Your Marketing Is Sending Buyers Straight to Your COMPETITORS (Here's Why)

Hi everyone, welcome back to Demand Decoded. Dan here with you today, joined in the studio by Amanda after a few months off from the podcast. Been working hard in the background, of course. But um yeah, good to have you back.

So in this episode, we're we're diving into the risk of marketing and growing somebody else's pipeline. And we've been having some really good conversations internally at the moment, particularly around um something that's called the duplication of purchase law, which was introduced by one of our strategists, uh Rafa, to me, anyway, which kind of discusses how there is a risk in marketing of driving demand for category leaders and people that aren't us, basically, investing in content campaigns, paid media to create awareness for a problem, but a meaningful chunk of that demand being lost to category leaders and people and vendors that aren't you, basically, is flowing to whoever owns the most mind share in that category.

So there's some areas, like particularly in like partner marketing and tech partner marketing, which we do as well, which makes this pain extremely visible. Um, but it goes throughout absolutely every business as well. Like this is a a real risk, and I can guarantee a lot of businesses are wasting huge chunks of budget right now marketing a problem and losing that demand to somebody else. So, yeah, we're gonna dive into all of that.

But Amanda, like good to have you back. What where have you been? What have you been doing? Obviously, I've uh jetted off somewhere fancy.

No, I um I have been hard at work uh on our sales, UK and AMIA. Um, it's been a fantastic start to the year here at Blend, and we've been working with some incredible partners, customers um all over the world, actually. Uh so although I look after AMIA sales, I've been dealing with people out of the US and uh and all over Europe as well as the UK. So it's been a very exciting time.

Lots of really interesting challenges uh going on for the businesses that I've been talking to, some of which are part of the reason why I wanted to have this chat. You know, we we talk a lot, I talk a lot to marketers who are having to make decisions about how to position themselves and the products that they're reselling, or um, you know, the solutions that they are bringing together from a range of owned and and resold elements. And uh and so yeah, this is something that I'm hearing as a real pain point.

Uh, I think it's a fairly perennial one in the sense that businesses that solve problems, and they usually do so with a mixture of products and service of some kind, they are always positioning things that they don't fully own alongside themselves and doing that well, I think, can dilute their efforts. Um, but yeah, what else? I suppose there's been a lot of excitement and investment around brand this year that I've noticed, and and that's very exciting to see big brands looking to launch themselves and to take themselves onto uh a new stage in their journey, but also people who are are rising in their categories and saying now is the time to position ourselves to move from that kind of scale up startup even mode into the next phase.

And I think identity is a really big part of that. So yeah, be an exciting time. Just a quick one before we get into the episode because I've got an offer that I'm sure all of you will be interested in. AEO is something that every B2B marketing team is trying to figure out right now, and most just don't know where to start.

But at Blend, we're offering a full AEO analysis of your brand's AI visibility, and we'll walk you through exactly what we found and what to do about it. From full prompt analysis against your competitors to a citation analysis where we'll look at different content types and how you're being cited for those and mentioned in those, and what you can actually do to be mentioned and cited much more for your brand, and what content you should create going forwards and how you comprise that strategy really.

We will drop a note in the uh description of this episode in the show notes, and you can go over there, request your free AEO audit, and we will deliver that to you. I'm jealous of the amount of conversations you get to have with um, you know, like marketing leaders. It's strange, like you hear, I think you hear more salespeople that have become marketers and less marketers that have become salespeople. Yes, I think so.

One of the things that obviously works well for me here is that having started our strategy function here and then moved in and broadened that to be client service, I do just know how we do things inside and out. So there isn't a part of this business that I haven't worked very closely with in my time here, and so it's just very easy for me to know who to bring in when a conversation needs it, or to actually um answer those questions myself. And I think that really helps. We've always been a very consultative business when it comes to the way that we do sell, and it's very easy for me to fit into that mode.

