The Trust Gap: Why Most B2B Brands Play It Safe, and Lose

Rob Carroll: Foreign. Building a great B2B go to market engine starts with understanding what works and evolving it. I'm your host Rob Carroll and this is a go to market perspective where marketing and sales leaders share how they're transforming their organizations, foundational best practices, smart trade offs and practical AI delivering value and scale today. If you remove the logo from most B2B tech ads today, you'd have no idea which company they belong to. Feels like a sea of agentic powered yada yada. Uh, founders and marketing leaders like to talk the talk about differentiation and our go to market strategies. They evangelize bold storytelling, humanizing the brand and standing out in crowded markets. But in reality most still play it safe. Today I'm sitting down with Scott Bennett, senior director of brand at qlik, to explore what might be the real constraint behind all of this.

Scott Bennett: Trust.

Rob Carroll: Specifically the trust required to take creative risks, challenge conventional thinking and show up differently in the market. I'm excited to dig into the gap between what companies say about innovation and risk taking and what they allow their creative teams to do in practice. Scott, welcome.

Scott Bennett: Hey, good to be here. Good to see you again Rob.

Rob Carroll: Um, you as well. Why don't you give everyone just a little bit of your background, your journey through the creative world and what your current role at QLIK looks like.

Scott Bennett: I was always drawn towards at an early age visual uh, storytelling m graphic design. And I kind of inadvertently trained myself for that career. I have early childhood memories of like grabbing the um, you know, remember newspapers? I'm old enough to remember newspapers and they had the whole entertainment section and I remember being at my grandma's house and she had this big box of tracing paper and, and I would take that paper and put it over like the movie advertisements and redraw them. And what I didn't know at the time was I was teaching myself about composition, visual storytelling, typography, balance. You know, all these things that um, started to feel natural to me later in life when I started to pursue a job as a creative. So fast forward, I get out of school, I get a job at a radio station group in San Francisco as their in house graphic designer. And it was fantastic. It was um, a head first dive into the world of brand which I uh, frankly didn't know much about at the time. We had very distinct brands there. We had a news station, a sports uh, station and then two rock stations. So I'm juggling all these like disparate brands with different audiences and different listeners. And if that wasn't challenging enough, this is all Happening many years ago, traditional form of media was suddenly finding itself, having to grapple with, you know, what, what does a radio station, website do? It taught me a lot about brand and it taught me a lot about agility and it taught me a lot about change. So when I made the big change of jumping into tech, there was a lot to learn, but at the core of it, the problems that I was drawn to solving, I had already been solving it in, in a different industry under different circumstances. So there was always this kind of thread of, uh, familiarity, you know, going all the way back to that tracing paper at my grandma's house. So, um, you know, I moved from radio into, uh, an ad tech company. It was, you know, early days of programmatic advertising. This was 14 years ago when this happened. And you know, I, I jumped straight into the world of, of AI before a lot of people were even really talking about it. So then I just kind of stayed in the world of tech. That B2B SaaS leading creative teams, uh, across a number of companies, including Informatica, where you and I met. That's where I kind of grew my management chops. Having, you know, teams of creatives reporting to me, people doing the jobs I used to do, like video production, like graphic design and kind of, you know, shaping their careers. And, uh, that was really rewarding. And then I went into consulting and worked, uh, for a variety of companies, helping them with everything from brand campaigns to floor to ceiling rebrands to, you know, any type of problem they needed to solve. And eventually another former, uh, Informatica colleague reached out who worked at Qlik, and they had this new role. I was thrilled with the job description. It just seemed like a great fit. It was this great blend of being, um, not just a creative leader, which, you know, I had kind of been there and done that for a long time. But actually being a strategic leader, a thinker, that sounds really grandiose, but, but that's uh, that's what they needed.

Rob Carroll: That's great. I'm, we're definitely going to dig deeper into kind of that leap into the strategic role. And I just imagine if when you were a kid, instead of tracing, you did what I did and you just used Silly Putty to pick up the ink. You know, your career may have been in a completely different direction.

