In this episode, Gee Ranasinha suggests that B2B marketing is in crisis because "effective" marketing is sidelined in favour of what he calls "efficient" marketing.
He says much of marketing, which is nearly 100% tactical activities, isn't marketing but communications or promotions.
As a result, marketing within the organization is relegated to a sales support function.
The culprit for efficient marketing
The C-Suite and how marketing is seen as an economic activity in which everything needs to be quantified and measured.
Auto-generated transcript. Speaker names, spelling, and punctuation may be slightly off.
Mark Evans: It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. I don't usually start my podcast by citing a LinkedIn post, but I couldn't resist when putting together the introduction for this episode. And I quote, marketing has never been more disliked because so much of it is generic, annoying, and interruptive. It's contributing to the noise, not the signal. When I read that post, my first reaction was that I needed to talk to the author g Ranasina, the CEO of Kexino, a digital marketing agency in Strasbourg. There's so much to unlock because Gee put the spotlight on what many people think but don't say out loud. Welcome to Marketing Spark.
Gee Ranasinha: Thank you very much, Mark. It's great to be here. Thank you for the opportunity. Can I just mention one little thing?
Mark Evans: You may.
Gee Ranasinha: You introduced our agency as a digital marketing agency, which we're not. We are a marketing agency, not a digital marketing agency, which goes against the grain considering the current weather. But that doesn't mean we don't deploy digital tactics, of course, but it means we're channel agnostic. And I think that's important to specify because I think using the word digital today is a bit superfluous, really. Everything is digital. TV is digital, billboards are digital, print is digital. But more than that, I think if you categorize your agency as digital, it does a disservice to what you're trying to do because digital is not a noun. It's not an adjective. It's a channel. It's not about digital marketing. It's about marketing in a digital world and using the most appropriate channels of communication to address a particular target audience group. So that's why I don't like to call us a digital yes. I am that guy. So I apologize. But we're not a digital marketing agency because digital isn't the only thing we do.
Mark Evans: You make an excellent point, and it resonates with someone like me because I spent fifteen years plus as a ink stained newspaper reporter. And I appreciate the idea that there is a whole world beyond digital. There's direct mail and radio and newspapers and billboards, different ways that companies can attract and engage their target audiences. One of the biggest mistakes that many marketers make is they get myopic about digital, all digital all the time, and they ignore the fact that their target audiences engage and learn and educate themselves in different ways. We're ignoring these channels that have huge potential, and they have a track record of working. That's a very interesting place to be because I think we've raised digital natives who overlook that there's nondigital channels out there.
Gee Ranasinha: I don't know if you've heard of Maslov's hammer. You probably better know it at of, like, everybody else on the planet. Knows it better as if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It really applies. If you're coming as an agency, you're coming at every client problem with a digital hat on, you're severely reducing the consideration space for the application that you want to deliver on a business result for that client. If you go to a Facebook advertising specialist and say to them, what should I be doing for marketing? Obviously, they're gonna say, I think you should be doing Facebook ads. It goes without saying. So that's why I think it's important to make that differentiation. And I think you're right. I think because there are so many digital natives who haven't grown up with non digital channels or non online channels, maybe we say, because these things are still digital in in a certain way. But I think it's important to make that differentiation to expand that consideration set as as much as possible. We should be widening our approach, not narrowing it down, shouldn't we?
Mark Evans: I spend a lot of time advocating for the importance of customer research and talking to customers. And I think it's important because unless you understand how your customers research products, how they do their jobs, you can't do marketing that resonates. If you asked a a marketer to talk to a customer and you say, how do you find out about different products and different brands? They might say, I drive to work every single day, and I'm on the highway, and I see billboards every mile that I drive. And that should be a signal to a marketer that, hey. Maybe our target audiences are commuters, people who are still going to the office, and we should be reaching out to them in a nondigital way. The same thing can work for people who still read trade publications, paper based trade publications. There's lots of businesses that are still getting those trade publications into their office, and maybe we should be advertising in those publications instead of doing digital advertising. But it's the idea that a lot of people are just happy to run with the buffalo even they run off the cliff. Maybe we should be thinking more about how our customers actually do research, how they learn about our products and not making assumptions on the fact that it's all digital all the time.
