The Real Power of Psychological Safety in Marketing Teams - Small But Mighty Marketing Podcast Ep 9

Speaker A: Hey, everybody, this is Josh Becerra. Welcome to the Small But Mighty Marketing podcast. Why are you giggling?

Speaker B: I'm excited.

Speaker A: All right, awesome. I'm here with a good, good friend of mine. So it's more casual today, Heather, uh, Boschke.

Speaker B: Floral casual it is. I like this vibe.

Speaker A: I was telling Heather that this is the last kind of 80 degree day in Minnesota, so I gotta bring out some of the beachy vibes. So, yeah, I got my floral pattern going.

Speaker B: I. I dig it.

Speaker A: All right, so, Heather, why don't you tell the audience a little bit about yourself, not only your marketing experience, but also some of the other things you're working on. It's a lot of stuff.

Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. Hi, everyone. Yeah, I'm Heather Bashke, and, um, I'm a corporate career marketer. That's kind of what I've done for my. The first half of my life, I would say 22 years and in marketing in various roles. And three and a half years ago I went out on my own. So I'm using all of that good knowledge and best practices that I've learned in big companies, helping small businesses with marketing strategy. So I, I really focus on the marketing strategy side of things. I also teach an undergrad marketing class at, uh, Metro State, which I love so much.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And then recently I've also become a children's book author with these little birdies that I've illustrated. And so that's been another really fun journey. So marketing birds, teaching, that's kind of my jam.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, you gotta check out the birdies books. They're pretty, ah, pretty, Pretty cool. Um, yeah, I'm excited to have this conversation too. Uh, you know, most of my conversations are like, I've got prepped questions and my guest answers. We're kind of throwing.

Speaker B: You don't have that.

Speaker A: Yeah, we're throwing a little curveball, uh, today, so we're just going to kind of riff mostly on ideas that I've been having. So it's about me today, uh, about ideas that I've been having about marketers and where I'm seeing marketers today. And I just want to get some of your thoughts on some of this stuff. Sound good?

Speaker B: Sound good? Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker A: All right, let's do it. So the first thing I'll say is I've been noticing that when, uh, prospective customers show up at Agurian, the underlying reason why they're showing up, in my opinion, is because they're lacking confidence in something that's going on in their marketing today. And So I thought it would just be kind of fun to first, like, unpack confidence a little bit. You know, you have marketing clients, um, when you see people showing up and asking you for help, would you say that, like, um, I'm in tuning that correctly, that there might be kind of a lack of confidence? People feeling like, I don't know if I'm doing the right things or the people that I'm working with aren't doing the right things.

Speaker B: Yeah, Uh, I do see that. And oftentimes I'm talking to CEOs and owners, and so they for sure don't really know if marketing is going well because they're not the expert. So I think there's some recognition of when someone's not an expert. They're not really sure if they're doing it right, which is why they pull people like you and me in.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And so from a marketing standpoint, if you're a brand marketer, and I'm more on the brand strategy side. So if someone were to ask me to pull together a fully baked SEO strategy, I know what those words mean. Could I do and deliver what they're asking?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: No. And that doesn't necessarily mean I'm not confident. I am just, uh, aware of what I don't know.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So it could be some lack of confidence. And I think that might stem from what are their expectations. Sure. Like if their boss is expecting them to do all of these things and know all of these things. Because as you know, being a marketing generalist, you have to know, you know, one inch deep, a mile wide. But then when someone asks you to get really deep, I think it's really smart that they pull in experts like you, especially on the digital side. So it could be a lack of confidence, but it could also just be they know what they don't know and they're smart enough to bring in experts that do.

