Getting real about marketing bullshit, myths and gurus: Vince Moreau

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Mark Evans: Hi. It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark, which features conversations with b to b and SaaS entrepreneurs and marketing leaders about strategies and tactics to make an impact. A key part of using LinkedIn is sparking conversations. It's great to publish content, make comments, and connect with people, but the real value, in my humble opinion, comes from talking to people. It sparks ideas, relationships, and opportunities. And sometimes, those conversations are so good and insightful that the next step, the next obvious step is a podcast. Vince Morrow is a great example. I'm not sure how we connected on LinkedIn, but one thing led to another, and we jumped on a a Zoom call. We covered a lot of ground, particularly around brand awareness. Thank you.

Vince Moreau: I don't even know what to say after such an introduction. I I learned that I am a marketing leader now, so that that makes me feel really good.

Mark Evans: That's a little bit of ego stroking to set you up for the rest of the day.

Vince Moreau: That's nice. Thanks.

Mark Evans: Why don't we start with an easy question, a softball question? Tell me about yourself and your marketing journey.

Vince Moreau: I'm Vince. I am French, which you probably cannot hear. I am based in France, and I run and I own and run b to SaaS marketing agency that's called Skill Crush. We do SEO content marketing, and we are doing more and more marketing strategy, messaging, and positioning for b to b SaaS company, like b to b SaaS and tech companies as a whole. My marketing journey is a little bit weird because I do not have any marketing or business background. So many people in our field, which we will get to discuss at some point probably. And I used to be an academic. I did a master's degree in medieval French literature, and I started a PhD in medieval French literature, which I ended up dropping. I did that at McGill University in in Montreal. I ended up dropping out because the perspectives in the field weren't that great in terms of employment and making Okay. And and eating. And it didn't help that my wife was doing the same things. I ended up working in content because I was a humanities, like, slash literature guy, and then I learned SEO on the job at a an SEO agency, set up my own consultancy, and then grew that into an agency, basically. No textbook marketing background here.

Mark Evans: I was a journalist and stumbled into marketing, and now I get to call myself a marketer. It's a role that I feel uncomfortable about because I don't have training, and there's a a sense of impostor syndrome. But sometimes you just have to fake it so you make it, and I think that's what I've done over the years. I am curious about your agency shift from SEO and content to messaging and positioning because the reality is SEO and content are tangible. They're measurable. You can quantify your performance. Messaging and positioning, on the other hand, are they're creative. Sometimes you can't quantify the impact. They're subjective. It's a much more difficult landscape to navigate if you're trying to prove to customers the value that you're delivering. Why the shift, and and how are you migrating the business over from SEO content to messaging and positioning?

Vince Moreau: How much time do you have? There are a few reasons why we made the shift. The first one is that, yes, you're right. I I think I never thought of it that way. The fact that it's easier to prove what you're doing and show the value of what you're doing when you're doing SEO and content. That's also maybe why we're doing it. I'm gonna explain. The first reason we're doing it is I don't know if it's the first or second, but I'll start with it. So now it's the first. It's very pragmatic. It's the fact that SEO and content are super tough to sell. And they're tough to sell because no one wants to buy that stuff because so many people have been burned over the years by SEO agencies and stuff. Pivoting a business when you've got talent in house, it's not always easy to find work for that talent. And I know I have a great team, and so I want them to work on cool projects and not sell SEO mill type projects where they update meta descriptions. That's the pragmatic thing. The marketing slash really positioning work that we have done is also that we have seen over the years as we were working on SEO and content projects that most of the projects that failed, not failed in the SEO results failed, but failed in the sense that the client stopped working with us or weren't getting the results because they weren't doing their part. That was because of a lack of marketing strategy in the business. And so we've seen that and we've seen that with talking, like you mentioned, LinkedIn is talking to a lot of people. I also know that this is a real problem in the market, Marketers in leadership positions who do not necessarily know what to do with the money that's allocated to them and basically have no idea what angle they should choose to approach their market and stuff. And so that's why we're trying to slip through the cracks here and infiltrate that little niche that we've seen where I think we can solve that problem because we've got the marketing experience. We've got the content experience. And also that messaging and positioning stuff, you can do as much content as you like If you don't have a strategic narrative to put in that content, you might as well have no content because it's gonna be fluffy. It's gonna be boring, dull content, however you wanna call it. If you do not put your strategic narrative in your content, that content may rank and people will forget it as soon as they read it, basically, if they even read it. So I think those are more connected than one might initially think. And so to me, it feels like a natural transition. I I did warn you it was gonna be a long

