Moment 190: Everything You Definitely Don’t Know About Marketing (But Should), From 4 World Leading Experts! AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

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Episode: Moment 190: Everything You Definitely Don’t Know About Marketing (But Should), From 4 World Leading Experts!

Author: DOAC
Duration: 00:31:09

Episode Shownotes

Why is marketing so important for businesses? In this episode, we've picked the highlights from our conversations with Josh Kaufman, Scott Galloway, Rory Sutherland, Whitney Wolf Herd to bring you the TL;DR on how to succeed at marketing your business. Head to https://www.linkedin.com/doac24 to claim your credit. Watch the Episodes

On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Josh: https://joshkaufman.net/ Scott: https://www.profgalloway.com/ Rory: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/rorysutherland Whitney: https://www.instagram.com/accounts/login/?next=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.instagram.com%2Fwhitney%2F%3Fhl%3Den&is_from_rle Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Summary

In this episode of 'The Diary Of A CEO,' host Steven Bartlett explores critical marketing strategies with insights from four leading experts. They emphasize the essential role of marketing in attracting attention and generating interest, distinct from sales. The landscape has shifted towards valuing product quality and consumer experience over traditional branding. Successful brands prioritize a blend of brand and performance marketing while leveraging word-of-mouth. The conversation addresses challenges in marketing unknown products and the significance of personal branding, showcasing innovative marketing tactics like guerrilla marketing during Tinder's launch.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Moment 190: Everything You Definitely Don’t Know About Marketing (But Should), From 4 World Leading Experts!) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:03 Speaker_04
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00:00:50 Speaker_01
Marketing is just who might be interested in this thing. And A lot of it is the fundamental thing is if no one knows you exist, no one's going to be able to buy your thing.

00:01:05 Speaker_01
And so marketing is the process of attracting the attention of people who might be interested in the value that you're creating.

00:01:14 Speaker_01
And in an ideal world, making them curious, wanting to learn more, asking for additional information, engaging with what it is that you have. A lot of people conflate marketing and sales. To me, they're distinct processes.

00:01:31 Speaker_01
So marketing is the attracting attention and generating interest, and then sales is the process of convincing someone to buy and then getting them set up as a customer. And a lot of marketing comes down to

00:01:48 Speaker_01
What is it exactly that you're trying to gather attention for? And where do those people generally hang out? What are they curious about? What are they already paying attention to?

00:01:58 Speaker_01
What can you take advantage of or dovetail into in order to attract someone's attention at the right moment, at the right time, and make them aware that you have something that could benefit their life? Here's what it is.

00:02:11 Speaker_01
Here's how you can benefit from it.

00:02:13 Speaker_04
Because people, many companies see it as like an annoyance. Like I've sold you the fucking thing. Stop bothering me. And they treat you like you're a nuisance.

00:02:22 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah. And that's a shame. Because really like those happy repeat customers are not just like your high lifetime value customers, the customers that will stick with you, keep spending money with you. They're also a primary source of marketing.

00:02:39 Speaker_01
Like word-of-mouth marketing is all happy customers telling other people who might benefit from your product that, hey, here's this wonderful thing, you should probably check it out.

00:02:48 Speaker_01
And so, yeah, like things like post-sale support, sometimes customer reactivation. So like to your point earlier, it's a very straightforward marketing technique called reactivation.

00:03:04 Speaker_01
If you can contact Jack and say, hey, you bought candles from us last year. Would you like to buy candles from us this year? And get him to pick up just a couple more candles. The cost of that promotion is potentially very small.

00:03:19 Speaker_01
You already know he exists. You already know that he's purchased. Can you just get him to do that again? Those are some of the most effective marketing sales campaigns that you can possibly run.

00:03:32 Speaker_01
But it also requires that they had a good experience with whatever it is that you're offering in the first place.

00:03:37 Speaker_04
How has the lands of advertising and a brand building a reputation changed in your lifetime? And what is the most important thing for brands to understand now or some of the important things for brands to understand now if they are to be successful?

00:03:53 Speaker_03
Yeah, so my first job in business school, I started a company called Profit Brand Strategy. That's now about 500 people, now it's just called Profit.

00:04:00 Speaker_03
And the basic notion was, it was based on the principles of my professor in my second year, David Ockers, considered the father of modern branding.