Speaker A: I love that. No, that is definitely also true. I would say that, uh, I do see people who maybe have, like, more experience on, like, the brand or creative side. Like, you don't want me to do brand creative stuff. Right. I'm never going to get you some, like, huge, crazy kind of post that's going to just go viral. That's not what we do. Right. We're focused on, like, the data and figuring out how we can get, like, really good incremental, scalable, recurring growth. Um, so it is kind of a different skill set. So I do think you got a good point there about maybe it isn't necessarily lack of Confidence. I'm feeling it. Ah. Because I guess most recently we've had. Just had some examples of people who've shown up and just said, like, you know, we're working with an agency. It's not like we don't like this agency, but we haven't been able to overcome, like, or we're hitting this ceiling, or we haven't been able to do some of the things. And because they aren't experts in digital. Right. They're like. And I don't. I don't know what that is. I don't know why we're bumping up against the ceiling. I don't know why we're, you know, have these challenges. And I need someone to help me solve that. So I do think, um, there's a whole piece too, to, um. Some of the things we've been talking about internally, which is like, when do you know when you need to, like, either build a team in house or bring in an agency partner? And I think that's a challenge for. For marketers as well. Right. It's like, should I build a team around this or should I bring an agency partner? Do you have a perspective on like, that at all?

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm gonna come back to that. Cause I wanna address something you just mentioned because you said, you know, working with someone that's already with an agency, and I think that's almost not necessarily the confidence piece, but it's more. They know something's not working. And I think oftentimes, and this is where agencies can get reputations that aren't reflective of who they actually are. Because maybe there hasn't been expectations correctly set with the client.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And maybe the client's not at. So when they start to see maybe the ROAs or if they're talking about certain metrics and they say, hey, you know, this isn't really working. Are they talking to their agency right away? And then is the agency providing all the information? So there could be a communication gap there. Um. Because sometimes marketers just assume that the agency is part of being a good partner, is to ask hard questions, push back when you feel like it's necessary. Because. Because it's a partnership. It's not just, I give you money and then make things happen for me.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And I bet in those situations that's sort of the case. And then they. The numbers aren't going the right way. They haven't had the tough conversation and they say, we don't. And then the trust gets broken.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: So. And then as far as in house, versus agency. I think it's such a boomerang that happens because I've seen it happen where all the money goes to agency, then they'll say we're spending. Usually a CFO will say, how much are we spending on agencies? We're bringing that in house. And then leadership changes in three to four years and the same conversation depending on their experience with agencies and marketing. I think that's, I think that's a decision where unfortunately it's sort of where the wind blows and where leadership wants to take its.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's very true. And I do think that like in the uh, boomerang scenario where you've hired an in house team and you may have really capable, great kind of people, but it's a people business business after all. And if somebody goes to a new job, if somebody decides they want something new in their life or you know, paternity maternity leave, like things happen and now all of a sudden you're like rebuilding once again. Um, so that is one of those benefits. I got to talk about the benefits of agencies. Right.

Speaker B: And, and I think another one is when you bring it in house and, and invariably that person is going to end up doing other things for the company.

Speaker A: Sure.

Speaker B: So when you go with an agency, you guys are all experts and you live and breathe this stuff day in and day out. No one's being asked, hey, uh, there's a PR release. Can you please work? Because they don't have anyone else and someone's on vacation. Can you. So usually when you're in house, you're not just doing the thing that you're actually hired to do. And part of the job and why agencies can be so great and effective is that you are staying on top of all of the trends.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: And the digital world. Like five minutes ago that was right. So I think there's something to be said for working with true experts that understand the space and you work with other clients so you're able to take all those learnings and help them think about things differently. Because you could say, I've got another client that also tried this. Here's what we saw. You're not telling them what to do, but you are certainly helping them make very informed decisions.

