Jay Acunzo on Resonance: How to Become a Sought-After Brand

Welcome to Content Disrupted. Bold takes on brand marketing. I'm your host, Dan Baptiste, and together we'll explore what it takes to excel in brand marketing at one of the most exciting and disruptive times in industry history. Welcome to Content Disrupted. Today we get to hear from one of the most important voices in marketing, Jay Acunzo. Jay. In a world that's increasingly flooded with repackaged takes, Jay is truly one of the best at helping leaders build a unique platform of expertise that causes people to stop, pay attention, and even repeat your ideas when you're not in the room. I do this with your ideas all the time, so thank you, sir. And through his work around premise development, differentiated messaging, and signature speechcraft, he's the not so secret weapon behind some of the most effective communicators in marketing and business today. He has a podcast that, that I love called How Stories Happen. Definitely check that out. And as Jay always says, don't market more, matter more. Today we'll break down exactly how you can do that so you can multiply the effectiveness of your marketing and future proof yourself, which we all need to do these days. Jay, welcome to the show. First of all, thank you. I'm just going to clip that, put it on the homepage, and take care of my own messaging that way. Thank you. That was incredible. Of course, of course, man. I'm so excited to have you for a whole bunch of reasons, but one, I think you have a pulse on what. What's happening in the world and why better than almost anybody. I listen to the clarity of your messaging and how you structure the importance of what we need to accomplish today. But before we go there, I think breaking down this sort of chaotic environment that we're all operating in is really important because people can better understand what's happening and why they can create a competitive advantage. So at the core, we have this huge portion of the marketing industry working 24 7, like, toiling away at solving the wrong problem, which is how do we create exponentially more stuff so that we can increase our reach and traffic? So volume equals traffic equals success. And this system is broken. It has been for a long while, but in a sense, like, we've helped build the cage that we're now trapped in. So how the heck did we get here? Oh, my gosh, I don't know. But you know what's funny is a lot of the things I look back on, as was once my creative practice, which was just putting myself on a deadline and producing a volume of things, that was always, to me, as A former journalist, as someone who had a lot of side projects, and I don't mean side hustles, I think we've lost the. Whether you're an executive or you're a beginner or anyone in between, like, having a side project to hone your skills is so important. I used to create a volume of content, but it was never meant to produce results. It was my practice. Quantity, to me is a wonderful way to practice and sharpen your skills. Quality is always the aim. And for some reason now we're in this era, which I'm actually really thankful for, and I can explain why I said that. But I am really grateful for this era of people producing mediocrity at breathtaking scale. And there's a number of contributing factors. One is the cost of content creation has come down. You can produce stuff for very little, if not for free. The other is the platforms where we distribute these things. They are showing their true colors and that color is gray. Or I like to joke, they want more green, so they incentivize more gray. Meaning these platforms, like social networks, they don't care about our businesses. They care about their own business, their advertising networks that call themselves social media or communities. That's all this. I didn't get out of bed this morning to create free ad inventory for meta, but that's what is going on right now. And what they are incentivizing different than what we are incentivizing. And I know you and I came up in B2B, certainly in B2B. That's uninteresting and less effective than if I sold tissue paper or soap or something like that. We're not trying to sell commodities, but we show up as commodities. So that's another contributing factor. And then the third and final, I think like death knell of a lot of content marketing was we keep talking a lot about how marketing is. Oh, we're all media companies, right? You've heard that for years now. We're all media companies. And I'm like, who do you trust at media companies? Is it the logo? That's the byproduct? You trust the individual voices they understand, not just editorial operations and analysis and building an audience for audience sake and all these things that marketers have fallen all over themselves to understand. Media companies also understand that the personalities, the voices, the people, they are the ones that you connect with. And that's the last domino that needs to fall in the brand world, where I think a lot of marketing teams are in big trouble because they've figured out how to create content. What they need to figure out is how to create creators. So a lot of my work centers on that. It's the perspective and it's the voice and all the skills necessary to resonate as a voice that a lot of these marketing teams, a lot of these leadership teams, a lot of soloists that I work with are now investing in. And oh, by the way, it is also the most defensible against AI slop and mediocrity. And oh, by the way, it is also what allows you to earn trust and charge a premium because generic expertise has been commodified. So it's almost like the stuff I've been saying for years now just got urgent in the minds of a lot of people. And I think part of the urgency is trap that we all kind of signed up for, which is judging our success and failure on the sort of volume of traffic in leads or whatever, which created a formula. I'm going to create X amount of things which create X amount of impressions, X amount of visits. And they're all kind of like, then my job is done. That's different than saying my job is to create resonance in the market and how do I stand out and how do I say something different? And I think the path to traffic up to this point was you mentioned the color gray. It was gray, right? Like, the more generic you can be, the more traffic you get check job done. So if you've signed up for that job, like, this is part of the problem, right? As marketers, we've like said, hey, if you give me budget, one of the things that I'm going to be on the hook for is traffic. And I have to feed the ad network so that I get traffic. I do my job, I continue on. So if you've said that message, which a lot of us have to leadership, like, how do you walk that back? Like, how do you think about reframing that? I think about efficiency, I think about return. I think about, can we straighten the funnel instead of just broaden the top, I think of revenue. So I'm a soloist, I'm an entrepreneur. In 2016, I left the corporate world. I had worked in jobs like I was head of content at HubSpot briefly. I had been in sales at Google. I worked in content marketing functions both as a practitioner and as a leader for different organizations. In 2016, I became a soloist and I immediately lost, I'll say it harshly, I lost the ability to cosplay business. A lot of the big organizations I worked for allowed me to Cosplay and. Or really to hide from the fact that, like, I could drive a proxy metric as my success. This proxy is awareness. And all the measurements of awareness, like traffic, I don't know, some survey you send out about how known you are, or social followers. These are proxies. Awareness itself is a proxy for what we