00:04:08 Speaker_03
And it was that the intangible associations with a brand or a set of products or services are the only sustainable advantage. That if you can wrap

00:04:18 Speaker_03
a set of products and services with these brand codes of masculinity, European elegance, youth, and then pound away at those associations using this incredibly cheap, efficient medium called broadcast advertising.

00:04:31 Speaker_03
You can take a marginal shoe, salty snack, marginal car, and get amazing margins on it.

00:04:38 Speaker_03
So that's been, from the end of World War II to the introduction of Google in the 90s, the algorithm for creating massive shareholder wealth was find a mediocre product, wrap it in amazing brown coats and make people feel more patriotic or younger, stuff the channel with it and print money.

00:04:56 Speaker_03
The P&Gs, the PepsiCo's of the world, the Coca-Cola's, these were the economic titans of yesteryear. The sun has passed midday on that.

00:05:04 Speaker_03
because our weapons of diligence, whether it's Google or TripAdvisor or Amazon reviews, now it gets us to the best product without the benefit of this weapon of diligence called brand.

00:05:13 Speaker_03
When I came to London, I used to stay at the Four Seasons from the Mandarin Oriental. Why? Because someone else was paying and they're always an eight.

00:05:20 Speaker_03
And then I went on TripAdvisor and I went on my social graph and I found out people love the Connett Hotel or people love the Ferndale Hotel. So I started staying at the Haymarket. Why?

00:05:29 Speaker_03
I like a place with a nice gym and I wanna hang out with people who are younger and cooler than me. So I started staying in boutique hotels. So all of a sudden product became the bomb again.

00:05:40 Speaker_03
And then your ability to embrace these new mediums around social became more important than broadcast advertising.

00:05:45 Speaker_03
So the traditional metrics of branding, the traditional vehicles for branding, a brand identity and broadcast advertising that I've been preaching and brand strategy, the sun has passed midday.

00:05:55 Speaker_03
If you look at my curriculum and the majority of curriculums and marketing departments, you could argue that we're just training people to go to work at Unilever or General Mills and be laid off 24 months later.

00:06:06 Speaker_03
Branding has become much more about innovation and actual product quality. Now that extends into how you discover the product, how you absorb the product, the community around it. But Tesla is a better product.

00:06:18 Speaker_03
Apple used to be an underpowered product with a great brand. Now it's a great brand with a superior product. So Airbnb is a much better product. Google is 10X better than what was there before it.

00:06:33 Speaker_03
So supply chain, design, the way you absorb the product, it's ease of use, it's moved from kind of what you call a brand economy to lack of a better term, an innovation economy.

00:06:47 Speaker_03
So rather than taking classes on advertising, I say, take classes on supply chain or analytics or really understand industrial design. You know, there was a general feeling that all product quality had maxed out.

00:07:01 Speaker_03
And then the internet came along and unlocked all this product innovation. So cars, they felt it hit kind of a peak in terms of product quality. And then all of a sudden with the internet and GPS, you could tune a car up wirelessly.

00:07:17 Speaker_03
you can unlock the doors. There was all kinds of crazy things you could do with it in addition to EV. I mean, there's just been so much actual innovation around the product and what are the most valuable companies in the world have in common?

00:07:32 Speaker_03
They either spend no money on advertising and they're spending less.

00:07:36 Speaker_03
Apple is the strongest brand in the world, at least a consumer brand, I would argue the strongest brands in the world universities, but it's reallocated six or $7 billion out of broadcast advertising into its channel, into stores.

00:07:47 Speaker_03
It built 550 temples to the brand. And I think of that as almost part of the product. My 12 year old and I were bored yesterday, so we went to the Apple store. So that's kind of consuming the product and I ended up buying

00:07:58 Speaker_03
screen savers and new cases that I'm sure are 90 points of gross margin that I could find to FNAC or Best Buy or someone for less money. But we wanna be in that store and in that environment.

00:08:08 Speaker_03
So it's moving out of pre-purchase broadcast advertising into the distribution channel and into innovation. But the traditional norms of marketing or branding as I taught it, that shit's over. Don Draper has been drawn and quartered.

00:08:24 Speaker_03
If you're watching a lot of advertising, it means your life hasn't worked out. the majority of people who are technically literate. or wealthy can avoid 80, 90% of advertising now.

