Why Brands Need to Humanize Marketing in the Age of AI w/ Jose “Pepe” Gorbea (Hyperquake)

0:00Targeting the right influencers, like in this case with him, but in the end serving the community with purpose. And I think it was later in my career that I discovered the value of purpose. And when you combine that and you co-create content with the right influencers, I think you can achieve anything.

0:21Hey, Pepe, welcome to the show. How are you? Ciao, Alessandro. Tutto bene. All good, all good. Happy to be here. Thank you for having me. We're going to be polyglots today. We're going to go like English, Spanish, and Italian for the people listening in. I love it. So amazing. So Pepe, why don't you give us like a quick who you are and then, you know, something that just like, you know, in a second, like, you know, what is your creator economy hot take? So born and raised in Mexico City, passionate for marketing, passionate for brand building and storytelling, discovered marketing very late in my life, thanks to only when I started working, a local company in Mexico called Grupo Bimbo, who taught me how to work and what marketing is.

1:03And then I had an international career that spanned five companies, four countries across Mexico, the US, Switzerland, and Spain, where I'm based today in Barcelona. and a lot of learnings along the way, failures, successes. And when it comes to the creator economy and creators in general, for me, they're human beings, you know, like we all are. Like, you know, brands talk about consumers. Now the hot buzzword is creator and the creator economy. But I think in the end, it's human beings trying to influence other human beings about something. Whatever the topic is, there's something to be influenced about.

1:40It might be personal, it might be professional, it might be a product, it might be a service. But that's always somewhere in the middle where you need to add value between two people or two communities. And that's where creators come in. And, you know, what I say all the time is that B2B, at the end of the day, it's a human to human, right? We see corporation to corporation. At the end of the day, there is a person with their feelings and emotions. They have a family, right? As you said, right, like their failure, their wins. And many times we forget about that. So let's talk about this, right?

2:09Like about the human behind the product, even behind the AI these days, right? Because, you know, you spoke right about that at the transformational CMO assembly, right? On humanizing brand, especially in this era of AI, where many times, unfortunately, we do see what I say personally, I say, I mean, I say AI is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, right? Nothing is new, right? So how do you bring this humanizing for a brand in the era of this very strong AI implementation? Do you have any ideas on that? AI, you know, in the end, is just a tool. It's not the story. It's just a tool to serve humans.

2:44In the end, the story is always about the humans behind the tools that we create and that we use. And AI is just the latest one after social media, the internet, and so on. But when it comes to talking about change and, you know, managing the agenda of AI in the agenda of CMOs, with the Millennium Alliance, who invited me to talk for the first time a year ago in Munich, I created a story around humanizing brands in the era of AI to remind marketers how important it is to serve humans in the end. And that's where you truly win as brands. You know, when you create the narrative, if you're only focused on selling a product, I think you might get some benefits in the short term.

3:22But in the long term, you will never build brand equity. You will never win hearts of human beings. And I think that's where, to me, co-creation, which is the word that I would love people to remember about me when I, you know, pass out and go away, is the word that invites people to create something together, not alone. And that's why co-creation for me, the co at the beginning is so important because it implies a contract, a pact between two communities, between two persons for a greater purpose, a greater good. And I had the joy of co-creating a story with Jim Stengel, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame this year.

4:04And kudos to him for for a wonderful career who really taught me the value of purpose. You know, after a long career that I have in marketing in many companies, he came from P &G, he started his own business, and now he has numerous programs that teach marketers how to do better marketing. Everything evolves around purpose. So when I met him for the first time, we activated the story with Ukrainian creative refugees because it was when the war was starting between Russia and Ukraine. And we were going to Cannes Lions, we were trying to influence marketing decision makers. And what I said to Jim is how cool would it be that now that we know that in the Cannes Lions database, there's a set of creative people that are Ukrainian that need a job and they are just scattered across Europe because of the war.

