The Formula for Standing Out in the Age of Infinite Content, with Debbie Millman & Christina Bottis | Ep. 430

0:01Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray. And join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. Well, thank you everybody for coming. I have two great panelists and I'll let them introduce themselves, but they have a huge track record and I'm excited to talk about brand. Especially, I think brand is having a renaissance right now because of all this AI. So I like to hear your opinions too, but I'll let you, I'll go Debbie first and then Rosina.

0:52Debbie Millman:Hi everyone, I'm Debbie Milman and I am a designer and author and educator at the School of Visual Arts, where I founded the world's first ever master's program in branding. So hopefully I'll be able to add some value, hopefully. And I'm also a podcast host, a long-time host of the show Design Matters, since 21 years now. Yeah, she was one of the first podcasters in the world, so it's a pretty cool thing. First ever on design. Yeah. Awesome. um hi i'm christina bodice i have not started a podcast yet but maybe i will be convinced after sitting between the two of you i'm from chicago do we have chicagoans in the there we go i've been in b2b marketing for over 20 years and i've worked at pretty much every stage and size of company so you know how you're branding and and the programs and really the budget that you have available to you, that's really important.

1:50So excited to chat through to your point, right? Brand is back, baby. It's back. And I'm Daniel. I'm a recovering marketing ops person. And then I decided to start the Marketing Millennials. It's a newsletter podcast, events. We do it all. And I'm excited to chat. And I want to open the session because with the session title, And the goal of this is break through the noise. So before we go anywhere, I want to challenge the premise. In the world of seemingly infinite AI-generated content, is trying to shout louder than the noise a losing battle? Debbie, what does breaking through actually mean to you?

2:31Debbie Millman:Breaking through means creating something that is both original, well-crafted, and meaningful. because you can scream from the tallest rooftop, but unless you're saying something that people are interested in hearing, there's too much cacophony out there. Nobody's going to pay attention or listen. What's your opinion on that? Couldn't agree more. To me, it's about connecting with the person who matters to you, right? AI allows us to go fast, but you could just suck faster, right? And what I find, And it's a trap, right, to know that you can do so much more. But if any of you have ever been in the position where, you know, your team or your company hasn't necessarily done the ICP work, AI and speeding things up is going to be dangerous, right?

3:31And it gives the opportunity for us to go back to the foundational strategy, which I think is really important and probably the only way you can get to that point of connection. Yeah, and I'll just add one thing. I have a little formula that I say is it's A plus consistency plus B plus content. So I think you need to be above average in the noise out there, especially in the newsletter world. And above average in the noise is usually you having a strong point of view, a strong stand. And then consistency wins in the long run. I know a lot of podcasters that stop at 19 podcasts. And if they just went to the 25th podcast, they might be a top 20 podcast.

4:09So I think breaking through the noise is just sometimes just lasting longer than the rest.

4:14Debbie Millman:Yeah. You said B plus content? I have a higher standard than that, but I think you need to be above the noise. Because I think anything that's B plus, I kind of feel is mediocre. Yeah. And so I think that in some ways you need A plus content. And consistency is only going to be important if you have something that people are going to want to engage with. Totally. I think that what you need both is consistency. You need a really compelling message to get people to try you. If they try you and they don't like you, no matter how loud you are or how consistent you are, they're not going to come back.

5:00and I'll add to that, you need to understand which topics you have to own for your audience. So anybody trying to get more LLM traffic? Oh, everybody should have your hands up there. Come on now. So what we've seen is there's an absolute correlation to the frequency, right? Of like, you got to feed the beast, but we don't want to feed it with anything that is less than the standard that we want to put out on behalf of our brand, if you don't have the strategy for these are the pillar topics, here's the cluster around it, here are things we can collaborate or even just brainstorm around, you're going to get like a buffet of stuff that doesn't necessarily ladder up to ownership.

5:47And that's what we're starting to see, right? AI slop, just things to be out there for the sake of being out there, not necessarily leading somebody down a consideration set so that they ultimately say, I'd like to try you, right? You've convinced me that you know this and I'd like to consider you as a solution.

6:05Debbie Millman:If I could also add to that, because you said strategy, a lot of people think strategy is just a plan, right? It's our unique plan, but it's not. Strategy is actually behaving differently than your competitors and being able to offer something of value that is different to your competitors. It's not just having a smart plan. And so I think what people need to understand is what strategy really means. And I often use Michael Porter's strategic definition. You have to behave differently than your competitors. And that is what is going to ultimately pique somebody's interest. If there is something that's different, that's also compelling to them.