00:08:37 Speaker_03
They watch Netflix, they subscribe to Spotify, they live in cities where they have local officials that demand you can't see a billboard from a park. So the advertising is a tax on the poor and the technologically illiterate.

00:08:54 Speaker_03
So it's moved to more distribution and innovation, but for God's sakes, you know, avoid falling into the trap of thinking that the masters of the universe are branders or advertisers.

00:09:07 Speaker_04
Having worked in the advertising industry, this is a conversation we have all the time with clients, which is you'll meet a certain type of client who's very, they're religious about the bottom of the funnel.

00:09:16 Speaker_04
If I can't track it and I don't know exactly- I won't do it. I won't do it. And you'll sometimes meet the opposite, which is someone who just loves to spend on brand.

00:09:26 Speaker_00
They're both wrong, by the way. Mark Ritz, a very good marketing professor, always talks about the importance of bothism.

00:09:33 Speaker_00
And he says, it's vitally important that when I actually speak about the importance of brand marketing, that you do not interpret this as denigrating digital marketing.

00:09:42 Speaker_00
In fact, I go a bit further and say, the bottom of the funnel in many respects is the thing you have to optimize first.

00:09:49 Speaker_00
Because there's no point in actually, if there's a bottleneck at the bottom of the funnel, if there's some constraint or a problem or a failing, if you have very poor conversion, there's no point in spending money on advertising because you'll just introduce more people to a disappointing experience.

00:10:04 Speaker_04
You're wasting money.

00:10:05 Speaker_00
So you've got to get the back end. And I would argue the first thing, in theory, you should optimize if you're being an absolute purist is repeat purchase.

00:10:13 Speaker_00
Because having gone through the expense to acquire these customers, actually, that's the metric that always fascinates me. Because we were talking earlier about electric cars.

00:10:22 Speaker_00
And I said, the question about electric cars isn't how many people are buying them, OK? It's not what percentage of the new car market in the UK in July were plug-in vehicles.

00:10:32 Speaker_00
Now, only question worth asking, really, in the long term is, does anybody who buys an electric car go back to buying a gasoline car?

00:10:42 Speaker_00
Because if the answer to that is hardly anybody, then, OK, you don't know the exact shape of the S-curve, but you know the growth is going to be pretty spectacular.

00:10:50 Speaker_00
And so the thing to understand, I think, in a market is to what extent does your product actually convert someone to something. And then the lifetime value of that.

00:10:59 Speaker_00
And so you'd start with repeat purchase, then you go to conversion, and then you'd work your way up. But what tends to happen is that when people are obsessed with quantification of everything,

00:11:12 Speaker_00
It's worth noting, by the way, that all big data comes from the same place, the past.

00:11:17 Speaker_00
So there's a limit to how much big data, particularly if you've had some major event like a pandemic in between, how much big data can actually tell you about the future in any case.

00:11:27 Speaker_00
As David Ogilvie famously said, you're not advertising to a standing army. You're advertising to a moving parade. People are coming in and out of market all the time. And so you're absolutely right. You get some people who are just fame junkies.

00:11:41 Speaker_00
And by the way, I suppose there are brand categories where that's appropriate. If it's sold through retailers, in other words, if it's mostly sold in the physical space,

00:11:50 Speaker_00
You might argue, to an extent, for, let's say, a Burger King or a McDonald's, that's not a totally crazy position.

00:11:56 Speaker_00
Although it is now, because suddenly they've got to think about delivery and whether people order through the app or order through an intermediary, because it has a major bearing on their business.

00:12:06 Speaker_00
But at the same time, yeah, I mean, the tragedy is this false dichotomy between brand advertising and what you might call performance or digital marketing, as if you have to be in one camp or the other. Where is the balance, though?

00:12:21 Speaker_04
And how does one go about it? Is it just intuitive?

00:12:24 Speaker_00
There are figures on this. So if you look at the work of Liz Burnett, for example, and Peter Field, The ratio shifts a little bit, but generally they'll stipulate a figure around about the 60-40 mark in favour of what you might call brand mass media.

00:12:45 Speaker_00
Because they have a mutually beneficial relationship, obviously. Top of the funnel makes the bottom of the funnel cheaper. The first 20 years of my life was spent in direct marketing.

