How Social Media Is Driving Relationships with Duarte Garrido

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 podcast is aimed at senior executives who want to find out how other businesses are building value through marketing. So join us as we sit down and talk with the heads of some of the biggest companies on the planet about the business of marketing. We'll find out how they run their marketing departments, where they're putting their budgets, and the ethos that drives their decision making. I'm Dom Hawes, and in my day job, I'm the chief executive Officer of Selbey Anderson, a fast growing marketing group that helps complex businesses win the future. Last season, we spoke to Leading marketers about a number of things, including account based marketing, how to scale a business finding purpose, yada, yada. It was a great season, packed with excellent guests and plenty of insight. Well, we're back for 2023, and boy, have we got a series of great episodes lined up for you.

01:00
Dom Hawes
In the coming episodes, we're going to be exploring things like what a marketing department should actually look like, the importance of value propositions, the newest and most exciting marketing technology, how to scale account based marketing, and how to run thought leadership campaigns. And, you know, of course, we're going to be taking a look at, but hopefully not dwelling for too long on because it's too depressing the big R word recession. Now, at Sylvia Anderson, we work with over 200 challenger and global brands. And of course, just like you, we network too. I guess what I'm saying is we see a lot. And I'm getting increasingly concerned that marketing as a profession is losing its place in strategy formulation, in the boardroom, and even in the wider business debate, especially in business to business, where a lot of the public discussion seems to be tactical at best, or, frankly, kind of lightweight.

01:49
Dom Hawes
And I don't think we're helped either, because this profession loves jargon, it loves acronyms, it loves impenetrable language. Why should a chief executive or chief financial officer take marketing, the marketing director or his or her agency seriously if they speak in tongues? I think we're also not really being helped by the barrage of business books that oversimplify marketing. Marketing should be one of the most challenging and value creating professions in business. And if marketing isn't adding value to your business, it's not marketing that's at fault. You're just doing it wrong. So at Unicorny, we're going to bring you deep insights from people both on the front line and in the boardroom, people who are driving value by getting marketing right. And we're kicking off things in this new year with the help of today's guest, Duarte Garrido, standard Chartered Bank's global head of social media and cross Channel activation.

02:40
Dom Hawes
And my co host today is amazing Sarah Nunnely, senior strategist at multi award winning AML Group. Now, I think that's enough context. Duarte was an amazingly eloquent and insightful guest. You're in for a real treat, and I really hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed recording this episode. Let's go.

03:01
Duarte Garrido
Hey, folks. Hey. Hi, Don.

03:03
Dom Hawes
I saw a post art that you put on LinkedIn about hating school.

03:06
Duarte Garrido
That's correct, yeah. Basically, I quit university when I was 18 and I decided to pursue a career as a chef.

03:12
Dom Hawes
Wow.

03:13
Duarte Garrido
So, yeah, and I did that for a few years in Portugal, and it was only at 23 after I had a stint as a chef, another one as a gardener, another one as a warehouse worker, and I traveled about 50 something countries. After that, I decided, okay, I'm going to go back to Portugal, going to go back to university and take my bachelor's.

03:35
Dom Hawes
Wow.

03:36
Duarte Garrido
Yeah.

03:36
Dom Hawes
See, but I think that is an ideal background for a marketer.

03:39
Duarte Garrido
Yeah.

03:39
Dom Hawes
I did every job under the sun. I was exactly that. I was a remover man. I worked in warehouses, I worked in the photo library, English heritage. So when I got into this business, I had experience across loads of different environments, loads of different types of people. And I think it's been useful, really.

03:54
Duarte Garrido
And I think types of people is right. That's the biggest value I got from all my experience is the enormous amount of different people that I got to meet and work with.

04:03
Dom Hawes
But I also saw are you already chartered or are you on the chartered track?

04:08
Duarte Garrido
I'm on the chartered track at the moment, yeah. And it's been really exciting. I mean, to be honest, I do consider myself a lifelong learner, but just not in a very conventional way. I took two courses recently and then over the three years in two very big universities at Columbia and at INSEAD, and both on digital marketing. And, I mean, I don't want to badmouth these institutions because they're great and the teachers are great, but I think I get a lot more value out of the four podcasts and two newsletters I read per day. And that's really where I do the bulk of my learning, is learning through people who actually work in this industry.