Speaker A: Yeah, love that. So let's go back to managing expectations because I feel you mentioned it, you also talked about, you know, going into, um, companies where it's the owner, the CEO, and so they're like, we need to do these things. And they have very, you know, ideas about the way things need to get done. Yeah. Um, I feel like that is one of the hardest things to do as an agency, as a marketer in house, is managing expectations of all stakeholders, managing the expectations of your own team and what you need to get from them, but also, you know, sales and marketing and that connection, the kind of C suite and what they're looking for. Um, so any thoughts about managing expectations of internal stakeholders?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is, and I almost feel like in some ways we're like wealth advisors where I cannot guarantee a return because that's always the conversation is, we're going to spend this much with you, what are we going to get?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And that's the wrong conversation. It's what needs to be accomplished here. I'm going to help you figure out how to achieve that through various ways. Um, But I think CFOs can be tough. I mean, sometimes I think marketing, and especially digital marketing people think that it's a faucet that you all of a sudden turn this faucet out and all the leads come through and all the revenue comes through. And a lot of times I'll work with clients who only want to talk about campaigns, they want to talk about digital marketing. They, meanwhile, their messaging is a mess. Uh, meanwhile, what they say they do is very different than what their website says. So it's like, I know you want to go here, but we actually have to go here first. And the ones that are willing to go here first, I know that they are willing to at least listen versus focusing on this. So I do think that, you know, the expectation piece can be tough. But I think if you can at least come in with, here's what we can do for you. Here's. Here's what I can't promise you. Obviously, we are here to grow your company and do all those things, but guaranteed returns are a tough conversation.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And I think, you know, sales versus finance, going into a company and having those separate conversations to understand, like, sales, what do you guys want? You know what, we need more collateral. We need more messaging. Because what we're saying isn't landing with our customers. And I have nothing to, like, give people. Awesome cfo, what are you hoping for? You know what, we just spent a bunch of money on this, so we really got to make sure. So once you understand what everyone hoping to get out of this, then you can kind of reflect back in a way that you can control. Here's how I can show up for you and kind of hit on all the points that every department wants. What do you do?

Speaker A: Yeah. So I think, um, we focus a lot on trying to get like a shared mindset. So I think that's kind of some of the things that you're talking about. So like, we come at it from like, marketing is really learning, right? Nobody, um, has the silver bullet. You know, there isn't like something that you can just take from one company and repeat it verbatim. And it's just, you know, it's going to work. Right? You can't make those promises. And so what we try to do is tell our clients, like, we want to build a learning organization, which means that we are going to do all of our audits and all of the things that we need to do to understand, like, what should be our top priorities and what should be a kind of our roadmap to execute on. And then we need to show up and really like defend that and say, this is what we believe from our, uh, expertise we need to do first. This is how long it'll take. This is the resources it needs. And once we get that alignment, like, okay, we understand the roadmap, we understand this is what we're trying to the arc of it for the year, how it connects to kind of the overarching strategy. Then here's what we're going to do in the first 90 days to try to hit that arc, that overarching arc. If we can get alignment on it now, all of a sudden we can start to just get into the execution of it. And then I think where sometimes marketers get tripped up is they're not great at kind of, uh, reporting on that execution. Like, here's how it's going, here's what we're doing, here's the progress that we're making. We're on track, we're off track. Here's where we are learning something. Either because we're like going gangbusters and it's going really good, or this failed. Like, this failed, but there's ah, data in failure. And here's what we learned either about our messaging or about how our product compares to the competition, or how our competition is going to market and eating our lunch, or, um, you know, how our consumer like, sees us. Where are the platforms where we can really actually find them to. And so, um, we're just all about like, we need to build learning organizations. We need to have a learning mindset. Uh, as soon as you, you get into people who are asking you to like, promise that you're going to hit these goals, I call those like ride or Die. KPI Chasing organizations, like, we don't even want to work with those people because it's just a mindset that's just really hard. And we don't believe. We believe that like winning organization. Marketing organizations are learning organizations. So that's kind of how we do.

Speaker B: I love that. And I also think that reminded me of something that I do with my clients, is we establish a marketing scorecard.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Let's talk about what we want to measure. And whether it's every week or every month, we look back, did it improve, did it not improve? What impacted that? How are we going to change things? But now there is a measure that everyone agreed was important. What you want the traffic, you want the social engagement, whatever those things are. And we decide that as a team. So that way everyone's kind of heard. And then we figure out, okay, are things working? And then the things that are working, how do we do more and double down on those? Just like you said. But having a visual scorecard also really helps because then they can see the impact of the marketing activities with numbers.