4:50How can we empower CMOs to give them a job? And that's where we started co-creating a story to bring CMOs and Ukrainians together so that the Ukrainians could showcase their talent and the CMOs could actually tell their agencies to hire them for the next project, you know, as a copywriter, choreographer, editor, you name it. So that really allowed me to discover the power that is behind creating content, targeting the right influencers, like in this case with him, but in the end, serving the community with purpose. And I think it was later in my career that I discovered the value of purpose. And when you combine that and you co-create content with the right influencers.

5:32I think you can achieve anything. And we're going to go back in like, soon on this, because I am very interested in asking you more about both the purpose and the co-creation, especially these days, right? With co-creation where I've been in the industry myself for like 12 years. So I see like, you know, changing a lot and how important it is these days, especially co-creation. But before getting into that, I also wondering about another important word that is trust, right? Again, these days with AI, there is fake, like, you know, news and fake videos. these days with AI is so difficult to understand is that the real influencer is, it is like, you know, CGI, creating and so on.

6:04So when it came to like your, you know, you're actually partnered, right, with creators and influencers through your HP's Creatorverse Exchange, right? And so I'm curious in that case, how do you trust, like, you know, when you have HP, such a big brand, right, a name in the industry for many, many, many years, how do you choose the right person to partner with? And how do you create trust for both ways, right? With the idea of the co-creation, the co-branding, the go-together with something that is not just HP and the creator, but it's something together? I will say it's for HP, but I think it applies to any company in the world, big or small, B2B or B2C.

6:37When you create a communication message, whatever that is, you have to put the opinion and the story of the persons that you are working with or targeting before the opinion of your company or your brand. What do I mean by that? With HP, we had a case study where we were able to penetrate the printing technology of HP into hospitals, which is very rare to put something printed in a hospital. If you remember or recall your last time in a hospital, usually every room is white. Every wall is white. There's no color. And it's for children actually scary to go to hospitals, especially when they go into the MRI room to get a scan.

7:15So we redecorated MRI rooms with stories of pirates, of spaceships, of Formula One cars, of princesses, and so on and so forth. But the stories were created by the children. And then when we interviewed the nurses and the doctors, they actually reduced the level of sedation that they need to put into a child before going into an MRI between 60 to 80%. Why is that? Because through storytelling and stories created by the children, not by the hospital, they were able to make them feel they were like a Disneyland type of experience where they were going into a room that if it's all white, full of machines and noises, you get scared and you have to be in that room for a full hour.

7:57You tell them a story that they like, that they create, they participate. Oh, you're a pirate. Which pirate do you want to be? You're a Formula One driver. Who do you want to be? You're going to go into a race. Then they relax and then they go in and they can do the scan. They go out. The parents are more relaxed. Everyone is more relaxed and less medicine has to be put into their bodies so they can go through an experience like that. So HP, of course, when we did the campaign behind that activity with a hospital called San Juan de Devo in Barcelona, it was amazing to see the stories of the parents and the children.

8:32And they were the ones telling the story, not HP. Where do I go with this? When you ask about HP, big corporation, world of AI, software corporation. is not about selling that. It's about understanding the human behind that. And this case where children and the parents of the children and the nurses and the doctors telling the story, which scores very high in terms of authenticity, credibility, and human connection. So this is the type of stories that I've been creating for the last decade with multiple customers. This is just one example because your question went directly into HP. Still on this, right?

9:10You said the importance of the storytelling, understanding there is a story behind when it comes to, again, people meeting other people, understanding that you are not alone, and so on. Sometimes also when it comes to sustainability, messaging, sometimes it can be feels a bit like forced, because maybe there is a script behind and so on. How do we approach that? It's a two part question. The first part is how do you actually find the creators that can be that authentic? And two, again, how do you really co-create? Like, where is that balance within? I fully trust the creator in going with this sustainability and purpose messaging.

