The Formula for Standing Out in the Age of Infinite Content, with Debbie Millman & Christina Bottis | Ep. 430

Speaker A: Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray, and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the off.

Speaker B: Well, thank you everybody for coming. I have two great panelists, um, and I'll let them introduce themselves, but they have a huge track record. I'm excited to talk about brand, um, especially I think brand is having a renaissance right now because of all this AI. So I like to hear your opinions too, but I'll let you. I'll go Debbie first and then Christina.

Speaker C: Hi, everyone. I'm, um, Debbie Millman, and I am a designer and author, an educator at the School of Visual Arts, where I founded the world's first ever master's program in branding. So hopefully I'll be able to add some value. Hopefully. Um, and I'm also, uh, a podcast host, a long term longtime host of the show Design matters since 21 years now.

Speaker B: Yeah, she was one of the first podcasters in the world, so it's a pretty cool thing.

Speaker C: First ever on design. Awesome.

Speaker D: Um, hi, I'm Christina Bottas. I have not started a podcast yet, but maybe I will be convinced after sitting between the two of you. Uh, I'm from Chicago. Do we have Chicagoans in the. There we go. Uh, I've been in B2B marketing for over 20 years, and I've worked at pretty much every stage and size of company. So you know how you're branding and the programs and really the budget that you have available to you, that's really important. So excited to chat through to your point. Right. Brand is back, baby. It's back.

Speaker B: And I'm Daniel. I'm a recovering marketing ops person. And then I decided to start the Marketing Millennials. It's a newsletter, podcast, uh, events, we do it all. Um, and I'm excited to chat and I want to open the session because with the session title and the goal of this is Break through the Noise. So before we go anywhere, I want to challenge the premise. In the world of seemingly infinite AI generated content, is trying to shout louder than the noise a losing battle? Debbie, what does breaking through actually mean to you?

Speaker C: Breaking through means creating something that is both original, well crafted, and meaningful because you can scream from the tallest rooftop, but unless you're saying something that people are interested in hearing, there's too much cacophony out there, nobody's going to pay attention or listen.

Speaker B: What about what's Your opinion on that?

Speaker D: Couldn't agree more. To me, it's about connecting with the person who matters to you. Right. Um, AI allows us to go fast, but you could just suck faster. Right. And what I find. And it's a trap. Right. To know that you could do so much more. But if any of you have ever been in the position where your team or your company hasn't necessarily done the ICP work, AI and speeding things up is going to be dangerous. And it gives the opportunity for us to go back to the foundational strategy, which I think is really important and probably the only way you can get to that point of connection.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I'll just add one thing. I have a little formula that I say is, um, it's A plus consistency plus B plus content. So I think you need to be above average than the noise out there, especially in, like, in the newsletter world. And that above average the noise is usually having a strong point of view, a strong stand, and then consistency wins in the long run. I know a lot of podcasters that stop at 19 podcasts, and if they just went to the 25th podcast, they might be a top 20 podcast. So I think breaking through the noise is just sometimes just lasting longer than the rest.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker C: You said B plus content.

Speaker B: I have a higher standard than that. But I think you need to be above the noise.

Speaker C: Uh, because I think anything that's B plus, I kind of feel is mediocre. Uh, and so I think that in some ways, you need A plus content. Consistency is only going to be important if you have something that people are going to want to engage with.

Speaker D: Totally.

Speaker C: I think that what you need both is consistency. You need a really compelling message to get people to try you. Uh, if they try you and they don't like you, no matter how loud you are or how consistent you are, they're not going to come back.

Speaker D: And I'll add to that. You need to understand which topics you have to own for your audience. Anybody trying to get more LLM traffic. Oh, everybody should have your hands up there. Come on. Now. What we've seen is there's an absolute correlation to the frequency of, like, you got to feed the beast, but we don't want to feed it with anything that is less than the standard that we want to put out on behalf of our brand. If you don't have the strategy for. These are the pillar topics. Here's the cluster around it. Here are things we can collaborate or even just brainstorm around. You're gonna get a buffet of stuff that doesn't necessarily ladder up to ownership. And that's what we're starting to see, right? AI slop, uh, just things to be out there for the sake of being out there, not necessarily leading somebody down a consideration set so that they ultimately say, I'd like to try you.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker D: You've convinced me that you know this, and I'd like to consider you as a solution.