Scott Bennett: I would have saved a whole lot of time. What is. That's like Silly Putty, the original LLM, just taking other, taking other people's work and showing it to you in a different way.

Rob Carroll: I think that's anthropic's um, billboard on 101.

Scott Bennett: Yeah.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Rob Carroll: Ah, well, let's, let's go, like, right into it then. So, like, when we talk about brand marketing from a strategy level, like, what is the real job? If you want to simplify it in the elevator pitch with a founder or a, uh, leader of an organization, what is brand marketing's number one job?

Scott Bennett: What do they care about? They care about revenue, they care about growth, they care about sales. So the way that I talk about a brand with that audience is if I just sum it up in one sentence. A brand makes your company easy to choose before a buyer even talks to your sales team. That's it. I mean, and that's not it. It's a lot more than that. But, but, but my elevator pitch is, you know, you've got to be. You've got to be in their minds. You've got to be in the conversations. Shortlisting happens before any RFPs go out, before any demos are viewed, um, before anybody signs up for your newsletter or downloads your ebook. Like that shortlisting has already happened. They already have an idea of, like, you know, the small number of companies they want to talk to for, for their problem. So brand is getting into their minds before that happens. I'm sure by the end of this podcast, people will be tired of the whole 95.5rule. I know we'll get into that. But it's really, It's a human problem. It's a human brain problem that you're trying to solve because people have, you know, only so much bandwidth, only so much mental availability. So when a problem surfaces, if your company is in their mind as a company that solves that particular problem, then there you go, you're on the list. Then all the RFPs go out, then all the demos happen, then all the product conversations happen. So I think there's a misconception that brand is about logos or brand colors, copywriting, um, which is all critically important. And speaking as someone who spent their life as a creative, you know, I really believe in that. But some people might toss that off as fluff. And it's not. Brand is. It's pipeline infrastructure. You know, it's not fluff. It matters.

Rob Carroll: Yeah. And in a recent episode, I spoke with Nadia Davis about marketing attribution, and we talked about this concept of the dark funnel, is that there's a whole bunch of stuff that happens in a customer's journey well before they touch anything that we engage them with, um, any content or any webinars or events or emails. And brand is a massive part of that. To even respond to an email, they want to have some familiarity that you, that you even exist. And brand is what kind of, to your point, that human memory element is. Oh, there's familiarity thanks to the fact that I've experienced what you look like, what you feel like, what you know, something about you which is out in the world, but it's not a one to one.

Scott Bennett: Yeah, that's, that's a great way of putting it. And the frustrating thing is so much of it is outside of, of your control. Sometimes the really exciting things happen that are outside of your control. Sometimes not so exciting. Sometimes your brand ends up on a short list because two of your executives go to a Coldplay concert and all hell breaks loose. Yes, sometimes your brand ends up on, not on a short list because somebody in a fleece vest with your logo was rude to someone on an airplane. You know, it's just like all those things are brand moments. They all matter. Um, for, for better or for worse,

Rob Carroll: in B2B tech, a lot of founders, CEOs, just leaders really come, their expertise comes from a technical background. They know how to build amazing products and innovate, but they don't necessarily know how to take that to market. You know, and I've certainly had plenty of conversations with guests in prior episodes around their expectation that positioning and you know, messaging is easy. I built it, I know how to talk about it. Well, but you don't know, you don't know the nuance. So the same with brand. What do you think is the biggest misunderstanding that companies, and especially kind of maybe product, uh, LED and engineering centric, uh, companies have? What's their biggest misunderstanding of the role in brand, in their company's success?

Scott Bennett: You, you said, you mentioned it a minute ago. The uh, the positioning part of it. You know, another misconception out there is like brand is like that last mile of demand gen, you know, if you like, you know, dress up all your campaign assets and fuss over every last detail of your, of your brand guidelines, which is very important. I don't want to discount that. But you know, you can make sure everything's, you know, everything looks and sounds, you know, it's, everything's aligned to your brand voice and, and all those things that really do matter, consistency does matter. But if you haven't done the positioning work to influence all of that, to guide all of that, if there's no foundation under that, then you're, you're basically just, you know, dressing up a spec sheet and that's how we get. I'm sure we'll talk a lot about. People get tired of 95.5 by the end.

