What is Marketing? With Kory Marchisotto [Uncensored Renegades]

0:06Welcome ladies and gentlemen to Uncensored Renegades. This is a new show that I'm launching with Corey Marchesotto, and we're going to be focusing in on leadership. And we're going to be doing that in a new format, which is the two of us tackling one topic for 20 minutes. So shorter than normal show, but super focused and with the absolute rock star that is Corey. I know you're going to love this. Now, if you want to make sure you get this every single week, please do go and subscribe to Uncensored Renegades in your feed, and then you'll never, ever miss an episode again. But without further ado, let's get into it.

0:38Here it is. it's okay boss what's up johnny boy we are well we're back in france i think we're gonna have to make this series like tour of france aren't we like basically we were can last time we're in paris this time which is a pretty cool location i mean who's better than us yeah right one thing that struck me actually when we last last chatted is you'd done a session in can with a group of marketers and a really basic question you asked them which really struck me as a question we never ask is what is marketing? And I remember you telling me like there were no two similar answers. No, I asked in that moment, I asked 25 people in the see it be it program and I got 25 answers.

1:18So that was a signal for me to say, if these 25 people who are actually in the discipline can agree on a word, what happens if I take this to a broader audience? So I got back to the office and I gave everybody the same prompt. And this time I opened it up to about 150 people. And it's unbelievable what came back. So I thought it was fascinating if you think about other functions in an organization. If you said to somebody, what is finance? What is supply chain? What is legal? I would venture to guess it's not gonna be elastic in its definition. Most people are gonna be somewhat within the same type of framework.

2:00When you think about marketing, and I looked at the responses and I would love to get your head on it and we can react and respond to some of them. It's purely elastic. The extremes are so far away from each other with everything in between. I think that what that signals is marketing is not one thing. Marketing is everything. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. it's quite funny isn't it when when people ask you what you do and you say just to see what they think the job is or what do you get phoned up asking for advice yeah i mean people phone them i've got a new website can you give me some advice i've got no idea i'm probably the last person to get and give advice on a website you know i have people do that for me you know what i mean well what does your your daughter say she said you color and sticker so you do the cutting the sticking and the coloring in but cutting the sticking and the coloring in this is amazing Well, my mom still goes to the beauty parlor as 80 year old women do to get her hair done.

3:04And every time she goes to the beauty parlor, what does she talk about? She talks about her kids and what they do. And she'll call me every once in a while before she has to go to the beauty parlor to say, hey, you still sell lipstick for a living, right? So to my mom, I sell lipstick for a living. And I'm like, you know what? But sure, let's go with that. Okay. But I love your answer you gave just earlier about it's everything. Because I really believe, and I think part of the reason marketers career-wise get unstuck is they stay in the tactics. It's like I'm in charge of the social media handle or I do the print campaign or, you know what I mean?

3:44And it's like, actually, as marketers, once we realize that what we do impacts everything in business, and also when everyone in our business impacts on marketing you see the world differently and suddenly you go hang on a minute I'm responsible for how this brand turns up in the world what people think about it what they experience what they say about it is down to me so it changes everything in terms of how you view your role doesn't it yeah and I think it goes the other way too as marketers brand people communications this is all more or less within the same vein you recognize that at some point.

4:21What I would like everybody else to recognize in all the other functions is actually every function is responsible for brand. Brand is your thing. Your brand equity is your value out in the marketplace to whoever your stakeholder may be, including your community, your consumers, your investors, whatever the case may be. So if you are in finance, you are responsible for brand the same way as somebody who's in supply chain, the same way somebody is in legal. And all of the codes and cues and language you use and every single signal you give to the world says something about who your brand is. And I think very oftentimes in organizations, everybody thinks brand's job belongs to the brand people.