Speaker C: If I could also add to that, because you said strategy. A lot of people think strategy is just a plan, right? Uh, it's our unique plan, but it's not. Strategy is actually behaving differently than your competitors and being able to offer something of value that is different to your competitors. It's not just having a smart plan. And so I think what people need to understand is what strategy really means. And I often use Michael Porter's strategic definition. You have to behave differently than your competitors. And that is what is going to ultimately pique somebody's interest if there is something that's different that's also compelling to them.

Speaker B: And I'll, uh, add one more thing. I think the noise. People forget that the noise is every piece of content out there. You're not only competing against, like, your industry or you're competing against, uh, Debbie's podcast for attention. You're competing against a brand that's putting out content. You competing against a Netflix show like you. Your standard of content, like you said, uh, I'm going to change it to A plus content and A plus consistency, uh, my new formula. But it needs to be you're competing against all this different kind of content. So if you're creating the best B2B content, you might be failing because it might be worse than the other great content out there. And I want to go to Debbie. I have a question for you, because you've argued that branding is manufactured, meaning, um, but you've also said there has to be a real reason for a brand to exist from the inside out. For every marketer in this room who's hired to manage a brand, how do they actually protect the real meaning when the business is demanding immediate results?

Speaker C: If you're living for immediate results, then you're thinking short term. You have to be able to have a roadmap for growth that looks at the trajectory of your brand, and that includes respecting the integrity, the inherent integrity of who you are, but also living on a continuum, um, between recognition and surprise. So you have to have a little bit of both. If you're not living within the framework of what your brand stands for, people aren't going to recognize it. They're not going to understand it. People don't love change. Think about all the changes that we see in branding. Has anybody ever remembered a time where a brand was redesigned and the whole world stood up and said, yay, it doesn't happen. If anything, people are immediately criticizing it. Inevitably someone is going to say that the redesign looks like genitalia. It always happens. And then maybe a year, 18 months later, people will calm down and begin to accept it. So much so that if you change it again in another couple of years, the same thing will happen over and over and over again. We are hardwired to hate change. We have, uh, a reptilian brain that is involuntary. The reptilian brain actually manages all of our involuntary behavior. Eye blinking, digestion, heartbeat, breathing. And that fear that we experience when we don't know what is going to happen next is the same fear that we have when we might almost get hit by a bicycle. That adrenaline spike. We don't will that. We don't say to ourselves, okay, adrenaline, kick in now. Um, when I need you. So when anybody sees a change in a brand that doesn't make sense to them, they will immediately go to, I don't like this. What's changed? This isn't for me anymore. So you have to be really careful when you make those immediate changes because you're addressing something that might be happening culturally to stay within what people understand about your brand and then move it just enough to surprise them and excite them about what you're doing as opposed to try to do something everybody else might be doing just because it's of the moment.

Speaker B: I also want you to go into what that manufactured meaning means. Cause I think you have a really good definition of what brand is. And I think I want the audience to know how you think about it.

Speaker C: The reason I say that branding is manufactured meaning is because brands don't operate on their own. They're not self directed. We create brands and brands are constructed meaning. We assign a whole set of values around whatever it is we're marketing. Could be water, it could be sneakers, it could be a handbag, it could be a conference. All of these ways that we communicate what something means is part of the world of branding. And that includes behavioral psychology, it includes cultural anthropology, it includes economics, and of course, design and creativity. But we don't. This brand doesn't come to life on its own. It's not self directed. And so what we need to be able to do when we're creating a brand is create Enough meaning around the visual language of the brand, around the psychological language, language of a brand, so that people will understand what it is. But that doesn't happen without us. And so when I say it's manufactured meaning, it's human created, that this signifies something. And that signification could also come with a whole set of beliefs and affiliations. And we've been creating meaning through symbols and behavior since we started recording our reality on the walls of Lascaux, the caves in Spain and France. Religions, in many ways are brands because it's a set of associations that we associate with something else. So for lack of a better way of saying it, it's associations we create to allow us to understand what something means via consensus. That's the other part of this. We can create this, but unless we all agree what this stands for, then it's really not a brand. It's just a thing with a name

Speaker B: on it, just a commodity.