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Scott Bennett: conversation, and probably the term sea of sameness is probably going to turn into a drinking game by the end of this. I think that's where a lot of companies get it wrong, including myself. I've gotten it wrong. You just, you end up getting this beautifully designed content that really doesn't differentiate itself.

Rob Carroll: Beautiful doesn't always mean impactful, right?

Scott Bennett: Exactly, exactly. And I have some empathy for executives and founders and leaders who struggle with what you just described. B2B does have a tendency to kind of over index on product marketing. And again, I get it. Those are clean stories to tell. They certainly look good in a board deck. They're logical. And then you've got. The human side of it is these people have invested their intelligence, their, their energy, their sacrifices into, into building these, you know, you know, beautiful and complex and hard to talk about, frankly, products. And then you've got me showing up at the meeting, you know, telling them that's not how you tell your story. You know, that doesn't feel good. A lot of times I feel like I'm, I'm the headphones at the United Nations. At the un You've got the dignitary, uh, on stage speaking in whatever their language might be to an audience of hundreds of People from around the world who, who probably don't speak that language. So they, they're all wearing the headphones with the real time translation going on. So they're all, they're all getting the same information but they're getting it catered in a way that they understand it which is what language is. So a lot of times I feel like uh, I'm the headphones at the UN helping people craft their stories so a bigger audience can, can you know who you are and understand it. The whole over indexing on product marketing, has it been a source of frustration for me? Absolutely. Um, but the deeper I get into my career, um, the more, the more empathy I have for, for the people who are involved in that side of that because I've worked closely with a lot of them and they're wonderful people

Rob Carroll: and I think um, we're going to put a pin because we're going to talk about kind of that I call it, it's a healthy tension between brand and product marketing. It's really funny because everyone's got a different perspective. Hey, this is a go to market perspective. So it's exactly what we're talking about. I've had prior episodes with product marketing leaders that say founders are over indexing on demand gen and spending not enough time on product marketing and positioning. And so they're doing that. They're probably spending zero time on brand and creative. It's more than a two sided coin is what it comes down to is it's, it's not this or that. There's a lot of decisions that are being made that maybe sacrifice what's the right order of the right things to do. I think you and I are ah, you know, being, let's call it the brand guy and the product marketing guy. Just in terms of our heritage, we probably both agree that we got to get our work done before you start running campaigns to um, come up with leads because if you don't have a position and identity what are people reacting to? So, but I guarantee the demand folks that I've had on here have a really strong argument about why you need revenue to your first point. And you're not going to get revenue if you don't do anything to drive in. So none of it's unimportant. It's the balance that's hard.

Scott Bennett: Yeah, it's a matter of balance. And look that if you look at, there's that chart, I've seen it so many times that shows like the long term growth of brand versus the direct response plays and that, you know, the brand is going up and up and up over time, whereas the sales plays are kind of going like this, like uh, almost like an ekg. And that to me, when I look at that, and I don't think the point of that chart is to say that brand is better. The point of that is they have to work together. The point of that is it's all brand really at the end of the day it's all brand. And so it doesn't have to be. It's often adversarial. Let's just tell it like it is, it shouldn't be. And, and so the real key is, um, and we've done some really great stuff at Click to kind of find a way to have those, all those things feed into each other, reinforce each other along the journey.

Rob Carroll: When I advise folks on just the whole positioning and messaging architecture, brand and corporate is a slow moving dimension that should not change often at all. You only change when there's a massive transformation going on in your business model, your audience, your product. That should not change much. But as you go down the messaging stack in terms of what are your platform capabilities, what use cases and solutions are delivering to market, what are your features, that changes really fast. But uh, you don't launch a new feature and then rebrand because of the new feature.

Speaker C: Right.