But you're right, it's it's one of the great joys. Um, having come from client service and always thrived on those new relationships, essentially that part of my role has expanded massively, and so I speak to new people every single week and help them, even if it's very brief, even it's we're not the people to help you, but I love hearing about problems and knowing either I've got a great example of how that can be solved, or you know, there's a bigger conversation, something to unpack here.

Yeah, well, yeah, I think talking about problems, the one problem I think to solve today and to discuss is actually understanding who you're marketing for. And I don't mean that in the sense of understanding your ICP and personas that we've spoken about lots, but who's this marketing benefiting? You know, are we distributing, you know, thought leader ads on LinkedIn that are discussing a problem in the market, a category? Okay, well, that's great to a certain extent to build demand in that category, but the question to ask is how does that actually benefit us?

Like, where are you tying in the value of your business, your people, your expertise, even your product as well? If you're um, you know, in that kind of industry, it's a really interesting question to ask yourself. Yes, I think so. I think it's it is so it's so intrinsic.

Think about many of the businesses we worked with over the years, Microsoft partners, right? Well, of course, in talking about themselves and what they offer, they end up talking about Microsoft products. But Microsoft also sell those products and people can go and research them. So, on the one hand, you do want to do that and you want to be part of that voice, but you also don't want people to go, oh Microsoft products.

Oh, here are three other people who sell those Microsoft products. So, how do you how do you balance that well? Is a really is it's more than just a marketing question. It is a full revenue arm question.

How are we going to position ourselves within the mix of what we're offering and make sure that we stand out and have value in our own right that can't be replicated when you compare us to the other people in the directory, yeah, for example. Um, or if it's more of a physical product and any business could buy and then resell that, again, how are you positioning the value that you add? It's something that has to happen in the conversations that are had by your salespeople. It's something that your CEO's vision needs to be around.

It's not just what marketing put out there, I think. Yeah, absolutely. I think if I use us as an example, like we're a HubTalk partner, of course, and we love the platform. Like, genuinely believe the platform is transformational for a lot of businesses.

But belief in a product and a clear go-to-market strategy about how we use that, why we are the people that can implement that effectively and actually give you true ROI on that platform and make it work for your business, are two completely different things and completely different messages. HubSpot should be the best at marketing HubSpot for themselves. Yes. Um, Microsoft are better at marketing Microsoft than any Microsoft partner.

So, you know, and actually think about HubSpot themselves. If HubSpot just marketed the issue of, you know, an agentic customer platform, which is now their thing, right? Or if if we go back, roll, roll it back like I don't know, 15 years and they talk about um cloud CRM, well, if they're just focusing on that problem, that demand could flow to Salesforce. Well, absolutely.

That that's yeah, for for someone like for any any product out there, you know, you think about a HR platform, for example, um, there are so many competitors out there that sell HR platforms. They do it to all different categories of business. And I think that is where you can start to see some differentiation in positioning at the highest level, which is is an important thing, and I'm sure we'll talk about more in a minute. Um, but if they are not careful in the way they frame things, they do end up putting themselves essentially in a position to be compared when they might not have had to have that comparison in the first place.

Um, the classic example outside of B2B is of course that category redefinition, yeah. Compare the mere cat to compare, you know, compare the markets. Actually, that big battle between compare the market and also go compare, those brands try to change what people looked for. And they have the power to do that, obviously.

Um, but when you are emerging in a category or in dense competition, that's one of the hardest things to do. And few brands have the opportunity to actually do that in a broadcast environment and with Whimsy, which I think plays a lot of uh, you know, has a lot to play uh in the success and failure of both of those two examples. Category redefinition is something that a lot of brands aspire to, even in the startups that we've encountered over the years. The number of times I have sat down with businesses early in their conversations with us, and they've said, we have a blue ocean strategy as opposed to a red ocean strategy, we are, and their plan was essentially to redefine a category.

And then the framing that they would use for that would be something that came from a different category entirely. We've had businesses come to us and say, we want to rebrand this entire industry to a term that's actually a psychology term. It's like, well, it's not relevant, and there's also a hundred universities that do courses on that that are psychology courses, so you're never actually going to be found for this term. You can't carve out a niche there, um, and you can't put the budget into redefine a category in that way.