Speaker C: Yeah, well, brands that are commodities are still brands.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker D: I also think you have to figure out how to defend that to your cfo. Right. So parts of brands are immediate growth levers and parts are more long term place. And being able to demonstrate your knowledge of that, typically, if, at least in my experience, the CFO looks as brand as this, like nice thing to have, somehow we disconnected it from the funnel. Right. We put it in brand and then we put it in demand. Well, you can't get demand without this part. And more so now than ever. I mean, to your point, right, unless people understand what you stand for and what it means to them, it's probably unlikely you're going to be able to drive more people into the funnel. So being able to educate them on this is the fuel, this is the Lamborghini. I have to have both, otherwise we're just going to sit in the driveway. But also managing those expectations to your original question about what happens when they're like, I want to see things now. Being able to show these are the now things, these are in month or in quarter roi, These are more like six months, end of year, depending on which stage you are. That typically assuages any sort of question from the board or the CFO on when am I going to see the results without you having to be answering all the time.

Speaker B: And I want to go deeper in that with you because I know that it sounds good, but a lot of times there's a lot of internal friction, there's a lot of campaign time cycle times, there's a lot of dealing with a lot of team and it slows us down. And I know one of your point of views is built around speed. Um, so I want to go into that a little bit and talk about, like, how you think about how to move fast, but also, like, think about brand long term.

Speaker D: Yeah. And you never are moving fast at the cost of quality. Right. Like, you want to be able to move efficiently and effectively. Right now we know, like, we can no longer pass a baton. We have to be iterative. Just things are changing so rapidly now. We can talk about this later. But there's a whole funnel before they even get into the funnel. And the only way we discovered that is we just tried a bunch of stuff and we were like, oh, okay, this is different. So when we talk about speed, I talk to customers every single day and everyone has the same problem. Alignment. Right. That could be with your boss. That could be. We have a head nod right in the front. Thank you for that. It's more about how do we more quickly get aligned so that we can make the next decision so that we can go and get it into market. Not let's skip really important steps like ICP Persona. What's the value prop. Just to get it into the market for market's sake. So it's the balance of, um, what's the minimum viable product to get it into market so we can start to learn. Can we go faster by doing our due diligence and aligning at the decision points. And then based on those results, then you have validation to spend more time and more money. Right. To say, we have this test now, let's go double down, pour some gasoline on that fire. And you can back it up.

Speaker B: That's why I think, um, one of the best channels that I've seen to validate ideas quickly is social. And people are. You could put out things so quickly, validate the audience. The algorithm is the audience. So give you quick feedback like, your message is wrong, your idea is wrong. Um, there's features like trial reels where you can trial. Not to your audience if you're scared to do that.

Speaker C: Uh, but when you're doing that, you also have to understand that there's gotta be a reason that you believe it in the first place.

Speaker D: Sure.

Speaker C: And if you understand what that reason is, you might have to take a risk in getting people to understand it. If people don't like something, it might just be that they don't understand it in relation to alignment. I often say that common behavior, common vocabulary doesn't always equate to common behavior. What we think is evolutionary change might Be revolutionary to someone. What we think is beautiful might be ugly to somebody else. So I think part of the risk in doing that is understanding what you want to be able to do for the brand. And if there is a reason that you're doing something but your audience doesn't understand it and is saying we don't like it, it might not be because it's bad. It might be because they just don't understand what you're trying to do. And that gets back to the strategy.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: Or it's the wrong audience, I guess.

Speaker D: Or it's the wrong audience.