6:48And I had one more thing. I think the noise, people forget that the noise is every piece of content out there. You're not only competing against like your industry or you're competing against that Debbie's podcast for attention. You're competing against a brand that's putting out content. You're competing against a Netflix show. Like you, your standard of content, like you said, I'm going to change it to a plus content and a plus consistency my new formula, but it needs to be, you're competing against all this different kind of content. So if you're creating the best B2B content, you might be failing because it might be worse than the other great content out there.

7:26And I want to go to Debbie, I have a question for you because you've argued that branding is manufactured meaning. But you've also said there has to be a real reason for a brand to exist from the inside out. For every marketer in this room who's hired to manage a brand, how do they actually protect the real meaning when the business is demanding immediate results?

7:50Debbie Millman:If you're living for immediate results, then you're thinking short term. You have to be able to have a roadmap for growth that looks at the trajectory of your brand. And that includes respecting the integrity, the inherent integrity of who you are, but also living on a continuum between recognition and surprise. So you have to have a little bit of both. If you're not living within the framework of what your brand stands for, people aren't going to recognize it. They're not going to understand it. People don't love change. Think about all the changes that we see in branding. Has anybody ever remembered a time where a brand was redesigned and the whole world stood up and said, yay.

8:43Debbie Millman:It doesn't happen. If anything, people are immediately criticizing it. Inevitably, someone is going to say that the redesign looks like genitalia. It always happens. And then maybe a year, 18 months later, people will calm down and begin to accept it, It's so much so that if you change it again in another couple of years, the same thing will happen over and over and over again. We are hardwired to hate change. We have a reptilian brain that is involuntary. The reptilian brain actually manages all of our involuntary behavior. Eye blinking, digestion, heartbeat, breathing. and that fear that we experience when we don't know what is going to happen next is the same fear that we have when we might almost get hit by a bicycle.

9:38Debbie Millman:That adrenaline spike, we don't will that. We don't say to ourselves, okay, adrenaline, kick in now when I need you. So when anybody sees a change in a brand that doesn't make sense to them, they will immediately go to, I don't like this, what's changed, this isn't for me anymore. So you have to be really careful when you make those immediate changes because you're addressing something that might be happening culturally to stay within what people understand about your brand and then move it just enough to surprise them and excite them about what you're doing as opposed to try to do something everybody else might be doing just because it's of the moment.

10:19I also want you to go into what that manufactured meaning means? Because I think like you have a really good definition of what brand is. And I think like, I want the audience to like know what, how you think about it.

10:31Debbie Millman:The reason I say that branding is manufactured meaning is because brands don't operate on their own. They're not self-directed. We create brands and brands are constructed meaning. We assign a whole set of values around whatever it is we're marketing. It could be water, it could be sneakers, it could be a handbag, it could be a conference. All of these ways that we communicate what something means is part of the world of branding, and that includes behavioral psychology. It includes cultural anthropology, includes economics, and of course, design and creativity. But we don't, This brand doesn't come to life on its own.

11:18Debbie Millman:It's not self-directed. And so what we need to be able to do when we're creating a brand is create enough meaning around the visual language of the brand, around the psychological language of a brand, so that people will understand what it is. But that doesn't happen without us. And so when I say it's manufactured meaning, it's human created, that this signifies something. and that signification could also come with a whole set of beliefs and affiliations. And we've been creating meaning through symbols and behavior since we started recording our reality on the walls of Lescaux, the caves in Spain and France.

12:00Debbie Millman:Religions in many ways are brands because it's a set of associations that we associate with something else. So for lack of a better way of saying it, it's associations we create to allow us to understand what something means via consensus. That's the other part of this. We can create this, but unless we all agree what this stands for, then it's really not a brand. It's just a thing with a name on it. It's a commodity. Yeah. Well, brands that are commodities these are still brands. Yeah. I also think you have to figure out how to defend that to your CFO. Right. So parts of brands are immediate growth levers and parts are more long-term place.

12:45And, and being able to demonstrate your knowledge of that typically, if at least in my experience, the CFO looks as brand as this like nice thing to have. Somehow we disconnected it from the funnel, right? We put it in brand and then we put it in demand. Well, you can't get demand without this part. And more so now than ever, I mean, to your point, right? And unless people understand what you stand for and what it means to them, it's probably unlikely you're going to be able to drive more people into the funnel. So being able to educate them on this is the fuel, this is the Lamborghini. I have to have both.

