#189 - Why Most Marketing Should Fail with Amanda Cole, CMO at Bloomreach

Speaker A: You told me that you're enabling your teams to feel really comfortable with failure. Why do you think it's so important right now, more than ever, to be emphasizing that with your teams and prioritizing that kind of mindset?

Speaker B: The playbook is being rewritten. There's not a right answer. Part of what I struggle with when it comes to education in schools, you get a good grade for finding the right answer. Often in business and definitely in marketing, there is not a right answer. I was actually on the phone with another CMO recently, and she said our job is not just to get to the finish line. Our job is.

Speaker A: Hi, everyone, and thanks for joining me on another Finite by Clarity podcast. Today I'm speaking with Amanda Cole, CMO at bloomreach, about dealing with failure. It's a super candid episode, including Amanda's own experiences with failure, how she leads her team and wider organization through failure, and why, at the moment, failure is both inevitable and important. We're dealing with new, exciting technologies and completely changing audience behavior. Suffice to say, if you're not failing, you're not succeeding. I hope you enjoy. Hi, Amanda. Thank you for joining me on the Finite podcast today.

Speaker B: Hi, Jodi. Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: It's great to have you here. We've only talked briefly before, but I was very enchanted by your topic suggestion and what you're thinking about at the moment. I think. I don't want us to get too negative, uh, in this. In this podcast. I hope that we can take an optimistic spin, but it's important to be realistic as well, which I think we're going to be. I'm really excited to hear your thoughts on the industry at large and how you're managing failure or the fear of failure.

Speaker B: Never been, uh, described as someone feeling enchanted before, either.

Speaker A: I'm sure all this is, will be as, well, Enchantment. That's what it's about. Okay, so why don't you enchant us with your background and your experience today? I know you have a super impressive, uh, career so far. So. Yeah. How did you get to Bloom Reach, uh, and your CMO position there?

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, well, super impressive career is a very, very nice way to word it. I think, if anything, it's been this part of what we talked about. It's been a series of, uh, failures that have led to successes. But, um, I've been in B2B marketing and the technology space for over 20 years, and, uh, every job I've gotten has been the result of, uh, a network or someone who I worked with previously who brought me to their company. And so uh, I've had the very fortunate experience of starting in marketing in direct mail over 20 years ago. And my job was uh, bringing the responses from nonprofit uh, direct mail solicitations and looking at what drove the most, uh, donations. And so my illustrious marketing career went from that to now CMO at Bloomreach where we do AI driven personalization for B2C brands looking to connect with consumers.

Speaker A: Cool. Yeah, that's definitely a big leap. Um, and I'm sure we can get into more of those kind of lessons learned along the way and how you pivoted into tech. But um, why don't we also hear a bit about your role at bloomreach and your team as well, your team structure, who you manage and things like that.

Speaker B: Yeah, so I'm the chief marketing officer here. I'm also responsible for our global technology relationships and how we think about generating pipeline through our agencies and our SDR team as well. Um, and inside the marketing organization it includes product marketing, marketing demand generation field marketing where we're connecting with uh, with customers and prospects for events and dinners and, and things like that. And also operations and um, paid media and, and really the, the traditional email marketing and nurture and customer marketing. The, the really the traditional B2B marketing structure.

Speaker A: Yeah, yep. Sounds pretty traditional, pretty standard. But I know that you're taking a really ah, interesting approach to it all and I would say an interesting philosop at all. Um, you told me that you're enabling your teams to feel really comfortable with failure, which is a really interesting take. Why do you think it's so important right now more than ever to be emphasizing that with your teams and prioritizing that kind of mindset?

Speaker B: Yeah, the playbook is being rewritten. There's not a right answer. So I think part of what I struggle with when it comes to education in schools is that it teaches you that, that you get a good grade for finding the right answer. But often in business and definitely in marketing, there is not a right answer. The process of failing itself is what actually brings you the opportunity to deliver outcomes. And uh, most of what we do, I think, I mean this is a made up statistic, But I say 80% of marketing is failure. Most of what you do doesn't work the way that you thought it would. And so that's why tracking and KPIs and really understanding what outcome you're trying to drive is so important. Because if you're not driving the intended outcome, you need to Move on and pivot very quickly. So I think it's important for marketing to know there is not a right answer. That's even more important now because the entire world is changing. The way technology works is changing how consumers, if you're on the B2C side or how buyers are actually thinking about technology on the B2B side is changing every day. So really building that muscle to say this didn't work, I'm okay with it, I'm moving on is super important for marketing.