Gee Ranasinha: I read this very scary statistic a while back, which said that most marketing managers haven't spoken with a customer in the past six months, which I find scandalous, to be honest. And I think, number one trait of marketers in general is being humble, right? Do not assume, are not, no matter who you are, what you sell, you are not your target market. And even if you were, and you crossed over the barrier to the other side and became a vendor, the very fact that you now have a sales hat on means that your insights are no longer valid. The whole market orientation stuff is about being humble and understanding that the way the the channels that you use, your commutes, the influences which you notice in your day to day life are yours, and they're not necessarily representative of your customers. Those sorts of things, you know, thinking everybody thinks the way that you do and using that as the base point of your marketing is not customer research. That's narcissism. So it's going back to basics, assuming nothing. It's basic market orientation stuff. It's assume absolutely nothing. And we do this whenever we do a customer client onboarding process. We have this process where we assume nothing, even if it's a a business of which we've worked with in the past, the similar sort of industry or category. We assume nothing and we start from scratch. So that's client interviews, stakeholder interviews, partners, all that usual stuff and assume nothing. It's not the sexy part of marketing certainly, but it's getting your fingernails dirty in the dirt, rolling your sleeves up, and getting on with it because I don't think you can do a decent job unless you can start from that zero point and move upwards.
Mark Evans: It's a sad reality. And the one comment that I will make is when I start engagements with clients, I asked the head of marketing or the CEO if I can talk to customers. And I position it that I only want a fifteen to twenty minute conversation with a customer because I don't want them to think that I'm asking a customer to make a big commitment. It's a Trojan horse because what I find is that once I talk to a customer, then fifteen minutes becomes twenty, becomes twenty five, becomes thirty. Absolutely.
Gee Ranasinha: Absolute they're happy to actually being able to speak to somebody close, but not close, if you like.
Mark Evans: And what's even more interesting to me is that they tell me things that that I say, that's really interesting. I didn't know that. So that's how you feel about the product. This is how you do your job. I'll go back to the client, and I'll summarize the conversation, and I'll say, hey. They said this and this. And the reaction that I get sometimes is, really? They said that? They feel that way? They want those features? Which sets off the alarm bells because it obviously indicates that they're not talking to their customers and not getting that real world insight that may need to do better marketing or sales or product development. I don't know why that happens. I just don't understand why companies don't talk to customers on a regular basis.
Gee Ranasinha: They don't do that. But, also, I think having you in that role, a third party in that role, is an enviable position for the client because quite often, the customer is more likely to reveal their true opinion than they would if they were speaking to somebody from the actual business. They they they feel they can be a little bit more open and a little bit more forthright. I always for these those customer calls, I always make sure that the person knows in advance that it's all anonymous, and they can feel free to be as forthright, as vocal as they want. And the transcriptions, if those transcriptions ever make it to the client, they're abridged and they're always anonymous, because obviously otherwise that whole trust feeling is gone. That loses the insights that you're trying to get, because you don't shills, do you? You don't want people to just say, everything's wonderful. The sun is shining. The birds are singing. Everything's great. Because that gets you nowhere, absolutely nowhere. What you want you want to find out is those touch points which can be improved. There may be something really small. We we completed a project a couple of couple of months ago, and they didn't even know that one of the biggest hurdles that the customer really found annoying was the company had recently implemented one of those automated phone answering things, press 1 for sales, press 2 for support, all those sorts of things. And they just wanted to speak to a human being, which normally in those cases is you press 0, but for some reason the default wasn't 0, it was another number. So nobody could bypass that to actually get to a human being. And it may seem to be a small thing, but especially if it's a support call where it may be, there may be some emergency involved. Having a quicker route to get to speak to the right person within the organization may be a bigger issue than you think it is.