Rob Carroll: So that's again the whole where brand and product come together is the fact that they're intentionally doing this because they have to keep reacting to changing market conditions, competitive conditions, customer, um, needs. Whereas the brand is, that's our North Star. That's who we are and what we do. And hopefully that's not changing on a daily basis or you're going to go out of business.

Scott Bennett: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess the other short elevator pitch, I just had this conversation, uh, with the colleague the other day. You know, the brand positioning is who you are and then the value statement is what you do. Um, it's really easy to get those things mixed up or try to do both in one statement. And I don't, I don't think that's wise. A lot of people don't. I'm not, I'm not going too far out on the ledge here. But, but, but yeah, there, there is a difference between value positioning and brand positioning. You know, and then you get down, you know, you get down and you can talk more about the kind of tactical stuff, you know, that's where you can get into the features and have those conversations, when those conversations arise. But you have to start, you have to start the conversation somewhere.

Rob Carroll: So I loved it when we were uh, planning the episode and you're, you're kind of telling me how early in your career the types of requirements you would get from different parts of the organization was make it pop, make it look cool. We probably all are guilty of saying to our creative colleagues in the past because we don't know what to ask for. So how do you think that differs from the experience of uh, all other functions in marketing and collaboration versus is this a creative specific pain point or do you think there's flavors of this out there?

Scott Bennett: It's a double sided lightsaber.

Speaker F: No.

Scott Bennett: It'll stab me on either end. No, I think people have those types of conversations when they're making requests with creative people. It's like I said, the headphones at the UN thing, like not, not everybody out there is going to be able to talk to your art director or your script writer or your graphic designer in, in a language that they understand. So the role of a good creative director is to foster those more strategic conversations so that your team is prepared. Um, like in a perfect world we'd always be working from a creative brief. But that may not always be the case with, with small teams or startups where everybody's doing everything. So the work of a creative director is to, is to kind of frame things in a strategic way so, so that the uh, creative people have something actionable. They know who the audience is, they know what the tone of voice needs to be for the particular message. That's going to determine, you know, all kinds of choices from, you know, copywriting to layout to uh, whatever it is you're, you're, you're working on. But I think the reason why people feel so comfortable kind of inserting themselves in the process, whether or not it's their profession or sometimes there could be like a lack of humility. It took me years to understand this. But, you know, it's really simple. Most people have eyes and ears. Most people look at things aesthetically and take them in and form opinions every day. They have a favorite book, they have a favorite song, they have a favorite movie. And so when they get the chance to collaborate with, with somebody who can build those types of experiences, then they've got, they've got a point of view. And maybe that point of view aligns with what the organization is trying to do or maybe sometimes it aligns with their own personal preferences. But, but again, you have to, you have to slow down and engage those people and have conversations so that you can Understand what the, what the point of what you're working on is. And early in my career, I would be halfway to the finish line on an asset without really understanding why someone needed it, why someone asked for it. And then sometimes you'd turn and you go back to the person that asked for the thing, and they didn't really know. They would just say, well, I need a video. Oh, why do you need a video? Uh, because. Because the product needs a video. Why does the product need a video? To explain it. Okay, explainer video. We can work with that. Where is this going to be? Oh, just put it on the website. Oh, by the way, anytime you have the. Just in front of a request and you know that you need to ask, like, 10 more questions. So, uh, so, you know, then it's like, okay, well, how are you going to know if it's successful? You know, just because you, you like it, that matters. It's not the whole story. Are you going to track performance? When is it going to be out of date? When are you going to pull it down? Like, there's all these, you know, all these things that have to be talked about up front, but when, when somebody comes to you and they're, they, they haven't thought those things through, then you start having those conversations, like, you know, make the logo bigger, make it pop, make it cool. And to me, I think, you know, that there was a time in my career where that stuff would drive me crazy. And when I have, you know, colleagues or direct reports who find themselves in those moments and they come to me, my advice is always like, remember, we're brand. We're good at starting conversations. That's your opening. That's not a creative brief. It's the opening. That's, that's your opportunity to start asking questions.