04:43
Dom Hawes
Well, that's exactly what this podcast is about.

04:45
Duarte Garrido
I know, right?

04:46
Dom Hawes
That's fantastic. Here we go. Brilliant. Segue. Now, I said at the beginning that normally we ask you to intro you and your business. That's a bit tough today for you.

04:54
Duarte Garrido
It is. I'm literally in between jobs at the moment.

04:58
Dom Hawes
So are you having fun time off or are you no working notice periods?

05:02
Duarte Garrido
So today is my final day at Coca Cola HBC as group head of social media. Okay. And on Monday, it will be my first day as global head of social media.

05:13
Sarah Nunneley
No break at all.

05:15
Duarte Garrido
No break at all. Yeah. It's standard charter.

05:17
Dom Hawes
That's mad.

05:17
Duarte Garrido
Yeah.

05:18
Dom Hawes
So here today, we're going to talk about social media and digital marketing specifically, and I think there were a few items you and I were discussing just before we started, like, in the modern age, what should a marketing department look like?

05:31
Duarte Garrido
That's correct. Yeah. I've been dedicating a lot of time studying this and thinking about it and listening to people who know much more about marketing than I do, really, and trying to glue all the pieces together. I do believe that we are witnessing a new dawn of marketing, and that presents as anything really challenges and opportunities. If we think back at the beginning of marketing, it was widely seen as a cost center, was mostly advertising. There was no direct attribution, there was really no measuring of any advertising campaigns. You poured a lot of money into a TV advert, it went up. And if for some sort of miracle share price went up during that quarter, the CMO would knock on the CFO door and say, you know, this was us, this was because of us. But there was really no proof. Now, with the advent of digital marketing, that became different and we started measuring everything that we put out, especially when it came to social media.

06:23
Duarte Garrido
Social media played a big part in that. But what I think is happening is marketing, which should be this sort of beautiful symbiote between art and science, is now really mostly science. And we've lost a little bit of touch with the art part of it, with emotion, humanity, creativity. Really what we're doing is we are losing a sense of brand building and we are focusing in short term goals, right? In lead generation, in conversion, in what we call performance marketing. And brand marketing is suffering. And because brand marketing is suffering, brands run the risk of becoming irrelevant in the future, especially as new generations look to a lot more than just product, right? Value for them is associated with values, associated with purpose, and that is associated with trust. And that comes through brand. It doesn't come through cold DMs or through banner ads. That's not how you build trust as a brand.

07:24
Sarah Nunneley
You mentioned this sort of marketing being sort of a black mark on the budgets, and it's often the first thing to go in times of cris, even though it's probably the thing we should keep the most. And I think it's interesting, through the pandemic, there was almost already a shift towards this digital first, and especially like highlighting social. And during the pandemic, we actually saw sort of like 75% lifts in social budgets. The budget was just expanding. I'd be really interested to see whether you think this is just sort of an acceleration of what was already an existing shift or there was something really special about the pandemic, like it was the only way they could access their audience.

07:54
Duarte Garrido
I do think it's a mixture of both. I mean, it was a shift that was already happening with digital marketing evolving and social media becoming more than just a novelty, more ingrained, and actually companies understanding that social media is input and output, right? It is content and it is conversion in a way, but it's also listening, it's also insights and it can feed not just the marketing department, but every single department in a company. So I do think that companies were already beginning to become aware of that before the pandemic. Obviously the pandemic sort of fast tracked everything that's digital. So I guess it happened that way. I think now, as you pointed out correctly, we are now entering a big crisis. I believe not well, not me personally, but economists who actually understand this more than I do. But from what I can tell, we are about to enter a you know, the first sign of a recession is usually companies stopping their advertising spend, right?