9:45And I trust them entirely, too. There are certain things that we have to say because of regulations, because of this, because of that. What is that type of balance, again, where this type of message is not that easy to pass as totally authentic? Right. So how do you do that? I think it's part science, but part art. And what do I mean by art? It's your human feeling on finding communities that have a common purpose. There is a project I did in India during the pandemic with Rekid Benkiser, a brand called Dettol, which is an antibacterial gel. They were, of course, very concerned on how they change behaviors of human beings to protect people from the pandemic.

10:22And because in India, in many areas, you don't have a lot of health protocols and behaviors. The brands working there have to help educate the people on how to protect themselves. So Dettol took a very courageous decision, which I applaud greatly to this day, to remove their own logo from the bottle. Imagine if you're a brand manager and you go to the marketing director and say, for this campaign, our product will not have a logo. What? You get fired, right? So they have a lot of courage to go and say for this campaign, because we are united by purpose between the community of people in India who want to help and us who can deliver a product that actually kills the virus.

11:05How do we make this even bigger? How do we recruit the right people? So we launched the landing site and a campaign called Dettol Salutes, the warriors of COVID-19 or the warriors of the pandemic. And in that campaign, it was a landing page where you just told your story. How are you helping your community overcome the pandemic? And we gathered close to 200 ,000 people with 200 ,000 stories in two weeks. Those stories went from the landing page and from social media into the bottles. The bottles had the face of the person and their story instead of the logo. And every time you got one of these bottles, if you're a consumer, you get an idea.

11:46yeah, oh, next time I'm in this situation, I will do that because then I can protect my people much better from the pandemic. So you started sharing ideas and cross-fertilizing ideas on how to use the gel in the right moments and build the behaviors for people to wash their hands and things like that, so that you reduce the rate of infection in the country. But it was everyone working together. So finding these people is not easy, Alessandro, I can tell you. Of course, you need to invest on finding the right people. but once you launch a message as a brand and people have the same purpose that you are pursuing and we're talking about purpose here in this case protecting from the virus people people react people participate people share their opinions and i think as a brand if you have the courage to put their opinions before your logo you win because you know what happened they grew double digit over a six-month period which they haven't been growing double digit in a long time and from an equity, brand equity point to be one of the metrics that they were reading that the dead toll is perceived as a brand that truly kills germs, went from 30 % to more than 60%, which they have never had that equity score in their life.

12:55And it's because the stories of real humans that you can relate to are the things that really engage people today, not an ad that is breaking into your screen, disrupting your experience. It's not an easy thing to do, but once you get the hang of it and you start creating a philosophy behind and a methodology it actually took me to teach classes at esade university in barcelona where i teach a program that sits in the intersection of marketing and sustainability which is story making for good hi ready to elevate your brand at the influencer marketing factor we've got you covered we manage influencer campaigns from start to finish so creator sourcing strategy legal shipping logistics all of it we work with fortune 500 brands in DTC companies worldwide, and our campaigns are backed by real ROI analysis.

13:45Check us out at theinfluencermarketingfactory.com. And this is very interesting because again, many people think like they see something like this, right? And it says, oh, that's easy, right? It's, you know, like they don't understand why they're behind the scene. And now you say something very interesting is like, you know, the frameworks, right? Like the designs behind that. Can you tell me a bit more like when it comes to, again, how a brand instead of speaking at a consumer, right, can actually, again, co-create, right? To go back to the co-creation, the importance of that. Brainstorming, thinking together, getting together with a messaging that is actually perceived, again, as something way more authentic than others.

14:18So again, you said that you, is it something that you build on on other type of frameworks? Is it something that you come up completely yourself? It's a combination of both, Alessandro, and it's my life journey as a marketer. I had to become an expert on personalization when I joined HP because they were selling personalized printing to their customers, the brands, the marketers. So I did a social media research with an agency where we analyzed 50 million conversations over a year on why humans are attracted to personalization. And we found out many things, but we built a need state model of personalization.