13:26Otherwise we're just going to sit in the driveway, but also managing those expectations to your original question about what happens when they're like, I want to see things now, being able to show these are the now things. These are in-month or in-quarter ROI. These are more like six months, end of year, depending on which stage you are. That typically, you know, assuages any sort of like question from the board or the CFO on when am I going to see the results without you having to be answering all the time. And I want to go deeper in that with you because I know that it sounds good, but a lot of times there's a lot of internal friction.

14:06There's a lot of like, like, like campaign time, like cycle times. There's a lot of like dealing with a lot of team and it slows us down. And I know one of your point of views is built around speed. So I want to go into that a little bit and talk about like how you think about it, how to move fast, but also like think about brand long-term. Yeah. And you never are moving fast at the cost of quality, right? Like you want to be able to move efficiently and effectively right now. We know like we can no longer pass a baton. We have to be iterative. Just things are changing so rapidly now. Like we can talk about this later, but there's a whole funnel before they even get into the funnel.

14:54And the only way we discovered that is we've just tried a bunch of stuff and we were like, oh, okay, this is different. So when we talk about speed, I talk to customers every single day and everyone has the same problem. Alignment, right? That could be with your boss. That could be, we have a head nod right in the front. Thank you for that. It's more about how do we more quickly get aligned so that we can make the next decision so that we can go and get it into market. Not let's skip really important steps like ICP, persona, what's the value prop, just to get it into the market for market's sake.

15:29So it's the balance of what's the minimum viable product to get it into market so we can start to learn. Can we go faster by doing our due diligence and aligning at the decision points? And then based on those results, then you have validation to spend more time and more money, right? To say, we have this test. Now let's go double down, pour some gasoline on that fire and you can back it up. And that's why I think one of the best channels that I've seen to validate ideas quickly is social and people are like, you could put out things so quickly, validate the audience. The algorithm is the audience.

16:09They'll give you quick feedback like your message is wrong, your idea is wrong. There's features like trial reels where you can trial not to your audience if you're scared to do that.

16:19Debbie Millman:When you're doing that, you also have to understand that there's got to be a reason that you believe it in the first place. And if you understand what that reason is, you might have to take a risk in getting people to understand it. If people don't like something, it might just be that they don't understand it. In relation to alignment, I often say that common behavior, common vocabulary doesn't always equate to common behavior. What we think is evolutionary change might be revolutionary to someone. What we think is beautiful might be ugly to somebody else. So I think part of the risk in doing that is understanding what you want to be able to do for the brand.

17:00Debbie Millman:And if there is a reason that you're doing something, but your audience doesn't understand it and is saying we don't like it it might not be because it's bad it might be because they just don't understand what you're trying to do and that gets back to the strategy or it's the wrong audience like it's or it's like that's what i've seen a long time it's like you might be hitting down the wrong customer profile like i know you hate that word customer profile but the the wrong audience for that message and you might want to pivot to the wrong that other person and maybe your followers or, but the good thing about social in these days, I think if you could say your message, right, it will like, it is an interest based graph.

17:42It will get to that, that audience that cares.

17:45Debbie Millman:But there are times where people have this sort of intense reaction to something, hate it, or say they hate it, or, or a contingent of consumers say they hate it. And then speaking of, you know, quarterly returns, the announced, the next announced returns on Wall Street shows that the brand is actually improved because it just took a little bit of time for people to understand what was happening or for the people that weren't outraged not to weigh in. A lot of times the outrage is just the outrage. It's people that aren't outraged aren't necessarily going to be like, that's a great thing. Yeah.

18:22I was going to ask you, because I want to ask your opinion on speed, because you've built a podcast for 20 years, and it took time to get to the iconic state it is at now. So how do you think about speed when building brands? Is there times to go fast? And what are those times to go fast with speed?

18:44Debbie Millman:I think that there are many times where it's absolutely appropriate to go fast. but there needs to be a really considered thoughtful deliberate reason to do that if you're just reacting then chances are you're going to fail if you are moving quickly because you've come to an agreement internally about something that needs to happen and you want to be able to engage the culture in some important way, then yes. But I think if you're trying to go fast to beat yourself or to create a scenario where people will take notice just of the speed, then I think you're really running the risk of burning out and really quickly.