actually need and want, which is affinity. Which is why I rail against people who are obsessed with reach. Because I'm like, reach is how many see it. We need to put resonance over reach. Resonance is how much they care about. And no amount of reach guarantees they care. And if they don't care, they don't take an action. If they don't take an action, we don't see results. And that's fine if I'm working on an incremental piece of the puzzle at a large organization. But as a soloist, I'm responsible for everything. I'm responsible for what I eat. At the end of the day, I can't cosplay marketing. I need to put aside coach. A big part of my business is coaching executives on their speaking. I was coaching these marketing executives, actually two different ones on two different occasions. Both said to me, marketing. And they were talking about themselves. They weren't saying like, those people over there. They were like, we as a community have our heads up our asses a little. We've gone so far into like figuring out what is marketing and how do you do marketing and all these things. Friend of mine and also a client, Devin Bramhall, likes to say, we've forgotten that marketing's supposed to grow the business, so maybe focus on growing the business. So it always begins, always, always with what is it the stakeholder wants? Anchor your conversation to that. If you're like, well, I can't do anything. But the quantity game. Jay, what is it your boss wants from the quantity game? When you begin a conversation with somebody, you tend to start with your ideas or start with I. But foundational to something I teach a lot is message design, is alignment. There's actually four phases that you want to move through in a good pitch. This could be a good blog post structure. This could be a good speech structure. This is actually where I learned it as a touring keynote speaker. This is good message design. There's four things you want to hit to speak to somebody else when you want to show them what you see. And maybe they're not seeing it yet. So to your point about like somebody who's talking to their boss or someone talking to their client, the four stages are align, agitate, Assert, invite. So just imagine you walk up on a stage as a keynote speaker. It's an easy proxy or easy example for what we're talking about. I can't say, here's my idea. Later, Deuces. That's my time. No, I can't do that. I can't say to the boss either, nor should I. Here's my idea. What do you think? But that's how we pitch people. Peer, boss, client. It does. It's insanity. We want to give them our ideas. I'm like, you need to convince them that your ideas should exist. And so you need to align first. So using the speech as an example, you walk up on stage and they're going, how's this going to help me? And you have to respond with, well, you know how you have this goal and this belief and this desire and this here's you now and what you want? And they go, yeah, aren't I already trying to achieve that? And you're like, yes, here's the current approach. So again, that's a good starter for a speech, or at least a speech structure. It's good for a pitch to a boss or a client. Here's the goal you have. Here's the current approach. And they're like, yep, that's true. We're aligned. But now, as a storyteller, you have to start agitating the pain. And so you say, but we have some problems with that approach. And if you detail those problems, you get one of two great reactions. Either, oh, no, I didn't see it. Thank you for revealing that. Or they nudge their buddy, like, around the boardroom table or in the audience of a keynote, and they're going, that's what I'm saying. Thank you for finally speaking out. Like, can we get Dan to come in and give a talk or execute his services, or can we hire them for us? Because, like, thank you. You get gratitude if you're just honest and saying, we have problems. Hey, we're driving all this traffic. It's not working. Marketers are scared to say, we're doing a lot of stuff. We're looking for new budget, for new stuff. It's in the current stuff we're doing, which is not working. And that is not our fault. We are not the work. We have to have that ability to say, I actually want to speak to this problem. I actually want to call attention to the fact that the playbooks we laud are broken because they're from HubSpot in 2012 or whatever. Here's what's not working. And then if you're really good, you diagnose why. So here's your goal. Here's the current approach. Here are the problems with it. Here's the cause of those problems. Let's solve that. So that's what I'm in the business of doing for people, is saying you're creating a lot of content, and then you're trying to tell stories to maybe accentuate the power of that content or push it harder. You're chunking it into a million small pieces and repurposing it. All that is incremental stuff. All that is downstream from the actual diagnosable problem, which is you're sharing basic advice. You're a commodity. Expertise has been commodified today. It's foundational, but I can get it anywhere. And you don't want to show up as anywhere. That's the problem. You're not resonating. So I'm in the business of solving that problem. And then the reach part, which we all agonize over, that gets easier. So I've said, here's your goal, here's your current approach. Here's the problems. By the way, I see an illness to these symptoms that we have to cure, that there's the root cause of the problems, here's what it would look like, and here's how we do it. That is the structure of a better pitch. That's a great structure. And you mentioned the importance of reach. But after you have a message that resonates because it becomes easier. Yeah, that's what I would say. But that's not me talking about traffic. That's me talking about the work I do as a speaking coach and strategist. But it's important, right? So I think if you're looking at some of the gaps, like, obviously, we need to hone our message. We need to be different. And part of that turns you into a magnet where people kind of find you. Right. Because you're saying the things that if I'm in the audience, you're saying that, and I elbow my colleague or coworker or friend and be like, he just voiced the thing that we've been feeling, you know, to your point, I'm going to share that with everybody I know. There it is. Dan, you nailed it. Which is like the transformation that we want, the transformation that allegedly trying to seek is from constantly chasing attention to being highly sought. And when we're not highly sought and we're still stuck chasing attention, what we've decided to do is to get better at the chasing of attention. And I think that's a mistake. I think we need to focus on the things which are different things that make you highly sought. Like a really easy example is a lot of your competitors, whatever niche you're in, they're agonizing over getting in front of the audience 10 times in a week. Let's say, what can you say to your audience today that they will think about 10 times that day? That to me it's like you need that exposure to your audience multiple times. They need to be thinking about you multiple times. It's not just the first greeting and then all the sales happen. We know that. But there's only two ways to do it. It's I gotta agonize over getting in front of you all the freaking time. Or I can give you something so potent and powerful that you can't shake it, that it's just sticks with you. It's like that meal you've had, you're like, I can't. That cauliflower dish, like, what was that? I can't stop thinking about it now. I'm telling all my friends about and the place. It's like we're really obsessed with visibility. We're really bad at memorability. And