Rob Carroll: You're doing two things, and, uh, I'll speak for you and you'll tell me if I've got it right. But one, you're talking about your own journey from becoming a creative execution person to a strategic partner, and how you've learned to do that through these experiences. But you're also providing a really valuable advice, honestly, not just to creatives and folks, but anyone.

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Rob Carroll: is accountable, which is most of us, for delivering on some form of requirements. Is feeling confident that every ask is the beginning and not the end of the conversation.

Scott Bennett: Yeah. What is the ultimate outcome of this, of this PowerPoint deck that you have to collaborate with a designer on? You know, a lot of times people are making these things because they, they have to make them. It's their job description. It's just the way things are done. But I would just encourage people to just take a beat and like, think about outcomes. You know, be empathetic to your, to your audience. If your audience is sitting through, you know, nine different product demos in every two or three days or God knows how many pitches, is it important for yours to stand out? Of course. Is it important for it to be accurate? Of course. Think about the person on the other end of that who has to like, sit through these things. Like, what is it? What, what can you do to make the experience better for them? Just having, having empathy for the audience is something I always tell people who report to me, agencies I work with, they all know this. But I think the people who are executing, asking for these things, like, if you give them a little nudge, people actually really love talking about that. They love thinking about it, even if they don't realize they do.

Rob Carroll: That's good advice. We decided to name this episode the Trust Gap, implying that there is lack of trust between a lot of B2B organizations and their creative teams, the brand team. You know, as I hinted at in my intro, a lot of folks are kind of playing it safe, even though they want to be differentiated and they want to stand out. There's some inherent discomfort with maybe being bold, because the definition of bold is a perceived thing that might mean different things to different people. Can you share Maybe just some examples because, you know, it sounds like you've had some really positive experience where you've earned trust, but you've also had the other end of the spectrum where you had like zero trust and it was like pushing that boulder uphill to just make any kind of splash. Can you share some experiences on both sides of the spectrum? M Just so listeners can kind of get a sense for what that feels like from the creative's perspective?

Scott Bennett: Yeah. Sometimes not being trusted is someone leaning over your shoulder and literally telling you what to do. That doesn't feel great. And uh, I would argue that doesn't really lead for a good product. Sometimes not being trusted is the too many cooks. Let's show it to so and so and see what they think. The fear of taking accountability can lead to a lack of trust.

Rob Carroll: Consensus driven creative.

Scott Bennett: Exactly. That's not exclusive to creative, by the way. That's something that a lot of people deal with in their roles. I will tell you from personal experience, the most dramatic conversation about trust I ever had was with a CEO I was working on a rebrand for for a company. I started out as a consultant. We got along so well. They brought me on to a full time role and I hadn't spent a ton of time with, um, getting to know the CEO. I'd done my research, I'd had, you know, conversations, like interviews with him to kind of, you know, learn about the trajectory of the company and all that that would inform the choices I made for the rebrand. But he sat me down. I was trying to like feel him out about how involved he was going to be. Some leaders want to be super involved and some of them just don't want to touch any of it. And some of them just don't know what they want until you show them what they don't want. And then you go back and make it 10 times. So what kind of CEO is this guy going to be? And he said to me, and uh, I'm paraphrasing, he said, we hired you because you're good at what you do. We hired you because we trust you to do a good job for us. If you are need a tiebreaker vote on something because you're having trouble making a decision, that's when you can call me in. I'll add value that way. And otherwise you're here to do a specific job. I trust you do the job. You have years of experience and expertise and if you say it's the right way to go, then I trust that it's the right Way to go. And I just about fell out of my chair because those conversations, those are the conversations you dream about as anybody, but especially as a creative, I think. But in corporate America, in tech, like, can you imagine, you know, a, uh, CEO saying that? What that did, it allowed me to give myself the permission to take the blinders off, try things, get things wrong, get things wrong until they're not wrong, and try, Try new things and push things in unexpected directions. And really, you know, all those things we love to talk about, you know, having a brand stand out and, and having a brand, um, you know, be a part of the conversation and, and all that like it. If you have trust in the people who are doing that for, for you, then they're going to trust themselves to do things differently. They're going to trust themselves to approach problems from unexpected angles. And then you start to get, you know, the results of that speak for themselves, because then you're not in that sea of same sameness anymore. Now, is that going to happen everywhere you work? Hell no. You know, uh, but I think the experience of having that conversation, and I've worked other places since where that wasn't the case, but that little spark of somebody saying, you're good at what you do, you've. You've got this. That stayed with me, like, uh, this, this was something that happened four years ago or something. I'm still running on that every day. Every day. It changed everything.