Speaker B: That's what I've seen a long time. It's like you might be heading down the wrong customer profile. Uh, I know you hate that word customer profile, but the wrong audience for that message and you might want to pivot to the wrong that other person and maybe your followers or. But the good thing about social in these days, I think if you could say your message right, it will like it is an interest based graph. It will get to that audience that cares.

Speaker C: Uh, but there are times where people have this sort of intense reaction to something hate it or say they hate it or a contingent of consumers say they hate it. And then speaking of quarterly returns, the next announced returns on Wall street shows that the brand is actually improved because it just took a little bit of time for people to understand what was happening or for the people that weren't outraged not to weigh in. A lot of times the outrage is just the outrage. People that aren't outraged aren't necessarily going to be like, uh, that's a great thing.

Speaker B: Yeah. I was going to ask you because I, I want to ask your opinion on speed because you built a podcast for 20 years and it took time to get to like the iconic state it is at now. So, um, how do you think about speed when building brands? Is there times to go fast? Um, and what are those times to go fast with speed?

Speaker C: I think that there are many times where it's absolutely appropriate to go fast. But there needs to be a, uh, really considered, thoughtful, deliberate reason to do that. If you're just reacting, then chances are you're going to fail. If you are moving quickly because you've come to an agreement internally about something that needs to happen and you want to be able to engage the culture in some important way, then. Yes. But I think if you're trying to go fast to beat yourself or to create a scenario where people will take notice just of the speed, then I think you're really running the risk of Burning out really quickly and people see through that. I mean, I think that I'm a huge, huge fan of what is capable with AI. What I'm worried about is using it when we don't have any other better ideas. And so if you're using it for speed because you haven't come out with anything better, I don't see it ever ending well. I could be wrong about that. Maybe if the stars align and something happens where you get pixie dust thrown into the equation, it could happen, but I've yet to see that.

Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, we're all saying the same thing, which is going faster with something that was well thought out and can be great will go well if it wasn't thought out or you're doing for the wrong reasons in the beginning. Going faster is just going to get you to a poor outcome faster. So it's starting in the beginning and really spending the time to think it through and make sure you know your intent, you know the goal, you know the audience, your budget. Whatever you go through going faster hopefully will get you to that better outcome versus. Oh, we just did this because I wanted to say AI, which, I mean, hey, it happens, I get it, but that's. That's not the true value of AI, Right? Not getting to a crappy outcome faster, that doesn't help anybody.

Speaker C: Right?

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: Yeah. I have a question for you, Christina. I think, um, a lot of great ideas or creativity get killed because there's, like, dysfunction in an organization between approvals or who has the final say, or there's people making decisions by committee. So how do you and your organization make sure that creative ideas rise to the top instead of get bogged down by approvals or many decisions and stuff like that?

Speaker D: Well, I'm lucky, right? I mean, Mural is a visual collaboration platform. So our whole goal is to help people collaborate and get from execution to outcome. But it's not to say that that doesn't happen. Sometimes I think in my experience, you have to find a unifying thing across the teams and root it in. And to me, that's always been the customer, right. The audience, the Persona. And if we can all agree that we're trying to get to this person and do this thing, that usually solves a good chunk of it. Um, and then I think you have to. The people have to feel safe to fail. And in this iterative world that we're now in of AI and put it out there, and maybe it goes out to social, and maybe somebody really doesn't like it. That's okay, we learn something, we learn what not to do, and often that's just as valuable. But I think it has to be deliberate. Right? Being an iterative team doesn't happen without intent. And you can't just tell people to, like, go be creative and, you know, bring back the fruits of your labor. There's. There's a certain amount of trust that that's okay to do, and there's a certain amount of process that needs to facilitate it.

Speaker B: I want to talk about AI a little bit, because I know we haven't discussed it at the conference at all.

Speaker C: Um, you did that really well.

Speaker D: I was like, wait right in.

Speaker B: I know now content is infinite, and it basically is free to create content. But when everybody can generate everything, what is the thing that still actually costs something? What is the new scarce resource?