So it's it's something that comes up at the small scale of businesses, they'll say, I'm going to, I'm going to change the way that people think about this sort of product, and it comes up at the bigger end as well. But in more established categories, I think there's often more of an awareness, more of an issue where bigger businesses struggle to say no to things strategically. They struggle to own a niche and stay in a position. And niche generally, when we talk about it, will be like vertical niche, persona niche.

But actually, um, when we think about the Anthony Pierre uh Fletch uh piece that we were chatting about earlier in the week, yeah, one of the biggest segments is an invisible segment uh in your audience, and it's between those who are aware of your category, like really aware of what products are in it, and those who are simply unaware that things like you exist. And too many businesses, particularly bigger ones, are trying to cater to both at once and therefore doing a poor job on both sides.

Um, it's actually easier for small businesses to say no, we're only for people who already know about this, or we're only for people who know nothing. Um, it's harder to say no to you know, business deal maybe already winning or to things that you feel are already effective, but clarity is 99% of success in marketing. Saying something consistently that is simple over and over again is what makes brands win. Yeah, absolutely.

You know, you touched on um red ocean, blue ocean there as well. I I wonder now how long oceans stay blue for. Yeah, I would agree with that. Because like the scale um and the tools available for us now to create products to create new technology is just absolutely incredible.

Like if you have a new category, um, a product and solution, somebody's jumping on that the following week after you launch it. Like it might be a bigger product that's tagging it on as a feature. Competitors are just all around you. Yes, and and a blue ocean strategy isn't always just actually in many cases, a blue ocean strategy isn't just about being different, it's often about difference in positioning.

So the one of the classic examples was like before wine bottles were fun, or the even the chicken wine example, right? It's got a chicken on the bottle, becomes the chicken wine, everyone knows which one you mean and buys that. Um, but there are plenty of other examples where that's the case, and I I think there's been a bit of evidence in the last few years of more B2B brands trying to do that. Like, how can we be visually distinct?

Yeah, and I think it was last year as Vanta and another brand, I'm trying to remember what the other brand was, both launched purple llama mascots. Right? Right. We're trying to be we're trying to be whimsical, um, we're trying to be a little bit different, but actually you settle on the same thing or something that you know it very quickly becomes crowded.

There's a pink line from Fibrillar, like it's it's very quickly something that is already done because of speed to delivery increasing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. So duplication of purchase law is kind of like this concept of creating demand that is then drifted throughout the category leaders. And I suppose, like in in plain English, what duplication of purchase law is, because it's actually there's a a lot of scientific meaning behind this that like I don't even understand really.

Um so I asked Claude to give it to me in plain English, of course. And the plain English is that when you grow demand for a category, the main share of that new demand flows to whoever already owns that mind share and that category. So buyers who are becoming convinced that they need a solution just default to the name they already know. And this comes back to so many things that we've mentioned on this podcast about like being on the day one shortlist, making sure that your brand is dominating the mind share of buyers so that when that buying trigger occurs for that category, you're already on the short list.

Because if you don't, let's say, you know, you uh you're walking the conference halls at an event and you bump into people and you start talking about like, oh, have you heard, you know, there's this new agentic customer platform. I can't think of any other example now apart from HubSpot. Um, and you're like, oh yeah, so agentic customer platforms can do this thing and you can like run all these workflows. So they're like, oh, okay, that's cool.

Um, but you don't talk about HubSpot. You don't talk about like the benefits of a particular platform, you just talk about the problem it solves and the workflows that you can create. So they might go away and think, oh, okay, yeah, agentic customer platform. I'm sure I heard Salesforce talk about that, and then they go and like Google Salesforce and buy that, like because they are potentially the category leader in that space.