5:09and my perspective is brand's job is everybody's job yeah that's so that's really good it's i did oddly i did a finance degree right so one of the things i learned in my finance degree is i think about 60 to 70 percent of the average business's value is intangible assets and intangible assets are pretty much brand goodwill and it's like that so you know brand is the majority of the value of your company. So building that is obviously going to be hugely important to shareholders, to employees, to everyone. Yeah. And it's amazing when you think about the number of people you encounter and what that means to how someone's going to talk about your brand.

5:52So for example, I have a corporate credit card, so it says Elf on it. So when I'm checking into a hotel or anytime I take my card out, somebody, oh, you work for Elf. Now think about that interaction and what that's going to leave behind for them. If this is a positive interaction, if they like me, if we have a good moment together, if I leave a positive impression, that's the impression they have about the Elf brand. On the contrary, if they encounter somebody who works for Elf and they don't have a positive association in that moment, they're actually going to have a negative perception of the brand.

6:31And that's where this idea of brand, what is it really, which is it a feeling? Is it a promise? Is it an emotion? Is it an impact? Is it influence? And all of those words are actually true. Every single person who encounters anything that carries the name of your brand, the people who work for it, the community members who buy it, the product itself is in fact your brand equity. I think there must be an inverse correlation between like the size of the company and the understanding of the brand in that context. Because whenever you talk to like a startup founder, that like everything, like the employee handbook, the, you know, the uniform.

7:16It's like you can see that because they've got no advertising budget, everything has to be media, right? You just treat everything as a media opportunity. Like the first time we put product down the production line becomes, you know, a viral hit, you know. So I think you think about it, but I think part of the problem is as, you know, we progress into bigger companies, we dissect marketing into its kind of constituent parts, don't we? And therefore we, marketing gets reduced to the, to the one P of promotion. And I think we've got to get marketers to realize it's all the four P's, not just the one P.

7:48There's way more than four P's. Well, there's more than four P's. I know, we talk about this a lot. Yeah. Yeah. And I 100 % agree with you. And again, I think it depends on where does brand sit in the organization? What is its wingspan? And even the person themselves, because if you have great influence and you can prove out that there is real value in the contributions that are being made in this regard, then you can actually influence everybody to ensure that the brand does in fact radiate from every chair. The brand has to radiate from every chair, which is why I actually think about brand as an ethos.

8:25It's really about the spirit of the thing that you're up to. And that is how it comes across and who you hire should be within that ethos. And if you are a brand that is a bold disruptor, like Elf, for example, you need to hire bold disruptors. You're not going to get disruptive work if you hire conservative people. So the key is, it's also a hiring practice. It's what the walls in your office say. It's how your people carry it from every single chair that they sit in. And that's 24-7. Again, you're out at dinner, entertaining, you and I can go out to dinner together the night, I'm going to take out my elf card.

9:06It's, somebody's going to see that name and that interaction they have at that moment, even though there is not a single piece of product on the table is going to mean something to them yeah i think you could argue actually that there's a very close correlation between how clear you are on your brand and what your hiring policies look like do you know i mean because like if you join a company and you look at the hiring policy and go well that could be any company they don't know what their brand is whereas you know i mean there's certain companies when you go oh my god they have that as a hiring policy they're you know but actually it speaks volumes doesn't it because we know that our brand is so important to us that we know that that's got to be reflected in the people we are and that means you have to codify your ethos that is fundamental and if that ethos is codified and it's on the walls and it is surrounding every area that will come across in the people and they need to find themselves in that word in those words otherwise they're going to have an energy conflict with themselves if their antenna is not aligned to the ethos it may work for a little while until it doesn't because they're going to realize that what they feel and who they are and what they represent and what they put out is actually not aligned to this thing.