Speaker A: Interesting you say that because a lot of the CMOs I talk to are almost assuming that marketing is more objective than ever and we have mass amounts of data and um, you know, this data driven decision making lens, you know, we've got CMOs building agents who are making those decisions because they're not really decisions to be made. They should just be like driven by like next steps from data. How much of marketing do you think is still that kind of test and learn and creative pushing and failing as opposed to this like, I don't know, almost engineering kind of um, approach to decision making?

Speaker B: I think marketing is absolutely a combination of both. But I think marketing will always be test and learn. It is an ever evolving space. Let's just talk about what you just said. The example of an agent interacting with a consumer and delivering specifically for that consumer what they're looking for. Let's the, the Taylor Swift phenomenon. Let's start there. Or the Barbie movie where pink just all of a sudden started coming out of nowhere. Agents would not have had the context that Pink was associated to Barbie. They would have started to see a trend very quickly. That pink was becoming a dominant color in searches. And so they likely could surface or do better product recommendations for Pink. But the story and the connection to the market moment of Barbie or the SP related to Taylor Swift as an example requires that human connectivity and ingenuity. That's an example of something very obvious that I think we were all able to arrive at that conclusion. But in, in B2B where the context is nuanced. So maybe this is too technical of an example, but it's one that I'm, I'm dealing with today. We have a technology called Contextual Bandits. And Contextual Bandits is something that's in AI and ML, where it actually helps you connect elements of like a product catalog with a different data set, like a customer. Prof. Contextual Bandits is the engineering name. When we launched it, uh, at Bloomreach six years ago, we came up with a super creative name called Contextual Personalization and uh, let's just say it still was not a very sexy way to describe it. Since then the industry's moved forward and they've now uh, some great marketer called it AI decisioning. And so when you look at how we would train our agents, so if we loaded an agent with our taxonomy to understand our business language, we would describe the solve to a problem as contextual personalization. But the moment that's happening in the market, similar to Taylor Swift, is a description of AI decisioning. And so as a marketer, as a marketing team, that's an example of something that we failed at. We failed at coming up with a name that would resonate with the market and build a really great story around describing something that's very technical but that actually has some pretty significant business impact. Someone else solved that problem better than we did by calling it AI decisioning. That's not a problem an agent is going to fix for you though. Does that make sense as an example?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I think so many leaders go on about it should be AI with a human touch and I think that really brings it to life. Um, an example of how humans and AI does interact and in those kind of hyper personalized one to one interactions, yes you can be data driven, but in those really kind of structural, systemic or branding, um, creative led moments that should be contextualized with the industry, um, that's a really good example of where humans should be leading the loop. Um, do you think that AI will ever be able to contextualize in that way itself, uh, and be able to kind of read the market, uh, on a day to day basis and make decisions from there as well?

Speaker B: Absolutely. I mean if you think about um, the kind of data that we can give AI, we can give it weather data, we can give it news information, it can and will be able to start to build correlations between these things and you can either choose for it to surface it to you as insights and it could say something like maybe over the weekend it could say we're seeing a tremendous surge in Pink products. We also see a whole bunch of news articles about how well the Barbie movie is doing. Do you think that Barbie and pink are, are related in some way and should we change a taxonomy about how we describe the products? That is absolutely something, uh, you could begin to build and think about as a, as the combination of a context and agent layer. Um, but that context thinking through like what are the things that I want to know and understand and track with agents is what I think the value of the Business leader of the future is going to be what are the context point? What matters to my audience, to my intelligence, to how I operate my business? What are the areas in which I need to build that specialized context? Much in the same way you would with your human org, you would think about what are the tools, capabilities, data sets, information that they need to have access to and understand you will need to be doing that same thing for your agent workforce.