08:52
Duarte Garrido
Always frustrating. And we can see by the latest numbers coming out of Google and Meta and Pinterest and Snap that there is a reduction in advertising money. And if there is a reduction in advertising money, I anticipate that companies will go back to the default, tightening their purses by cutting down on marketing. And it worries me because I thought we'd gone through that as an industry and we'd understand that marketing is the biggest engine of growth in a company. It's no longer just about advertising for a product, it's about building brand, building communities. It's about building a workforce, nurturing that workforce. It's about building relationships with your shareholders, about tracking your competitors. It's basically about everything. And what I mean by social media evolving as marketing evolves, is that social media, which used to be a sort of discipline of marketing and sit under the marketing department, has been the biggest catapulter when it came to a cross functional view of marketing.

09:58
Duarte Garrido
Social media does currently serve everyone in the company.

10:01
Sarah Nunneley
I think just quickly pick up on something you said about trust, which I think is incredibly important. And I heard you speak about it before, and I'd really like to talk to you a little bit about it, because we see sort of study after study, report after report on how social media can sort of drive both brand preference equity and also brand trust. And I think, coming from my perspective at AML, a lot of our clients are financial services and I know you're moving into this space. We know that trust is a massive problem in financial services. So FS sits very reliably at the bottom of Edelman's trust barometer. And so it would be great to hear from your perspective on sort of how not just in financial services broadly, more broadly, if you like, but how social media really is helping to drive brand trust.

10:41
Sarah Nunneley
Is it just sort of awareness and engagement or what does it look like?

10:45
Duarte Garrido
No, it's way beyond that. I think it's about in one word, and I know that this is a buzword and I'm always afraid of pushing too much on it, but it is about community, right? And I remember when content marketing came up for the first time, I remember a lot of people were sort of calling it a red herring of sorts and that there was really no value to it. And they were wrong, obviously. Massively, massively wrong. But I think that now community runs the risk of being on the same boat. It is slightly becoming too much of a buzzword, but it is the most important thing to a marketer and to a company right now, and especially when it comes to trust, and especially when it comes to financial services and health, which are really what is more important to people than health and money, right?

11:34
Duarte Garrido
Those are two things you don't want to mess with. And because of that, it is vital for financial services companies, for banks, for insurance companies, and then in the health area as well, for any big health company to build relationships with your communities. And your communities are no longer just your customers, right? They're a mixture of customers, employees, shareholders, even competitors and business partners. So it's your whole ecosystem. And I think this is partly because I almost see this as a layered shift in society, in capitalism, because there's a shift in social media that ties into a shift in marketing, that ties into a shift in capitalism because we are now, and what economists call, again, not me, but economists call stakeholder capitalism, right? We've went past this sort of Milton Friedman the point of a company is to deliver value to its shareholders kind of thing.

12:33
Duarte Garrido
And now companies are looking at their whole variety of stakeholders as important communities to deliver value to. And that includes, of course, employees, which companies have realized that they can't really be customer centric if they don't have the workforce to make that happen. Shareholders, which are your biggest supporters, especially private companies that rely a lot on VC money. So they become more than just banks, they become partners. So in all of these communities that are now central to a company's growth, they are on social media, they're all there. You just need to find them. And I think that with community, marketers run the risk of treating marketing as a self serving discipline. This has been haunting our profession for ages. We continue to look at things in a self serving way. And what can I get out of this? As a company or as a marketer, right?

13:28
Duarte Garrido
And I think that with community, it's becoming a bit of a buzword and it's getting a bad rep. And it's been called a red herring because marketers, some marketers are beginning to what they call build communities. And building a community, it's not something that I really believe in because if you're building a community, you're building it with a purpose. And that purpose is not for the community because the community doesn't exist. You're building a community with a that's.

13:58
Sarah Nunneley
Really interesting self serving purpose.

14:00
Duarte Garrido
If you're building it's because they want if you build it, they will come kind of thing. But if you're tapping into existing communities as a marketer, trying to solve a problem that these communities have, realizing having a degree of self awareness and thinking, okay, as a company, how can we be of value to these communities? Whether it's through product, whether it's through content, whether it's through relationships. So whether this ties into product development, customer experience. But this has to be how can we add value to existing communities?