so. But the memorability, the resonance, that's the stuff that allows you to show up as a market leader. To be memorable is to actually leave an imprint, leave a lasting impression, make an impact. A lot of our communication has become really low impact. And so I'm really obsessed with, as a former full time speaker, you learn, oh, high impact communication is learned, it's a craft, it's a scalable thing. And it's an absolutely unfair advantage to be a high impact communicator everywhere you show up. Why in the world are we not learning this more? And I think a big problem is it hasn't really been codified for our world as much. So that's something where I kind of raised my hand several years ago and said, I'm going to try to do that. I think that was smart. I look at this moment and there's leadership vacuum because we're all kind of on our heels, right? Like there's so many things being thrown at us. There's volatile economy, there's uncertainty around AI, there's diminishing teen size, there's just pressure to use new technology for the sake of using new technology. Like, what the problem are we even solving? You know, like, and let's not diminish the fact that we're all carrying around Trauma and low level, if not high level, depression from a fricking pandemic. Like, we. We all just stopped talking about this ridiculous thing we went through that we're just like, oh, we're back. We're just fine now. No, like, so that's another thing we're adding to this pile of things you just put out for us. I mean, it's almost like the series of events have gotten us here, right? Like the pandemic. A lot of people working from home, and then I reduced the staff size. And it's really interesting how the order of those things have kind of gotten us here. But we, a lot of folks don't want to talk about that, that last part anymore because, hey, we're beyond that. So, like, let's stuff our feelings down and not talk about it anymore. Many friends who are Irish, that's their move. I'm Italian, so the feelings are like, they're like second layers of clothing. I can see them bubbling out of your skin right now. I was looking at, just kind of thinking about the problem with resonance. And one of the things I was curious about was what is the average conversion rate for leads in B2B? And I looked at a few different studies and obviously, like, millions of variables, but the average conversion rate for a lead was 5% from a few studies. That means 95% of leads don't do business with you. Do you think that's a symptom of ineffective resonance and lack of premise and mass marketing? Is that a problem or is that just something that we need to figure out is, like, reality and we need to do more of it? It's really hard to say, but I think we can understand it with a metaphor, which is that of like, imagine your buyers are running a road race. A lot of marketing is at the end of the road race, you leap out from a bush and you're waving at the runner and you're like, hey, finish the race with me. And that maybe worked for a time. If you're the first to market, if there's not much noise around you or not much competition, and people listening are going, where are these oases of easy marketing left in the world? And I'm going, exactly. Those are gone. But what we found was most marketing looked like, I am at letter Z. You have run through most of the Alphabet, and now I'm going to go XYZ with you. And our content is xyz, and our speeches start at X and go Y and Z. And all of our marketing xyz, I'M jumping out the end of the race going, pick me, pick me, pick me. That's what we want. That's the thing I kind of trade in, is helping people get picked and helping people get referred because you want to be highly sought. Those are the two symptoms of that. Yes. Things like conversion rate or straighter funnels or all these things are part of it in marketing parlance. Then what happens? You are waving to your audience at the end of the road race, go and pick me up. You see the finish line to your left. They're coming from the right. You look to the right, all of a sudden, another competitor jumps out from a bush. All of a sudden, somebody parachutes down from the sky, and they're waving at the last mile, pick me, pick me. That baby slumbering in the stroller next to you, they whip off a blanket, pop out the pacifier. Turns out, not a baby, it's another competitor. And they're all shouting, pick me, pick me, pick me. And then the smartest marketers and communicators and thought leaders in the world, they go, yeah, you know what would be easier? I'm just gonna run the whole race with them. I'm gonna meet them earlier in the journey. And so the runner, the buyer, goes, hey, thanks for shouting at me to pick you. I have a running buddy. I'm just gonna cross the finish line with them. And so all of us are trying to influence how people buy. The best of us, the strongest communicators among us, they know how to influence how people think, which then influences how they buy. And so that, to me, is a really difficult shift for people to get on board with. And what I saw in the early days of content marketing, like when I got into the field, was I was really eager to do that. And everybody else was trying to say, how do we do the last mile pick me stuff? But through content. Instead of an ad, let's replace a banner ad, which we wanted a direct response metric to measure with a blog post, which we also want a direct response measure of success for. And it's like, okay, maybe, sure, but there's so much more going on in this buyer's journey. Be the one that they've picked before. They're actually busting out the credit card and doing a financial form of picking again. Instead of leaping out to get in front of them, be the one that they've been thinking about the whole time. Stop chasing and be sought. And again, as a speaker, as an author, there's a community of business voices in the world that we all follow and love and gawk at when we are in front of them or love listening to them on a podcast. And I am also on some podcasts, so there's all those people. And then I'm also running along like, can I be part of you? And those folks have learned how to create a whole platform of impact that influences how you think so that it's easier to influence how people buy. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I'm like, we people have figured it out. Why are marketers like, how do I take these basic blog posts and social posts that nobody really cares about or engage with and put them in more places and reach more people with? I'm like, the people you already reach are signaling to you the work isn't working. They trust and love you already. Why are you automatically then going, huh? That's interesting. The people who trust me didn't like it. I better put it in front of way more people. Like, this is bananas, the way we're going about our business these days. It's funny. I mean, I was talking about a version of this yesterday, and we were just looking back on some of the work we had done at Skyward years ago, and it was at the time similar. You create things and you treat it as if it's advertising, right? So our whole spiel was, stop interrupting what people love and become what people love. Like, start building the things that are built for your audiences that are highly resonant. And then we moved away from that messaging years ago. But it's to your point. You look back and you're like, the mission really hasn't changed. I think the world has gotten noisier. And you introduce AI and you're like, hey, that really, like, crappy path you're on now. Let's give you a Lamborghini. And you can go much faster and at a greater volume. You know, so it's really kind of interesting. And here's