10:13And one of the things I actually love most when we do the interviewing process is somebody can see like six of us in the organization and they'll get to me last if I'm the final decision for whatever this particular hire is. And at the end, I'll always ask them for feedback. And the number one piece of feedback they have for me every time is that we are remarkably consistent. that means the ethos is super strong because we i never spoke to the five people they interviewed before we never talked about this we never strategized or had a you know game theory put together on how they just went through the line of process eventually ended up on my desk so for every single person to say my goodness no matter who i met you are remarkably consistent that's really meaningful that's very meaningful isn't it and this stuff this stuff is not easy as well i I mean, like whenever I've been in businesses where we've tried to do this, this is constant battle because new employees come, things change, you know, the boss changes.

11:12And you've got to really fight hard, don't you, to keep the integrity of that. For sure. All right. So let's talk about these words. Okay, come on. Bring it on. Let's dive in. So we've got like 150 words that came back. I'm going to just throw out the one that hit the most times, that was repeated the most often, which is connection. That one was probably the one that while it is also an elastic term, I think it's very clear that if you're marketing energy, activity, whatever it is that you define marketing as does not make a connection to someone, then that would mean it did not succeed. So I think the word connection, probably a lot of people could align to your brand has to connect.

12:02It has to make an emotional connection, has to make somebody feel something. So I would say that one didn't surprise me, but I do think it's worth saying because it was the one that people said most. The one that I actually, that probably tickled me most was alchemy. and what I love about the word alchemy when I think about the work that I do and why it hits me as a CMO is we are taking things that are disparate pieces and parts and ingredients and formulas that look like nothing and then somehow have to transform it into this piece of gold that we put out to market for millions of people to see so I love the idea of real value creation in there isn't it you know creating something that didn't exist before the similar words that that struck me on the list right by it was magic and now there's always a danger when you say magic because people think that you're unaccountable that that you're just you know you're just kind of like you know it's not business but actually there's the thing the thing i find with marketing is we're creating something in the future and most people can't see it yet and so therefore what you know looking back it's like oh that's amazing how did you create this buzz around this launch or Or how do you create this new brand?

13:18And it is magical when it comes to life, but people don't see it in the beginning. And often one of my challenges as a marketer is like we naturally have this vision and idea of where we're going, but no one sees it. Very often you have those battles where why are you spending all this time doing this? Magic for me, I see it all the time. When you are in a creative flow state, when you have a group of people together who are ideating on something and you see when it catches and then it starts to build and transform. It is true magic. It is bibbidi-bobbidi-boo. It is not something that you could ever put in a formula and a framework.

13:57It is the chemistry that happens between the ingredients that each of the people are putting on the table. And the greatest campaigns are true magic among the humans who are ideating them. There's no doubt. and when you look at some of the greatest work out there you have to ask yourself like what happened in this room that made these people come to this thing and it's actually really magical when you've been in those rooms yeah and it's really hard to explain to somebody why isn't it like because there's there's all those moments we've been in the boardroom where we're going well i'm going to show you our new campaign and you get that horrible kind of tumbleweed moment and you go this is amazing this is partly why i think the magic's often seen in retrospect but never at the time.

14:41I had a recent campaign that we put together that I'm super excited about. And I was showing it to our exec team and we couldn't get it to work on the big screen. So they actually all wound up standing behind me and I had my small little laptop in front of me. So talk about not a high production moment. And what I found fascinating in this 30 second spot was everybody laughed in a different place. And I actually loved that because what it said to me is there's enough appeal in here to a wide group of people that that they can penetrate different dimensions based on who they are and what it says about them or their field of view or their perspective 100 you know when you've got something like that don't you yeah totally one other word that jumped at me on the page actually which i think we neglect as marketers is the role of strategy because the reason i feel so passionate about this is that as marketers we own the relationship with our customers right so we've got a hotline to our customer we should have a hotline to our customers you know we're getting their feedback daily we're thinking about you know connection who we talked about at the beginning and therefore we should therefore be in the best position possible to be writing the strategy for the future of the brand but but again because we're so dragged into tactics and this quarter this month this week's results we can take our eye off the ball from a strategy point of view but i think like as a marketer we should be owning the strategy absolutely and all of the pieces and parts that get put out from innovation, innovation has to have a strategy.