14:37
Sarah Nunneley
It's like that true customer focus, not this self serving customer focus. I think you see that a lot with content. I mean, creating content and whether you're creating content that people want to read or things that you want to say. And that kind of segues me quite gently and nicely. Something I want to talk to you about in terms of quite a little bit more specific. When we get into financial services, there's a huge amount of red tape compliance issues, privacy issues, especially when you look at private banks. Private banks have been touristically the slowest to pick up social media. I mean, FS is generally the slowest to do most things, but especially with them, just because there are so many issues with it and so many sort of regulatory hurdles that have to be considered. You kind of mentioned this sort of almost sort of advocates from a company, people that can have a presence and advocate for that company.

15:25
Sarah Nunneley
And I think that is an interesting thing for financial services, especially private banks. We saw sort of at AML with our research partners Nursery. We did this report called the Investor Index in its third year. This year was kind of looking at constant crisis and is the new stability. And we found that sort of there's like 70% of young and young investors. This is people between 18 and 44 are like heavily influenced by what we would call these influences, financial influences. And it's not people necessarily going out to be influences, but someone like Martin Lewis or even Elon Musk. And if people are so prepared and primed to be influenced by presences on social media, is that an opportunity for sort of financial institutions to have these advocates and have these people sort of that can be centres to those communities? Because people don't trust institutions, but maybe they trust individuals.

16:12
Duarte Garrido
Yeah, definitely. I mean, that's my short answer. The long answer is that my philosophy on social media goes way beyond corporate accounts, like you said, and rightly so. People trust people, not institutions. And from my experience so far in the social media industry, senior leaders in a company who are not maybe not that well versed in social media, they tend to think of social media as the corporate accounts, right? Whether it's global corporate accounts or market specific corporate accounts. But they're the main focus of any social media strategy in a big company and they are the measures of success. But my approach to social media is way more holistic than that. I think that corporate accounts, specifically, if you're not selling a product directly, if you're not DTC right, if you're not using social platforms as pay to play, if you're using social platforms with an organic purpose of brand awareness, you need to rely much more on activating people.

17:10
Duarte Garrido
And that can be your employees, which are a community on their own. And they become employee advocates and essentially influencers what I call your first free influences, although they're obviously not really free. And then, of course, there are another multitude of influences that you can tap into, specifically when it comes to financial services. You have this big sort of personal wealth trend going on some social platforms where influencers teach people how to manage their finances and how to actually.

17:42
Sarah Nunneley
This girl talks money and all of those type of accounts.

17:45
Duarte Garrido
And that's a community in itself. And I'm not talking about big celebrity influencers. I think we've all agreed that we've grown past that as an industry, no one really trusts big celebrity influencers anymore. But if they are niche influencers that are transparent, that are aligned with your brand in terms of purpose, in terms of tone of voice and the process of vetting influences are now harder than ever. They have to become, in a way, ingrained in your company. You have to almost onboard them, although they're not part of your workforce, they become the voice of your company and they become a conduit between your other communities and your brand. So you need to nurture them, you need to vet them properly, and it needs to be an ongoing relationship. You need to be sure that you are using influences that are right for your brand and that can deliver value.

18:35
Duarte Garrido
And then you have to be transparent as to either you're paying them or you're not paying them, or you're giving them promotional material, whatever it is, the relationship you have with them. But I think it's definitely an important community that marketing has to be aware of.

18:47
Dom Hawes
I'm really interested in the concepts of first line influencers, like all of our colleagues. So one of the things we're B2B ourselves. So LinkedIn is obviously our natural home. And actually, I give very little attention or time to our LinkedIn page because no one cares about our LinkedIn page, but they care a lot about our people. And we've got just over 200 people, all of whom have somewhere between 1505,000 followers. If you think about the size of the network and the size of reach we can get, it's the people themselves that are more important than the entity. And so I'm fascinated by actually thinking of our people not just as colleagues and effectively broadcasters in their own right, but actually as influencers. Authenticity, I know, has been another cliche, but allowing sorry, encouraging people to come to work as themselves, not to put these phony masks on and pretend to be other people.