They're not, but you know, if they were. Um, and you know, this is what we mean about how like markets work and how category demand flows, because most of it is flowing to the category leaders, and it's it's our job to make sure that doesn't happen if you're not one of those category leaders. Yes, there's the in in the reseller environment, the drift is towards the product, whatever the big product is. In the in in other environments, the drift is probably to the the Davids among the glias.

Yeah, right. So a number of brands that we've worked with over the years that have been taking uh a pot shot at part of SAP or you know, something from Oracle, let's say, and and so if they are not careful with how they position themselves in that competitive environment, the drift is going to be to the known category leader, absolutely. So, how do you create meaningful voice, meaningful ownership of that mind share? Um that's that's the thing to solve, but also you're only going to solve it if you are really, really clear on what it is you do and who you do it for, which what you what you do is not the category itself, it is always some version of it.

Yeah, yeah, like a Microsoft partner, what you do isn't resell Microsoft. And then maybe there is a business out there that just resells Microsoft. I think it's very unlikely that all a business would do is say, here's your order form for Microsoft, off you go. Exactly.

You know, there are strategic services that go around that, so it's not, yeah, the who you do it for and what you do is way more complex than we have this product that you should try, and it's not even ours. I think from a practical standpoint, um the way I would position this is whilst it's it's hard, right? Because there are cases where we should just talk about the problem. You know, on this podcast, we just talk about the problem a lot of the time, actually.

And um, but we're not that's a different medium, I suppose, to something where uh you're trying to get like an advertisement in front of somebody or like a particular um thing to be consumed like immediately, like a long-form piece of content is just there really for people to like consume and enjoy, I think. But if you can stop leading with the problem as much throughout everything you do, and start leading with your answer to that problem, that will enable you to have a more unique voice in the market and a value proposition that actually ties back to the problem as well.

You're not just banging the drum about the problem, creating demand for a category that you exist in, but might accidentally flow the actual demand for the solution to somebody else. Yeah. If we think about where people might actually feel this pain, they might be feeling it like right, right down the strategic chain. They might be feeling it at why are my ads not performing?

Why is this piece of work that we did not doing what we thought it was going to do? Why is our pipeline so slow? You know, we they might be feeling it really, really far down. But actually, if we look at it as a strategic issue and we think about the growth cycle uh that we talk about here, this is a product market fit issue.

This is about the fundamentals of how we position ourselves. It is something that defines messaging, not just is part of that messaging and therefore is part of everything it touches afterwards. It is about figuring out how you are going to, what value you bring that is more than the sum of the parts that you've stitched together in order to do it. So most businesses, I would say, fall into the category of solutions.

There are very few that don't have, well, there are, of course, retailers who just sell products, e-commerce outfits, and so on. But most B2B businesses will have some area where they are not just selling a product, but there is some value add to it. Yeah, of course. Yeah, absolutely.

So it is about thinking about what that overarching value that is being provided by that combination is. What is the thing that your combination of skills, your combination of offerings gives customers that no one else can do? Yeah. And that is a that is one of the highest strategic uh questions that need to be answered in a business.

It's a it's a C-suite, it's an ownership, it's a visionary conversation, actually. Yeah, and then once you've got that defined, bringing uh that answer throughout everything you do is essential. And I think um one of the things that is still just not done enough is making proof just impossible to miss. There's too often like I'm thinking, you know, micro.

Examples here, but like on website navigation where you don't have case studies in the main nav, they're buried somewhere somewhere, you can't even find them. Like, you know, you're running retargeting ads without actually displaying customer proof and results and why your solution is better than anybody else's out there. And you know, proof should just be impossible to miss because that is the reason why somebody's gonna resonate with you, relate to the problem you've just solved, um, and buy from you.

There's proof and it's value proposition, and it's really that fundamental. What is the thing that we do better than anyone else because we are made up of these components, and those components are people, service, and products and offerings. Getting that down to its simplest is one of the hardest things to do. But as we've said so many times, getting it right at the simplest level gives you that ability to expand and it rules out a whole bunch of possibilities.

