What can brands do to position themselves to emerge from COVID as strong and dynamic players?
While many brands are struggling to keep their heads above water, the strongest brands are already thinking about what needs to be done outflank rivals with marketing that engages consumers in new and different ways.
On the Marketing Spark podcast, Ron Tite provides insight into how brands can build marketing momentum to pull away from the competition.
Auto-generated transcript. Speaker names, spelling, and punctuation may be slightly off.
Mark Evans: My name is Mark Evans, and I'd like to welcome you to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers small doses of insight, tools, tips for marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches. By small doses, it's conversations that are fifteen minutes or less. On today's show, I'm talking with Ron Tite, founder of Church and State, a content marketing agency based in Toronto. Ron is also a best selling author and an in demand speaker. Welcome to Marketing Spark.
Ron Tite: Thanks, Mark. I'm so excited to be here. Such a nice snackable way to do a podcast.
Mark Evans: We're gonna cover a lot of ground in fifteen minutes, so let's get started. I wanted to begin by asking you about your most recent book, think, do, say, which I think captures your approach to marketing in a noisy busy world. Can you walk me through the different components?
Ron Tite: As you can probably imagine, there are three components to the book, think, do, say. There's the think part, the do part, and the say part. You know, the problem with the is and with a lot of organizations and it can be it really is it's an it's an operating system for an organization. It can be an operating system for a leader, or it can be a marketing system or an operating system for marketing. Many organizations, many marketers, many leaders choose one of the three. So they're like, they they think, think, think, think, think, and never actually do anything, which is useless. It's just useless. They overanalyze stuff. Or if the organization that does does that, they're so focused on execution that they're just, you know, head down. They're do, do, do, do, do. It's not strategically aligned. It's totally random, and they're a sweatshop, and no one wants to work with them. Worse is the the people who just talk about it. Right? They're all saying that they they just talk about the things they're going to do, but they never actually do them. And those in an organization, they experience great churn. If it's a person, they get found out. So it really is all three together. So the think side is around what do you fundamentally believe. In your heart of hearts, what do you fundamentally don't tell me what you sell because other people sell that probably. What do you believe? What is your corporate purpose? And that is not what is your social cause. That is not, you know, what charities do you support. This is corporate purpose. Why do you do what you do? Then the do part is what do you fundamentally do to reinforce that purpose? And, yes, that include what products do you make. That include what, you know, what clients do you chase. But what do you do? What is the experience for the people who interact with that purpose? How do you bring that purpose to life? And then the third part is, look. If you believe in something more important and you behave in a way consciously that reinforces that belief, that's worth talking like, it's just worth talking about. So if if it's worth talking about, then you should probably say it in a compelling way, in a consistent way. And when you combine all those three together, what you end up with is an organization that is bound by purpose. They are defined by their action, and they are adopted, and they grow through their communications. That is think, do, say.
Mark Evans: It's interesting because a lot of companies in this current COVID environment, there's a lot to do and there's a lot to say, and the problem is that there's not a lot of think. My take is that companies aren't taking a smart strategic approach to marketing. They're in many cases, they're just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. And as a result, you're getting a lot of noise out there and a lot of marketing that that frankly isn't effective.
Ron Tite: Yeah. My friend Warren Tomlin, who's at is a great line for this, which is it's random acts of digital. They're just they're just chasing random things. Right? Like, they go to they hear a speaker like me or you or they they they're like, a new platform comes out, they're like, we gotta be on TikTok. Right? And they're just they're just chasing these random things that aren't strategically sound, and they're not laddering up to a higher purpose. The result of that, Mark, is it's it's not only is it chaos, but it's it it it leads to higher margins or a lower margin, higher cost. It leads to a poor definition of success for your team. It leads to clutter around message. And then you step back and you go, we should've just done on what we did last year. You know? I mean, it's just it's a it is a horrible way to do it. Yeah. I think people are they feel like they should be sprinting around doing a bunch of random things, you know, opposed to stopping and really establishing what they believe and then chasing only the things that deliver on that.
Mark Evans: Yeah. I think it makes marketers a lot of marketers feel better because they can somehow justify to their bosses that they're busy and active and doing stuff. Yeah. When we were talking in advance of this podcast, you talked about a concept of digital letdown and how advertising has become increasingly and overly and overly complicated. Why has that happened, and what are brands doing wrong?