Mark Evans: I go back to my days as a journalist. When I talk to customers, I make it clear. This is an off the record background only conversation, and then it immediately disarms them because they feel that they can be as honest as they need to be and that that because they're talking to a third party is that they're more comfortable. And especially, like, I have CEOs or marketers who wanna be on the call with me, and I say, that's just not the way it works because you're never gonna get the information that you need. Okay. So we've gone off script, but this is good. This is the way the conversation
Gee Ranasinha: I'm Matt. This is how I go. I go off on tangents in different ways. So you need to pull a choke chain on me and pull me back in and reel me back into where you need to go. So I apologize for diverting us on that.
Mark Evans: You've completely disrupted my flow, the all the preparation that I did just to get ready
Gee Ranasinha: for the chat. Stop in let's just stop and start again, Ian,
Mark Evans: shall we? Yeah. Okay. It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to the parking stark.
Gee Ranasinha: Oh, yeah. Good.
Mark Evans: Okay. So let's go back to the quote because I I think we could have a really great conversation. We can spend the entire podcast unpacking this quote, and I'll repeat it just so people understand where I'm coming from. And the quote is, marketing has never been more disliked because so much of it is generic, annoying, and interruptive. It's contributing to the noise, not the signal. This is the way that I feel, and I've been leaning into this for so long. And the reason it resonated was that I was like, yes. You're speaking the truth. So unpack that for us. Why did you write it? What do you mean? And what was the reaction when you put it out there?
Gee Ranasinha: The subject matter topic is something with which I have a close affinity just like you. Right. Basically, because I see the inevitable disasters of lazy, ineffective, inattentive marketing messaging, probably more than most. And that's not just because I'm a voracious consumer of marketing output from all sides, from many channels and from many media. It's because I I speak with business owners. I speak with startup owners every day, often multiple times a day. And I have to empathize with their predicament because they're invariably being steered to take a particular action or series of actions by somebody who basically, dare I say, hasn't got a clue about what marketing actually is. And this is where it stems from. It was most of the ideas that I have for LinkedIn never make it to LinkedIn or videos or anything else. But every so often, the similar sorts of marketing irks creep up and to the point where they'll rise above the surface and I'll think that I need to actually have a think about this, put some thoughts in order, and let's see where it takes me. I wouldn't say it went viral or anything else, whatever virality is. I'm certainly not in that kind of echelon of LinkedIn celebrity like you are, for instance. But in my own little way, it we've got it certainly got a blip from the algorithm, which was very nice. I I think it did resonate with to be honest, it resonated with far too many people. It would have been nice if we had enough contra arguments to say, no. Actually, I'm quite proud of what our business does for their marketing or such and such business, but I didn't hear that. Too many people were in the congregation agreeing rather than being on the other side and and countering where I was coming from. The premise really comes down to my ongoing issue with what marketing is evolving into and how marketing with a capital m as a proper core business function is in crisis.
Mark Evans: What do you mean crisis?
