why don't you just UGC it user generated content for those that don't know the tla.
And I thought now hang on a sec, that's really interesting. Like we've got this, we've built this extraordinary community of marketers and academics and authors. Why don't we.
Let's give people their own shows within the unicorny thing. What do you think about that?
Rachel Fairley
I think that'd be great if People who know Unicorny could interview people that they want to interview to talk about what they want to talk about in terms of adding value. Then you and I can listen and help people understand the takeaways and also what other ideas there could have been. I think that would be amazing.
You've had some extraordinary people on.
And it's that sort of moment where it's like if each one of them wanted to interview somebody that they've always wanted to interview, I think we get some magic.
Dom Hawes
And also imagine. Imagine so. So viewers and listeners won't get or see this, unfortunately, yet.
But the community, the power of the community that we're building in the background. I feel like the Unicorni alumni. And if we get our alumni bringing the people who they rate really highly in.
This is going to be a very special group of people.
Rachel Fairley
I think so. Because it's by the people and for the people. Yeah, I really like that.
Dom Hawes
And so then the question is, how do the people who follow the podcast get to experience that?
Rachel Fairley
Yes.
Dom Hawes
Corny. The conference.
Rachel Fairley
Oh, hello.
Dom Hawes
What do you think? So we do.
Rachel Fairley
I think that'd be amazing.
Dom Hawes
Would it be great? So, you know, we need to find some sponsors, but if we could. If we could bring in some of the big.
The big speakers, like, I'd love to see Jeffrey Moore on stage running a keynote at the Unicorni conference. It would be amazing. Or to get Ben Bensauer over from Paris to talk about innovating and we could have a re. I think we could have a really good event.
Rachel Fairley
I think we could. I would love to go to an event that is intellectually rigorous and. And debate and discussion.
Dom Hawes
The very best.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah.
Dom Hawes
On stage. Awesome.
Rachel Fairley
I've been to quite a few conferences this year where I have worked on my book whilst listening.
Dom Hawes
You know, it's a real shame. I. I bought a conference a couple of years ago. I ended up killing it because it wasn't. It wasn't.
Rachel Fairley
Oh, did you?
Dom Hawes
Yeah, it wasn't appropriate. And it was. It was in the search engine optimization world.
Rachel Fairley
Okay.
Dom Hawes
And it was a world I didn't know or understand. And I wanted to get to understand it.
I thought, what better way than actually owning the conference and then going and seeing what's happening around it? It didn't work out.
Rachel Fairley
I love the way you think for various reasons. Some people just bought a ticket, but.
Dom Hawes
You know, well, it wasn't running. That was the point. I didn't. I'm not saying I paid very much for it, by the way. I sounded grand when I said I Bought the conference.
It was very cheap because it hadn't run for a few years. I got to learn a lot. I got to learn enough that I knew I didn't want to be buying agencies that did that.
Rachel Fairley
Yes.
Dom Hawes
I wanted to go the other end and do much more of the creative stuff. Yes. But anyway, I too have been to conferences this year where I spent most of my time outside the conference rooms meeting people.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah.
Dom Hawes
Because what's been going on inside the conference rooms hasn't been helpful for me.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah.
Dom Hawes
Doesn't mean they're bad conferences. In every case. I think there were people who went. Who got so much value from it. It's just they're not targeted at me.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah.
Dom Hawes
And I want to create a podcast for marketing leadership that is going to stretch and actually which as we know, includes non marketers too.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah.
Dom Hawes
I mean, EO or FA should be able to come to this conference and, and enjoy it.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah.
Dom Hawes
Cool. We heard it here first. We just made that up. We're going to do a conference. We're just going to work out how we're going to budget it.
Rachel Fairley
We'll find a way.
Dom Hawes
We'll find a way.
Rachel Fairley
We will find a way. Because if you can get.
If you can get the movers and shakers in a room when they emerge from it having learned and knowing more and thinking differently. Right.
Dom Hawes
Yeah.
Rachel Fairley
And having made connections with each other, that's gold. Because it's really hard to get out the office when you're busy.
I mean, I remember you look at your diary and it starts with conference calls at 8 and there's some at 10 o'clock at night. I mean, it's just ridiculous.