Speaker A: Right. So we go one step beyond and have almost like a scorecard that we share on our progress on the tasks we're executing on. So it's not just like, here's our weekly numbers or monthly numbers and here's like the insights around why we're up or down or it's. It's also like, here's what we're actively doing. Because I think in digital marketing, sometimes agencies kind of operate like in a black box, like, ooh, we're like wizards or witchcraft or whatever behind the curtain. You know, you don't know what we're doing with SEO. And we try to make it like super transparent. So there's a high degree of accountability and that just by having like a really strong, strong process, it helps like minimize the kind of somebody dropping in and just saying, we need to go like this other direction. This isn't working. We need to go this other direction. And um, and by having that strong process, you can say, great, that's an interesting idea. If it's the CEO, it's like, okay, it's your company. If you want to pivot, we can. But I need to tell you that we agreed on this annual roadmap. Here's where we are in our current execution. And you making this pivot decision is going to, we're going to lose all of this work. You know, we're going to have to pivot ourselves. That's going to take a different set of Resources. And so at the end of the day, the CEO can say, yeah, but we have to make this pivot, which is fine. Then we change and move. But half the time, more than half the time, it's like, no, you know, just stick, let's stick to the plan. Like, we'll, we'll put this in the parking.

Speaker B: Okay. This makes me think of a question I want to ask you. Because part of that. And that happens, right? The CEO, all of a sudden there's a new direction. And a lot of times it's like, we have not given this enough time.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Do you have a rule of thumb where you're like a campaign, an effort and initiative, we've got to give it at least four months or three months or six weeks. Do you have a rule of thumb you use. Because sometimes it feels like rugs get pulled out when we just got started.

Speaker A: Right. So we do, you know, paid media, uh, organic search. So SEO and content are like the, those two main buckets. Analytics is another service of ours. But when it comes to paid media, the answer was every marketer will say is depends. Right? So like if we're have budget where we're able to get to statistically relevant data in a week because we can throw, you know, $10,000 at something, then we're ready to pivot. Like, it's all about statistically relevant data. And so that is what we use to push back when, when we get someone who shows up and says we need to, this isn't working. It's like, well, do we like have, has it had enough play? Yeah, um, so it does. It depends on budget. So there isn't really like a time frame with paid media, with organic search. It takes time.

Speaker B: It takes time.

Speaker A: It takes time. Yeah. Um, and it's hard. And so we like to see like our content or our changes to start to move the dial after six months. Like we should be having some like, early insights that this is working at the six month mark. Um, that's kind of how I think about it. And we can have some like quick wins, like wow. Or you know, we've come into situations where there's been like technical SEO and you get those things fixed and all of a sudden, like, it's working. Um, those are a little bit more few and far between. So I would say, yeah, that depends on the service. Um, but that's kind of how we think about it. Awesome. Yeah. All right, so we talked a little bit about, uh, mindset, uh, anything else. Like one of the things that I've Been reading is this, uh, book about polyvagal theory.

Speaker B: I don't know if you say more words.

Speaker A: Uh, isn't that sound super interesting and intellectual?

Speaker B: Uh, especially for a guy in a floral shirt on a Friday?