Mark Evans: It is interesting that you talk about a strategic narrative and the way that it permeates the entire organization because my spiky point of view is that positioning is seen as a marketing exercise and often dismissed as a fluffy marketing exercise. But I believe, wholeheartedly believe, that positioning underpins marketing, sales, product development, customer success, HR, raising capital because it provides a a company with a coherent story that they're telling everywhere and to everybody, personally, I think the positioning is completely underrated and seen as a nice to have versus a need to have.

Vince Moreau: I agree with that it is something that it is probably above marketing in terms of the hierarchy of things. And it should definitely be a culture thing for bigger orgs that they should know the problems that they solve and how they solve them and how that integrates with the other problems in the day to day of their customers. But at the same time, we as marketers are in a very good position to actually do that because we have access to market insights, to market research, or at least we should have access to market research. We are in a position where we can, depending on the type of business. Obviously, if you're working with enterprise clients or you're working with professional services firms, no one's gonna let you interview customers because that's not how it works. You're not gonna be able to interview the CFO of Fortune 500 company because you're part of marketing department. But for most businesses out there, we as marketers have all the tools needed to do that, which is why I think it's a good thing to have marketing work on that if it is not a fluffy exercise, obviously.

Mark Evans: We've tackled one of my favorite subjects, which is brand positioning and messaging. Let's shift gears a little bit. Over the past eighteen months, the marketing landscape has dramatically changed. Budgets are shrinking. C CEOs and CFOs are watching every penny and demanding that marketers drive ROI from their budgets. And meanwhile, the economic landscape is volatile. And the question to you is, how do you sell marketing to people and companies who don't wanna buy it or they're cautious about taking the plunge?

Vince Moreau: That's a tough questions, and I'm not a salesperson. So I may not even be the best person to answer that question, but I think the down to earth pragmatic answer to that question is you don't. You don't sell stuff to people if they don't want to buy it. There is no way to do that. There are ways to do that but you don't want to build a business on those practices. It's tough. I think the toughest thing for us is not to find people who need marketing. It's to find people who need marketing, who want marketing, and people who need marketing, want marketing, and wanna spend on marketing because these are three different things. And this is also why I say marketing is the best place to start when you're doing customer research is people might have a need but no want. They might have a need and a want, which we call demand, and they might have a need, a want, and no budget. Having a problem and wanting to solve it does not mean you're ready to pay for it.

Mark Evans: Right? Mhmm.

Vince Moreau: My arm is aching or something. It hurts. Maybe I don't actually want to go to the doctor. Or if I go to the doctor and it's a €150 or a $150, then I'm not ready to pay that. And that's problem solved. You can try and sell me that stuff as long as you want. If the conditions of the deals do not change, then I'm not gonna buy. If you know me and follow me on LinkedIn, which if you don't, you should. I know you do, Mark. I'm saying that for the audience. I'm doing a shameless plug. I always say that you cannot make people buy some stuff they wanna buy they don't wanna buy. And it's all about the problem that you solve. So if people do not see marketing as a solution to a problem, you can't sell it to them. And at the same time, I don't the phrase educate the market because I think no one wants to be educated by strangers on the Internet, at least not unwillingly. But at the same time, this is the effort that we have to do is to show, prove that marketing is something else than just fluffy terms thrown around that some people actually have thought about this and published research about it and that it's it can be a serious field and it can be a serious endeavor if you're doing it the right way, approaching it the right way. I think that's my less pessimistic answer.