And so to be motivated to go for a day and spend time with people, you have to know you're going to get something from it.
Dom Hawes
Challenge we might have is going to be expensive because the kind of caliber of person we're asking to speak ain't going to do it for free. We're gonna have to pay people to be up on stage speaking because they are all.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah.
Dom Hawes
A list. I'll. I'll send you a list of my. I have a short list of people.
Rachel Fairley
That's all.
Dom Hawes
A list. Yeah. And I. And I think it's worth paying quite a lot for apart from anything else. That's how people get into the community.
And the community's all a list.
Rachel Fairley
Okay.
Dom Hawes
Okay. So that's one thing we're gonna do next year. And then we talked on, on our show 100 a little bit about this 27 states thing.
Rachel Fairley
Yes. I'm really excited about that.
Dom Hawes
I know, me too. So I've put a framework together.
I've created the business logic that looks at what you would might use in each of the 27 different combination of states. And I think we are, I think you and I are going to run this as our original content this year.
Rachel Fairley
I'm so in. I'm just not going to let you refuse to have me part of it. No, no.
Dom Hawes
Well a. You know, it's always better to have two brains than one.
More than two obviously gets a little bit difficult but, but, but I think, I think there's quite a lot of work to do in the background.
But if the, the idea at the moment is that we're going to find for each of different states and if you didn't listen to show 100, I'm just going to explain it very briefly now.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah, please.
Dom Hawes
There's a bun fight been going on in kind of nerdy marketing world that no one else really cares about.
But there's a bunch of academics who are throwing their handbags at each other about whether segmentation, targeting and positioning is relevant anymore. And so segmentation, targeting and positioning in very, very shorthand term is you cannot afford to market to the whole market.
You take your whole market, you break it up. Cohorts of what? Of like minded or like feeling people. You work out which one needs your product the most and you then go after them. Right.
STP and shorthand.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah.
Dom Hawes
The other at the other end in the blue corner if you like we have MBA market based asset theory, largely the work of Byron Sharp and Ehrenberg Bass which says that that doesn't work anymore. You, you always market to whole market because of what's called the 95. 5 rule.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah.
Dom Hawes
95% of people are not in market for your product so you still need to communicate to them so that when they come in market they have mental availability key concept there. So you market to everybody to try and become memorable and that you have to match that with almost ubiquitous distribution.
So make it easy to buy and make it available to buy and your brand will grow. And the book was called how brands grow. So in the blue corner we've got market based asset theory.
In the red corner we've got stp, segmentation target and positioning. And it's like. And the, and the debate online in 2024 was which one of these is right so polarized and it's just, well, neither.
So what struck me from speaking to Ben Bensau and Geoffrey Moore and knowing the Blue Ocean strategy stuff. Chan Kim and Rennie Mo Bourne.
Their work is there are many other factors that are being completely ignored in this discussion and you can't do all of them. So we've chosen three for this model. We've chosen product maturity because every product has a life cycle.
Used to be a core skill of marketers obviously to understand product life cycle.
Rachel Fairley
Bless the four P's.
Dom Hawes
I know exactly. Every company has power or lack of power based on size and the kind of stuff they do.
So company power is an important one and market maturity is also really important.
So and if you then give a low, medium, high to each of those three states, you get 27 states where you can have low, low, low, low, low, medium, low, low, high. All the various different variants of that give you 27 states.
So what we've done is we've created the business logic that says for each of those states is segmentation, targeting, positioning or market based assets theory or a combination of both. Most appropriate. So we've created the business logic that identifies what we think the right way is. Yeah, we've gone out and we've researched it.
We have 27 companies who have applied that combination of theories at that stage of their evolution and we're going to interview their marketers.
Rachel Fairley
I mean, I just think that's gorgeous because it's partly, it's a decision tree. Right. Answer the questions, follow the path and you will get to an answer.
But then learning about what's worked and what hasn't worked from companies that are essentially in a similar situation to you, Yes, I think that's fantastic.
But it's also fantastic when you change job because what it forces you to do is to come back again and go, right, I'm gonna do the decision tree for this business what is needed because so many people, I think rinse and repeat out of comfort. Yes, right. But this gives you a way to go through the decision making to work out what the right thing is.