the thing. Like, I'm in the business of human intelligence. Crafted with human intelligence is at the bottom of all my newsletters. Because when you hear my voice or read my words, that has been written by me. Because I actually think using AI to create content or to scale the creation of content is a bit like using your car for a flashlight. It's like, imagine being the inventors of AI, inventors of the car. And you drive up to a bunch of marketers playing in a field, and you're like, behold the car. And they're like, this is amazing. And you're like, yeah, I know, I worked really hard on this. And then they're like, this has flashlights. And the inventor's like, what? You have flashlight? You gave us some flash. Yeah, I guess the car has flashlights on the front. And then marketers run around the world excitedly telling other marketers that the car has flashlights. And here's this awesome giant flashlight you can use. And I've used it once. Now. Here's my ultimate guide to flashlights and 25 flashlight prompts. And I'm like massaging my temples. If I'm the inventor of the car. Yes, there are lights on it. It technically can do that. Can we talk about all the car like things it can do? Right? Can we talk about all the human enhancement things and the synthesis and the making sense of mountains of data or transcripts of client calls or whatever, the organization principles, the punch ups that it can do? Like why are we using this tool for the flashlights? It's a car, use it for that. So then people go, but I need more content. No you don't. You need stronger ideas, you need a stronger messaging, you need to be a stronger storyteller. You need to matter more so you can then market less. Let's make that the goal. Love that. I was talking to our chief strategy officer last week on this topic of resonance and one of the things getting back to your sea of gray, one of the fail points I think that marketers fall into is when you're building ideas not having a specific segment of audience in mind. And let me give you an example. So if I'm marketing to CFOs, I'm like, hey, my audience is CFOs. That's really hard to create a resonant message because the audience is too broad. If instead I'm looking at growth minded CFOs who are now under pressure to be profitable where they never have. They're looking at how AI influences their business and oh, by the way, they still want to grow. Like building an experience. When I pick a segment of the market and focus on the psychographics is so much easier to say, oh, I know how to help that person. So when you're building structures and stories, how specific do you get with audience segmentation and what is the role of that in storytelling? So It's a catch 22 a bit because it's like we need to focus on our audience, but we also need to deeply resonate with that audience. And therefore we can't craft messaging, stories, experiences, content. I can't show up on a podcast or a stage carrying a message I don't believe in or care about. Also, it needs to be something that could only come from us because we want them to pick us. So there's like this bifurcation you see, of what I would call inside out versus outside in thinking. Outside in thinking says, what works on that channel. I'll do that. What do they want to hear? I'll say that inside out thinking says what do I have to say? And by the way, it's really difficult to do either, but the difficulties Pick your this is something I got early in my career when vetting companies or jobs, you're shoveling a pile of dirt no matter what job you have or how fancy the brand is. And I've worked for like awarded companies that are like best places to work, Google, HubSpot, et cetera. Clients of mine, Salesforce, Wistia, Godaddy, also awarded. Everybody has messiness inside their businesses. So it's what pile of dirt are you happier shoveling? So that's what I'm saying here. If you're an outside in communicator or thinker, you necessarily are going to act like everybody else because you're looking at the market, you're looking at what they're clicking on or thinking about or researching or searching for. And then you're just pandering to that. So what happens is you start looking and sounding like a commodity. And the only way to win as a commodity is you have to be first. So I have to rank higher than my competitors, I have to shout louder, hype harder, have more followers, I have to pitch more, et cetera. So it's an exhausting effort based approach to marketing to be an outside in thinker, communicator, maybe storyteller. Right? Very little of what you do is defensible. So if you're like, we have the budget, we have the speed, we have the brute force, be an outside in thinker. Inside out is my preference. It's where I start all my clients and it's who I am as a person. Which says not what would they want me to say, but what do I have to say about this? And it starts not with the volume of your content, it starts with the impact of your ideas. And can you sharpen your idea and develop a premise, this big idea that you want to own in people's minds? Because you can't own an audience despite what you've heard. You can't own an audience, but you can own an idea in their mind. So what is that idea. It's not a keyword, it's not a topic that's all been commodified. It's your insightful reframe on a familiar topic. So James Clear writes about habits in Atomic Habits. His reframe, because that's a very common topic to write about, his reframe is you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. Or a friend of mine, Michelle Warner, who's a business model designer and strategist for small businesses. Michelle is ultimately could be put on a spreadsheet with her peers when vetted by clients, and that's a race to the bottom. You kind of win on price or fame, I guess. But Michelle says to develop the strategy that's right for you, you need to be the kind of person, as a small business owner or an entrepreneur, who raises their hand and says, I don't have the answers, but I'm moving forward anyway. In other words, she distills that into her premise. Think sequence over strategy. Knowing the next right move is more important than knowing all the moves. And so she attacks the pristine playbooks and blueprints. She attacks the need to know the answers in theory before you act. And she rewards action to find answers and knowing the next right move. And it informs her podcast called sequence over Strategy. It informs her evangelism when she's on a podcast as a guest or writes. Her newsletter, like everything Michelle does, is not just to teach better business strategy and business model design. It's to evangelize and embody the premise of sequence over strategy. That's inside out thinking. She is saying to the world, you care about this topic and instead of me just pummeling you with more generic advice about that topic and outside in approach, I'm going to be inside out. I have something distinct to say and I've done the hard work again, the pile of dirt you're comfortable shoveling. The hard work for an inside out thinker is how do I get them to see what I see? What are all the stories and frameworks? How do I turn expertise? Which is where the outside in thinker stops sharing expertise. But the inside out thinker goes, how do I turn my expertise into brand ip? We have a proprietary method and a bunch of frameworks. We have signature stories. We have a message that is so crisp and memorable. We have little turns of phrases or terms we define that you remember. We have actual repeatable IP intellectual property like you suck out all the goodness from a big concept bestselling business book, all you're left with is the ip and then you create a whole platform of thought leadership using