Strategic PR & Comms w/ Jackie Price of End Game Results | builders podcast

0:00One of the things that became very apparent, at least to me, was that we didn't think enough about what was the end game. And so part of the reason that I chose the name end game was because that's the most important thing we have to remember throughout the entire process.

0:21Jackie Price is a communications and PR hall of famer. She runs her own firm now and has advised governments, some of the largest companies in the world and startups on communications. Her advice on thinking about comms as a service organization, I think is essential for anybody who either works with or is in this industry. And she also introduces to me the two questions you need to ask about almost any communications question or issue. Jackie improved and corrected my thinking on this as we were talking. We also get into a bunch of really interesting and diverse areas of communications, including how it works at a Fortune 500 company, the topic of crisis communications, why the news business is what it is today, and a lot of other stuff.

1:10Thanks for listening.

1:16Hi, Jackie. How are you? Good to see you. Hey, John. Good to see you too. We are on opposite sides of the United States. I'm in rainy Seattle. You're in, I presume, sunny Fort Lauderdale. But we're connected through the power of the internet. And today, Today, we're going to talk through communications, PR, external communications, how important that is and how people building a company or should really think about these things. So maybe I could start here at any stage of business. You're going to want or need some type of external communications to protect yourself, to augment your business, to to express what an innovation means to the world, et cetera.

1:56I thought I'd start by asking, since you've worked with a number of Fortune 500 companies, how does a Fortune 500 company think about external communications, internally work with agencies, etc.? Sure. And it's a great question. I think the first thing you look at is what industry is that Fortune 500 company in? Because there are industries, for example, health care, financial services, to some degree, technology that are highly regulated. So they have some limitations on how they approach communications. Is the company, for example, publicly held or privately held? That's a huge factor. So if they're publicly held, they have a lot more requirements on them and they have a lot more quiet periods and things like that where they can't do a lot of communications work.

2:45So let's say we're talking about a publicly held corporation. let's say Intel, for example, you know, big technology company, company that has been in the news a lot lately. They're having a lot of struggles. Typically the way they look at it is the head of marketing, whoever the CMO is, will oftentimes work with the C-suite and figure out, okay, based upon the divisions of our company, you'll have certain divisions that are business to business. So in the case of Intel, selling services to Westinghouse or the big manufacturers of devices where they install their chips, the Intel inside sort of program.

3:24Then you'll have companies where they'll have a business to business division, and then they'll have a business to consumer division. So Apple is a perfect example. Microsoft is a perfect example. On the business to business side, communications is very specifically focused toward customer groups and toward what they call optimistic customer groups, those that aren't current customers, but we would like them to be. There is also a lot in that example where you're not just talking to customers and prospective customers, you're talking to partners. And a large partner relationship for a chipset company, for example, like a Qualcomm, where I've also done a lot of work, they work with the handset manufacturers.

4:05They work with the hardware companies. So on the technology side, on the public company side, typically those types of organizations will have multiple divisions within the company, right? So if you're working at, for example, General Mills, you've got, I don't even know how many brands under that label in terms of a company. Most of those are business to consumer brands. So that's a very different animal in terms of the communication side. It's very aspirational. There's a lot more creativity in that type of work. Whereas business to business or even there's a third group called business to government.

4:44That's where the government is one of your main audiences or main clients, military contractors, automobile manufacturers, building construction companies. They do a lot of government work. They have a very different sort of communications program and approach than you would when you're trying to sell Coca-Cola, for example, to consumers. So there's different environments under each of those large, large sort of Fortune 500 umbrellas for communicators. And they require different skill sets, if that makes sense. It does make sense. And if you're in the traditional marketing world, I don't even know if that's the right way to say that.

5:27You're developing your company's mission, the key messages the company has, the key conflict that you're addressing, those type of typical brand framework things. How does a company approach communications? Let's say, you know, they're after a B2B or B2C community. Do they think about things the same way? Here's what we need to convince certain people of. No, I don't think you'll think about the communities the same way. So let's say let's use the example of a large technology company. Let's use Apple. Let's use Microsoft, actually, probably a better example. So they have a very large, the vast majority of revenue comes from corporate sales.

6:04All these huge companies that buy Apple, Microsoft licenses and equipment and stuff like that. Those environments are going to be most often the selection process has a lot to do with procurement departments. And for anyone listening to this who has never had the hellish experience of going through a procurement selection process with a Fortune 500 company, it is extremely painful. And what most procurement departments are focused on, they are not communications people. They are business people. Many times they'll have various functions within those procurement departments. And what they're mostly worried about is risk mitigation and how are we going to measure results here?