14:54We actually found six emotional needs that humans have when it comes to personalized experiences. And what I learned in that research is that it's not about personalizing something and putting your face and your name on it. It's about co-creating stories. What humans really want is sense of belonging. So here I go a bit back to the pyramid of Maslow, you know, back to the basics of the basics of marketing, which is the third, the most important need that humans have. And you talked about, you know, being connected, a sense of belonging and love and making people feel connected is where the creator economy is so powerful and where co-creation with purpose is a very good and important part of your marketing mix that must be prioritized.

15:36But people forget about it because today we live obsessed with the power of AI and everything we need to learn around AI that we forget about these things. So that journey empowers me to create the framework, creatively speaking, that when I get a brief and I develop a brief with a customer and we need to solve the business problem, we put them into this system where we use this need state model to create ideas that really connect with people, but also inspire creatives to create the right campaign. You know, like this example from HP with the hospitals, this one with Deadpool and people in India.

16:10And there are many others that I can quote. But in the end, this system is something I started with HP. I perfected it over the years. It became a class in a classroom for marketers and people learning sustainability at the Sade. And once they invited me there, they were asking me, how can I bring this into my company? So I started designing that as a methodology that then any company could absorb and bring into their own brands. And that's what I've been trying to scale over the last few years, because I just believe it's a much better way to do marketing. And after the campaign or during the campaign like that, you always want also to see the metrics, right?

16:48And I think that you are trying to change that also, that approach, right? the mindset behind what metrics we are currently tracking and what, in your opinion, we shouldn't be anymore because they are either vanity metrics or thing that looks good, but they are meaningless. And what are actually those metrics that you think we should start looking at and put in our typical standard campaign dashboard? In the end, marketers only care about one thing and one thing only, profitable growth. So if you focus your efforts in the part of the portfolio of a brand that gives marketers a greater profit and you make that grow, that is the only metric that matters.

17:27If you launch a campaign out there that is selling more of the service that you sell or the product that you sell, to me, that's the only metric. It's not about likes, engagement, shared content. Those are, for me, soft metrics, but the hard metrics is about business growth and most importantly, profitable business growth. So if you do these campaigns that I tell you, and then we have a chat with the marketer and we say, oh, did this truly have an impact in your business? Did you grow incrementally? Are you growing more from a profit point of view? And they say, yes, then you have a good formula, you know, to win.

18:00And I think today that's where the blind spots for the marketers are. They use a lot of AI to create algorithms and metrics and systems that can do a lot of reporting on its own and report, you know, this campaign has a billion impressions. A billion impressions are worthless if your brand didn't grow sales. It's as simple as that. So why are we reporting on metrics that have nothing to do with business growth? And I think this is for me where I've been trying to find the right partners in my career to find the conversation with marketers who truly want to grow the business profitably, but also with love.

18:36And what do I mean by love? With attracting people because they really want to be part of a community and part of a movement. So that to me in the end are the metrics that matter. You know, if you ask me, very simple, it's love. how many hearts are you winning? And sales, how much are you growing your business? Of course, you know, it's similar to, you know, when you're hiring also someone, what I say all the time is that there are certain hard skills that you can learn, right? On YouTube these days, you want how to code, yes, but the empathy, the love for what you do, the passion, the sparkle in the eyes, that is those soft skills and part of your personality that you cannot teach anyone, right?

19:10So that is something definitely challenging. Still on the belonging, Right. You said something that I think it's very important, especially these days. You know, I'm a person from the 90s, so I grew up with the first like Nokia and everything, but we were getting together in person. Right. And then through the years with MySpace and then Facebook and so on, a few, you know, like fewer and fewer gatherings and then COVID killed all of that. And now we've been seeing, we actually went out last year with IRL, Real Life Report, right, to understanding how influencers and creators are pushing from the online sphere to actually offline, getting in person, right?