Rob Carroll: Obviously it shows some amazing leadership and professionalism for that CEO, because guess what? That CEO was probably growing the business and making the business successful because they weren't micromanaging or not trusting the people they hired. But at the same time, like, you know, the blinders are off, it means you and the creative team are able to take bigger swings. What, like, can you provide examples? It could be from stuff you've done, it could be stuff you've seen in the market. But like, what does a big swing look like in a B2B context where we'll get more into the sea of sameness, but like, everything just seems to just be very washed with the same, uh, with the same patterns. What does a big swing look like for B2B?

Scott Bennett: I think, like, big swings look like such, uh, an overused term, but authenticity, you know, uh, uh, something that is a real sensibility about it. Something bold enough to say that maybe not everybody's going to get this right away, but they will remember us, and somewhere down the line they will get it. They, they will get it. You have to accept that not everyone's going to love you. And sometimes that's the goal. Maybe that makes your audience self select a little better. I think Domo does, does a really good job of that. They've got a very down to earth realistic human voice. It doesn't really feel ah, sassy. It's Sassy trademark that one I just came up with that um, even like the, the early Drift stuff was a little contrarian, you know, a little smart ass and that was how they made their mark. And you know those of us in the Bay Area remember when the, when those snowflake billboards started showing up and it was like oh my God, finally, finally someone who's talking like a human and not a spec sheet. So it is, it is possible. I mean those are some like real world examples of, of, of what they look like.

Rob Carroll: No, who, who comes to mind more modernly is, is Wiz just acquired by Google. It's a security company and.

Scott Bennett: Oh great.

Rob Carroll: I've always just been a fan. I had um, Alyssa Stone is the head of AR from Wiz. So they're top of mind because of that. She uh, she was a guest recently and everything they do from a marketing and brand perspective is, is very, just approachable and friendly and fun. They actually have a fun vibe for a security company. It's so not the sameness of most security companies that are very serious because it's all about risk mitigation. It's all about um, you know, compliance and uh, what they've always done. And I've just, you know, whether it's what's on their website or seeing them at an event, they're always trying to find a fun angle. And I uh, just give a lot of credit to their whole organization because I view that as kind of another example of a big swing. Because security folks were not necessarily looking for fun. They were looking to not get fired. Not being the COVID of the Wall Street Journal for a, ah, breach. So that's just an example of someone who went out of the norm of what others in their market would do.

Scott Bennett: Mhm. Right. The key to that type of approach though, I'm not suggesting organizations or brands just go left when everyone else is going right just to be different for different sake. It has to be connected to something bigger. It has to be connected to what we were talking about earlier in terms of doing that hardcore positioning work. It's all aligned coming down from that. It doesn't mean that it has to look like everyone else and sound like everybody else. Even if you have a similar product or you're solving a similar problem. But there, but there has. It has to ladder up to something bigger than just being different for different sake. And I think that's where we talked earlier about this misconception about brand being fluffy. Um, that that's the danger. Like if, if your only goal is standing out being different, then, then you're going to make fluff. You know, it has to be supported by the, the other parts in the organization, including product, you know, our friends and product and leadership and everything else. Like, it's got to be, it has to be a unified thing. Even if people you know are on

Rob Carroll: different teams and you bring it up and I'm not going to name any names. Well, I think we've all seen it on our link, LinkedIn feeds or whatnot. Is brands from a campaign or a social media perspective or November trying to be funny or goofy? Which I love in general, I love it because it's entertaining and it's, it, it wakes you up from the doldrums. But if nothing else in your brand and your experience matches that, then it's just weird, it's cringy. So, you know, for me, um, so if, like, if your website and your events and everything is really pretty much by the book, professional, toned or smart people or whatever, and that's it, and then you have something that's just really goofy. I'm just like, where did it come from? I don't get it. It doesn't make sense. So to your point, it's got to be like a full stack identity. Not, you know, you could pilot things, but it's, it's. That's not on brand is kind of the goal.