your ip. So the inside out thinker says it's going to be harder because I'm not just pandering what are the things I need to say and do and create to get them to see what I see. But once I do that, I am in pole position to win their business. I can charge a premium for what I'm doing. I will be highly sought and highly referred to because everything I'm doing is memorable and more importantly to my success, defensible. The outside in thinker goes, I guess I'm going to be the winner among all the others like me running on the hamster wheel. And I'm going, I don't want to play that game and I don't want my clients to play that game either. We've talked a lot about premise just for folks who are unfamiliar with that concept. Can you A define premise and B, talk about how you go about either codifying or building? Like what are the elements? Yeah. So a premise, it's not your topic, it's how you see your topic. It's a defensible assertion that you make. So I talk about marketing. My defensible assertion, this perspective that I'm packaging and communicating to you, is that you need to think resonance over reach to be a successful marketer. Think resonance, overreach. That's my entire platform's premise. I mentioned Michelle Warner, sequence over strategy. Ours sound very similar. We're friends, we've worked together, we. So hers sounds similar in the like this over that dynamic. But you can see in both cases a good premise is sort of kinetic. There's a before and after moment. So think of a premise as your refreshing reframe or your insightful reframe on a topic you're focused on. I mentioned James Clear, Michelle Warner. A very famous one we've heard from for many, many years is Simon Sinek. People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. Uncle Tony. Anthony Bourdain, my favorite storyteller. Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride. It's not this, but it's this. You're thinking of it this way, but think of it that way. And so a good test of a strong premise is what I call the X Y premise pitch. So think of a project, just distill it down. Instead of thinking your whole company for a moment, think about, well, we have this business, it's in motion we're going to launch a podcast, a newsletter. Pick your project. Can you say to the world this is a podcast about X. That's your topic X. Unlike other podcasts about X and other content and other speakers and communicators, only we Y. And if you can't come up with the letter Y part, don't launch the podcast or know the first flurry of episodes is to try and find that and develop it, then articulate it better as you're packaging and you're communicating your podcast to scale. These are small business services. This is software for this purpose focused on X, helping you X. Unlike other competitors who say they also do that for X only we why? Most people, they don't convey how they see things. They only convey maybe what they do. And that's a big mistake because there's you can't really win. You can't charge a premium. It's like, okay, great, I'll put you on a spreadsheet along with everybody else who has the fancier clientele, who has the whatever bigger budget effectively or higher tolerance for the hamster wheel of marketing. I guess I'll pick them. Or what it really turns into is who's cheapest. Tough way to build a good business. So this is a something about X. Unlike others who also talk about X only we Y that helps flesh out your premise. How do you pick the altitude of the why? So when you're thinking about that why better be significant or else we would be like cool, I don't care. How do you make sure it's the right why? Most of my clientele, I'm working with the individual voice because I believe hiding behind a logo is ineffectual. But I also most of what I do centers on public speaking and messaging. You can't send your corporate logo to the keynote stage. That's going to be your executive, your marketer, you the listener. It's going to be Dan. So I'm going to work with Dan. So I work with a lot of in house creators of some kind, executive or otherwise, or actual creators, soloists, authors, thought leaders. By doing that, what I do is if I'm at the table as a consultant or coach working on an organization's message by design, I only work with the top decision makers. If the CEO wants a better message and is is invested emotionally and intellectually but not actually on the schedule with me, I'm not going to work with them because what I'm doing is. You asked me how I come at this. For lack of a better way of Framing this, I'm going to work with that CEO, that founder, or that soloist, and the first couple of interactions, I'm going to get them drunk. No, not really. I joke that it's like the two drink minimum version of you that I need first. What I most need is to interrogate you about your perspective and your thinking and how you see things and have you not think at all about wordsmithing or being accepted by the market. I just need you to be brutally honest. Like you've had a couple in your system and you're like, you know what? Think about marketing today, Dan. Or I joke that. Okay, if you're sober, that's wonderful. I respect that. I'm a bourbon guy. You don't have to be. Let's do the tired at the end of a long day confiding in your workplace confidant where you're like, I can't hold back. So frustration with what you see in your space is a wonderful doorway into or spark towards the next piece of it, which is curiosity. So rant at me for a time. I'll catch what flies by. I'll put it on the page. I'll work with you to synthesize what you're saying in messy fashion into a good dish later. But right now we gotta shop for ingredients. Then after you have your frustrating rant or moment, you start asking questions about it. You're like, hold on. Okay. I can't stand this over obsession. With reach followers, we're like conflating almost entirely awareness with success. The two are not the same. In fact, awareness itself is a proxy for another marketing thing. We need to care about affinity. It's not about reach, it's about resonance. I could say all this till I'm blue in the face and I'll win some business by doing that. But to build a platform of thought leadership, I need to start interrogating it. Turning frustration into. Into curiosity. Why? Why are we that way? Who has done it differently? How did they do it? I keep saying resonance. What does that mean? The dictionary says this, the sciences say that. I'll write about that. I'll arrive at my own marketing centric definition of the word. Now, that's a part of my ip. So I have this premise development process. I call it the Matter More method, where I'm leading somebody through a movement from their frustration to their curiosity, to then the articulation of that curiosity publicly, where you're raising your hand in view of the audience and saying, I'm not settling for what we're up to the status quo is broken. In the distance is the mountain peak. I think we should go to. Competitors want to take you to that one. We're going to that one. Subscribe for the journey. Let's go again. If it's a podcast, if it's a newsletter, if it's a single speech, if it's a moment in time with you, all this works, even if it's not serialized content. Because effectively what you're saying is, no matter what I sell, no matter what I do, I am in the change business and I'm anchoring that change back to the very beginning of our call to what you want to the goal you have. You have this goal, right? Yeah. And you're coming at it this way, right? Well, here are the problems with that and here's the illness causing all those problems. Make this change. That's the premise. So we start with premise development. We construct that narrative