Speaker C: Ingenuity, imagination, Originality. I have no issue with using AI to make things more efficient and to streamline operations. Um, I've yet to use it to send out emails, but only because I know about the open claw sort of debacle, and I'm afraid of something like that happening to me. Um, but I think that as somebody that is using AI to do a lot of research, I've yet. And I'd be astonished if it happened. I'd be thrilled if it happened. I've yet to get anything back that is truly originally breathtakingly ingenious. It's hard enough for humans to do that, let alone for a machine.

Speaker B: I mean, it's also taking all human ideas and spitting it into. So it's everything in the past that has been created.

Speaker C: I want to be moved. I want my heart to break. I want to feel tingles when I see something really, really original. And that's what is so wonderful about the human brain, is we can construct these things and make this magic that is not necessarily about speed, but is much more about craft and intention.

Speaker D: So the biggest shift that we've observed, but we are also moving to strategically, is we talk a lot in B2B about thought leadership. And I've started to call it leader thoughts. Because what people want is what is your point of view as a brand? But they actually don't want to hear it from the brand anymore. They want to hear it from the people who make up the brand. So that means your executive communication strategy. That means the person like, you know, we send out product updates and do videos, and that's all cool. We've started to say, get the engineer who built it. Have him walk through them, right? Get the marketer who launched the campaign, have them talk through it. Um, and there's a really interesting story that someone had shared with me that generationally, right. Dating myself, but the. When we grew up being an authentic brand, was the brand itself trying to be honest, right. And open. We were like, oh, that's so great. Then there was another generation after that where influencers started to become present. And then we were, like, heartbroken because we were like, oh, my God, you're making money. That's so, like, that's not authentic. That's so scary. This generation knows it. They're like, we know not only are you an influencer and you're giving your point of view, we also know you're getting paid. So it's this very interesting amalgamation of all these types of people. And now all they want, they want to hear from the actual person. And then, like you said, they're going to take the point of view as they want and they're going to run with it as they want. But that has been a material shift in the way, especially from B2B perspectives. Right. We talk about AI a lot. What's our perspective on AI and the balance of humans and technology? That's a question our customers and our prospects expect from us. And that's probably different because brands, a lot of them weren't, um, necessarily sure where to weigh in and have a perspective and where they could just say, safe and silent, that the expectation is you have a point of view on everything now.

Speaker C: Well, I want to challenge just one small thing that you said about brands and authenticity, because in many ways, I don't think it's possible for brands to be authentic. First of all, they are manufactured. They're not. Yes, you can have a banana, or you can have a banana with a Chiquita label on it. Brands are, uh, mostly owned by publicly traded companies or privately held companies that want to ipo. When those are the when, that's the ownership model, there is a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholder, and that is to get a return on the money that you've invested. As soon as you put money into an equation, it takes all the authenticity out because you are looking to have a specific financial goal. That financial goal is the responsibility of the organization. There is no brand that is authentic. It's people that might be working to create a transparency around the brand. Because brands, we can have a whole separate conversation about whether or not brands can be people and people can be brands. But a brand facing product doesn't operate without a human behind it. Those humans are changing all the time. The authenticity of those people are changing all the time. But the minute a brand has a fiduciary responsibility to a shareholder, then the consumer needs are secondary. That's just the way capitalism works. And I think that if we're looking for authenticity, what we should really be looking for is transparency. Totally different things. As soon as we operate at that level, we can have a deeper, stronger relationship with whoever our customers are.

Speaker B: Yeah, I was gonna say I battle with the scarce resource of 2. I think 1. So what you said is taste. I think it's a hard thing to teach taste, and it comes from experience. I think your design skills with AI would be great because you have. Well, if the tool was easy enough to use, that was great. And you gave it prompts because you know what great design looks like. I'm a designer and I said, make me a design. I might be like, ooh, that looks good. But I don't have taste of what great design is. So I might be like, this is bad. Same with content marketing. So I think the marketer who is experienced and like, uh, the writer, the designer, the demand gen person who understands and has taste of what good looks like or seeing what's good or seeing what works is gonna be one of the most scarce resources. Because if everybody's going to use AI, then they're not building up their fundamentals of growing in that skill set. Um, and that's going to become a scarce resource if they only use AI and they're not building fundamentals of good design, fundamentals of good writing, fundamentals of human psychology, whatever they're studying.