Scott Bennett: Yeah. And I would say, like, if you are a brand like that and you do have a desire to, um, express yourself with comedy, which is really hard by the way. You've got to pick the right partners, the, the right production companies, the right agencies, the right writers. If you want to do funny. Funny. There is nothing harder. Nothing harder than being funny. Take that from someone who's tried and failed many times. You just, you got to get people that are better at it than you are. But like, if you're, if you're starting from that, if you're like a very, you know, stuffy, stodgy company you want to start and incorporating something a little offbeat. Make fun of yourself, right? Like use, use that. Use, use your, your reputation as a starting point. If you start from that place, you, you're showing some humility. You're showing like a human side of like a very corporate brand. Um, and that could be a way to start to you know, again, you know, stand out in the conversation. Take, take people by surprise, acknowledge your

Rob Carroll: brand if you're doing something different to just acknowledge that this is different and you're having fun with it. And that's, I like that advice. As we're kind of closing, there's a couple more topics I wanted to um, bring up. One was just really on the pendulum swing and we've been through a measure everything swing. Everything in marketing has to be measured. Every dollar has to be accounted for. Improving that it's delivering revenue versus you know, and how does that stifle those big swings? You know, so where do you feel things live today and what actually needs to be measured? You know, it doesn't mean you shouldn't have ROI on investments, et cetera. But what actually needs to be measured to truly strategically run a brand?

Scott Bennett: I will show some vulnerability here and admit that maybe this is something people don't like to say out loud. I'll say it out loud. Measuring brand is hard. Not even sure if it's possible to. Scary thing for a brand leader to say. Are there tools out there? Yes. Do they give you part of the picture? Absolutely. But in contrast to the kind of measure everything era that we've been in for the past, you know, 15 or 16 years a B testing everything towards whatever the, you know, the median clicks on, I think that's, it's, these are tools that you know, have only haven't existed until recently. They're important, they're enlightening, they're not the whole story. Rather than like you know, going down the well trod path of familiar patterns and like optimizing yourself into total mediocrity. But I prefer, I prefer data informed to data driven. It's part of the story, it's part of how you measure the health of your brand or the health of your campaign or whatever you're doing. But again this gets back to trust and probably not a very sexy thing to talk about in the age of AI but it's talks but it's, this is human lived experiences, taste instincts, these very non measurable things that are, yeah, they're subjective, you know, I, I, I admit that but I feel like in this, this age of measure everything like the, the, the value of, of those things has more and more been overlooked. But where the opportunity is, that's where the ideas come from, man. That's years of experience of trial and error which hones your, your instincts As a, ah, as a storyteller, as a communicator, as uh, you know, whether you're, you know, creative or anything else in marketing, we shouldn't doubt that stuff. We should be using it every day, even if it's not measurable. You talk about a, uh, sea of sameness, you know, optimizing everything into, into looking exactly the same on LinkedIn. You know, I think that is a result of that type of thinking and the importance that's been put on it. Now maybe it's just the algorithms serving me what I want to see, which, which is basically what they do. But it feels like the dam is breaking a little bit. It feels like the pendulum is starting to swing back. Maybe not all the way towards, you know, maybe more towards the middle. Um, and that's encouraging to me. Um, I'm having conversations right now, even in the age of everybody trying to figure out how to implement AI, I'm having the most, um, engaging and exciting and thought provoking conversations about messaging, about positioning, about creativity, about storytelling than I've ever had in my career. And it's happening right now.