argument around the premise to ensure people actually care about it. And now we have the starter dough, we have the language and the narrative argument, the lens through which you see everything. And you can flex that into homepage copy, into thought leadership content, into a signature speech, into we need a couple more stories, let's go create those. We need a visual framework or a repeatable method or whatever. So it's equal parts development and assessment. So that's really briefly the process. You mentioned some larger brands you work with. The number of sort of premises, I don't know the, the plural of premise that you can have in a large organization. Like, is it a business unit can have one premise, one primary voice? Like, how do you think about. I know you're working with individuals and creators, but out in the wild inside of a multifaceted brand. How do you think about the architecture of these arguments? I worked for one of those brands, right. Like. But when I joined HubSpot, they were 750 people and they had their sights on. They talked about the IPO all the time when I was there. And you know, they were one of those early movers of it's the inbound marketing movement and methodology and all those things. And what they relied on there, I think to their credit when I was there is they had this term. They'd written a book that was very advice centric. Their co founders, Dharmesh and Brian, they had a kind of an emerging methodology. It was more like station to station, like what a marketer goes through. But they kind of put it to a visual the inbound marketing methodology. And of course they defined inbound itself. Set that aside for a moment. When I left and became a speaker, that was several jobs later. What you find is, oh, a speech is the test of your mettle. Because in a speech, it's the densest dose of your ip. You're making a. Hopefully you are making a coherent argument to embrace a change, to embrace your perspective, to go with you both in the speech and beyond it. So you subscribe, share, buy, et cetera. The speech is really like when I develop something with somebody, we are focused on a speech in some way, even if you're not giving a speech, because the speech is the test and it's also the development tool because if you can't do that, you really don't have much to say. The reason I bring that up is for my own speaking business. What you find is, oh, wait, I don't just need a nice sounding term and a single visual that just summarizes the natural progression. It's like every consultant has a proprietary method. It's like, step one needs analysis. Okay, that's not really proprietary. You are forced as a speaker for your product, which is a keynote speech, to figure out, do I have all the elements here? So what I do is, I imagine who is the CEO of that organization, if they were giving a keynote to the absolute ideal audience for that organization, what is going in the keynote? And a lot of people make the mistake of going, oh, I'm going to be a futurist. That keynote is going to be about, I'm the CEO of Salesforce, I'm going to talk about the future of X or whatever. And I'm going, no, let's say it's the ultimate user conference. It's not a bunch of industry analysts that would become the development tool for your premise at that level. And I actually don't think that you can summarize or condense this idea of storytelling. That's kind of broadly what we're talking about. A premise for your story into a PDF deck that disseminates around the company. Like, one of the biggest pet peeves I have is a lot of us want to have like an organizational story, which matters as a lens that unites. But then who is carrying the story to market if your marketers are not storytellers, what does it matter that your homepage copy sounds nice, that you have this beautiful deck that was really expensive paying a consultant to produce for you? That's why I'm like, oh, the pendulum is swung way too far away from the individual. And, oh, we're talking about media companies. Except for the crown jewel of media companies, which is who works there and what are they saying and what are they like? We can't learn story, we have to be storytellers. And so that's why when a big brand comes to me and I just lay it all out, this doesn't work. If what you want is a logo to talk about your stuff, who is doing the storytelling that matters today? The who behind the content. As our friend Ann Handley loves to say, the from line matters more than the subject line. That is the perfect encapsulation of everything I've been talking about. What makes the from matter? Who is the from? And more importantly, how do we give them a super suit of intellectual property of ip? The premise is the heads up display of your suit. It's how you see everything and how you operate your suit suit. And then you have a framework and signature stories and terminology and methodology and then you bring that all out into market and you can compete with people who might have a bigger budget than you or be giant space aliens. As this metaphor tips off the rails, let's keep going there. Now as you're talking, I'm thinking a lot about subject matter experts within any of these brands. I think all I just said to you was I shy away from this stuff. If it's a massive behemoth brand going, I want a distinct premise. I'm like, you're probably not in that business anymore. You are going to be outside in, you are going to be in the triage, arbitrage, outspend, whatever. Like I don't think distinctiveness happens among P and G brands. Do you think that's a disadvantage? You know, so if you're, if you're a big brand today in the battle for attention, you're using a sledgehammer and somebody else is is found a highly resonant message. If you're in that position, more so than ever, you're at risk I would assume, right? So like in many ways the large brands need to take a step back and say this is not the path forward. Even though that's my the reality of today. And I'm trying to put more horsepower and more dollars around this reality of today. There's a self reflection here that I'm going to say something that might get me kicked off the show. I actually think that the larger a brand gets, the more they just pay lip service to wanting to differentiate and be original and have something distinct. But really what they want is to be comfortably average. It's like average products for average People, mass products for mass audiences. That's what they want, that's what they are. And even if they have rogue agents internally where they don't really believe that, I'm saying, great, like, you know, make some change. And while you make some change, go look for the company, that that's an advantage for them. For me as an individual, I'll go back to my speaking story for a second. When I started giving, you know, some 2016 I started, that was my first year as a paid keynote speaker where my livelihood was from the st, giving business keynotes. I had no fame at the time, I had no book. Much smaller following than I have right now, much smaller network. And yet you're so. You're forced to invest in different things than the celebrity who's like, I know I'm going to catch 400k in speaking fees this year just by being me. I was like, I can't do that. I would love to do that. I don't have that luxury. Right. And so what you're forced to invest in are things like, how sharp is my message, how differentiated am I? What is it that I bring to the table that others, when they experience it, leap out of their chair and go, I need more of you. I need you in my next event. I need you at my company meeting. I need you in my inbox. I need you in my podcast player, Right? And if you are incapable as an organization of