16:14You can't just create a piece of product without having a strategy. Why is it going to be a green glass versus a red, blue, or orange one? There's a reason for that. Somebody decided that the glass has to be green. So when you think about strategy, every campaign has to have a strategy? Who are you trying to speak to based on what insight? Is that the strongest signal? And one of the ways I think about an effective strategy is what I call constellation building. We are all inundated with massive amounts of information. And where I think people get lost is swimming through the sky of stars. It's infinite.

16:57So you have to bind the brightest stars that shine and create a constellation. And then when you have that constellation, now that's your strategy. I took these brightest signals, I'm going to put them together. And that is now going to translate into a series of actions that I'm going to take in order to move the brand forward. Yeah. And it's quite pragmatic as well, isn't it? Strategy. So we sometimes think strategy is all about kind of clever words on a page, but ultimately what you're doing is boiling down, what's the consumer needs? Do I have the ability to meet that need? Do I have a go to market that's going to be able to supply that?

17:32Do I have a brand that has the right to play in it? You know, it's thinking through those practical things. And I think that's where marketers can join the dots together. I mean, the supply chain director, I'm sure go, yeah, of course we could make it. The salesperson go, yeah, I'd love to sell it. But as a marketer, we're there to go, is there a real need? Should we be the brand to do it? And how do we then execute it? There's one question I love to ask everybody is what problem are we trying to solve? Great question. And that pauses people in their tracks. And once you get through the, what problem am I trying to solve?

18:02The next question is why can only my brand do this? Very, very good question. So maybe let me ask you, what was the most surprising thing that you saw on the list when you got these 150 responses back? Did anything surprised you thought oh I hadn't thought about that I wouldn't say that anything necessarily surprised me other than the wingspan of it and the fact that it could travel from selling some people see marketing as selling to magic and alchemy and and and everything in between I don't think I was expecting that many different words to come back I thought maybe the list would be half of what it was.

18:44So if I just think about some of the words, for example, for our audience, we got everything from storytelling, advertising, vision, consumer behavior, creativity, messaging, engagement, community, trust building, belonging. I love this word belonging and the idea that we can create a place of belonging where like-minded communities can come together to connect I think is really what is that the essence of a brand the one that jumps out there and I know I know this gets a hard time um it's storytelling like I mean some people like to really put storytelling down as this sort of you know I don't know a hobby type thing but but if we think about what a brand is it's basically how you feel about it what you understand about the brand and that comes through stories it might be your friend that's introduced it to you it might be experience you've had but as human beings we've been telling each other stories ever since the first humans existed right you know don't go over there because there's a bear around the you know about to eat you or whatever you know what I mean it's like it's fundamental to who we are isn't it the whole idea of storytelling and we are the chief storytellers in the organization internally as well as externally I think the ability to kind of create a clear story for your brand and you know explain the problem you solve as you said is absolutely And being able to tell that story in a captivating and compelling way.

20:09There are many stories that we hear that go over our heads or that don't hit us in some way. So as a chief storyteller, your job is to take the story on the road and make the incremental improvements to it based on the signals that you get back. It's not because you write a story that it's actually a good one. it becomes a good story when you can see that it touches people in a certain way and those little increments make a huge difference i heard this other word that i'd never heard before which is a new one which is story living oh right i had the same reaction it's live isn't it it's evolving constantly and it's active and it's involvement and i think it comes a little bit back to when people say, do you, you know, talk the talk or walk the walk?

20:58When I think about story living, it's actually a brand living its own story rather than just telling you what that story is. So I actually really like that reframing, because if I think about a lot of the work that we do at Elf, it's actually beacons of inspiration because we are living the brand ethos in real time. exactly that's wonderful I asked as we're on 20 minutes I think that's the perfect place to say what's your story everybody all right love it thank you thank you