Mark Evans: One somebody said to me, and and it resonated that a lot of companies are afraid to do marketing, and at the same time, they're afraid not to do marketing. So they're caught in this gray zone Yeah. Where they know that marketing needs to be part of the business mix. They understand that it drives leads and brand awareness and sales, but at the same time, they look at their balance sheets, and they get spooked. They get spooked by the fact that sometimes marketing is quantifiable and sometimes it's not. And when they're looking to pull back on spending, marketing is often an easy target. And it's frustrating to to me as a marketer because I recognize that there are certainly short term benefits to driving inbound, but there's the long term that a company needs to think about. And often, the long term considerations get put aside because of short term issues.

Vince Moreau: Marketing, like you said, it's a long term thing. And at the same time, these companies, when they see the what's on offer, they cannot differentiate the good from the bad and the bad from the ugly. There is no way to do that right now. And the bar in marketing is very low in terms of the amount of people with actual marketing skills in the industry. That's pretty low compared to the number of marketers. Right? But everyone can call themselves a marketer and set up a marketing business. And everyone can try and sell out. How does one who does not have the marketing skills, because otherwise they would be handling their marketing already, how does one differentiate who is good and who isn't? How does one make sure they're not getting bullshitted by someone and that all of that is is actually legit? What that person is saying is legit. That's the toughest thing. And that usually leads to inaction because it's the safest thing to do, like you mentioned. The other side of the coin is that the bar is really low. Like anyone with who is willing to do some kind of actual marketing work will get results because no one wants to do the work. It reminds me of a story. A guy I know, he wanted to go into the military or the police. I don't remember which exam it was. So they have a paper test which he passed. Then after that, there is a physical test. And that physical tests, the way it is designed, it's the Leclage test. It's a VO two max test. The way it is designed and the threshold that they have to hit to pass the test, it is designed to sort out people who actually trained once a week for for the past six months or a year and people who didn't. How hard is it to go running once a week? How hard is that? Right? It isn't. Seventy five percent of people fail that test. And that just shows I think it's the same for marketing. If you do the work, you will get results. But if you take shortcuts and blame it on the test or you blame it on the market or you blame it on marketers or you blame it on something else, then that won't work. So I think the end question or the the way that comes back to it, the education, I don't like that word, but people have to understand that we as marketers can be less aspirational. We can be less bullshitty. We can do all that. But they also need to stop believing in those shortcuts because there are no shortcuts. They do not exist. And if they exist and they work, they are not good for you. Right? Steroids are are a shortcut. I I don't know what the side effects of steroids are. But if you wanna get a heart attack at 40, be my guest. There are consequences to taking shortcuts. We all know that. There are both parties can actually act on this and and do better for sure.

Mark Evans: I think the reality is that marketers talk a good game. They get people very excited even though there may not be a lot of substance behind the talk, and and it's easy to get seduced by a marketer because that's our job. Our job is to get you excited, inspired, and and willing to do things that you may want wanted to. So that is very interesting. A related question is that marketing, particularly digital marketing, has been quantified by data for the past ten years. Although, I see the pendulum swinging back to brand. Data has steered how companies determine whether marketing has been successful or not. In the process, I think it's made a lot of marketers dependent on KPIs and dashboards and and whether the green arrows are more prominent than the red arrows, green being good and red being bad. But what about the importance of marketing that can't be measured? What about marketing that drives brand awareness and brand affinity? For example, beer companies spend millions of dollars on marketing and advertising. They blow their brains out on Super Bowl ads. But it's not like they want to recoup their costs in the short term because they understand that marketing is a long term play. They understand that if people are aware of their brand and know that it exists, then the likelihood of them buying a product at some point in time is gonna happen. My question is, how does brand awareness and this is a a big question that we're not gonna answer in a short period of time. But how does brand awareness fit into the economic landscape, the marketing landscape, and the focus on r r ROI? Are we going back in time when marketers like David Ogilvy were hailed as superstars because their work drove brand awareness? What are your thoughts on brand awareness versus this Yeah. Quantifiable marketing that everybody seemed to have leaned into for the last ten years?