There's an infinite number of things that we could say about ourselves. There are so many possible permutations, and the more things you can rule out, the more focus you give yourself, the more effort goes into the areas that you've chosen and the more successful you will be. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, I'm just I'm just thinking of other other examples of I think it works the other way as well.

Um, I think the other angle that we need to think about is for those businesses that have partner channels, how can they help? Yeah, that's an interesting thing. How can they be a better ecosystem? How can they build a better ecosystem for their partners?

And it, I think a lot of it comes down to the businesses that resell you, that co-sell with you, will be more successful when they are allowed to have more of their own identities, when they are allowed to not follow the script, and when they bring real value to the table. And sector expertise is definitely one of those things where no product company is gonna always have every single sector covered and so on, and geographical reach, another way that partners differentiate themselves.

But actually, if you have an ecosystem of partners, you should look to find other kinds of niche and you should promote promote those, you should help promote those businesses, you should lean into what they're saying and and and help them elevate it because it will take you into audience categories that you aren't able to develop because you, as the product owner, cannot be everywhere for once. Probably advising them on niching down, on getting more specific about the challenges they like to solve, the challenges they're best at solving, and who they do that for.

Yes, that's gonna enable you to create an ecosystem of like powerhouses of partners that you can point out to your customers and say, Oh, okay, you just brought our software, you need help with this specific thing. I have the partner for that exact issue. Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Makes such a difference, I think. Certainly, um, it's where some of the very successful partners that we work with, that is something that they have really done is cultivated that niche identity, that specialism, and then really leaned into it. Yeah. Um and that requires an element of trust, I think.

When when you are the product owner and you are releasing your updates, the the kind of desire is to go, right, here we go, Q1 release. Everybody re-brand overnight, please. Yeah. Like we want everyone to be singing from the same hymn sheet, saying the same thing as us.

But actually, that can be detrimental to the success of those brands and them in their own right. And with that success will come back the return to you. You want you want to see that your partners are flourishing and growing in their own right. That means that the business model is working and will drive that revenue back to you.

Can we talk a little bit about, you know, partner marketing is like hard. Yes. And, you know, I I feel it every day because it should be easy, like marketing to marketers as well. I suppose it does make things easier.

Like when I was marketing to chief scientific officers, it was quite hard to for me to relate to their world, you know. Um, but not having a product that you can base your marketing strategy on and your problem solving on, and like actually extracting the value from that makes things tricky because ultimately you're down to your people. That is your unique value, the the people, the expertise that are solving the problems for your customer. And I don't think it is ever, and we've spoken about this a couple of episodes ago when we were talking about like um some other channels and the importance of video and people and putting people in front of your brand now.

Yes, I yeah, I agree with that generally. I think that in the rise of content generation that is coming at the moment, there is a real desire to see things that feel more authentic from real humans, authenticity is key, real people. When you're a service business, that's absolutely true. But I will also say that it has been an issue for a very long time.

It was a um a little joke that I have with our creative director Paul in our hidden bingo card. Because if a service company comes in and they say the things that's the thing that makes us different is our people, that's that's one of the big bingo things. Yeah, every business says that. Every business says that.

But the but the thing is, it's not your people, it is the service that those people bring together. And so how you do that service, what is unique about it, those are the things that you should be talking about. And for us, it might be, you know, it might be the combination of the way we manage our projects and the way we manage feedback is a key differentiator in the way that we serve. For others, it might be that they are the only people that really, really know how to connect certain kinds of things through integrations and have done it so many times that it's not going to be six months of headaches.

It could be all sorts of different things. Um, but usually there is that's a it's that's also a great way of showcasing internal capability is to bring out that thinking, that rationale, the way that we do things here is so important. Yeah, but how much more powerful is it when it comes from that person themselves as well? Oh yes, rather than, you know, I can I can go to Phil, right?