having great air game, that's the ground game that differentiates you. And I always come back to a simple truth, which is, okay, am I for you or not? Is my philosophy aligned with you or not? Here's the test. Is it an advantage for you to talk to your audience today through content or conversation about something you observed at home yesterday, telling that story and using it as a metaphor to teach making espresso, playing with your kids, walking the dog, whatever. If you are very uncomfortable with the idea or people around you will shoot that down. If you open a blog post like that, or you're like, no, I don't really see an advantage, then you need to go harder at what your advantages are. I'm not for you. My message isn't for you. I'm here to say AI runs on LLMs. So do people. AI large language models people, Little life moments. And the strongest communicators draw gratuitously from their little life moments to connect with other people. But the more you scale, I think the more you forget that because you're looking for grandiose, generic things. And so I'M not for everybody. And I want to make that clear. I don't think this philosophy works for the, again, PNGs of the world, because that's not what they want to be. I mean, that's interesting. If you have a strong premise, you view almost everything in your world through that premise. Right. So something happens, and I'm like, oh, my God, I had this insight, as you may say. That's the thing about signature stories in premise. They allow you to teach new things to people through unexpected lenses that are really different. And if you can come at it from an unexpected way, that's pretty incredible. Because at great scale, you get the clunky version of that. That's the healthy version of, like, I see the world a certain way. So I'm pressing it through that lens. Like, I believe in resonance overreach. So I'm talking about how to show up on social media where people really focus on reach. How do I talk about it? It's got to be pressed through the lens of resonance overreach. Right. I'm not going to ever give a talk about how to win the attention economy, how to predictably go viral. No, I'm going to say my speech is called be their favorite. How to Stop Chasing attention and be highly sought. Because that's how I see it. Right. Speeches have premises. I have a premise. When you get to great scale, it starts to sound a little cringy. Where, you know, I saw HubSpot do this too, where it was like, we were inbound marketers. We're all about inbound marketing. Oh, there's also inbound sales, there's inbound hr, there's inbound support. And I'm like, ooh, you're taking this lens that used to be so brightly colored and clear. It's almost like if the lens are literal goggles instead of just one person behind it. You know, you're trying to take those goggles and you're trying to, like, stretch them across multiple people, and it breaks. So I do think this has a breaking point once you start to get to that level, or at least to use it in that way. And I had a friend and mentor sum it up beautifully for me, Andrew Davis, who absolutely should come on the show. He's, I think, the best living marketing speaker. He also has really sharp insights on AI and creativity and things like that. So Andrew Davis once told me, as I was learning how to craft my first keynotes, and he said two things, many, many things I'll never forget. But two of them are one Is as a speaker, fight hard to stay humble. Because unlike a lot of people who will work decades of their lives with no recognition, every time you deliver your work as a speaker, you get applause twice by the way, up front and at the end. And that can mess with people and does so he said that to me. Stay humble, connected to that. He said the best leaders. I took this to mean individual voices, but also organizations of any size. The best leaders are comfortable and confident enough to say to the world, I don't have the solution. I have a solution. And the reason you would care about a not the is because this solution I have on offer among several is based on an idea that maybe you haven't considered before. It's a solution you haven't seen that I'm illuminating to you. Now back to the refreshing reframe idea or a premise and how to articulate it. It is more potent. It is not just another it is the only that does it this way, comes at it this way, built through this perspective, what have you. So I'll never forget that we're not the solution, we're a solution. What do you see from like software companies at great scale, the number one in the category, the solution, the this of record, right? It's everyone wants to be like, we're the only game in town. We're the best game in town. We're the number one. We're the objective. Right Pick. And I'm going, that's not how people make choices about anything. They're subjective of don't be the best, whatever the hell that means in our work, be their favorite. As you're talking through that concept, which I love and I think is so smart, this methodology or framework better for aspirational brands than category leaders. Because category leaders almost can't help themselves. If you're a category leader, you're beating your chest in a lot of cases to your point, for buyers, like, it's a safe bet, but it's not the one you're excited about, right? Like you're trying to figure out, like, okay, who has something a really unique, interesting perspective. They're not out saying, you know, number one, we're the solution. So on the aspirational side, do you see people embracing this mindset more than from a category leadership standpoint? Not really. Where I see this the most is the acute pain is our sales cycles are really, really long. There's low urgency when we interact with our buyers at whatever stage they're at. And we are not seeing passionate engagement and response. And maybe you're looking at the challenger brands in your space or the thought leaders in your space and you're watching them post things, or more likely you're watching their leaders and marketers or the voice post things and say things and give speeches and you're watching it just light up with conversation and support and all that stuff. And you're like, what gives? I talk a lot about resonance. That's the word I want to be associated with. That's the word that my audience knows me for. The follow up questions are many and I have to build content and IP to answer those questions. What is resonance? How do you define it? It's the urge to act. People feel when a message or a moment with you aligns so deeply with them that they feel amplified. So you're increasing the odds of an action. Most people want an action, but they don't know how to impart the energy necessary for that person to act. That's the job of resonance. And it's almost like you can reach out through the screen and tap you on the chest. The keynote speaker who ends with a whisper and everyone leaps out of their chair and applause. I've always been fascinated by them because I started out as more of a yeller to try and get people like, I'm like volume based. No, they are impact based. They could whisper and still hit hard. What is that? Sorcery? Like, how do I do that right in everything? And so that's who it works for is like the folks that either they say this or I can look at them and identify this is. We're not resonating the way we need to. And again, I am pretty sure I don't know these people. I keep beating on them because it's an easy example. I am pretty sure that the organization in charge of selling tissues under P and G doesn't think about that, doesn't care about that, or they just pay lip service to it. But for the rest of us, where we need to resonate, where we need trust, which is built