Vince Moreau: This is a tough question, and I think my answer is pretty controversial. When you look at what works and what doesn't because in the end, that's what we want. Right? What works and what doesn't. If you look at it that way, where does ROI fit into this? What I'm saying is, what does work mean and what does success look like? That's the fundamental question that marketers cannot answer. Because for some period of time, it was leads. Everyone's like, leads, leads. And because leads weren't that great, they invented MQLs and SQLs. So there are good leads and then bad leads. And now that we've had MQLs and SQLs, people say, no. It's not leads, MQL. It's opportunities. So how is that difference? I I don't know. And then that didn't work either. So now they're saying, oh, marketing should drive revenue. Okay. So what does work mean? And if you mentioned you're preaching to require because you're using my examples and feeding them back to me with the Super Bowl thing. So fun.

Mark Evans: That's what a good interviewer does. Right?

Vince Moreau: Exactly. If you think about this, what does work mean for a Super Bowl ad? The only thing that they are probably watching is how many people saw it and how many pennies per view we got or something. That's the context of that discussion. ROI is out out of the picture. Like you mentioned, it it doesn't matter. It's marketing budget. We spend marketing budget. That's it. It's allocated. It's going so there's that. The issue that I think we've had with marketing budgets and stuff, and again, how much time do you have? Because I can talk about that all night. There is a saying that people sometimes use that says something along the lines of what cannot be measured cannot be improved. Can I call that an aphorism? Probably, like, that very assertive saying, you could argue is pretty false. I can improve lots of things that I cannot measure. If a drawing has no shadows, then I can improve the drawing by putting shadows. And maybe if you draw way better than me, which you probably do because I I suck at drawing, then you can probably put less shadows and still in then how do we quantify who added more shadows and less shadows? One counterexample and you see that logic goes out the window. The issues we've built our entire ecosystem on that premise that what cannot be measured cannot be improved. Let's measure more. We've got this enormous amount of data. Analytics gives you more data than anyone ever needs, and we don't know what to do with it. So people started saying, yes, but we've got the data, but I've got the good data. Right? So this is the MQL versus SQL kind of discussion. I've got the good data. And the more pressure is put on budgets, the more pressure is put on budgets, the more people want to measure. Oh, yes. But I'm paying a dollar. What I'm what am I paying it to? Where is it going and how much is it bringing back? So the minute you start with the idea that measurement is the number one thing you need to do to know whether something is successful. The minute you do that, the minute you you force yourself to do more of what is measurable. And so you do more of the stuff that doesn't work. When I say doesn't work, it's because there are two things that work in marketing. When I say work, because I ask the question, is what drives long term growth? So not growth this quarter or next quarter, but what drives long term growth? To drive long term growth, you need two things. You need mental availability. So you need basically space, some kind of space in people's heads. And you need physical availability. So when people think of you, you need to they can actually buy from you. If you go out of business in the meantime then. Sorry. To drive that, ads suck. The measurable stuff just sucks. Mhmm. It does not work. So there is a graph that's famous if you look at it online. It's a long term growth versus sales activation. So what people call sales activation campaign is, oh, we need more sales next quarter. What can we do? Right? So we're gonna sell ads or we're gonna do an event or we're gonna do that kind of thing with the sole purpose of driving business and not the purpose of building a brand. Mhmm. When you do that, it it spikes like that. And then in the minute you don't do events anymore, then it just stops. Right? You do another event, you get four leads, you sell 200 k or something more than last quarter and then and so on and so forth. The stuff that's measurable isn't great at driving growth. It just isn't. And the problem is that more pressure is put on marketers to drive more business, to play a bigger part in the business in the bottom line. So what they do is they always cross the the next line. It was leads, then it's MQLs, then it sent SQLs, then it's opportunities, which probably proposals or something. I don't know. And now it's revenue. So people came up with the invention of marketing influence revenue saying I do marketing, but I do the right kind of marketing. And these are the suckers. They do the bad kind of marketing. I have a question for all these guys because what they're saying is we need to measure which marketing actions actually drive revenue, which is something marketers have no control on. And we're gonna do that with this new fancy attribution software that my pal built in the last six months and cost 150 k a year. We're gonna do that with this. But let me ask you a question. If you're calling it marketing influence revenue, doesn't anyone who looks at your website qualifies as influenced by marketing? But it's basically then every revenue is marketing influence because you have a logo. Right? So at some point, someone thought of a logo. And so what I'm trying to say with the this nonsensical reasoning is marketing is an ecosystem. It's not like people click on one ad and then buy and then you do more of that ad and it works more because otherwise we'd all be borrowing 5 millions from the local bank to invest in Facebook ads and sell for five x ROI. This is not how it works. How it works is you need to build a brand, you need to have a narrative, you need to understand the market, the problems, you need to say back to people what they feel and connect that problem to your solution. It's that simple.