Rob Carroll: The other positive that you know, you're not, uh, in the you're not alone category is product marketers have been struggling with the ROI of what they do for their entire careers. And what they often talk about is correlation versus causation to their competitive battle cars they gave to sales win deals. Or is there a correlation that since they've published those battle cards, we have increased the win rates? There's a thousand factors that go in why we might win or lose, including improvements to the product and things that our competitors are doing poorly. And there's a hundred reasons why you might win or lose. Same with positioning and messaging and product launches. Sure there's adoption metrics and sales metrics, but is it because I positioned it really well or is it because the feature just sold itself and customers just loved it and they didn't have to read any? You don't know. And it's very similar. Um, so let's talk about the. We'll wrap up. This will be our last question, which is really about the tension. I think it's a positive tension between brand and product marketing, which is really two sides of the storytelling coin. They're both necessary. And it's the emotional, human centric storytelling that the brand is trying to build versus the factual, defensible, solution level messaging that product marketing is also on the hook to deliver. What are your thoughts in terms of the best ways to work between brand

Scott Bennett: and Product marketing, this is going to seem overly diplomatic, but they're both right. The problem is they're both competing for, for the same real estate. It might be the homepage of your website or, or something else. So there's that, there's that tension there. The product marketing has really exciting, you know, features and proof points. You know, all those things that help a buyer justify a decision on their side. And those are, I'm, um, dorky enough to understand why those are really exciting to talk about. You know, then brands on the other side where, where you're dealing in those, uh, squishy areas of emotion and identity and you know, narrative. If you overcorrect neither direction, you're going to be in trouble. You can't lead with, you know, we have 47 integrations, you know, and you also can't just go out there with something that's just, you know, designed for an emotional impact.

Rob Carroll: I think the good news is both teams are recognizing, you know, the good product marketers don't want to talk about features, they want to talk about value, outcome. The good brand creatives don't want to just have pretty colors. They want to drive this experience you're going to get, which is an outcome. Everyone's leading to outcomes. And I think that's the meeting point.

Scott Bennett: Yeah, you know, yeah, it is the meeting point. It's just there's a million roads you can take to get there. I know we're winding down, but I think one, one thing I would like everybody to remember, including myself and maybe this is just like a mid career, mid career crisis, mid career wisdom and whatever you want to call it when you move through your professional career and you look back. Speaking for me personally, I'm remembering less and less of the things I accomplished. I'm remembering more and more of the people I accomplished those things with. I'm remembering the people, people. I'm thinking about the people. I'm in touch with the people. And I think it's worth taking a beat sometimes when you might be looking at a problem from, you know, a different way from a colleague to think about. In five years are we going to care about this product launch or in five years am I going to have somebody I can send a text message to saying, hey, remember that time at the conference and yada, yada, yada. I think something that I've started to incorporate in the way that I approach my work is I've always been like a consensus builder type of person, but now I keep that really in the forefront. Like I'M trying to understand the human being across the desk from me who might want to solve a problem in a completely different way and learn from them and appreciate where they're coming from and respect them, even if I fundamentally disagree with them about what to do next or how to do it. Because there's always going to be something you can take from that person that's going to inform your work and make it better. Even though we're talking about going to market for B2B companies and I'm over here talking about relationships, I think it matters a lot more than most people really think that it does on a daily basis.

Rob Carroll: Our old CMO over at, uh, Informatica, one of the things that really stuck with me, Sally Jenkins, was that there's no such thing as B2B or B2C. Everything is B2P. We're always selling to human beings, to people, and everything that should really ground every decision we make is that are we connecting with the human on the other side? And your advice about working with your colleagues and what's more important, the launch decision or the relationship you're building is like, yeah, for everyone early in their careers. That's the good stuff stuff. So I couldn't agree more. Scott, this was a lot of fun. Really appreciate you joining and, uh, thanks for being a part of this.

Scott Bennett: All right. It's just great to catch up with you, man, on a podcast or any other format. So thank you so much for having me and I, I hope some of it.

Rob Carroll: Thanks so much. Take care.

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