Speaker C: I think that good marketing, good marketing. There's a lot of older brands that have been out for a long time that I could look at and say, well, not so sure about that design, but we're so used to it, it becomes part of our visual language and what we expect to see. It's when those things get changed that people can't recognize it anymore. That provides some tension at a shelf or in an environment where people are shopping. So I think it's really a matter of understanding what the tolerance level is for any change. And then also, why would I want to be making this change now? What does it say?

Speaker B: I want to ask you a question, Debbie, because you've interviewed over 700 people and I said that, right? It's over 700 people, which is crazy amount of people you've talked to. Um, and they were some of the most creative people alive. Um, so what is a common trait of those People you've interviewed, work that endures.

Speaker C: I think this gets back to one of the first things that you were talking about with this sort of need for speed. One of the common denominators that actually really comforts me is the idea that any real tangible success or accomplishment tends to fade really fast. And that people that love making things, love the act of making things. And that, yes, they get very excited when they reach a goal or achieve something or get a promotion, but it's not long after that people begin to want the next thing. And that seems to be not, I think, because we're addicted to accomplishment the way I think a lot of people think. I think we're addicted to the making and that the making is like a fuel. And that when we finish making something, we're empty and need to be sort of refilled with something else that we want to make. And that's also one of the reasons I'm not as worried about AI, because one of the basic human needs I think we all share is this need to contribute and make and create. I think that's why we're here. And so that is one. And then the other is that very few really, really, really well known, successful people are really, really, really secure. Like, there's no correlation. Almost everybody that I've ever interviewed is still wondering, will I make something better tomorrow or has my best work behind me? Um, and so they're always looking for a validation of the self in the best possible way.

Speaker B: I love that answer because I. People always ask me, how do I want to become a creator? And all the time they want to come in because I. Of the money aspect. But the best creators I've seen have a passion of creating. Like they don't have the. They have a passion for what? If it's a writer, they have a passion for what they're writing about. And if they don't, if you don't enjoy the topic, you'll burn out so quickly. If you don't enjoy doing the design, you'll burn out before you get to that point. The people who are the best creators have deep passion for their niche that they're working on. And the other stuff just comes because of that deep passion that you have.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think if we apply those same principles to making anything, that is exactly. I think the point we're all trying to make about speed in making whatever it is that we're making.

Speaker B: And, uh, Christina, I want to ask you something because one thing I love about your thought process is you argued about own first own channels like you talked about, Thought leadership newsletters, podcasts. That's interesting because you don't hear many pipeline driven, demand gen people talking about owning audience. Um, so could you walk us through why you think owning an audience matters and also how do you go and prove that to the cfo?

Speaker D: Well, I think it goes back to that bucket of that's something that you have to invest in over time. That doesn't happen overnight. It has to start with a, with an intentional strategy of what do we want to own, who do we need to own it with, and what's the perception? Um, to me, it's going to be very easy for somebody to feel if you are. We strive to be. I hate the word vendor. Hate the word vendor. Our goal should always be to be a partner. But in order to be a partner and to build trust, you have to demonstrate right passion around a certain thing. Even if you build a product, your passion should be to help that person or you just love the industry. And without that demonstration, like you said, there's really low likelihood you will differentiate. And there's a lot of lookalikes. So building, figuring out who are we? What do we stand for? I've talked about what our point of view is maybe more in this year alone than in many of the years that I've done this at other companies. Because the market is changing, the audience behavior is changing, the world is changing. And there are things coming up that our customers and our prospects are thinking about that we never had to have a perspective on. And so sharing. My goal is always to be able to share insight around what we are good at.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker D: If I can help you do your job better, if I can help you feel more educated about a certain thing, then that's going to help you get to your next step. And then that starts a relationship between us. Even as a brand or even as the person who gave it to you, the csm, the salesperson. The only way you can do that is to sit down and figure out, well, what do you think about these things? Right? What is your point of view? And then you have distribution channels.