00:12:51 Speaker_00
And actually, you know, because direct marketing was unfashionable, we spent a lot of time denigrating advertising spend because they got much bigger budgets than us, not necessarily rightly, but they were also, you know, much more indulged than we were because they didn't have to prove effectiveness down to the same sort of level of statistical significance.

00:13:12 Speaker_00
But we came to realize pretty quickly that actually, first of all, there's nothing harder than direct marketing a product that nobody's ever heard of.

00:13:19 Speaker_00
And that every time, just to give an example, every time American Express went on television or advertised big in mass media, the response rates to direct mail would Not quite double, maybe, but they increased pretty significantly.

00:13:33 Speaker_04
You had to work less hard.

00:13:35 Speaker_00
And you had to work. It's that wonderful phrase which comes from a book by, let me get his job right, his name right. I think it's Matt Johnson, who's just written a book called Brands That Mean Business.

00:13:49 Speaker_00
And his wonderful line is, having a great brand means you get to play the game of capitalism in easy mode. Yeah. And what is true is fame, to some extent, brings a load of benefits which aren't necessarily sales related.

00:14:03 Speaker_00
So for example, you can cock up and your customers will be more forgiving. Take the example of Apple. On a couple of occasions, Apple has produced products which had fairly major flaws, which might have proved pretty fatal to lesser brands.

00:14:22 Speaker_00
The famous phone where if you held it in the wrong way, it didn't make phone calls, for example. And given the reality distortion field around the Apple brand, people have passed over those incredibly rapidly. And so people are less price sensitive.

00:14:38 Speaker_00
That's not easy to measure, by the way, as well. It's very easy to measure the extent to which something has an effect on sales. But the effect to which something has an effect on price elasticity and the extent to which you can command a premium.

00:14:50 Speaker_00
Because it's a great brand. Because it's a great brand. It's harder to measure because you don't have the counterfactual. When you sell something, the counterfactual is that you assume that you wouldn't have sold it otherwise.

00:15:02 Speaker_00
But if you sell something for a high price, You can't, in fact, determine that without your advertising, you wouldn't have sold it for that premium price.

00:15:12 Speaker_00
So to some extent, this quest for perfect measurement to reduce marketing to a kind of Newtonian physics is a bit of a false god.

00:15:22 Speaker_04
Fame, you talked about fame there. Fame can also be applied in the topic of personal branding as well. Obviously, social media has allowed us all now to build our personal brands.

00:15:30 Speaker_04
You've got the Gary Vaynerchuks of the world who have built, you know, their companies are famous because they've branded a person.

00:15:38 Speaker_04
At Ogilvy and within your sort of your marketing, what kind of shift have you seen in the desire for people to become brands themselves? And how valuable do you think that is?

00:15:48 Speaker_00
I think advertising always had those personal brands. And if anything, it's slightly diminished, actually. Really? Campaign magazine always did a very good job of, you know, making sure there were 30 or 40 sort of famous names within the business.

00:16:07 Speaker_00
That just happens in a different medium now, right? It happens on LinkedIn. Yes, I agree.

00:16:11 Speaker_00
I mean, one of the greatest things, for example, there's a wonderful, wonderful guy who now must be, I don't want to name his age, but he's past retirement age, called Dave Trott. You probably know him. Yeah, I know Dave Trott.

00:16:24 Speaker_00
He'd be a brilliant interviewee, by the way, on the show. Absolutely fantastic. But what has been absolutely fantastic is that he's a Glorious advertising mind. I mean just an absolute ornament to the industry and he through Twitter and through blogging

00:16:41 Speaker_00
has had a completely new lease of life and influence to a completely new generation of people, and has been hugely valuable as a teacher. And what's interesting about that, actually, is that, of course, he does that unpaid.

00:16:56 Speaker_00
And one of the things that is complicated about this new world, OK, the most valuable thing I often do in the course of a working week is either to give something away or to put somebody in touch with something else.

00:17:09 Speaker_00
Neither of which, that kind of barter, neither of those things is in any way monetizable, is it? Well, reciprocity would say otherwise. I know. I suppose you've just got to rely on a high degree of reciprocity in some respect.