Mark Evans: It's that simple, but it's complicated. It's simple, but hard. It's hard. I think that's the problem that marketers are encountering these days is that they've become so dependent on data and KPIs to measure their success. They've lost the narrative. If you look at the average tenure of a CMO, it's less than four years, and it's shrinking because the CFO or the CEO will look at the CMO and say, your marketing is not working, and they'll blame the marketer for not doing the right things in some respects. And it sounds somewhat sacrilegious. Is that is that a lot of marketing is a leap of faith? Yes. You do the research for your customers. You do marketing that is the right thing to do. Some of it can be quantified because there's a correlation between if I do this kind of marketing, then this will happen. And that's the short term demand gen performance marketing that you talk about. But a lot of it is what I call slow burn marketing. And you don't know it's working, but it's working in the background. People are having conversations. They're driving referrals. They're talking about your brand at conferences, but you have no idea that it's happening. You can't measure it, but it it's working. That's the conundrum facing marketers is that they can't claim that success.

Vince Moreau: We all have stories to tell around that. I was with on a with a prospect last week, and it's a guy I invited on LinkedIn. Just invited him, dropped a message saying, hey. Hi. Who are you? What do you do? And you can check out my profile. No. I'm not selling anything. I'm just like, hey. I exist. You exist too. Let's exist together. The guy went to our website, check out checked out our content, checked out our playbook, responded. And what I thought was going to be a casual conversation like this one turned into a discovery call. He had qualified himself through my content. Right? I have two questions. Had my content not been there, would have I been able to add one lead to my CRM? Probably not. The second question which is shows even more how that works I think is how many people checked out my content and did not reply to my message?

Mark Evans: You don't know.

Vince Moreau: So how many times and this is like the survivorship bias. How many times did my content not influence people the right way? I could draw the conclusion that this is great. My content's working because that guy said so. But maybe I put off 99% of people because it's bad content and that guy is just a statistical mistake. You never know. And if you trust measurement, what is the data saying to draw conclusions, you can go in the wrong way. The problem is not the data. It's what you do with it. And most of the times, the data is used to prove something that has already been decided before. I I use the same reasoning when I work with small businesses because I do that sometimes. People have, like, high-tech at consultancies and stuff, and I help them build their narrative and build their marketing. And I say, like most small businesses or professional services firm, they're relying on referrals. And they always say something along the lines of we get most of our business from referrals. And I say this, how many times you were referred to someone and they contacted you? Do you know how many times you were referred to someone and they didn't feel you were the right fit so they never got in touch because your marketing's so bad? You don't know. Maybe it's never. Maybe it's all the time. You don't know until you do that research. So what I say now is I talk about confidence, which is an emotion. But once you've done the work, once you've done the market research, you've built your narrative, you've thought about it, you're confident in what you're saying, you're confident that you have a narrative, you have a plan, you know where you're going. Maybe it's a bad plan, but a bad plan is still better than no plan. Right?

Mark Evans: I agree. And I think that the problem with a lot of companies is that they don't have a strong message, a strong story that they wanna deliver to the marketplace. Regardless of whether you can drive attribution or not is what you're looking to do is attract and engage the right people. You want to do things that that spark emotions, that generate reactions, that get people thinking about your brand as a possibility, and what could be possible if they used your product. What the what what would that experience be like? How would their life change professionally or personally if they used your product? And one of the biggest challenges facing marketers these days is attribution is increasingly difficult. And if you listen to people like Chris Walker who is banging the drum about dark social and dark web, what he's basically saying is that most of your dashboard information is pretty useless.