19:46And so on. And we see that there is so much appetite for that back again, because we lost many years, right? And now the belonging, the one to be together, the gatherings is getting like, no fruit of the roof in many major cities and even smaller ones. So how do you do that effectively? Like these days, how can you bring that physical touch points between people, you know, with creators, influencers, not only them, right? Also other people that might not be the typical influencer, but they can actually make an impact for others' lives. I think for me, the challenge is to find how are you going to exchange valuable information between the two, between a creator and the community you want to target behind that creator.

20:24How are you going to exchange value? And I think today, sometimes there's a very thin line and a high risk that when you brief these people into a project and they start creating content, people can see through the bullshit, if you know what I mean. You know, people are not stupid and they will see when a creator or an influencer has been really paid to say something. So for me, there's an experience you need to gather over the years as an agency, as a marketer, to really understand how to create content that is more organic. And I even quote myself before this podcast, you know, you were asking me, Alessandro, Pepe, have you read the questions?

21:04Are you ready? of course i'm ready but i'm not rehearsing the responses because responses have to be based on my experience and then you get a more authentic response and i think when creators launch a message out there and they want people to react you have to be as authentic and as organic as possible if you are like extremely rehearsed in the way you deliver a message and i'll tell you an example an unboxing experience how many influencers are out there in the toy industry or in the cosmetic industry. And they do these YouTube videos when they unbox something, you know, the big reveal, this is a new product.

21:37Watch my unboxing experience. Okay, it's nice. It's a paid advertisement in the end and people get that. But they're not asking the community to get involved into something bigger than that. And I think that's where the missed opportunity is. And for me, breaching marketing and sustainability, sustainability more from a social impact point of view, it's so, so important in this day and age because societies in the world are divided. Politics are extremely complicated across the world. So you need to find things that connect us, you know, instead of things that separate us. And I don't think that just selling your product or your service will do that.

22:10You need to find a higher purpose that connects people, not only gives you the sense of belonging, gives you a purpose to say, yes, I will buy Dettol instead of that other brand because I have a commitment to my people in India, in my community, because I want them to see my message to help them overcome the pandemic the way I'm doing it with my family, for example. And I think finding that, Alessandro, is not easy. It's very easy to say it in a podcast, you know, after you did the case study, but going through the discovery process of crafting the idea, launching the idea, finding the community, learning from the community, fine tuning the approach.

22:47It takes time. It takes a lot of years of experience. I don't believe that there are smarter marketers. I think everyone is smart. You just need to be exposed to the right experience over time to learn to do things and then replicate and improve. And in this case, me, I've been learning and I'm very passionate about this topic, as you can hear. And I've been always trying to say, what can we do better? What can we do better? Because things are never perfect. You can always do them better. And I think it's that striving and that ambition for success that that society can learn on its own how to improve itself.

23:22And you don't need the brands. You don't need the politicians. You just need the communities to come together. And sometimes they need an idea, a creative idea to spark that. And based on that, close your remarks, what is the marketing industry look like, in your opinion, in two, three years? I know it's a big question and no one knows the future. But in your opinion, if you have to say in two years, this is what marketing industry... In two, three years, I think more automation, more integration of systems, more integration of agencies, less people, more processes, unfortunately. But I also think that people are going to get tired of too much technology.

24:01So I think there's also a tipping point where people are going to realize that, you know what, we need to go back to basics and really have a truly human centered growth strategy, which is part of the passion that I have for joining Hyperquake, you know, my current employer who have that human centered growth DNA baked into their system. And this is why I think for me, with Storymaking for Good, it's giving me a very good chance to scale this mindset across marketers in the world. So I hope that whoever is listening thinks twice. Next time, they're going to launch a campaign out there and they bring the opinion of the people they're trying to target before the opinion of the brand.

24:42Love it. Pepe, thank you so much for sharing all your knowledge with us today, your careers, all the experiences so far, the importance of the messaging, the purpose, the co-creation. So I wish you best of luck with all the future endeavors there. My pleasure. Molto piacere, Alessandro. Anche per me. Grazie. Thank you, Epe. It was a pleasure. And this was the Influence Factor by the Influencer Marketing Factory. And I'll see you in the next episode.