Speaker A: Yeah. Now I'm gonna butcher the concept. So here we go. So you've heard of, like, fight or flight, right? And so, uh, you have this, like, vagus nervous system that's been developed. We've talked about, like, the brain as the lizard brain. And then you have kind of like your thinking brain or whatever. Um, so you have a nervous system that kind of accompanies that. And so polyvagal theory is like, total talks about there's three different kind of nerve, vagus nerves. And again, I'm just reading this and butchering it a little bit, but it. It. It's where you see, like, um, you know, fight or flight happening. And so there's. There's this kind of green, uh, vagus area. So polyvagal means there's kind of three different. There's three different areas. One is where you feel good. Like, you have psychological safety. You feel like that's when you have, like, the ability to think really entrepreneurially and, like, be super creative because you feel good, you feel safe. Right. You're in a good spot. Um, as soon as you get into kind of the Fight or flight, which is the second one of the. Of these vagels, which I'm butchering, um, that's where, like, you actually, you know, your heart rate starts to go up and you can't think creatively.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You're like. Things in your body start shutting down because you're, like, worried, like, I need to preserve myself. Right.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And so what. Uh, the. Then the. The third and last one is the freeze phase, which it, uh, was kind of what this theory, I think, tried to describe is. There's a third phase. There's fight or flight, but then there's a. There's a phase where, like, your body literally shuts down. Like, you're gonna get attacked. You're getting attacked by a bear. Your body literally, like, shuts down because there's nothing else it can.

Speaker B: Unless you're Leonardo DiCaprio.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: In that one movie.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, he. He pretty much shut down. And then it just. Yeah, and then it just, like, beat him on the chest. And that was. I can't believe he came back from that and he's still alive.

Speaker B: It's a great movie.

Speaker A: Oh, yeah. It's a M movie. That's right.

Speaker B: Uh, I love what you're saying, Basically what you're saying is we've got more mental real estate state when we're allowed to be safe and feel like we belong and have that psychological safety. Because if you don't, like, I think about someone that's worried about losing their job all the time, right? Are they gonna perform at optimal levels and have the mind space to think creatively and problem solve when all they're trying to solve for is, how do I keep my job, how do I keep my job?

Speaker A: Or how do I get that KPI up? They're looking at that KPI, that's cap. Like, you just get to this place where, like, you just can't kind of, um, do your job as well as you could if you had more kind of psychological safety. So anyway, that goes back to this idea of, like, organizational mindset. You know, you have to. If you build a learning organization, then leaders understand, okay, you might fail. But let's learn. Let's get insights from that. And I'm, I'm not just going to, like, kick you to the curb. I mean, there's a reason why The C suite CMOs, like, churn way more than everybody else. Um, and I think it has a lot to do with, like, the fact that, you know, we just, you know, cfo. Nobody's showing up in the C suite and saying to a cfo, like, uh, let's talk about how you're managing the company's money, right? Nobody does that. But of course CFOs are like, let's talk about the marketing. Like, what kind of results? Like, I agree. I just think it's crazy that that happens in general.

Speaker B: Everyone thinks they can do marketing's job because everyone is a consumer of marketing. So you're right. Like sales folks, customer, everyone's got marketing ideas. But I do. I mean, the psychological safety in marketing, in work, in relationships and life, it's critical. Like, if you don't feel like you belong and that you're safe and that you're not free to speak your mind for fear of, you know, retaliation or anything else, you're gonna bottle those feelings. So you might know something's not right, or you might have a great idea, but you think you're gonna get ridiculed or you think the boss is gonna say, you know what? That wasn't really appropriate. We've all been in those situations where someone. It's kind of someone's way or the highway, right? And I've worked for leaders like that, and that's really tough. So you feel like you can't challenge them.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And that, that absolutely does not create a psychologically safe environment, which means that team will never actually operate at their best because it's one person's ideas that get executed.

Speaker A: Yeah. And that's why I feel like learning organization organizations with that mindset will always be better than kind of those what I call ride or die KPI chasing organizations.

Speaker B: Yeah, I agree with you. And I think then that creates, and that creates more cohesion with an organization because it becomes less about, well, marketing. Did you do your job right? It becomes as a team.

Speaker A: Did you do your job right?

Speaker B: Right. It becomes as a team. Are we performing and are we doing, doing everything we said we were going to do to hit the goals that we want to hit for this year? Like that changes the conversation because there's been too many rooms where you know, yeah, sales, what's going on or marketing. That email didn't perform as high as we thought it was going to do. What are you doing differently? That blame game, that psychological safety goes away completely. So m. Unless you're a very strong and that you got to work up to have the courage to really own your space in those rooms because very quickly you can just say, okay, got, I've been there where I've, you know, got it. Yeah, let's move on.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: You know.