6:49Price obviously comes into it too. So in an environment like that, and this has happened many times in my career, and especially if you're working with those kinds of companies, you can win or lose a client based on procurement. The marketing side of the offense might think these people are wonderful. We've looked at 10 different firms and we want to hire this one. And then the procurement people come in and say, no, we won't let you hire them for these various reasons. And that happens a lot with, let's say, small and boutique agencies because they don't have the insurance, they don't have the track record, they don't have the financial backing behind them that a lot of procurement departments in large corporate environments want to see.

7:33So that's a different environment in a business-to-consumer environment where you've got Microsoft selling to all of us who buy computers and such, that's a more emotional appeal. There's probably a price appeal. And there's oftentimes a big push around what differentiates this product from a functionality standpoint or from an experience standpoint that the consumer is going to want to hear because they're their own procurement department. If they feel like, Hey, I'm willing to spend an extra 400 bucks for a camera and a phone that is, you know, the best camera you can possibly buy, that's fine.

8:08So it's a different buyer in many examples. So there's definitely no one size fits all for how a PR professional or communications expert thinks about things, different skill sets, et cetera. You do a considerable amount of consulting in the communications world. You have your own company called Endgame Results. Before we get into some examples that I want to talk through more like AI and using data, et cetera, maybe I'd love to know why you called the company that way. I think it implies at least I'm taking it as thinking a few steps ahead. For sure. When I was, and I spent my career in kind of a mix of, I'll take a little step back just to get you where, to answer the question.

8:48I started out as a journalist at CBS News in New York and at Hearst in Boston. And I spent about eight years in journalism. And then I moved into the marketing world. I took a little detour and worked on a couple of presidential campaigns. And then I moved into the marketing world and mostly on the public affairs and corporate communication side, about half of which was at agencies and about half of which was in-house, mostly in very innovative environments. I've worked with a lot of startups and things like that. And one of the things that became very apparent, at least to me, was that we didn't think enough about what was the end game.

9:25What are we really trying to ultimately achieve here? And I think a big part of that is particularly at agencies, but even in-house, in marketing departments, you're almost pressured down this path of tactics. We in our industry love to talk about strategy. In my view, it's very rarely actually exercised. You get forced down this, what are you going to do? What are you going to deliver? And those are all necessary things, but we miss that whole first step. And so part of the reason that I chose the name Endgame was because that's the most important thing we have to remember throughout the entire process.

10:07And for most companies, the answer to that question is we are trying to achieve revenue growth and competitive growth and to some degree, stability among our employees and happiness among our employees. But that gets lost in the weeds because a lot of the time it's just communications is thinking about what are we trying to do tomorrow? And the reason that results is at the end of the name is because we are deeply committed to being able to show that the marketing work that we do and the strategy work that we do actually can have a measurable result on the bottom line growth of a business. I like how you're positioning this about near-term revenue growth and what has to happen in the future.

10:52When I talk to a startup or really any company, maybe the plan is an exit or some type of event that happens in three, four, five years. And there are certain things that have to be true, I guess, in order to get the valuation that someone wants or a stock valuation or its revenue growth. But there are other things that have to be true as well. Like your potential buyer has to be convinced of something. And that's not something that you can just turn on when you're ready to go to market. And those are the things that it seems like a communication or PR professional should be thinking about two, three, four years in advance or at least quarters rather than weeks.

11:37Oh, for sure. And the potential buyer is going to change very rapidly over time. So that's another piece is you're always trying to discover new audiences and figure out is the buyer that we had a year ago still the buyer? Are there different buyers out there? What does the product roadmap look like so that we can find the new buyers or so that we can reinforce the buyers we have now? So the best communications work, in my view, is when communications, sales, business development and product marketing are all working together. I think we were talking offline about this, about, you know, the important rhythms of the business that need to happen to keep all of these groups aligned.

12:21Based on your experience, what would you recommend there? You know, it's hard because you often enter an organization that's already in progress, right? So it's not usual that most of us enter startups from day one. Even if you get there when there's 10 people there, they're often running. So when you come into an organization as either a communications professional working for the company or as an agency or a consultant of some kind, the first thing I do is kind of look around and say, okay, what's our remit? What is the end game remit for this client? What do we want to achieve for this client?

12:55And then I try to match that up to what is the client? What are the business goals of this client? Not the marketing goals. What are the business goals of the client? We want to increase our revenue by 15%. We want to retain X percentage of our customers. We want to be able to show through some type of measurement that we are out in front of our competitor set, that kind of stuff. Once you know that, then it becomes a lot easier to say, okay, who in the organization do I need to get to know? Who do I need to sit down with and spend time with? Because I think where we get into trouble on the marketing communication side is when we think we're leading the conversation.