00:17:23 Speaker_00
I mean, it always bothers me about this, which is that we're in a business advertising which is paid by the hour, which is a terrible way to pay for ideas. Because the value of something has no relation to the time devoted to its inception.

00:17:38 Speaker_00
And it is genuine. I mean, I always joke about this. The most valuable thing I probably did was almost accidentally in my working life, which was to go to the government's behavioral insights team.

00:17:49 Speaker_00
And as a sort of fanatical vaper, I'd been a longtime smoker and had been able to quit for the first time successfully by switching to vaping. It took me a little while, but once I made the switch, I've never gone back.

00:18:04 Speaker_00
And I went to the Government's Behavioural Insights team and I said, look, these things are coming over from both Japan and the United States. They're electronic cigarettes.

00:18:12 Speaker_00
I think there are two things you need to be alert to in psychology, one of which is that because they actually replicate the habit of smoking, not just the nicotine, they are a major kind of what you might call a gateway drug out.

00:18:26 Speaker_00
They're a major source of harm reduction, at the very least. It may help people to quit. At the very least, it'll help people to shift to a much less harmful delivery device. Versus patches.

00:18:36 Speaker_00
Versus patches and guns and things like that, which didn't replicate the behaviour.

00:18:40 Speaker_00
And then the second thing I said is the second thing you've got to be alert to is that because of peculiar human psychology, half the people in what you might call the health and anti-smoking lobby will be fanatical about banning electronic cigarettes.

00:18:55 Speaker_00
And all credit to the Behavioural Insights team under a guy called David Halpern. I think they went to the Cameron government and said, favour here, can we have a light touch on vaping regulation, please?

00:19:07 Speaker_00
And various parts of the EU have gone for much stricter regulation. There were some countries which were more or less banning it. The US has banned Juul for some reason.

00:19:15 Speaker_04
Yeah, bizarre. On that point of personal branding, though, do you think building a personal brand is important?

00:19:21 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's very interesting. I mean, you have a personal brand, whether you like it or not. But that's one really important point about branding, which is...

00:19:29 Speaker_00
that everybody, you know, and that's, by the way, why I think marketing is so important, because it's not, the brand is not the heated steering wheel of the marketing world, you know, the optional extra that you can do without, but it's quite nice to have.

00:19:42 Speaker_00
People are going to perceive you in some way, regardless of anything you do, okay? They're going to form an impression of you, they're going to form an impression of what you're worth, what kind of business you are, you know,

00:19:54 Speaker_00
And they will use all manner of kind of inferences and heuristics to arrive at this conclusion. And in many ways, I suppose, this is why I argue that marketing isn't an optional extra. It's an essential, because the worst thing you can do

00:20:09 Speaker_00
is build a great product and fail to present it in a way that is convincing, appealing, attractive, or which confers status on its users. And the same applies for your personal brand. And the same applies.

00:20:23 Speaker_00
You're going to have a personal brand whether you like it or not. So you might as well try and have a good one. I think it probably is true to say that the personal brand requires sacrifice.

00:20:32 Speaker_00
You know that old saying that strategy is the art of sacrifice. But wait, not totally true. I think there are win-wins, you know. What is the sacrifice of a personal brand? But, well, I suspect... You don't need to suspect. You've got a personal brand.

00:20:49 Speaker_00
You have to have weaknesses as well as strengths. Now, interestingly, for example, one of the things that will be part of my personal brand is I'm not a CEO. I have no aspiration to be a CEO.

00:20:59 Speaker_00
And I know enough about myself to know I would not be good at that job. OK, there are certain forms of ambition and aspiration which, you know, consonant with a personal brand that I have, are basically the avenues that are close to me.

00:21:14 Speaker_00
I'm not very good at administration. I'm very bad at making difficult decisions. Self-awareness is a personal brand strength. Now, where I'd be useful, I'd be useful at making oblique or unusual suggestions.

00:21:27 Speaker_00
I'd be useful at getting people to consider the same thing in five different ways or promoting a counterintuitive thought. I might be useful at suggesting somebody, you know, I've got a fairly good personal Rolodex.

00:21:39 Speaker_00
You know, before you run off and do this on your own, why don't you talk to this guy at this university who's been studying this for the last 15 years?

00:21:47 Speaker_04
In those early years of Tinder, I remember being told the story maybe 10 years ago in San Francisco when I was working there with a guy called Michael Birch, who was the old Bebo founder.