19:39
Dom Hawes
And that's where authenticity comes from, because they're being human beings, not being some kind of corporate sort of drone, but in regulated environments or unregulated environments, it doesn't really matter. When you're mobilizing an entire company and saying, here's social media go, what steps do you take to try and keep people within certainly within bounds? Or don't you?

19:59
Duarte Garrido
Of course, you have to. I mean, no one likes to eat their vegetables, right? But it's just something and I see social media governance and social media policy as our vegetables, so we have to eat them. In order for creativity to flourish, there have to be certain restraints. You know, I come from Philip Morris International. I did a stint there. So, I mean, you have no more heavily regulated environment than Big Tobacco, really, or what was called as Big Tobacco. And they've since pivoted to a science and technology company. But again, when I came into Philip Morris, they had never communicated as a company, right? First of all, because they couldn't advertise tobacco, obviously, and rightly so. But because they were promising to stop selling cigarettes and moving away from that, they decided to build an in house content studio, start communicating for the first time.

20:46
Duarte Garrido
Not advertising product, but communicating their transformation and how they were cannibalizing their bread and butter and disrupting themselves. And that was an amazing opportunity. But obviously loads of lawyers, right? As you can imagine, loads of red tape. And a company that was, in its essence, when I got there, very shy senior executives in the company who had been there for, like, 20 years and who'd never communicated, they were very cautious, specifically when it came to social media. Well, firstly, they didn't understand it. And because they didn't understand that, they saw it as a threat. So to be able to navigate those heavily regulated waters, those very well funded legal teams, and the kilometers of red tape that were around the company was very challenging. But I can safely say that I was never as creative in my whole career, and I'm counting my career as a chef, I was never as creative as I was at Philip Morris International.

21:40
Duarte Garrido
Because you have to because creativity is not just about design. It's also about design, but it's also about finding ways to communicate when it's difficult, finding ways to steer the ship when the waters are rough, which is a good segue into the crisis we're living in. This is a good time for creativity to flourish because there is difficulties, because there is a lot of obstacles that we need to overcome. So I guess you do have to build a social media policy and a social media governance, and you have to have training as one of the main functions of a social media team. So when I come into a new job, one of the first things I did, especially at Coca Cola HPC, was having big training sessions with different departments within the company to explain to them what would best practice on. Social media, but also to incentivize them to build their own personal branding profiles and say, listen, if you build a strong personal brand on LinkedIn, that's good for your career, that's good for you personally.

22:48
Duarte Garrido
It could be good for you personally as well. And we as a company, we can take advantage of it, not by asking you to post promotional material for us, but just because a strong presence from our employees on social media that become thought leaders in their own areas of expertise, that always translates into good brand equity for the company. Right?

23:11
Dom Hawes
Massively.

23:12
Duarte Garrido
And so it's a win. And I think a lot of companies still think, oh, if we help employees boost their social media profiles on LinkedIn, they'll leave. And I think that's such a big fallacy. They will leave if you don't.

23:27
Sarah Nunneley
It's sort of an organic earned advocates that you're just building these people up. It makes a lot of sense to.

23:34
Dom Hawes
Do because the flip side is if you don't want to leave, you got to lock them in a cupboard under exactly. I'm totally with you. I love it when I see that our people have really put some time and effort into their own personal branding because I know that when they're putting thought leadership out there, the first thing people do is know that person is really smart. Where do they work? It's the first thing they look exactly. Who's getting all of those smarts?

23:58
Duarte Garrido
Credibility.

23:59
Dom Hawes
Fantastic. I like what Duarta's saying here. If you encourage your employees to build their personal brands, your company will benefit too. Your customers and clients want brands to have a personality, you know, a human touch. And every one of your team members represents your brand in the eyes of customers. So why wouldn't you want them to build their brand and in effect, build yours too? You know, to me that's a no brainer. You're listening to Unicorny with Dom Hawes, powered by Selbey Anderson, the marketing group that helps complex businesses win the future. Coming up in this episode, Duarte Guerrido makes a compelling argument that your marketing team needs what he calls a social media segment of purpose. Now, I don't know what that is, so I'm looking forward to finding out. And also we're going to discuss how Gen Z has changed the way we buy.