I also think it's a way for cross functional teams, so not just the marketers but their colleagues as well to have a conversation in which they end up knowing how they're gonna have to execute as a business.
Dom Hawes
That's a really good point.
Rachel Fairley
It's a common methodology.
Dom Hawes
So I haven't seen this as a way of, I mean, cause one of the themes that comes up in the podcast all the time is how do marketers coalesce the team and bring sales and engineering and all the various, you know, hr. How do they bring everybody to the table to Understand what's going on. This could be a nice way of doing that.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah. I mean it's extraordinary. But I'm doing some interviews at the moment for some research to help someone out. Right.
And I'm starting with the business problem because I want to know what the model is. Right. I want to know what is your business strategy. Does it imply that what you're doing is actually a franchise?
Dom Hawes
Yeah.
Rachel Fairley
Or does it imply that you are a locally run global organization?
Dom Hawes
Yes.
Rachel Fairley
Or does it imply that you are a central service line or product driven? Because I don't know what your brand and marketing should be until I understand how you're going to make more money.
Dom Hawes
Yes.
Rachel Fairley
Right. And so.
Dom Hawes
Yeah, yeah, okay.
Rachel Fairley
It's really that, that conversation, having everybody agree what that business strategy is, what that market strategy is, then makes it possible to go away and come back with a marketing strategy or a brand strategy where people can recognize that it fits the brief. But if you don't have that conversation, then it really quickly descends into subjectivity about whether people like stuff or not. Right?
Dom Hawes
Totally. God, totally. Yes.
Rachel Fairley
So I think it's really, I think it would be an enabler for businesses doing their annual strategic planning about where is the market, where do they want to get, what situation are they in, what is the best methodology for it.
And also so I think it would encourage people to look outside their industry to find insight from other businesses who have been in that situation and understand what has worked and what's failed. Because if you only do what is in your line of vision, you're basically copying someone else you're competing with.
Dom Hawes
Yeah, totally, totally.
And yes, what this will do is give you, it will give you the grounding, the background for why you should be doing it, as we all know, always has to start with why. According to Mr. Sillic, what I also really like about it.
So when I've been out and tested the concept with a few CMOs from the community, I mentioned that I was out doing some, you know, consulting work on like multi region, multi position brand portfolios. And what they really like about the concept of 27 states is it gives them almost like a playbook for their brand portfolio.
Because in, for each brand, in each location, you know, at each price point, they're going to be different.
Rachel Fairley
Yes.
Dom Hawes
The attributes, the states are going to be different.
And so this allows them to have like a unified approach and some business logic that sits behind the decisions they're making about how they handle each brand in each of those locations at each different positioning point in the market.
Rachel Fairley
And I think that takes you all the way down into what the experiences go to market, the kind of channels that you need to communicate through.
Because if you understand, if you look at your geography of where your business works and instead of seeing it as, you know, these eight countries make 95% of our money. Right. But see it as these markets are quite mature and they need a specific approach to it.
These markets are very emerging, they're young and even though they're completely all over the world, they actually have all these commonalities. I think then you would be able to make decisions about how to execute in those markets.
That would be much more logical because at the moment what it usually comes down to is where's the center of gravity for the business that will get all the money? Money, right. HQ country usually gets the money. Although I have worked with one company where the HQ wasn't in the country they made most money.
Dom Hawes
Oh, really?
Rachel Fairley
And that was interesting because they were forced to not just think about their own backyard.
Dom Hawes
Tax. I'm thinking tax.
Rachel Fairley
No, I'm just not going to tell you. But otherwise what happens is because.
Because you're always in a situation in business where either you rinse and repeat from last year, especially in terms of budgets. Right.
Finance likes to just add or subtract percentages on what you already have or you look at it for which markets make you the most money and how can you get more efficient at making that money. But it's quite rare that people look at it in terms of the potential or in terms of what status play it's in. Right. I just.
Anything that gives you an ability to have a common conversation where you work through what the right strategic approach is, I think is a winner, a complete winner, because it's such a precursor to everything.
Dom Hawes
Well, we'll find out, won't we?
Rachel Fairley
Why that's what's so exciting.
Dom Hawes
It might be completely wrong. So I should say we're also. We're not just going to look at the winners. Graham Wiley pointed that out to me when we interviewed him.
You have to look at the losers too.