00:21:56 Speaker_04
In his little sort of incubator that I was in when I was 20, they were telling me the Tinder story of how you went to a fraternity. For people that don't know what a fraternity is, what's a fraternity?

00:22:08 Speaker_02
So I guess in the UK it would be like college clubs maybe. Do they have like members clubs or something like that? So basically sororities and fraternities and sororities are a house of women and fraternities are a house of men.

00:22:22 Speaker_02
And essentially a lot of college students, they do something called rush where they rush and they go house to house and they meet all the women or all the men. And then they basically pref,

00:22:34 Speaker_02
put in the name of the one they would really love to be a part of. And then they see who accepted them back. It's been criticized up and down.

00:22:41 Speaker_02
And there's a lot of things that are not spectacular about it, but this is a way a lot of people find friendship and community. It's a community gathering for their college campus. So with Tinder, I essentially went back to my alma mater at SMU.

00:22:56 Speaker_02
I'd just graduated. So a lot of my best friends were still in school. So I got access to the campus. And I would start at the sororities and then go to the fraternities.

00:23:05 Speaker_02
So I'd essentially have all the young women download it and then run to the fraternity and then they would download it and then everyone would start connecting. So, you know, is that good? Is that bad? How do you want to chop that up 10 years later?

00:23:19 Speaker_02
Who knows? But that's the reality and, you know, can't escape the truth. But so you heard about this way back when.

00:23:24 Speaker_04
I heard about this 10 years ago, because we were building community-centric apps. We were building something called Blab, which resembles what Clubhouse is now. And when we were talking about the marketing strategy, Tinder kept coming up.

00:23:35 Speaker_04
But yeah, that was the thesis. It was like, should we go to fraternities? And to try and build that sort of isolated, tight community to try and get product market fit. Because network effects really, really matter, especially in the dating game.

00:23:50 Speaker_02
The most important. That's why there's only a handful of dating apps that have ever survived. I mean, at least during my time doing this, which is almost a decade now.

00:23:59 Speaker_02
But what's interesting is there's such a... Not to say only I could do this or only somebody else could do this, but there was a superpower in the timing of it all because I had just graduated and I knew all of these people. So,

00:24:17 Speaker_02
if some random startup founder knocks on a sorority door, the police are coming. You know, like you can't, you can't do that. So I felt like I had this insider hook, right?

00:24:28 Speaker_02
Because I was technically an extension of that by proxy because I had just been on the college campus. I took the photo of one of my guy friends back then who was, you know, all the young women had mega crush on him.

00:24:44 Speaker_02
And then I took the photo of my best friend, Danielle, who was very well liked on campus. And I went into Danny's journalism class. because she was still a student. And I basically snuck into her journalism class and used Photoshop.

00:25:01 Speaker_02
And I took the Tinder screens and I put the guy's face on one and her face on the other. And I said, find out who likes you on campus. And then I saved it to a file because this is the olden days at this point.

00:25:12 Speaker_02
And I went to FedEx, which is like the office supply store across the street, and I printed a thousand copies.

00:25:19 Speaker_02
And I quite literally handed different students on campus $20 to go distribute them under dorm doors and to put them on windshields and to put them, you know, in their different social clubs and to essentially distribute these flyers everywhere.

00:25:34 Speaker_02
So this entire campus and now in hindsight, it's probably not great. It's littering. There's all sorts of bad things involved with it, but like I'm just telling you a story.

00:25:45 Speaker_02
Yeah, basically that was just one of the tactics I used to go and put it all over campus. And then I had a few t-shirts printed up that said, don't ask for my number, find me on Tinder.

00:25:57 Speaker_02
And I had my girlfriends wear the t-shirts and we went to the bar. And so I gave them a couple hundred bucks. And they would go around and buy drinks. And then when people would ask for their number, they'd essentially say you have to download Tinder.

00:26:10 Speaker_02
So it was a lot of these tiny hacking concepts that made no sense. No one had ever done these things before. I had no playbook. It wasn't like, you know, I was reading some manual to marketing. It was just what felt right. around me.

00:26:24 Speaker_02
It was just bringing the real life dating experience to life through an app. Marketing.