Vince Moreau: The replacement that he has is, as useless, in my opinion.

Mark Evans: Why is that?

Vince Moreau: Because his replacement for it is, like, a self reported attribution, which he coined as s SRA. And the idea is, oh, we'll ask people on a forum where they heard about us.

Mark Evans: Rand Fishkin had a really good blog post recently, and Rand Fishkin's from SparkTour. You gotta read it because what he basically said is that that self attribution, how did you find out about us form, has nowhere near the value that someone like a Chris Walker advocates for.

Vince Moreau: It's not even that it has nowhere near the value. It's that it has no value. There is no value in this. And I can prove it by stating a simple fact. When you ask heterosexual men and heterosexual women how much sex they have per week, you get different results. They have sex together. Right? So you should get the same amount

Mark Evans: for

Vince Moreau: men and women.

Mark Evans: Right.

Vince Moreau: So people lie sometimes because they just don't wanna tell you. And if you reflect on your own habits within with that self reported attribution, if I saw an ad and this is why I'm contacting you, there's no way in hell I'm telling you it's from an ad. No way in hell because you're you're gonna use that information against me.

Mark Evans: It is interesting because I have a client and we set up that exact form on the website. And then I was able to track every lead we got, every demo request we got. I was able to track what how did you find out about us? It was all over the place. And majority of the time, people didn't even give a reason because they couldn't be bothered. We didn't make it obligatory. And Google, I heard you from a friend. It was pretty much useless information. I think that's really interesting.

Vince Moreau: If I can add something here. I think that shows because you mentioned Chris Walker. I didn't. I think that shows how these people are hurting the industry. And they're hurting more businesses than they're helping. The reason I'm saying this is he's constantly trying to reinvent the wheel, and he's constantly spinning in circles and chasing his own tail. His entire business depends on his public image and the fact that he has something new to say, and he'll say anything because it's new. The best way to say new things all the time is to make them up. Right? That's a really good way to have lots of things to say. So he does that. He makes things up, like, literally, like, brutally. If you look at his content with an ounce of clinical thinking, he makes things up all the time. And the best strategy to be able to make things up on the fly is to complexify what is simple. And this comes back to what we were saying about when I I intervene, I say, no. It's not complex. It's hard. People misunderstand difficulty and complexity. So complexity is how intellectually challenging something is. Does it have a lot of intellectually moving part? A nuclear plant is pretty complex. Right? Mhmm. And difficulty is how easy it is to execute. Building a nuclear plant is fairly hard to do. There are things that are simple and hard. Doing a deadlift, simple and hard. Very simple or a pull up if you don't know what a deadlift is. Grab the bar and lift yourself up. 90% of people can't do a pull up because it takes years of training for most people in our current shape and form. It's simple. It's hard. There are things that are hard and simple and mark and yet there are things that are complex and simple. You'd argue for example, that driving a car is complex and simple. You've got lots and lots of things to think about when you drive. Once you know how to do it, it's pretty straightforward. Marketing is simple and hard. It's very simple in its intellectual form, but it's very hard to do because it's interview customers, very simple. But running customers into customer interviews is to get the kind of insights that you're looking for. That is really hard. It's it's not something that you you you can do on the fly on your first try. And so the entire industry of professional marketing services is based on the assumption that marketing is gonna ease when it is actually simple. And and so Chris Walker is always telling you that you do not understand marketing and this is why you're failing. The reason is you under the the reality is you understand perfectly what marketing is. You're just too bad to do it, which is fine. It's very easy to solve as a problem. Just hire someone who knows, and then we circle back to your first

Mark Evans: As Taylor Swift has her army of Swifties that will come to her defense whenever she is attacked in any way, shape, or form, I'm sure that there are an army of Chris Walker fan that will rally around him and say that what you're saying makes no sense

Vince Moreau: Let them prove it. Let them prove it and reason.

Mark Evans: It's a bit of a tangent here. One of the things that Chris Walker has done is he's done an amazing job of marketing himself. He's a good looking guy. He's very articulate.