Rachel Fairley
Yes.
Dom Hawes
So we're going to try and why not work? Yeah. Why didn't it work? Now, I've done some preliminary research in that area.
In most cases, from what I've seen from the companies that I've been looking at.
So I already have 54 companies identified that I want to talk to and I've started, started trying to get in touch with either founders, CEOs or CMOs of those companies to see if they'll come to talk to us in the studio. Yeah.
Of the ones that failed, what I'm seeing is it's external stuff, largely, not internal stuff that led to demise, whether that be market condition or government interference. Yeah, I think what I'm seeing, I think. But it's very early stage and we won't know till we speak to them.
But the marketing theory side, I think holds up. I think that the marketing stuff was going well. It could be a complete waste of time, but we are going to have a lot of fun finding out.
Rachel Fairley
We will. And then, honestly, it feels like a whole podcast series, but it also feels like a book.
Dom Hawes
I mean, I'm wondering, actually. So, you know, just 20 minutes ago, I was saying one of the problems is we've got a little bit too conceptual.
And you and I have just been talking about a conceptual framework, but it's.
Rachel Fairley
Not conceptual if it's about understanding the businesses that succeeded and failed by implementing that strategy, because that's. That's tangible. So it takes the intellectual, the why and the, you know, and makes it really like, what did you do? How did that work? Why did.
Because I. That's the problem, I think, is that even if you understand the intellectual side of things, real life is different.
And so, you know, even getting down to. We did everything. So I was talking to Leo on a podcast, right. Which just just went live. Live a few weeks ago. And there was.
After us, we had some food and we were talking about one of the companies we worked on right. At the beginning of knowing each other. And of course, what I had forgotten, which of course he hadn't forgotten, is that the company. So I.
I was asked by Leo to create the. The brand for the business. Y. We did it in. I had seven weeks.
It was over Christmas, Christmas Eve, I was in Edinburgh phoning the police to get them to get into the agency to get the artwork off the server because it had gone bust because of fraud.
Dom Hawes
No.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah. Yeah. And it was in those days where I was literally all the artwork was on the server and I was just like, I just need.
I'm going live 7th of January, you know? And so we launched that business, and then some months later, it was acquired and I had to kill the brand.
And what I had forgotten is that the reason that happened was because of 9 11. Because the funding.
Dom Hawes
Wow.
Rachel Fairley
The funding disappeared overnight. And so instead of us buying another company, another company bought us.
Dom Hawes
Wow.
Rachel Fairley
Right. And so that's the thing, right? You can do everything, right?
Dom Hawes
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Rachel Fairley
And these curveballs Come. It's quite reassuring to know it wasn't your fault, that you did the right thing.
So I think this will be an interesting mix actually of intellectual and practical.
Dom Hawes
And it's a good observation, I think, you know, now you've mentioned it, I think a couple of the brands I was looking at actually did get acquired.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah.
Dom Hawes
So if we just picture the sea where there's just sort of fish randomly running around eating each other, it doesn't matter how well you're doing, you actually, it's probably a testament to the fact things are going well if someone else acquires you, because no one. Very few people in this market go around or any market go around buying duds. They want to buy good companies with good brands.
Rachel Fairley
You know where they're going to make sure you get your money's worth. Right.
Dom Hawes
Well, we'll see.
But I think that's why I wanted to get a bit more like, let's get some creative people in to talk about creativity and, you know, the currency of our business, which is the output. I think so, yes. So the year ahead then. So that's our year for the podcast and for the episode, if you'd like to take part.
But if you want to contribute, if you've got any ideas to help us with 20, 27 states, please do. I'll get a website put up and we can open source, like either the research or some of the thinking, that'd be great. And then we are.
Should we agree now? So we commit to it, we're going to put this. We're going to turn this into a book.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah.
Dom Hawes
27 states.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah. Let's do it. I've now I've learned how publishing works.
Dom Hawes
You know how publishing works.
Rachel Fairley
Let's do it again.
Dom Hawes
I know how to make shit up. Together.
Rachel Fairley
Together we can do it. Honestly, I'd really love to do that.
Dom Hawes
So we just shook on that. 27 states. You heard it here first. It's going to be a book. Right. For the year ahead though, for our marketers. For the year ahead.