Speaker A: Yeah. So I think that there's that layer that needs to exist to like really have uh, the excellent kind of um, nutrients in the organization to then do great work. Then there's kind of four areas where I've been seeing, uh, that like marketing organizations that are like exceptional always get right. So those four areas are like, they're aligned on strategy. They're like really clear on their processes. Um, they have a clear source of truth. So like the, the data um, that they're looking at is shared, uh, with everyone else in the organization. And the last thing is they're just great at communication with all stakeholders. And I feel like when some one of those pieces just isn't quite right, that's when. And even with Agurian, I mean we've had clients who've. We've been chasing after cert. Like we have our reports and we're telling them this is going great and then they show up with like some other HubSpot report that we never knew they even had and they say like it's not going well. Look at this report. And we're like, whoa, like we're not even tracking the same. Like, we're not focused on the same numbers. Um, and that's tripped us up in the past and we need to make sure that that kind of stuff doesn't happen as marketers. So thoughts on strategy, process, data, communication, how that trips us up or, uh, uh, how you do it? Great.

Speaker B: I mean, I think you're right. Those are really strong pillars of awesome marketing. And I think that you always have, I mean, it always starts with strategy. Like you don't get in the car and just start driving. You have to know where you are driving to. So strategy, 1000% and good markers. Yes. They have some type of process like I think about with my clients, while my engagements look very different depending on the size of the organization, what the goal is, all that good stuff. Um, you know, there's usually like a discovery meeting and then I'll have meetings with other stakeholders and then I'll write, you know, like there is some type of process that is repeatable. Um, and I think marketers should have that and also should have the leeway of abandoning and creating new processes that they need to. Yeah, um, um, communication. I mean 10, 10%. And I think this is part of marketer superpowers. Like we not only can communicate, but also I think connecting dots in the organization. I think that is something marketing is so, so much the glue of an organization. There have been many times that maybe I've met with customer service and I hear about an initiative they're going to work on because marketing needs to help communicate and market that.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And then you sit in a meeting with leadership and you mentioned this and, and the finance guy's like, wait a minute, what are they doing over there? And sometimes departments don't always talk. And marketing should be the through line through an organization because we're communicating, we're connecting customers and the organization. And so that communication, I think is just inherent with every marketer. Like, we should be good at communicating to different groups, pulling things together, connecting dots. And then what was the fourth one?

Speaker A: Data.

Speaker B: Oh yeah, Data. The most important one.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: I think that also goes to the technology that has happened over the last 20 years. Marketing is no longer like a gut feel business. And I think for a long time it was. And so making sure that everyone's clear on what are those measurables, what are all the metrics we agree to. And luckily there's so many dashboards and ways that you can pull those together. But I think the biggest thing with the data is everyone's agreeing on what is being measured. Because to your point of like somebody pulling in a new report Wait, did we talk about this report? Like where did this report come from? So I think everyone has to agree on here. The numbers we think mean something.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, and the good part about marketing now is that there are numbers. And even though attribution gets really messy. Yeah, I think time based attribution is really interesting where there might be seven things happening. But if we know in August those seven things were happening, you can probably bet if the numbers are all going up, it had to do with all of these things. And as we know as consumers, it's not just one marketing thing that makes us act right. We saw the campaign, we clicked on the link, we looked at the website, we said like, there's so many things. So I think the data and attribute, like what's your take on attribution now? Like how do you have that conversation? Because I feel like for a while it was really, it was stronger than it is now. And now it feels like, can we, can we, can we believe attribution and reports?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a hard question. I think it really again depends on, on what? Like if we're talking about E commerce, like there's some pretty clear attribution that can be had. Um, you know, there's lots of different models. You know, we just don't end with like last click attribution. Like that's very, very lazy. Um, so you know, you can get some more complex attribution models where you see like assisted conversions. Right. Because we, if we think about our own behavior, you know, we're going online, we may see something on LinkedIn, we kind of store it in our head and then we decide to go like, what was the name of that company? And then we decide to go back and maybe we see something and then we leave again. And then all of a sudden we get retargeted on paid media somehow and, and then we go and we book the demo or we buy the thing or we do the whatever and if you're just like, oh, paid media is just killing it for us. Well, no, we had organic social in there. We may have had like a, ah, webinar, we may have, you know. So I do think that attribution is super difficult, but it really depends on the business. Right? If it's like B2B, the sales cycles, nine months, the deal values, you know, $15 million, you've got multiple stakeholders, it gets, it gets super hard and messy. Um, so I think when we are working with companies like that, all we're trying to show them is like the piece of Content that we created. It is one of those, like, rocks across the river. Right. That somebody hops to. Um, so we just need to prove that, like, that is actually a good rock and it is helping their people kind of cross that. Cross that chasm. So.

Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. So that just made me think of something on the consumer side. And I want your opinion on this. So this is more, um, B2C. I've heard, you know, that my. My Instagram. My Instagram algorithm just gets me. Right. It's feeding me all the right things to buy. Um, and I had a friend, and she bought something, and I'm like, where'd you get that? She was like, honestly? Instagram. Instagram told. Instagram made me do it.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And I bought it because I was so sick of getting the ads. It was like, fine, Uncle, I will buy this thing.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: How do you feel about, like, is that successful? Because ultimately she bought the thing.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: But the reason she bought it was because the ad was annoying and she didn't want to see it anymore. So what say you to that?

Speaker A: Uh, I say that people always try to have, like, a logical reason for doing something that's emotional. M. That's my take on that. So I'll give you an example. Uh, two years ago, I bought a convertible.

Speaker B: You. You did.

Speaker A: But this is what I tell everybody. Everybody who asks here, you're like, oh, you did. And I'm like, if, uh, everybody who asks me, I tell them, but it's a convertible. That's front wheel drive, it has heated seats, and it's a hard top, so I drive it in the winter as well. So my rationalization is, I bought a car. What I did is I just bought a car that I drive year round. Like, that's not whimsical. That's not like, uh, just like a pleasure that I'm giving myself. It just happens to be a, uh, convertible. So in my head, so I would say if we, like, actually sat your friend down and said, okay. So, like, you. You. You got your arm twisted. But there's. You want it. You.

Speaker B: You.

Speaker A: You wanted that. You really wanted that. Come on.

Speaker B: Yeah. Let's be truthful. Yeah.

Speaker A: I don't know. Have you ever bought something like that and. And then had a whole rationalization of, uh. Does that happen to you every day?

Speaker B: I mean, I think not every day, but.

Speaker A: Yeah. Go get a coffee. Like the $7 coffee at Spy House.

Speaker B: Oh, yeah, that's right next door is. Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, I need. I need a seven.

Speaker B: You do need full Spy House. Is good. That's good. I think. What's. I don't know if I buy. I think. Right. Like, I'm using my logical brain now to. Yeah, it's an emotional thing. But I will say, when you see ads, cons, the more you see ads, the more you're like. It's almost like a little, um, worm that digs deeper into your brain. And I Sometimes after the tenth time of seeing something, it's like, oh, that shirt really looks good. You know what? I've got the perfect skirt to go with it. Or it. Just by showing up more and more, you kind of need it more.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So. Yeah, maybe that's it.

Speaker A: Maybe. Well, that's a good way to end. We'll just let everybody kind of ponder their emotional buying decisions that they try to rationalize and how marketing can, like, get that worm in your brain. Yeah. Maybe we should do this again. This was super fun.

Speaker B: It was.

Speaker A: All right.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: Thanks, Heather. That'll wrap it up for this edition of Small But Mighty Marketers Podcast. Thanks.