13:36We're really not. We might be from a public execution standpoint, but in the background, and this is just my view, others in the industry, I'm sure do not share it or may not share it. I believe that we are a service organization inside a company. We're there to serve business development. We're there to serve product development. We're there to serve the C-suite when there's executive positioning and executive communications that need to happen. We're not there to go invent our own programs so that people will get excited and share posts on Twitter. We're there to make sure that the company meets their revenue goals and their strategic goals.

14:17And so I think, you know, that's the other thing to remember is that increasingly organizations are getting on to the fact that marketing writ large is a very large cost center. A lot of decisions are now being made by CFOs who own procurement in most environments, who are coming in and saying, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, CMO, before I sign off on this contract with you guys, I want to know what these people are going to achieve that's going to help us bring in more revenue. And I agree. We're a service organization as marketers and professionals. And one of the things, one of the repeated opportunities or challenges I've seen in my career is about trying to convince buyers or audiences that what you've innovated on or your technology is special in some way.

15:10And so there are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of new companies right now that are AI first and trying to demonstrate that what they've done with generative AI or new AI technologies are special. And so I feel like I could think about previous times when a mobile app company or a big data company or whatever, sort of the same thing. How do you separate yourself? How would you start to guide someone who's thinking about the problem of demonstrating that they're innovative in some special or novel way? Well, I guess what I would say is not to be too contrarian. However, I don't think being special matters a lot.

15:55It depends upon what's attached to that, right? So again, I'm a huge fan of Simon Sinek and I truly have for much of my career followed a lot of his core thesis, which is you have to start with why. So if a client came to me and said, we're this new AI company and we have all these special things. And my first question is, okay, so why does this matter and to whom? And in the example of AI, most people, everything's special about AI right now. Most people have a very low understanding of it. It might be special in a very scary way. Anything that involves machines and robotics. And I've worked in the Bitcoin industry and been involved in the Bitcoin industry since 2013.

16:41So very, very early. And we have struggled with this for years. To me, it's the inverse of that is what I look at. Not how do we go try to influence people that this new thing we've developed is special and therefore you should want it or want to be involved in it. I think it's the inverse. I think it's what are people frustrated about? What are they looking for? What are they lacking? What do they need that could make their lives happier, simpler, less stressful? That's when you say, oh, OK, this is where I can help with that. And this is where we, this new company that has all these AI solutions, here's how we fit into that.

17:25But I think one of the problems of marketing that we've just been institutionally absorbing for years is let us influence you. my view is no no no no let people shall tell us and let us learn what people want need desire aspire to and then figure out how can we bring this to you it's sort of the policy of or the approach of attraction not promotion that's really interesting in a b2b context um you're trying to sell to someone who's got a job. And how often do you think about how that person is being rewarded or incentivized in their job? It's almost like it doesn't really matter what the products or features are of this thing you're selling.

18:18Is this thing going to enable this person to get promoted, look good to their managers, et cetera? Am I thinking about the right whys or Or would you steer me in a different direction? I never think about that. Literally never. If somebody's making a decision based upon whether or not they're going to get promoted, that's not a client that I want. What are you looking at then? Well, I'm not necessarily talking about, well, maybe I am in the world of you selling your own things, but how are you thinking that about the motivation of a client and what they need? What's their problem and how can I help solve it?

18:56What's their opportunity? how can we help them achieve it? Those are the two things I think about all the time. But whether or not somebody gets rewarded, I don't care about that. If a company has a real opportunity and we think we can help them achieve it and measure our impact on that, or if they have a problem and we think we can help them mitigate that, those are the clients that we want to work with. One of the things that we talked about a little bit offline was how many companies, PR strategies, comms strategies involve data. Here where I live in Seattle, I think Zillow has done an incredible job of using data and insights that are proprietary about the housing market to show that they're important and good for consumers.

19:45I think it's been a real big, big part of their growth. What do you think about data as a strategy for comms? And then how does a company know if they have a set of data that can resonate with audiences? This was one of the primary missions when we started Endgame, which was data-driven decision-making, right? So that comes in a variety of different forms. It can come from, as you know, there's different sources of data. So there's qualitative data and there's quantitative data. And a lot of companies are very adept at quantitative data. Anything that's ones or twos that can be put on an Excel spreadsheet, for example.