Ron Tite: I think the core understanding and I, you know, I started as a traditional creative guy. I was doing TV spots and print ads and everything else. And I just remember all the digital folks who came in and, you know, would say, oh, just you wait. Oh, just you wait. Old advertising is gonna be nirvana. We're gonna be able to customize messages on a individual level. People will only see the ads that are specifically targeted at them and their interest, and it's gonna just it's gonna get rid of all the waste and all the crap that you make. And I was like, alright. Let's let's see where this goes. Where did we land? We landed in a place where people took digital and used it for scale. And so now it's not about customization at all. It is about touching, inappropriately or appropriately, as many people as possible. And because you can you can reach 5,000,000 people for the same cost that you can reach five people, people are just dumbing it all down and going, well, you know what? Even if my my conversion rate is 0.00008, I just need to add more people to grow my revenue. And can I swear on this podcast, Mark?
Mark Evans: You can now.
Ron Tite: You know, people saying, don't give a shit about the innocent bystanders. I really don't. I don't care about the people who shouldn't receive that message because I just need to grow that top line number to grow my revenue. Don't care. Yeah. And Yeah. That's horrible. That is a horrible place to be. It is a soulless place to be, and I don't wanna you know, you flick the earlobe of I wanna flick the earlobe of anybody that does it.
Mark Evans: Well, I think that's what happens when marketing becomes a game that's all about data, and it's it's quantity over quality. And one of the things I'm interested in hearing from you is is the focus on brand and branding these days. Because when everything can be measured, when there's KPIs for anything that you can do digitally, sometimes it can be hard to quantify the value and the impact of brand. And I wonder whether that's that's a problem these days is that if you can't justify it, you shouldn't do it.
Ron Tite: It's a horrible place, and it's a horrible place to be for marketers. Now I say that, one, as a creative guy, I have that bias. Like, right, I like creating from scratch, and I get that. I do value the ability that to to look at a piece of work and say, this is not performing as well as this other piece, or how can we optimize this piece to make it perform better? I get that. I totally get that. I get that you can make more money from the from the print than you can from the original, but the print only exists because somebody took the time to create an original. And you have to have a portion of your budget, which is constantly exploring for new things and new angles. Because, yes, it's like, you know, in Hollywood, we know how a typical romantic story works. Right? We know the script. We know the three act, you know, part of a story, all that. And we know when somebody has done that and they've perfected that assembly line. But the movies that really blow us away are the ones that nobody's ever done before. Those are the ones that really win the day. Now which are the ones that really tank? Some of those same ones. So you can either follow, you know, the benchmark of what you should do and use the data to say, well, we find that a headline that had starts with a three syllable word performs better. And you can do that, you know, all day long and get a pretty good level of performance, fine. Go for it. But if you really wanna hit it out of the park, you gotta do the stuff that nobody has ever done before. And the fact that data tells us what works, it does that doesn't compute in stuff that's can't you can't say, give me something that has never been done before, and give me the benchmarks of how it's gonna do. Right. Those things are mutually exclusive.
Mark Evans: So if you look at marketing as a pendulum where we had at one point in time, it was all about creative, and now it's the pendulum has swung all the way to data. Do you see the pendulum coming back? And what's a happy balance what's between what's a happy balance between creative and data? I guess they ideally, they inform each other.
Ron Tite: Yeah. A 100%. I wrote a piece for Canada Post on this. My background's in comedy, and here's what I know about comedy. For Chris let's say Chris Rock. Chris Rock does a bit. He writes a bit, the original bit. He's really creative in that. He doesn't go on HBO or Netflix with that right away. No. No. No. No. No. He takes the original bit, and then he tours it. And he uses the data, the just in time data of the audience response to go, oh, when I flicked my hand when I delivered the punch line like that, that joke delivered it performed way better. And so he perfects it by using real time data over time. And by the end, he's ready to the end of the year when he shoots his Netflix special, there is no improv in that comedy whatsoever. You don't improvise an eight camera shoot Netflix special. You just don't. He knows specifically what is going to work in that environment because he's used data along the way. So great creative becomes great performing optimized creative. One becomes the the really original creative idea becomes the optimized idea. But you can't just leapfrog all the way to the optimized idea, and only we lead with a data approach. This doesn't work.