24:55
Dom Hawes
But first, Sarah asked Duata if social media has created a new era of accountability for brands and if so, what this means for marketing. So let's take a listen to that.

25:05
Sarah Nunneley
For me, one of the most important things that's been born of social media and sort of the rise of social media has been the level of accountability that businesses now have. You've got sort of single voices just that can, without any bounds on them, can comment on their experiences or comment on their opinions or whatever. And like you say, with these people that have teams of lawyers and they seemingly were untouchable, brands can now be commented on and held accountable for their behavior and it can sort of one comment can spark change in these huge companies. And I'd be really interested to know what your sort of take is or the impact that you've seen that can have, or what you think it's going to do for businesses moving forward.

25:43
Duarte Garrido
Well, I think it presents, as with anything, like I said before, it presents threats and opportunities, right? And I like to look at everything as threats and opportunities. And I think that when it comes to accountability for what, for instance, a social media team puts up on the company's social media profile, a social media team is in its essence mostly compiled of young people, right? We have that. I mean, community managers, social media producers they are mostly young people who are not maybe that well versed in the corporate world, who haven't had many years experience, who don't have any training in corporate reputation. And yet they hold the golden keys. And they are the de facto spokespeople for your brand in one of the biggest mediums of reach in the world. Right? So obviously that presents a big threat. And the way I see it, you can sit on either side of the fence on this.

26:37
Duarte Garrido
You can either be really strict with your social media governance and you write these big playbooks and response books and you trap them in your community manager's laps and say, if anyone talks to us on social media, you need to abide by this book. And these are the words that you use. And we see a lot of companies do that. But obviously those are the companies that sound like there's no one on the other side of the line, right? They sound like a bot and there's no engagement, there's no humanity, there's no empathy, there's no authenticity, there's no trust building.

27:05
Sarah Nunneley
It kind of just ruins the point of what we're trying to do.

27:08
Duarte Garrido
Why be on social to communicate with people if you're going to be reading from a script? But then there's the other sort of side of the coin, which is the Oatleys and innocent drinks of the world who are young companies, edgy companies, maybe don't have that much to lose. I know that innocent drinks, for instance, and they're brilliant. What they do is they do not have a system of governance or of hierarchy when it comes to posting on social media. They hire their social media managers and producers according to their own culture and their own tone of voice. So they hire them correctly and then they say, be yourself.

27:46
Sarah Nunneley
I love it when this they've got them on TikTok at the moment. If anyone's popping off, if you will, on TikTok, like Duolingo was an app that everyone kind of knew but kind of forgot about. Most hilarious TikTok account of all time. Ryanair's TikTok account is absolutely hilarious and it's just like it's been massive for them. The impact has been huge purely because it's just absolutely scattergun. Get in front of everyone. Anyone that does want to learn a new language is like, oh, well, I like that funny owl on Duolingo's TikTok account. So now I'm going to download it. It's amazing.

28:16
Duarte Garrido
They empower their social media producers and community managers to just be as creative as possible. Now, of course, I love that. I think that works very well for some drinks. But when it comes to maybe big financial services institutions can't do it. Big health institutions or big tobacco or whatever, anything that has a lot of red tape and has a lot of stakes on corporate reputation, then that becomes a problem because someone somewhere sends the wrong tweet and you've got a massive PR crisis at hand. And that's not something that you want. So my approach to this is simple. It is maximize empowering people and let them be creative by having the basic set of guidelines. And that really comes down to what I call a social media statement of purpose. And this is usually my first document when building a social media strategy. And it's a one page document, much like the US.

29:11
Duarte Garrido
Constitution, where it's just sort of like values driven, and it literally just states who we want to be perceived as on social media, as a company who we do not want to be perceived as, and what are our main values, what is our core purpose to be on social media? And because it's not highly restrictive, there's no script for it. It just says, this is who we are. And we give them to our social media managers, to our community managers. And we say before posting a piece of content, before speaking to anyone on social media, responding to just cross check whatever content you're putting out or whatever message you're putting out against the values on this one page document. And if you don't feel like it fits 100%, you need to go back to the drawing board. But it allows them to be creative still while giving them a sort of a bit of anchor.