Vince Moreau: Chris Walker is a very good marketer.

Mark Evans: He's a very good marketer. He has tremendous energy. He is everywhere and anywhere. And I give him a thousand percent credit for building his personal brand and using that brand to build his business from scratch. Remember, he was a marketer, like a corporate marketer just like you and I a few years ago. And he jumped on the LinkedIn bandwagon early and hard and wrote it so well. We can challenge his hypothesis or his theories or his views of the world, but the reality is he's a great marketer. And and he's not the perfect marketer. Gary Vaynerchuk, for example, is an amazing self marketer, but most of the stuff that he says is crap. It's bullshit.

Vince Moreau: But your ability to market yourself does not necessarily translate to your ability to do marketing for other businesses. You can be great at building a brand and do all that stuff, but be really bad at providing marketing services. Right? I'm I'm not saying he's bad. I think he's a really good marketer. I just think that he is head deep in this at this point, and it's too costly to go back. Mhmm. Because every time I look at his stuff, it's more and more extreme. And there is a cultish dimension to it as well, as you mentioned. There is a cultish dimension Absolutely. Which I do not like at all, like the personality cult and that kind of thing. I'd rather stay away from it myself.

Mark Evans: It it it is what it is. We don't have to deal with that problem, fortunately or unfortunately. Final question. Why don't we shift gears to something a little more serious, a little more, in-depth? When we originally jumped on our, hey. Get to know you call. Yeah. You talked to me about a concept called marketing self defense Yeah. And how it's used to do critical thinking to make better marketing decisions. I I went through our transcript, I thought about what does this mean, and and how did you embrace these philosophies? Can you elaborate on what you mean by marketing self defense? And what can marketers do to start embracing this approach to marketing?

Vince Moreau: When you think about what we do as business leaders or whatever, I wouldn't consider myself a business leader, people who are like CMOs and companies, and and and I own a company. What we do most days is decision making. We make decisions. Some are random and do not matter, and some matter a lot, like who to hire or in which direction to go, which product to launch, etcetera, how to launch it. We all have beliefs, things that we believe but do not really know are true. Right? We don't know why we believe them, but we do. Some of these beliefs are actually real, like they are true in the end, and some of them are not. For example, one believes that I dropped because I'm French and this is a very French thing. French people believe 90% of French people believe that if you go out in the cold and you're not dressed properly, you will catch a cold. It's a very random thing. I'm I'm using it as a lighthearted ex example. It's better than a religious one. Okay. And the reality is that this is completely false. You catch a cold because of a virus. This is just the way it is. Sorry. You can go out in the cold without a cold and you will not get sick. Like I mentioned, religious beliefs are some people who are in cults or some people some beliefs can have a big impact. What I want with my life is to limit the number of beliefs that things I believe in that are not true. I'm going on a tangent here, but I'm coming back. Right? I'm not saying I can remove them completely. I will always believe full things, but I want to believe as few false things as possible in my life. The way to do that is to use the scientific method. It's the method that we've used for the past two hundred years or so, two hundred and fifty years, and it works really well. We have dropped the mortality rates of children down to something like one percent, one to three percent, and it used to be thirty percent. We have sent stuff on the moon. We have plenty of examples of that working. And we can apply that method to other areas than just like science or math or physics. We can apply it to marketing, and it's called evidence based marketing. The idea is that we we are going to determine what working means, and we're going to test it. We're going to see whether it's actually true or not true. There is research being published all the time in marketing, and there is a good an institution called the Ehrenberg Bass Institute that has published lots of research around evidence based marketing. Another way we can do that when the research is not present, when we do not have the research, is to use critical thinking. Critical thinking is a way of thinking, an ensemble of principles that will help us get closer to the truth or get closer to reality or ensure that we are not too disconnected for from reality. That's the critical thinking part. I'm coming back to your question. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So we got the idea to set up a newsletter that's called marketing self defense. And the idea is to help people master these concepts, most of which are pretty simple, but also hard. Remember? They're simple to understand, but hard to apply, and apply that to marketing decision making. So for example, I mentioned survivorship bias earlier. I got a lead and that proves that it's working. Think about all the other things that did not survive. Think about all the leads that you did not get. What does that say about the same data sample and how can we use that information to make better decisions? I can also mention a few of of these principles. Another one which is really well known is OCAMS RZR. OCAMS RZR states that if there are two hypotheses, we want to favor the one that does not involve any additional cause. For example, I got a very violent pain in the back of my neck and then it's swollen and then there's a bee flying around. If I say an alien bit me, it's not as good as is is not as good of a hypothesis. Then if I say I was standing next to the hive, it could be a bee. This is obviously an extreme example. Mhmm. But if you we use that in our day to day decision making, then that can help us make better marketing decision. And a really good example of that is something that is well known in the marketing research world is that most ads actually only make people buy who would have bought anyway. That's really interesting. How do we protect against that? Does that mean that ads are really bad? I don't know. I'm not an ads guy. But there this is a fact. If you see an ad, probably would have bought or ecommerce coupons are the same thing. Right? If you make a coupon, then, yes, you sell more. But do you sell more because people wouldn't have bought with the coupon, or do you sell more because of the coupon? The truth is if you think of your own buying habits, usually if you know that a website always has product on sale and it doesn't have product on sale when you land on it, you're gonna just gonna wait for a few weeks for them to So you're gonna subscribe to your newsletter and these guys go, our newsletter is growing. Yes. But it's because, no, you're shitting yourself in the foot. So we can use all these principles and I call that marketing self defense because it's protecting against the BS of the industry. It's protecting against the bad decisions and it's protecting against the bad vendors as well. Because there is one component which I plan to address a lot and that is, like, how to choose a vendor, how to know whether that guy I'm talking to is actually legit or not, which is the big overarching questions, the red thread that we have here.