Speaker A: Well, this is what I think is interesting and I think it's good that we're talking about agents so much, is this is a key example of something completely new within the marketing world that there's not a playbook for. And like within agent agents themselves, there needs to be room for that failure too. Like, yes, it could be the AI agent doing the failure, or it could be the human behind it failing with that agent because, you know, the agent doesn't have accountability or responsibility. Is that what you're kind of enabling your team to get comfortable with as well?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it's very, very scary when uh, for example, you turn over decision making to someone else, even in the human world. So I, 20 years ago hired my very first marketer and I'll tell this example, if she hears this, she would laugh. She works for me still today, so maybe, maybe it was 15 years ago. I don't want to age her in any negative way, but we were, I had done marketing most of the time. I'd been a marketer of one. I brought uh, her on to really run our digital marketing. So our email marketing, landing pages, those kinds of things. And uh, back in the day there was an app that when you loaded a browser only on the local browser it would change the name cloud to. But maybe this is not appropriate for a podcast, but this is an example of failure. Um, and so I was editing a page in HubSpot, a landing page. And of course at that time everything was about transitioning from on prem to cloud. And so this page on my uh, backend view had multiple examples of cloud. I published the page. Well of course the source of that content had been changed to the word, but because of this app that she had hilariously installed on my on Chrome as a Chrome extension, well, it actually published and became a lie landing page. And we had a prospect send me an email and say, not sure if you know this, but your landing page says but everywhere. So this is an example of where even turning decision making over to a human is very scary and the outcomes can result in failure. And that's obviously very Low, low impact failure. But the process of turning over decision making and the fear behind that is not unique or new. The difference is the scale and the volume of decisions that can be made with an agent within a matter of minutes. So taking that example, an agent could have done that to a million pages within five minutes instead of just to one page. And so that's where that feedback loop, we talk about this a lot. Where's human in the mix and those kinds of things. You need a period of time in which you're checking the work in which you're making sure that the outputs are correct. But the point should not be to build a process in which you are inserting humans consistently over time. It should be a period of validation that then removes the human because you validated that the work is correct and you let the agent execute. And that is scary no matter whether it's humans or agents.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. No, that's a really great example. And yeah, I guess the pressure's on the scale, the effectiveness, the efficiency at the moment is wild. So I guess it's um, keeping humans in the loop to get it started, to get it going, to check. Um, and that's how you kind of ensure that these failures don't have a hugely significant impact on your marketing more broadly.

Speaker B: And you keep checking, you keep, you, you have, you have weekly check ins, you have quarterly reviews, you make sure that the data and the metrics and the things are, you manage them very similarly to how you would, you would train, deploy, enable, uh, a human co worker.

Speaker A: And when you're enabling your team to kind of set up these agents and test and learn, is that really where the creativity lies as well? And are you asking them to go big and go bold and expect this not to work or would you rather it be more iterative and cautious?

Speaker B: Oh, I'm a, I'm definitely on the high risk end. Um, and I think there are very, very few things in marketing that, especially on the B2B side that are, that are, that would cause major long term issues. Um, so no, I would say I, I definitely go for the, let's go for broke. What I'll say I've done poorly is actually bringing people along. So I, I think I've attached to a group that are moving fast, that want to break things, that are pushing boundaries, but I haven' been sensitive enough to the way that that impacts the rest of the organization. I was actually on the phone with another CMO recently and she said our job is not just to get to the finish line. Our job is to make sure that we start at the starting line together and that we all finish together. And so in reflection, that's it. While I have been super excited about AI and transformation and we've done a ton of incredible things, I have failed at making sure to be intentional about bringing the organization along. And if that means I need to slow down a little bit, then I should be more sensitive to that. So my natural inclination is to say go big. Uh, but I think my responsibility is to bring everybody along with me.

Speaker A: Everybody within your team itself or the wider organization at board level as well?