30:02
Duarte Garrido
And it's such an easy way to do things.

30:04
Dom Hawes
I love that also, because it's not infantilizing. No, your colleagues, by saying, you can't do that. It's all about trust.

30:11
Duarte Garrido
My experience is that community managers and social media managers, they are brilliant. And if you give them wings to fly, they can climb really high in a company's rotor. I mean, just look at now social media, heads of social media becoming CMOS becoming CEOs. I mean, this is never seen before in our industry. But to do that, you have to let them be creative. You have to give them responsibility in some constraints. And like I said, creativity flourishes in heavily regulated environments.

30:44
Sarah Nunneley
You have all of these limitations, rules, things you can't do. Your brand guidelines are incredibly sort of tight. All of this. It really does force people to be incredibly creative. And I think that's something that we've always seen is that we get these incredibly creative people because you have to have a brain that can push it that far in order to work in teeny tiny spaces and make something really cool. And it kind of also should just be a natural extension of what is a brand strategy. That, you know, a brand has a general purpose and proposition and all of this, and it feels like it should be a natural consideration of how that should play out on social media, of course.

31:18
Duarte Garrido
But that's exactly where I think we are sort of losing the war a little bit, is we are returning too much in the direction of paid and we're discounting brand building. And I think, again, like I said, if you look at the Edelman Trust barometer, you see that 64% of people will now buy an advocate for a brand based on beliefs and values, right? So that's not product that we're irrational consumers. We're predictably irrational, like an author called it. So we are irrational consumers. If weren't, there would be no such thing as a buyer's remorse, right? So we do buy with our hearts and even during tough times, I mean, everyone is going to tighten their strings. We are the squeezed middle. I am at least. So I know that I've been having to look at my Excel sheets again and consider what to buy and what not to buy.

32:10
Duarte Garrido
But there are certain values, certain personal values that I will stick to. I will continue not to buy a product if it's tested on animals, right? That's a personal value of mine. And I know that this is not just me. This is how Gen Z buys. And not just buys, but this is how Gen Z chooses a job as well. And especially in a market that is still a buyer's market, essentially still, at least in the UK. Maybe not so much in the US anymore. But it's important to figure out how your brand can remain relevant for the coming generation. And that's through organic. It's not through paid advertising, it's not through banner ads, it's not through DMs. You have to build relationships.

32:56
Dom Hawes
Wow. There's loads to get into from today's episode. Right. At the beginning of the episode, Dwarter said that marketing departments and their output are absolutely essential, both in times of feast and famine. And I agree with him. You know, it may seem obvious to marketers, but I don't think that's necessarily obvious to everyone. So it's definitely worth reiterating. Business generally has had a really tough time for the last few years. You, dear listener, and me, we are living in like an era of really high degrees of uncertainty. Something that our forebears would not really have been able to understand. I don't think our world is increasingly complex, and that means the old ways of doing things, those things that were predicated on certainty and the ability to make a five year plan, that stuff just doesn't work anymore. Right? And here we are now when everyone's talking about recession.

33:52
Dom Hawes
But that's not the big issue for me. It's not about recession uncertainty and lack of confidence. I think they're much bigger killers than tightening markets, particularly because all the research that I've looked at points to the recession, if it comes, being pretty shallow. So while some businesses are mothballing their marketing department and their marketing people and their agencies and all that kind of stuff in anticipation of hard times to come, others, I think, more progressive people are taking a different approach. There's loads of documented stuff on this. You may have heard about the roaring out of Recession Thought leadership piece in the Harvard Business Review, or Mark Ritzen's commentary on that piece, summarized as don't think recession, think recovery. Come to think of, anything by Ritzen in recession is probably worth a read. He seems to have a really good handle on things. Or you may have heard the trope when times are good, you should advertise.