Mark Evans: It's interesting because you mentioned that because I recently published a a free guide on how to discover and hire the right fractional CMO because it's a perfect example of lots of people out there calling themselves fractional CMOs, but they don't have the experience or the expertise, but it's a a fancy marketing title to cover. There's lots of stuff to wade through in the current fallacies and things that simply aren't true and lots of people doing self promotion.

Vince Moreau: Promotion is fine, by the way. I'm not saying people should not self promote because this is something that people tell me sometimes. But everyone's entitled to their own marketing.

Mark Evans: Well, the truth is that you're French and I'm Canadian, and we are simply not good at self promotion. Americans, and I say this in a very respectful way, are great at waving the flag and telling people that they're the absolute best in the world. And

Vince Moreau: They do that very well.

Mark Evans: Yeah. And we suffer from being a little too humble. But, again, we're rambling off in different directions, and and that's fine for a podcast conversation. And I'm super excited that we're able to pull this off. We've covered a lot of ground. Times. Some of it's been controversial, which is great. I I expect that the Chris Walker fans will be coming to his defense with lots of enthusiasm.

Vince Moreau: You know what I would like to do? I would like to have that kind of conversation with a Chris Walker fan. If someone has a podcast and wants me on to just kinda chat about all these things and and exchange opinions, that would be really

Mark Evans: What would be even better than would be a Chris Walker, Vince Morrow podcast in which it's a discussion, a very respectful discussion, and an agreement to agree to disagree and explain themselves. That would be fun because I think that we don't have enough of those discussions in marketing. We're all nodding our heads saying, you're right or you're wrong, but I think that would be a really great conversation.

Vince Moreau: I'm open to it. Maybe you should do some marketing

Mark Evans: to to see if that happens. Anyway, one final question is where can people learn more about you and what you do?

Vince Moreau: You can find me on LinkedIn. I do not have Twitter, which is now called x, and you can look at scalecrush.io to see what we're up to these days. And you can always subscribe to the newsletter, which I'm really bad at launching on time. So be prepared.

Mark Evans: Thanks, Vince, for a great conversation, and thanks to everybody for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it and subscribe via Apple Podcast, Spotify, or a favorite podcast app, and share via social media. If you're a b to b or SaaS company looking for more sales and leads but struggling to do marketing that makes an impact, we should talk. You can reach out to me via email, Mark at Mark Evans dot c a, or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.