Mark Evans: I have to ask you about your racing car metaphor and how marketers have to navigate the curve so they hit the proverbial straightaway as effectively and efficiently as possible. Can you provide a little bit of color on on how that metaphor works?
Ron Tite: Yeah. And I say this as a dude who hates car rate. Like, I I hate Formula One and NASCAR. But here's what I know. I know that nobody I mean, it's I know that it's pretty easy to race in a straightaway. Right? Like, you just got it, and that's it. I also know that races aren't won in the straightaways. Races are won in the corners. And so when a driver enters a corner, what they do is they slow down. They slow down so they can get control of the car. They need to do that. They need the car stable. And once they get the car stable, which is that's where we're at right now. We entered the corner, and businesses and marketers needed to go, woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. There's a whole bunch of stuff happening. Let's just get things stable. Let's look at the data. Let's look at the dashboard. And every single one of us slowed down as we entered the corner. Now the amateur driver like me would think, just wait until the corner's over, man, then gun it again. But the professional driver knows that is not how it works. The professional driver knows once you've reached stability, you accelerate in the middle of the corner. And you do that so that you can leave the corner with as much momentum as possible. And so we're in the middle of a corner. People are using the phrase new normal. That means we've reached stability. It's time to gun it. And those brands and those organizations who accelerate earlier in the corner will have more momentum coming out of the corner whenever the hell that is. So people need to step on the gas, and that is c to c leadership. It's when you enter an environment of chaos, you need to introduce some composure. But once you've reached composure, you gotta make sure that you don't hit complacency. So you introduce chaos to the composure to gain momentum.
Mark Evans: Sounds like a very interesting approach to management. I have to ask you about speaking because you're an extremely busy speaker. I think you last year, you may have talked somewhere in the range of 75 times, which is incredible. What's it like to be a public speaker at a in the time of COVID?
Ron Tite: Yeah. I I'd liken it to, like, being on iCAD on iMAG. And so those who speak will know iMAG, which is iMAG is when a camera shoots you. You're in live on stage in front of 500 people, and they put you on the screens. Right? So the crowd is in the room watching you, but the reality is they're really watching the screen. So because of that, I love it because you can play it smaller. Right? Like, you can cock an eyebrow, and everybody's gonna see it. So what I love about speaking in a virtual environment is I can play it really, really small, and I could be really subtle and intimate. What is different about it and slightly challenging is I can't read the room because people are muted, I don't see their their faces and stuff. So it's more of an acting thing than, you know, I know what line delivers or I know what joke delivers, and I have to trust that I deliver it in the best way possible. Because I don't know. I don't hear the people laughing, and I don't see their facial expressions.
Mark Evans: You got no data to to feed on. Exactly. So are you doing a lot of public speaking these days? And Yeah. And and and how do you like, what are the best speaking engagement these days? How can you tell? Like, what kind of what kind of metrics are you getting that says you did a great job? Because there's no applause these days or maybe there is.
Ron Tite: There's no applause. There's also a lack of social media. You know, before I if I went in and spoke to a thousand people, I'm like, okay. There are gonna be 200 tweets that say something, and I'll I'll be able to know, like, just that reaction of how people people aren't doing that. They're not tweeting. Like, I'm in a webinar. This is amazing. Like, they're just not doing that. So I'm doing about one a week. They're all over the place from, you know, 50 people to 800 people. And my favorite ones are when I can spend a little bit more time on q and a, and I can deal with individual questions because that's real time. Right? And and it's so, like, if you speak for half an hour and take q and a for half an hour, that's amazing. Because then you can be really, really helpful to individual people, and there's value in that. Because if it's just the speech, then they they can go to YouTube and see that. So I love really, really react doing just in time speaking through q and a.
Mark Evans: Well, this has been terrific, Ryan. I really appreciate your perspective on marketing. I love the the racing car metaphor. It says I think it says a lot about what how companies should approach marketing these days. It's really come out of the corners in the right way, and the most successful companies, at the end of the day, will be even more successful because they'll be able to leverage their momentum and take advantage of marketing. Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review as well as subscribe via iTunes or your favorite podcast app. If you like what you heard, please rate it. For show notes of today's conversation and information about Ron, visit markevans.ca/blog. If you have questions, feedback, or would like to suggest a guest, send an email to mark@markevans.ca. To learn more how I help b to b companies as a CMO for hire, consultant, coach, visit markevans.ca. Talk to you next time.