over time, where we want not just passive audience and reach, but superfans and affinity and referral business. You know, that's why my home is largely B2B because this is where people. Oh yeah, that's our business, right? That's how it works. Relationships and trust and longer cycles and all these things. That to me is a healthy home. For everything I've said today, it's like you don't want passive reach, you want passionate superfans, which means you need to resonate. If you find yourself looking around and feeling like this is hitting home from a standpoint of, hey, we're not doing these things and we should a what is the risk of not course correcting? Indeed, what are some like early things you can, can and should start doing to change? And I know you look at this through the lens of individuals. Like, how can individuals create the change that they need? Is it just almost operating as a solopreneur within a brand and modeling the way forward? Or is it total change management within an organization? It starts I always think about this because it's where I came up. I led several content teams at several organizations, and back then, blogging was the tactic. So. And I'm a writer. If someone doesn't know what I do, I just say, I'm a writer. Nice to meet you. See you. I can explain everything else behind that if you need me to, but I identify as a creative who coaches. And so I've done this work and I teach it and strategize with people and sell it. But as a writer and someone who came up leading teams of writers, I say to people in the opening of your next article, a post, a blog post, a newsletter edition, whatever it is, are people like hawking you? Are they really over your shoulder controlling exactly how you write those first three paragraphs? Because if so, I'm going to ask you to leave that job because you're never going to do your best work. But if not, which is most places not, you have control over what you say there. Great. So for the next 10 articles, 10 social posts, all I want you to do is write a small story with big meaning. This is what everyone does. Ira Glass does this on Miss American Life. He tells a story of a guy you don't care about waiting on the subway platform in New York City as he's going home. And this guy has a weird interaction with a stranger and tells Ira Glass how much he cared about that stranger's perception. Even though this is one of those weirdos walking the subway in New York. And Ira Glass goes, that's the thing about strangers. It's like by not knowing who we are or not seeing us when we're trying to impress our loved ones, they have instantaneous insight into who we actually are as people. So we take their opinion more seriously than maybe we should today on the show Strangers. So I'm like, just do that everywhere. Start with a simple and small story. Metaphor, observation. Use a phrase that sounds like that's the thing about this topic everyone else is also writing about. Plus this Insight that you actually need. If you can do that over and over and over again, you start to get this. This weird but awesome sensation that people really seem to care about this. People around me are pointing it out. People I'm trying to reach are actually signaling that I resonate with them. You start telling small stories that arrive at big meaning, and all of a sudden, the world of possibility as a communicator opens up to you. Because everywhere you go, if you change nothing else about your advice, you are able to show people why they would actually care about your advice. And that's the business we're in. We're in the make me care business as we're wrapping up. I mean, I. I think the other element here is, you know, you and I were in the infant stages of content marketing, and there was a lot of folks yourself. You mentioned Andrew Davis and handling robust careers based on filling this leadership void at a time when we were almost like building content marketing from the ground up. Right. It feels like we're in a moment like that now where people are just, like, doing a lot of things that are nonsensical in marketing and looking for leadership. The fundamentals are now important. They've come roaring back. The incrementals, people have maxed out. People are losing their mind over the incrementals and then turning to a tool to be like scale to infinity, the tiny things that really don't matter that much. And I'm like, we have a choice now, people. We can keep doing that and exhaust ourselves and become even more commodified or irrelevant, or we can embrace the fact that this is what it's always been is, can you package and communicate your knowledge, your expertise to actually resonate the job is to make them care, not to just get in front of them. We talked about future proofing yourself at the beginning. And that's the key, right? Like, if you think of how can I step out and occupy this leadership vacuum that is largely present right now, which is, I can step in, I can get invited to speak. I can talk about to the boardroom about what we're headed. I can talk about internal employees, about the job to be done. And all of a sudden, I'm leading because I'm talking and thinking like this instead of chasing fame or vanity metrics or followers or traffic or reach, right? So I think that's a great place to wrap here. And just putting a fine point on the real estate. You talked about people occupying is the ideas in people's head, not the traffic on your Website. Thank you so much. Any final thoughts before we end it here? No. But to the people who are trying to do this, like, please, please, please keep making what matters. We need more high conviction communicators and thinkers. We have enough people lurching between tactics, kowtowing to big tech companies, doing all the things possible to basically make either themselves as a voice irrelevant. Because if you're doing things that don't uniquely require you, sooner or later you're not going to be required. So you're either doing that or you're just trying to scale what is kind of working in a mediocre fashion. What I want most from people is to stop trying to compete on the volume of their marketing and learn to compete on the impact of their ideas if they need help. Jay, how do they work with you? How do they find you? Jaconzo.com for everything. My newsletter, which is free and weekly, my public speaking, my consulting and coaching and my show is called How Stories Happen, where we actually look at the process. It's not just an advice show. It's mostly working with somebody else, someone exceptional like Seth Godin, Andrew Davis, Jay Baer, Anne Handley, breaking down a single story and how they wrote it all the way to someone that you've never heard of, who's going through the process of figuring out their message or their speech or their next story. And we rework things in real time. So it's the active craft put on display from exceptional communicators and others. That's called How Stories Happen. And you can find it wherever you listen to podcasts. I will. Plus one that man, I love that show. And it's in the weeds enough to leave every day with something practical that you can take on. So thank you so much. I think you're a cherished, valued partner in this community, which we all need very much. But really great stuff and can't wait to keep hearing from you in the future. Thanks, Dan. Thank you for listening to Content Disrupted brought to you by Skyward. To stay up to date on the latest ideas and insights in brand building and content marketing, visit our website@skyward.com that's S K-Y W O R D.com join us for our next episode where we'll continue to challenge marketing norms and inspire you with fresh strategies for growing business through brand storytelling.