Speaker B: Yeah, the company, I think it is the whole company. And as much as I even hate to say that it feels disingenuous to, to my DNA, I do see, uh, for example, we started a program where we wanted to automate, uh, when somebody's like on our website and they're looking for information, how do we give them the information they're looking for and engage them to request a demo? And then also if they, if they do request a demo, how do we automatically take them through the qualification process without having to speak to a human? Use our AISDR to do that. Book a meeting with a sales rep at the point at which they're actually ready to see a demo. That sounds like a great process, right? M. Most of us do not want to talk to a sales rep just to get information that we want or to book a calendar meeting. What I did not do well was, uh, talk through with the organization, why it matters, what it's going to impact, how it would improve the customer experience, how we were going to test it, giving validation to the company on why this was the, why this was the right decision. In my head it just made sense and was something that we should do. And I discounted the feelings and the emotions of other people in the company. So I, I, uh, I hope I have learned from that experience, but that, that was something that in hindsight I definitely could have done better.

Speaker A: I think it's interesting because I think marketers have always been, uh, you know, prone to shifts in the industry, prone to their jobs, kind of evolving and moving digital transformation. I mean if you go even further back web and then, I don't know, this move towards community that there's just so many different steps every single year. There's so much to keep on top of that marketers are so used to that fluidity, but I guess within the wider organization they might not be. And they're used to structure and tradition and you know, the same conversation so how do you actually go about getting them more comfortable with, you know, failure and creativity and big, you know, pushes?

Speaker B: Well, I mean, I think I have done a terrible job of doing it, so I don't. I don't have the answer.

Speaker A: Listen, slugs.

Speaker B: I'll listen to that one. But I, uh, the. Who I was speaking with, I thought. I thought the analogy was incredible. Like, you need to be intentional about getting everybody to the starting line first. And so my. My takeaway from that was the next time we do this, I need to do a much better job, level setting where we are and where we're going. Uh, now I don't know. I don't know the best way to do that because I haven't done it successfully. But, like, where are we and where are we going? And then as we're going. And again, this was the other thing that she said. We. You got to start together, and you got to finish together. I need to be very sensitive to the pace of the rest of the organization. Are they still with me, or am I really far ahead, or am I behind where the organization is? Do I need to catch up? And that analogy that she gave was something that, um, that I hope I proactively apply in future projects.

Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you for your candidness. That's really great. So I guess getting to the starting line is one thing. Getting to those checkpoints is another. Figuring out if you're on the right path, figuring out if you're veering completely off course. Is there even a finish line at all? How do you know when to let something go or to keep pushing and pushing knowing it will work? It sounds like you're really kind of confident with your own instincts. Um, and you have such a great network to learn from. And, yeah, you're very confident in leading these big moves. Have you ever hit the brake and completely swerved?

Speaker B: Yeah, M. Uh, my husband is a trauma therapist, and so he came up with another great analogy. Um, there was something that we had been doing, and, uh, I really wanted it to work. And of course, AI has blown up in. Changed a lot of our. Our lives. And. And he said, this is a bit like you've been running a marathon. And 12 miles in, you realize you went the wrong direction. And so you can either keep running or you get. Or you're. You need to start over. And so, you know when something's not working, but the. The mental energy, the physical energy that it takes to accept that and basically say, these last 12 miles that I ran weren't. They did Nothing. And I need to start over. That is where the really difficult decision comes in. And so that's where that, that discipline and that grit to say, I know this isn't working. I'm not going to keep pushing and I'm not going to keep running to not end up at the finish line that I set. I'm going to start over. Uh, so I genuinely believe that we know when something is not doing what we expected, but it's really hard for us to give it up.

Speaker A: It's the sunk cost fallacy. But I guess when you're aware of that bias, then you can override it and you can just try and suck it up and turn back that. Yeah. The analogy of the marathon, honestly, too visceral. I couldn't deal. I would, I think I would give up.

Speaker B: Oh, there's. If it was a mar. Well, I wouldn't run a marathon to begin with. But if it was 100. Give up.

Speaker A: Yeah. Do it another day next month maybe. But, but that's what marketing is. Especially when you are scaling I guess and you, you go so fast in one direction over such a short period of time. These days, to turn back and walk back with your tail between your legs takes, takes even more courage.

Speaker B: That's right. And it is exhausting. Even though we're not actually physically running a marathon, there is a mental and emotional tax to, to these things. So it, that is part of marketing. It's like grab your glass of wine, get that piece of chocolate cake for that night and uh, and get back to it the next day.