Speaker C: What you said about vendor reminds me, I don't know if people have seen the devil wears Prada 2, but that line in the movie, that devastating cut, Miranda Priestly says to Emily Blunt's character, you're not a visionary, you're a vendor. And that's, I think, what we're all striving to be able to become better at. Visioning. How can we be visionaries in what we're doing and take more risks and offer something that's really original.

Speaker B: I want to ask you both the same question, like starting over your podcast again or you started a new role as a cmo, like, what would you. What was, like, the first step you would take to think about breaking through the noise? Like, if you started your podcast again and then you as a cmo?

Speaker C: Well, it's a lot harder now because so many celebrities are launching podcasts, and because they have such big, wide awareness and platforms, they immediately make a difference and break through the noise, so to speak. I would say if you're looking to create something new, understand what you're doing that is different, if you can or beneficial to an audience. So what are you creating that's going to be of a benefit to someone in some way? And then based on what you said earlier, because I thought it was super, super, super insightful, bank 20 to 30 episodes, see how it feels to do it. See how it feels to have that continuity and that constant deadline, because it can be backbreaking. It could also be super inspiring, but it's also a lot of work. So see how that feels, and then see what type of, um, regularity you want when you launch something. Once a week is impossible to do. As somebody that's been doing about 30 to 40 shows a year, once a week is killer. It's a killer. So see what you want to. What kind of way you want to launch the show. Should it be bi weekly, should it be monthly? And see what your ability to make things actually is before you launch.

Speaker B: I like that point. I think sticking to. I would always err on the side of sticking to what you can commit to upfront and then adding more. Instead of saying, I'm gonna do a weekly show, and then you don't put it out weekly. And you see that all the time, like, oh, we're gonna do a weekly newsletter. And then that newsletter shows up three months later, and it's like, I thought you were gonna send me m a weekly.

Speaker C: The hardest deadlines to keep are the ones to ourselves.

Speaker B: What would you do if you were starting over?

Speaker D: Um, well, I was thinking about this. You asked Debbie the question about, like, what do her. What was the common factor. Right. Of the people that she interviews? Debbie knows her audience, right?

Speaker C: Hope so.

Speaker D: Right. But it's clear, it's genuine. And I think anytime you come into, uh, a new company, and I tend to have come into organizations that were going through transformation. Right. So you're either overhauling, building, remarketing the marketing team, if anybody's heard that phrase, the first thing I've always done is a listening tour with customers and a listening tour with the team and the people internally. Because you can't do your job without understanding the customer. But I mean something that I believe that B2B doesn't do nearly as well as B2C is. We never get to the emotional component enough. Right? We understand the functional thing that you're trying to get done with our product, but we don't go deeper. If anybody's familiar jobs to be done, right? The social and the emotional. B2C nails this, right? If you ask them about your customer, they're like, we're talking to this mom and she's commuting and she feels this way. And here are the ups, downs, and. And the downs of her life cycle. You got to get to that level of specificity. The flip side is when you're new to an organization and you're building for the future, you have to understand why past decisions were made. You also owe people the respect of, I know that I don't know everything. So give me, like, the lay of the land. Help me understand how the dynamics are. This whole thing about misalignment, right? There is no better way to earn credibility with a salesperson than to say, last week when I talked to insert customer name here, yada, yada, yada, because now you have skin in the game. And the assumption that marketing just is like, not. They're in the boardroom, they're slinging decks and asking you to do all the hard work that goes away. Because now we've aligned on a unified goal of trying to help this customer or this audience. So it's listening generally around like 90 days. And then usually the board goes, okay, we want to know what you saw and then you can put your plan together.

Speaker B: Well, this was an amazing panel. I think I've learned so much from both of you and I want everybody to give a round of applause to the amazing Christina and Debbie and you and your moderator. And guess what? I have one more job is to click the button, say thank you, and

Speaker C: maybe take it again over and over again.

Speaker A: Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more milk marketers into our community.