Now, how do you think marketers need to be thinking about 2025? Because the market is. Is crapola still, isn't it?
Rachel Fairley
Well, it is, but also I think next year is quite uncertain.
Dom Hawes
Yeah.
Rachel Fairley
It's not a year where you look into it and you think, I know exactly how this is gonna play out. I mean, partly that's the American election, Right. Partly that's it's geopolitical dynamics going on, right?
Dom Hawes
Yep. And there's a lot of uncertainty.
Rachel Fairley
There's a Lot of uncertainty. So I think you have to plan for uncertainty, actually. I think you have to sort of not fear it, but embrace it.
Dom Hawes
Yes.
Rachel Fairley
And when I look at it next year, I think my, my plea would be to almost return to the basics.
Dom Hawes
Okay.
Rachel Fairley
What worries me a lot in marketing as a marketer is that we are very, we do love talking about trends and new stuff and shiny things and we love giving things new names and you know, we love all of that. The principles of marketing have been quite well established for quite a long time and the, that when you are in a situation of uncertainty. Yes.
It's great to experiment, it's great to try new things. Whatever label you put on them. Yeah, but understanding your audience.
Dom Hawes
Yeah.
Rachel Fairley
Right.
Knowing what products are right for them, what services are right for them, how they buy, how they shop, how they want to engage, how they want to purchase and how to help them get the most value out of what they bought seem to me to be fundamentals that don't require us to sit and talk about next generation marketing or AI or, and I felt this quite profoundly the other week. So I was at a conference and every topic felt very, very trend based.
And I was thinking, I can't imagine any of my finance leader friends turning up and spending an hour and a half talking about how AI in forecasting has changed the way. I mean, I just, I, I feels like we need to roll it back and really focus on the fundamentals.
And the reason I say that is when things are uncertain, budgets are quite, they just sort of disappear.
Dom Hawes
They're on and off all the time.
Rachel Fairley
They're on and off.
Dom Hawes
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rachel Fairley
But if you are very, very clear about what you've got to do and everything else is nice to have, I think that the business as a whole is more likely to protect that because it understands what it delivers as value.
Dom Hawes
Yeah.
Rachel Fairley
I mean there's, you know, otherwise you get what's just happened in a huge tech company where they've just disbanded all their marketing from being centralized. They put performance marketing into sales, they put comms and brand into corporate affairs.
They've sort of taken apart what is actually working and then who knows, in a few years time it'll be, you know, go back together again. But what I heard from that was these are almost like departments that execute. My question was, well, what's the strategy?
Dom Hawes
What's interesting on the project you are, I sort of chuckled a little bit. The project you're doing at the moment.
You said I started with a business problem and the fact you had to explain that that that's where people start. That was always the place to start.
But if you do that with your marketing department, you can't start with a problem because all you can do is execute.
Rachel Fairley
You can't ask any questions, you can't because. But also people don't take you seriously. Like as a marketer who leads. You are part of a leadership team that is, I mean, at worst standing still.
But what you're really aiming for is to grow the business like everybody there is responsible for growing revenue. You gotta start with how are we gonna do that? And how do you do that when there's lots of uncertainty? I mean, there's other things going on as well.
So some other business leaders were talking to me about how equity is sort of going into, I was about to mention, yeah, going into industries where you wouldn't typically have seen them. And what they're going to do is immediately make a move on those businesses to try and make them as efficient as possible. Right.
But if you do that yourself by really understanding what it is that your business is trying to achieve and what you have to do to make that happen, you can actually become very efficient. I don't mean efficient like slashing jobs and you know, producing all your content with AI and all that kind of nonsense.
I'm talking about what do you actually have to do in order to be able to sell those products and services?
I think that there is an opportunity with that certainty of strategy to actually make businesses incredibly efficient and free up resource and free up capability without having to have an outside voice come in and do it. Right.
Dom Hawes
I really love that.
So we spoke to a guy called Peter Russell Smith really early in the episode and he's got a background in private equity and software among other things.
Rachel Fairley
Things.
Dom Hawes
And he, he told us a similar thing. You don't need to be pre back to do this.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah.
Dom Hawes
You understand what their playbook is. You can do it yourself. So here's my challenge for unicorns. This is your challenge. Tonight is New Year's Eve.