00:26:30 Speaker_04
There's like so many important messages of marketing there. I mean, the first one that you said was that you were the customer. You were so close to the customer that you understood them.

00:26:38 Speaker_04
I mean, even you said about how if another startup had come and knocked on the sorority, well, they wouldn't have even known which door to knock on for a start.

00:26:44 Speaker_02
That's true.

00:26:45 Speaker_04
They would have knocked on the wrong door, got the wrong people. And they wouldn't have understood those people, their motivation. So like really you being the customer, I think is such a key thing.

00:26:52 Speaker_04
And then the second thing you said about like, if I'd read a marketing book and you were kind of just doing it based on intuition, I've, I've seen over and over again from speaking to really successful CEOs and founders, how important naivety was, like not knowing.

00:27:06 Speaker_02
So important, just following your gut.

00:27:08 Speaker_04
Yeah, because that's creating something from first principles as opposed to convention. That's real innovation, right?

00:27:15 Speaker_04
And it creates solutions that are more suited for today and for the challenge that you're solving, which no one has ever had the challenge of solving on that date ever.

00:27:24 Speaker_04
But naivety, this is sometimes why I think some of the best founders don't come from business school or from marketing school. The best marketeers aren't marketing graduates because naivety is such a superpower.

00:27:35 Speaker_02
It's a superpower and following... your instinct. And if you understand what moves people and what motivates people, then you have this opportunity to connect with them on a real level. I mean, we've done things that are ridiculous.

00:27:55 Speaker_02
So I remember we would make these signs that said, they had the big X's like, no, you know, like you're not allowed to. And they said, no Facebook, no Instagram, no Snapchat, no Bumble.

00:28:08 Speaker_02
This was like week three of Bumble or something, some ridiculous early, maybe first year, I can't remember at this point. And we would post those all over the universities.

00:28:18 Speaker_02
So there was this association where it was like, wait, I can't do the things I really wanna do. I wanna sit in class and Snapchat. I wanna sit in class and Instagram. What the hell is Bumble?

00:28:27 Speaker_02
And so we were essentially seeding this psychological- Curiosity. Curiosity. And then we were actually sending young women wearing bumble shirts into classes 10 or 15 minutes late, interrupting a class of 300 people and saying, oh, sorry, wrong room.

00:28:47 Speaker_02
But everyone's looking at this young woman and or young man, whoever it was wearing a bumble t-shirt. So we were seeding curiosity and this like, why is Bumble everywhere type of thing.

00:28:58 Speaker_02
And so, a lot of people think, oh, well I can just go start an app and I'll just buy some Instagram ads and I'll just be successful.

00:29:07 Speaker_02
But if people only knew the fraction of the insane everyday little hacks that I did and our team did to bring this to life, we were the first people certainly the first tech brand to do humor accounts, to pay for the humor memes.

00:29:28 Speaker_02
Do you remember the humor memes?

00:29:30 Speaker_04
Well, we ran a bit of a hundred million followers on meme accounts.

00:29:33 Speaker_02
Yeah. So you know all about this, but like we were way back years and years ago. I remember reaching out to, I can't remember what it was, one of these meme accounts and they're like, wait, you want to pay us to I'm confused. How does that work?"

00:29:46 Speaker_02
And we're like, okay, here's the deal. We'll give you a hundred bucks or whatever it was. We turn around a year later, that same account is charging $100,000 a post. So there's also something about luck and timing. just right before something, you know?

00:30:03 Speaker_02
And if you look at Bumble, we were also beating the woman drum, this drum of, we need to advocate for women, beating this drum of, let's, put women first. Let's, let's elevate women. Women are not equal in their relationships.

00:30:21 Speaker_02
Women are not being treated respectfully. Women are being abused on the internet. Women are not being treated right. We were saying this in 2014 and then Me Too would come a couple of years later. So I think we've, we've been lucky as a business

00:30:36 Speaker_02
to basically be right before the wave. And then we've been able to be a part of that wave versus chasing a wave. And so many people chase a wave. So many people chase a wave. They look around them like, well, what's cool? How do I chase that?

00:30:52 Speaker_02
And I feel like we've always had the good fortune or whatever you wanna call it.

00:30:56 Speaker_04
Conviction, inspiration.

00:31:00 Speaker_02
to go first. And so that's been maybe a superpower of ours over the years.