Speaker A: Exactly. But it, but it, it is funny how market is. As I say, we are used to it and I guess the mindset of a marketer, uh, will, will do us well, you know, for, for a long time coming. But uh, but the day to day is just changing so much. How are you seeing the marketing role evolving? Especially those within your team? What new things are you asking from them? What new skills are you looking for? What new skills are you hiring for? If you're, if you're hiring like, how is the marketing trajectory changing?

Speaker B: Yeah, I, I don't think that my, what I hire for would be different. Um, what I do think is going to. So I, I have a very non traditional background. I didn't graduate from college. I was a, I became a mom as a teen major. And, and so I, I had a lot of like, let's just say missteps and, and took. Took jobs honestly because of school districts that they, that they uh, provided for me or different things. Like that. And so I never had this, like, I have this very mapped out career path that's going to help get me to X. It was always, I'm going to do whatever I can do to be successful to achieve what I need to achieve honestly, primarily for my kids. And, and they might say otherwise, but um, the, that what we call grit now. I think there's even a book called Grit, uh, to figure out any problem, to overcome any obstacle, to think creatively and not operate from a very defined set of structure or objectives in order to achieve the end result is I think what makes someone great at marketing. And, and honestly that's what I've always hired for and that, that skill set. Now actually, I'll give you an example. The best way to uh, interview someone to understand how they think and how they operate is to give them a problem or a question that they likely don't know. There's going to be one of three ways that they, that they manage this. They're going to, uh, act like they know and tell you the answer even though they don't. They're going to ask you to go through the process and tell them how to find the answer, or they're going to go Google it, figure it on their own, probably ask you some questions and come back with an answer. That last example in marketing is a very good behavioral attribute to have. If you're a doctor. Definitely don't do that. Please do the second one.

Speaker A: Absolutely. So it's all about adaptability, I guess, and moving with the wave. I do wonder about, you know, those marketers who went into marketing to write amazing messaging and content and, and suddenly they might need to be engineers. I do, I do wonder about the limitations of our own, you know, of our own inherent skill sets and our own inherent talents and how far those stretch. But where there's a will, there's a way. I completely agree.

Speaker B: I don't think that. Again, I was in marketing when we were talking about from on prem to cloud and the idea of you connecting to at the time, the Internet, putting in a username and password and running an application yourself was not believable for a lot of people. Then you get to mobile phones, right? We started with the flip phones and then we started with the screen. That was easy. And everybody's like, well, there's going to be a generation of people that don't use mobile phones. That has turned out not to be true at all. And now we're moving towards, okay, there, there's going to be this technology that's right now technical. I mean, I actually vibe coded an entire strategy, marketing strategy application over the weekend in Lovable. I'm, um, I know nothing about engineering, but because you can now communicate with a computer using something that is familiar to all of us, which is just language, you can all of a sudden build things without needing to be an engineer. You just need ideas, and nobody has more ideas than marketing.

Speaker A: I love that. That's so creative. Absolutely. No, you're. You're totally right. We don't necessarily need to be engineers. We just have to have ideas and communicate and still retain that creativity, I guess.

Speaker B: And, and I will go back to your earlier point about people who are incredible with words or storytelling or visualization. We all know this at this point. AI does not creatively explain things. It explains things with the largest common, uh, language set to explain it that it can find. So those people who are incredible with words are absolutely still completely necessary. I can think there's somebody on my mind is one of the best storyteller wordsmiths I've ever met. He is absolutely more important than ever. Our creative team, they develop incredible brand assets. AI cannot replicate the nuances of even, like, the spacing between text, like a text and a button. There's a unique. The amount m of rounding that you put on a button, uh, the difference between light and dark so that you're feeling emotion in an image. AI can replicate, it can copy. But to actually come up with that unique owned visual, that still requires absolute human creativity.

Speaker A: It's not there. AI can't feel the final product. I just can't feel it.

Speaker B: That's right.

Speaker A: Okay, cool. Well, that's a really inspiring note to end on. Amanda, I've had such a lovely time, uh, chatting with you today. I hope you've enjoyed it as well.

Speaker B: I have. Thanks for having me.