You're going to go off and have a blast with your friends and family. And tomorrow is a bank holiday.
When you come back to work on the 2nd, 3rd, 6th, 7th, whenever you're going to come back to work, imagine that you are coming into a brand new, freshly funded private equity company. Company.
Rachel Fairley
Love it.
Dom Hawes
And put 100 day plan together. That 100 day value creation plan. Simplify as much as you can. Identify where you can create value within that 100 days and then execute it honestly.
Rachel Fairley
Educate on efficiency in your business because so I had had. I'm going to call it brunch.
It sounds really pretentious because really I was just skiving off editing but with an amazing CMO this week who was in town and she was describing how she'd had to educate colleagues, non marketing colleagues who were talking about how AI and making content with AI wasn't that amazing because you could become more efficient. And she was saying, well actually no, I have to spend more money on brilliant creative and real compelling thought leadership.
Because what the AI content is doing is producing the average is based on everything that's been made before.
Dom Hawes
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rachel Fairley
So it's essentially a distilled read of the average point of view that's already been published. And so it just creates noise. But no cut through. It's got. I think of it as plastic in the ocean. Right. It's just sort of, it's just more stuff.
And so she was saying that actually makes us less efficient because I now have to spend more money doing something that gives us a spike where people actually want to engage.
Dom Hawes
Wow.
Rachel Fairley
Because what they see is just right.
Dom Hawes
So all the content that other departments are putting out, thinking they're helping, they're actually self harming.
Rachel Fairley
Yes.
Dom Hawes
Bloody hell. Yeah, I didn't find it that way.
Rachel Fairley
And when she said that I thought that has been my worry is that you basically it's AI making content for AI in a sense. Right.
So I mean creativity, the ability to cut through the noise, the ability to show up as yourself and be recognized as a brand is so important if people are going to trust and feel confident about making a purchase from you. And so if you are generic and vanilla and copious in your generic vanilla ness.
Dom Hawes
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rachel Fairley
You know, what are you doing? Because you're basically becoming like a category norm rather than that relevant, differentiated, you know, incredibly easy to buy from business.
Dom Hawes
To dial down the volume.
Rachel Fairley
So yeah, it goes back to quality again and that's why you return to basics on what do you actually have to do. The last thing you'll actually be having to do is to produce copious amounts of content or spray and pray. Right. It's just not.
Dom Hawes
I love that. It's also a really good way to end this year because I had a bit of a rant on our on Christmas Eve about this dreaded more for less comment.
Because the, the de facto belief. I mean there are loads of reasons for it but one of them is a de facto belief that more is better.
Now, more revenue obviously or more Profit is definitely better, but more content is not better, as you've just said. In fact, more content is worse. If you want to spend less, do less, but make it better quality.
Rachel Fairley
Yeah. And support the buyer on their journey. What are their exam questions? What do they actually want to know? And how do they want to know it?
Serve that before you do anything else.
Dom Hawes
Wow.
Rachel Fairley
I know, right?
Dom Hawes
I think that's a really good way for people to think about going into the new year.
Rachel Fairley
I do, too.
Dom Hawes
Well, happy New Year to you, Rachel. We'll see you in January, February, I don't know. Sometime with our new format show.
We've got a few backed up from this from this year, which is going to be the same format, but I think from now on we'll start recording the new format.
Rachel Fairley
Amazing.
Dom Hawes
And see how it goes.
And if you like or dislike any of our shows, our formats, our experiments, or even just something you've seen or heard, why not get in touch unicorney@selbyallison.com we'd love to hear from you, Rachel. Have a great time. I'm off to the country now to party with my friends.
Rachel Fairley
Amazing. I have champagne on ice. I'll see you next year.
Dom Hawes
See you next year.
Rachel Fairley
Bye.
Dom Hawes
There you go. That is us. Us for 2024. It's a wrap. Thank you very much indeed for following us, for listening and for liking our podcast this year.
It is a labor of love making a podcast, as you may well know, it's an awful lot of commitment and a lot of evenings and weekends throughout this year have been spent writing, drafting, editing, recording. We've got a fantastic crew that has built the podcast for us. But anyway, that's enough because you haven't New Year's Eve party to go to.
I hope you have a great time and we will see you next year.