Phil's a smart guy, as everybody who listens to this podcast knows. Yes. Um, and I could I we could have never started the podcast, and I could have just like set up weekly calls with Phil to extract some insights from his brain and things that he's working on at the moment, things he's seeing and and doing. But it was more important to make sure that like Phil was, you know, a person in front of the brand, not a person hiding behind the brand, and that everybody else can see that.

And you know, that's why we've got you here, that's why we have Josh on the podcast, that's why we've had Chrissy on the podcast. You know, there's it's bringing people to the forefront of your brand so that you're authentic, you're trustworthy, people connect with people. And I just think there is so much AI slop content that comes out now, and it's so easy to hide behind a brand. Yes, that the the more authentic you can be means people are just gonna connect with you on a whole new level.

Well, that's the thing. I mean, when we when I have calls with people who have watched the podcast, it is a noticeable difference because they feel like they already know us. They feel like they already know who they're gonna be talking to because they know how we think. And you're right that many businesses, particularly legacy businesses, there seems to be there's this historic thinking that I think went on even in the last five years of you need to move beyond the the CEO's kind of network, and you need to move beyond their vision, and the business needs to stand on its own feet, and marketing is how it does that.

But the risk is that that makes the business very faceless, very soulless, and where it becomes a vision of a corporate entity, no business is truly corporate. Every business is made up of people. So, how do you how do you unlock that? You see lots of businesses, particularly younger businesses at the moment, who just are fully in on the personalities.

You think about Clay and um, you know, Baron and Karim, they are all over content and marketing, their vision and their voice, it's out there. It is part of how Clay as a business speaks, but there are other figureheads in there who are doing amazing content work for that business across all of their different areas. And and the truth is that it is the way to connect brand authentically with people, and it also brings us back to where did we start? That network, that human network that got the business so far before it needed marketing to elevate it.

So there's a sense where some legacy businesses are almost afraid to have too much public figurehead, but it's a it's a mid-category, right? Because you think about the biggest businesses in the world all have extraordinary figureheads, and then there's that mid-category, mid and lower category where they become less and less well known. Actually, at the bottom, you've then, or bottom and growing, you've then got new visionaries. So it's a it's a big unexplored area, I would say.

Who who is the visionary in your business? How do you get them out there? Yeah, who is the one that inspires the people to do things the way that this business does them? And to be honest, if you don't have that, then you got other problems.

Yeah. Tying that though, the like the vision, the convictions are basically the answer to the things we just talked about. You know, when I was um chatting about why this happens and, you know, the duplication of purchase law and how you get around that, it's the difference between just market education and why us is the conviction. It is the point of view that the CEO has, that the leaders in the business have, yes, that you then distribute through through everything you do.

And of course, that comes through their voice, the authentic content they create. But as well, it's like how you know, we spoke about Blend Core um in this podcast a couple of times, which is, you know, how do you create a centralized, governed way to ensure that point of view, that conviction goes throughout everything you're doing? Yeah. Because that's what's gonna differentiate your content between just market education about a problem that's gonna build demand for somebody else's solution and they're gonna go elsewhere.

To okay, not only does that answer like why this problem exists, but actually we're getting we're giving them the answer to why us, why we're different, what our point of view is, what our convictions are around this. Yeah. And you know, not like balancing the authentic voice around that is one thing. It's essential to have that, but having that in a governed way that can be distributed throughout everything you do, like you know, that's a real unlock.

Yes, I think it is. I think it makes it's always going to be a balance. There's always going to be a juggle that needs to be done for marketing to be effective. But yeah, if you bring real authentic voice strongly through everything, even if it is in something like Blend Core, that we've gathered the voice together so that we can distribute it effectively, or you have you know really got that visionary turned over almost exclusively to visionary acts, um then that is where most businesses will really start to soar.

It's funny, isn't it? Because most businesses have this problem in some form. Yes, it's just more present in others. Like our ours, the problem is is hugely present.

Like in being a tech partner, other tech partners in other industries will suffer this even more. Resellers, especially. Um, it's really hard to differentiate yourself if you're calling yourself a reseller. Um, what's the difference between a reseller and another reseller?