19:36Debbie Millman:and people see through that. I mean, I think that I'm a huge, huge fan of what is capable with AI. What I'm worried about is using it when we don't have any other better ideas. And so if you're using it for speed because you haven't come out with anything better, I don't see it ever ending well. I could be wrong about that. Maybe if the stars align and something happens where you get pixie dust thrown into the equation, it could happen. But I've yet to see that. Yeah. I mean, we're all saying the same thing, which is going faster with something that was well thought out and can be great will go well.

20:22If it wasn't thought out or you're doing it for the wrong reasons in the beginning, going faster is just going to get you to a poor outcome faster. So it's starting in the beginning and really spending the time to think it through and make sure you know your intent, you know the goal, you know the audience, budget, whatever you go through. Going faster hopefully will get you to that better outcome versus, oh, we just did this because I wanted to say AI. Which, I mean, hey, it happens. I get it. But that's not the true value of AI, right? not getting to a crappy outcome faster. That doesn't help anybody.

21:01Right. Yeah. I have a question for you, Christina. I think a lot of great ideas or creativity get killed because there's like dysfunction in an organization between approvals or who has the final say, or there's people making decisions by committee. So how do you and your organization make sure that creative ideas rise to the top instead of like get bogged down by approvals or many decisions and stuff like that? Well, I'm lucky, right? I mean, Mural is a visual collaboration platform. So our whole goal is to help people collaborate and get from execution to outcome. But it's not to say that that doesn't happen sometimes.

21:45I think in my experience, you have to find a unifying thing across the teams and root it in. And to me, that's always been the customer, right? The audience, the persona. And if we can all agree that we're trying to get to this person and do this thing, that usually solves a good chunk of it. And then I think you have to, people have to feel safe to fail. And in this iterative world that we're now in of AI and put it out there, and maybe it goes out to social, and maybe somebody really doesn't like it, that's okay. We learn something. We learn not what not to do. And often that's just as valuable, but I think it has to be deliberate, right?

22:28Being an iterative team doesn't happen without intent. And you can't just tell people to like, go be creative and, you know, bring back the fruits of your labor. There's a certain amount of trust that that's okay to do. And there's a certain amount of process that needs to facilitate it. I want to talk about AI a little bit, because I know we haven't discussed sit at the conference at all um um content you did that really well i was like wait what um i know now content is infinite and it basically is free to create content and but when everybody can generate everything what is the thing that still actually costs something What is the new scarce resource?

23:13Debbie Millman:Ingenuity, imagination, originality. I have no issue with using AI to make things more efficient and to streamline operations. I've yet to use it to send out emails, but only because I know about the open claw sort of debacle. And I'm afraid of something like that happening to me. but I think that as somebody that is using AI to do a lot of research I've yet and I'd be astonished if it happened I'd be thrilled if it happened I've yet to get anything back that is truly originally breathtakingly ingenious it's hard enough for humans to do that let alone for We're a machine. I mean, it's also taking all human ideas and spitting it into, so it's everything in the past that has been created.

24:07Debbie Millman:I want to be moved. I want my heart to break. I want to feel tingles when I see something really, really original. And that's what is so wonderful about the human brain, is we can construct these things and make this magic that is not necessarily about speed, but is much more about craft and intention. I would. So the biggest shift that we've observed, but we are also moving to strategically is we talk a lot in B2B about thought leadership and I've started to call it leader thoughts because what people want is what is your point of view as a brand, but they actually don't want to hear it from the brand anymore.

24:47They want to hear it from the people who make up the brand. So that means your executive communication strategy. That means the person like, you know, we send out product updates and do videos and that's all cool. We've started to say, get the engineer who built it, have him walk through them, right? Get the marketer who launched the campaign, have them talk through it. And there was a really interesting story that someone had shared with me that generationally, right? Dating myself, but the, when we grew up being an authentic brand was the brand itself trying to be honest, right? And open. We were like, oh, that's so great.

25:25Then there was another generation after that where influencers started to become present. And then we were like heartbroken because we're like, oh my God, you're making money. That's so like, that's not authentic. That's so scary. This generation knows it. They're like, we know, we know not only are you an influencer and you're giving your point of view, we also know you're getting paid. So it's this very interesting amalgamation of all these types of people. And now all they want, they want to hear from the actual person. And then, like you said, they're going to take the point of view as they want.