34:39
Dom Hawes
When times are bad, you must advertise. Basically, what I'm saying is there's loads of good material out there on why you should not cut marketing during recession or when markets are jittery, kind of like now. Now we're going to put the links to the best of those in the show notes and Dwarter highlighted that what we do is essential, but that we may need to think differently about what we're doing. Ritzen's material, I think, agrees with that, as do I. So right now I'm advising my own management teams to think more social, to encourage their colleagues to think more social. Relationships sell because they're based on trust. So use every resource you have to make and build trust. And the most basic building block of trust, of course, is affinity. Feeling like, you know, someone so empower your people to build their personal brands, and you as a business will reap the benefit too.

35:36
Dom Hawes
To be heard and have an effective social media team, though, Duada says you need to strike a balance between guiding their tone of voice and giving them freedom. Now, I think something really interesting that Duada pointed out is that by giving your social media managers a set of social guidelines, or what he terms a segment of purpose, you won't necessarily stunt their creativity. In fact, sometimes when you put people in a creative play pen, they get better solutions. So it may be that by giving them guidelines and a framework within which to operate, you can help them find more creativity, better solutions to magnify your message while you protect your brand. I think the final thing that I'm going to take away from this episode is that it all comes back to purpose. Now, there's a lot of debate out there at the moment on social channels and in networks that, oh, in times of recession, people forget purpose.

36:29
Dom Hawes
It comes back to fundamentals. But I don't necessarily agree with that. I think if we're talking about building trust and building relationships and relationships being the key to sales, then actually authenticity and purpose, I think, still have a really important part to play. Brands and companies can only build relationships with their customers by finding shared values and people want to trust the brands they buy into and buy from, and they can't do that if your brand is behaving in a self serving way. So authentic is a much overused word, but it's opposite. You need to be authentic, especially in straightened times. Thank you, Duarte, for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom and insight. It was a really good conversation at a time. I know that was a little bit challenging for you and both Sarah and I really enjoyed it. And on that note, thank you to you, the fabulous Sarah Nunnelly, for co hosting with me on the podcast today.

37:21
Dom Hawes
Next week on Unicorny I'm joined by co host Adam Greener from Digital Radish and Amadeus Global head of product marketing Barbara Moreno to discuss value propositions. In the episode, we outline why your company needs a really strong value proposition, particularly now, and what a great one looks like. Barbara also details what insight metrics she uses when building value propositions and we end the age old debate between brand or performance marketing. It's a fabulous episode. We hope that we will see you there next week. Thank you for listening today's show. Together, we're building a body of reference to make marketing work better for business. You can subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast channel. We're listed on Spotify, Apple podcasts, YouTube, Amazon, Google, iHeartRadio, Podbean Podchaser and all other good platforms. Now, it takes us eight to 10 hours to produce each and every episode of Unicorny, so if you like the show, please help us out, make it worth our time.

38:20
Dom Hawes
Please take the time to share, rate and review us, help us get found, and help yourself at the same time. Because Unicorny is far more than a podcast. It's a community of leading marketing minds and pretty soon we're going to be running events too. If you're interested in joining our community, please get in touch by following the Unicorny page on LinkedIn or connecting to me on LinkedIn. My name is Dom Hawes, H-A-W-E-S. We'll always prioritize people who've helped us, so please share the love and we'll share what we have with you. Also, if you want to join the project by starring in a future show, please contact the series producer, Nicola Fairley, through LinkedIn or by email at guest at Unicorny Co UK. If you do want to rate or review us on your favorite podcast channel. Please, please give us five stars and in the comments in the review, please tell people what you liked about the show.

39:10
Dom Hawes
But also, if you want to tell us what you didn't like about the show, you can either do it on the reviews or why not contact me directly through LinkedIn. You've been listening to Unicorny with Me Dom Hawes, powered by Selbey Anderson, the marketing group that helps complex businesses win the future. Unicorny is conceived and produced by Selbey Anderson with creative support from One Fine Play. Nicola Fairley is the executive producer, connor Foley is the serious producer, kazra Feruzia is the superb audio engineer and editor, and the episode is recorded at turnmilstudios.co.uk. Thank you for listening and we will see you in the next one.