20:28And if you're doing a poll, a yes might equal a one, a no might equal a two. That type of data is fairly easy to collect because it's binary and you can pull it in through various apps and you can pull it in through various sort of partnership networks and things like that and open APIs. The harder data to collect is qualitative data. And that's the difference between quantitative data is someone liking a post that you put on X. Qualitative data is understanding the comment if they make one. So what we look at a lot is qualitative data. We look at both, but qualitative data is really important.

21:05And one of the things, I'm just looking at my notes that I made before we had this call. So a lot of companies, I think, when they look at data, they still look at it in silos. And what we try to look at is, OK, here is a campaign that we developed for XYZ technology company or AI company. Here are the specific results we received from that campaign that we're able to measure qualitative and quantitative. And oftentimes in organizations, that data is reported as marketing data. And what our desire is, and it doesn't always work because sometimes internally, there are so many silos that you can't get to the head of sales or the business development team.

21:53What we try to do is then take that data over to the business development side or the product roadmap people or whoever the other audience is and say, did you all see an impact from this? Here's the data that we gathered. Did it impact you? And if the answer is, well, not really, we didn't see a lot more leads or we didn't see a lot more purchases or we're not seeing a lot of in-store traffic or whatever it is, well, then either the message was wrong or it just wasn't effective. And then we have to look at why. So when it comes to data, I think, again, at the end of the day, it's all about business impact.

22:35How do we collect every marketing metric that we can and then do analysis that isn't just marketing analysis? It's business analysis. So we're analyzing, we're using the marketing data, but we're combining it with sales or prospecting or product feedback data so that we can see the total impact. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think so. though. And we were talking offline a little bit about this too, but demonstrating and measuring results is probably one of the biggest challenges that many PR and comms professionals have. And dogged pursuit of that, I think, is essential to one's long-term career at a company with a client in communications.

23:23I've got so many things I want to talk about with limited time. So I'm around a little bit because I wanted to get your feedback on crisis communications. And hopefully, as a communications professional, if you're listening, you never have to deal with a crisis, but that's probably a pipe dream. You probably will. I'm curious about how you think about that. What are you proactive with? What are you reactive with? And what do you think is... Would you advise communications professionals or companies about this topic because there's seemingly a crisis or controversy almost every day. So I think that last part, what you just said, is a big part of this.

24:05What actually is a crisis and what isn't? And that's a fascinating topic to me because it involves a lot of human behavior and human psychology, right? So I think for anybody listening, let's say you're starting out your career and you want to go into communications, I think great classes that you can take are behavioral economics classes because it teaches you how to understand things that fascinate me anyway, which is why do people believe what they believe and why do they do what they do? And what's happening now in terms of crisis, in my view, is a lot of these crises start and end on social media.

24:47Why is that? Well, because social media is designed for that. There's literally algorithms that incentivize crisis because it generates more traffic. And this has bled over into mainstream media. So if you look at the difference in mainstream media, or let's not even call it that anymore because it's not mainstream anymore. In legacy media, they don't necessarily amplify crises the way that a social network might. but they know that certain headlines, certain stories, certain narratives are more divisive and controversial than others. And they navigate toward them because it attracts clicks and likes.

25:30So part of it, I think is there, if you're a CEO of a company or a head of marketing for a company and somebody busts into your office and says, Oh my God, you know, there's this and that's being said about us on X and Instagram and TikTok videos are exploding. You have to have the fortitude and the calm about you to say, okay, okay. So what does this actually mean? First of all, is it real? Is what they're saying true and real? If it's not true and real, is it necessary? Is there a value to us responding? Because sometimes responding just exacerbates it, right? And you have to go through this process.

26:09But I think what's happening now is just as crises are erupting on social media as these knee-jerk reactions to things that aren't really crises at all and are often someone's opinion, the response is the same. Companies often feel like, well, we have to respond to this right away. And I often think to myself, why? Just let this play out. See what happens. Now, it depends on what it is. If people were hurt or, you know, it's a natural disaster or something like that, that's one thing. But or if you have an influencer that said something that's really damaging or someone from the company did something, you know, behavior wise, it's very damaging.

26:54OK, that's fine. But I'm a fan of oftentimes less communication is more. and I used to work with a man who's considered probably one of the best crisis comms persons in the world. He's brilliant. And I remember him saying to me, Jackie, sometimes you have a PR problem and sometimes you just have a problem. They're not the same thing. So I would hope that what will happen more frequently down the road is that we can all kind of take a deep breath and say, okay, is this actually a crisis? And if so, fine. That takes me to maybe a better part of the initial part of your answer was most companies and good communications people will set up a crisis protocol and a crisis plan for when something does happen.