Like, if you're a strategic partner, there's a bit more to it. Um, but all businesses suffer this, right? And I think um, well, we're getting some people together um in a few weeks, right? And we'll be discussing these things.

And I'm really like really looking forward to seeing what comes out of those conversations and how people are going about solving this issue. Yes, I think it's gonna be a really good opportunity. We're getting together people who have the same problem but aren't necessarily solving it in the same worlds, um, and a an interesting mix of people who have products with partners and people who are partners. So I think it will be a really good environment for learning more about the different ways that people approach the challenge or whether they're even where they're seeing it.

Because I think I think that most people have this problem, but they don't necessarily all realize they have this problem. I think there's probably a lot of businesses out there that are going, why aren't these things being more effective? And they don't realise that they've got a fundamental clarity issue because they're trying to do too many things at once. So yeah.

Yeah. Do you know one thing like uh kind of unrelated, it's just I love events. Yes, and like I go to as many as I can as well, and I just think as the world's becoming more and more agentic, I just think let's become more and more human. Like, I just think events have so much runway for bringing people together, solving challenges together, us learning, like the person putting on the event, like trying to learn as much as the people who are coming to the event is super important as well.

And yeah, I I don't know, like just I've been thinking about my obsession with AI recently, and how even my my conversations in my home life and personal now are just dominated by AI, and I'm thinking at some point in time we need to come back to like what truly makes us human, and it's that like connection, it's that authenticity between us, it's like those human emotions that you get from being in a room with people. Well, it's experience, isn't it? So obviously, we're all getting inundated with copy, in some cases, video, lots of stuff that is AI generated, sloppy.

Loads of massive documents that are like you know 25-50 pages long. It's like read the I don't want to read any more 50-page documents, I just want to have a chat. Yeah, exactly. I think yes, I I do agree with that.

I think it's very important that we find ways of anchoring ourselves back to experience because although it may not be one of the it it may be that things continue to evolve and judgment is no longer a crucial skill set, but certainly right now the execution of good judgment when it comes to AI is 99% of what makes it effective. Good judgment is what allows you to prompt well and it is what allows you to evaluate well what has come out of it, yeah, and and to decide how to approach the next step, and so that comes from experience.

And experience can be borrowed experience from others, conversation, but it has to come from something that is authentic and human. We don't really, I certainly don't feel like I gain experience by spending time on Claude or what have you. Yeah, no, absolutely. It's not where I actually learn, it is where I execute and I'm able to execute because of my experience.

Continuing to build that experience is so fundamental, and I think events are a great way to do that. Yeah, absolutely. Um, yeah, just to wrap us up, I would say I probably didn't do the best job of communicating what the duplication of purchase law is. Um, you know, I gave a a good enough account for it, but I would say I did some research before this on actually what it was.

I just didn't know if I could communicate the scientific value of it well enough. It's a super interesting theory to go and check out and just spend a bit of time researching because it really makes you think about um everything in perspective, like messaging, how you actually communicate with your market, who you are marketing for, like answering that question. Um the duplication of purchase law is kind of like scary. It's like, oh my god, we've wasted all this time, effort on things um on driving pipeline for somebody else.

Uh so yeah, really cool to check out. Any final thoughts? I would add, uh yeah, Anthony Pieri over at Fletch, massive shout out to him if he's watching. Uh, but I think his uh recent article on category aware versus category unaware really, it's just a problem I see everywhere now.

I think it's just coloured my entire worldview. So yeah, I think there are some people who are doing a great job of our of zooming out and and thinking about the bigger picture. Um, certainly on this topic. Yeah, absolutely.

All right, well, let's wrap it up there. Hopefully, you enjoyed this episode of Demand Ecoded. Nice to have you back, Amanda. It was great to be.

And you're coming back next week as well, right? Yeah, I am gonna be back. More of Amanda to come. So, yeah.

Thanks for tuning in, and we'll catch you next time. Bye, everyone.