Gee Ranasinha: It's in crisis for two main reasons, which are quite different but are nonetheless connected. And I think, firstly, I think marketing is is in crisis, not because marketing doesn't work, because clearly it does when executed with a degree of brain work involved. But I think marketing is very core. It's ideologically disliked in the, let's call them the higher echelons of business, meaning that effective marketing is being sidelined in favor of what I call efficient marketing. There's two strands, and I'll go into the effective marketing and efficiency marketing in a minute. That's number one. Number two is I think marketing's in crisis because much of the actual work, which is nearly 100% tactical work, that's conducted by what I like to call as people who call themselves marketers, because I don't call them as marketers. That work is only a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage of what real marketing is actually about. What these people are actually doing is communications or promotions. As a result, marketing within the organization is relegated to a sales support function. It's producing brochures or prettying up a PowerPoint deck or making, ordering tote bags or stress balls or something. Right. While automating lead generation and automating advertising, delivering substandard and ineffectual results to sales team and getting the blame for it really. So to get back to the efficiency versus effectiveness. Okay. That comes down to the way that the C suite, not the C suite, but many C suite individuals have been educated and have got to the position that they have. CFOs, especially, but CEOs as well, who've usually come from a finance or economics background. I think they have an inherent distrust in marketing because it goes against the logical, sequential, rational thought processes that finance people love so much. If you think about it, much of business is founded under a kind of engineering type model. Okay. Most management consultants, for example, come from engineering type backgrounds. You could even argue that economics is based on an engineering model in that it looks at economies and markets as though they operate under the rules of Newtonian physics. One plus one is always two. Since every other area of the business is overwhelmingly driven by rational logic based thinking, trying to find ways to reduce costs, reduced effort, increased productivity, efficiency, all that sort of stuff. Okay? That line of thinking is now being extrapolated into marketing with the goal as being to reduce effort and of course cost by mechanizing the process. But while, if you're supposing you're making a widget, you can reduce the cost of manufacture of that widget without necessarily having a detrimental effect on the efficacy of the widget itself, unless you make it so cheaply that it's no longer fit for purpose and it breaks. Okay? But reducing the cost of marketing manufacture, if we can call it that invariably reduces its effectiveness because the arbiters of effectiveness are greater than the constituent parts, if you like. While business process is based on rationality and logic and presupposes a fixed and rational target, One plus one is always two. Right? But marketers aren't dealing with fixed and rational targets because human beings aren't rational. The human beings aren't machines. They don't think the same way, do the same thing in the same way, even what in the same context. We don't behave logically. We don't behave rationally, which means effective marketing involves experimentation. It involves out of the box thinking. And most importantly, involves there are there are more there's more than one way to effectually deliver on a tangible result. It's not like the only way two can be arrived at is by adding one plus one. There are other ways of getting to the same result. Since the levers are being pulled by influences which finance people see as being superficial or irrational because they're not logical, certainly. They're emotional. Right? It scares most of them to death because they're looking for everything to be measurable and quantifiable based upon the assumption that life is like physics. Right? Where all the important metrics that determine the outcome of something are numerically available and attainable. And it's also just like in economics, it assumes that you have all the information required to understand the condition, and it can be expressed in a unit that can be measured across, interrelated disciplines. But human behavior isn't like that. If you look at the sorts of things that influence a buyer's decision, there's no such thing as an SI unit of irritation or regret or fear, which are all things which help drive our behavior to go in a certain direction. These are contextual influences. Mhmm. The base idea that you can create a totally rational logic based model of human behavior as though humans behaved like atoms is totally absurd.
Mark Evans: You're preaching to the converted because my background is as a creative before creators became this very sexy kind of kind of thing. And I've always had a very I don't know what the right word is, but a very sort of uneasy relationship with creative versus data. The pendulums started to swing ten, fifteen years ago towards data and KPIs and that everything that marketers did needed to be measured and quantified and that decisions, even micro decisions, were based on what the numbers told them, what the dashboards were signaling. Green was good. Red was bad. And that you you constantly needed to be optimizing to make sure your marketing was as efficient as possible. In many ways, marketers have become data jockeys rather than creative thinkers or critical thinkers. That's a dangerous place for them to be. And it goes back to our the start of this conversation when we talked about the fact that not all marketing is digital or should be digital, and that's contributed to some of the challenges that marketers have today. And just going back to your your point about emotion versus logic, if you ask a marketer, many of them will acknowledge the fact that people make decisions based on emotions, how they feel about a product or brand. Right? You regularly cite the example of Apple versus Dell. When you buy an Apple computer, you feel like you're making the right decision. You feel like you're part of something bigger, something powerful, something almost like a tribe. When you buy a Dell, there's no feeling there. You feel like you're buying something that's functional and
Gee Ranasinha: affordable. Utility.
Mark Evans: And it's almost as if data has made many marketers forget about that side of the marketing equation. They lean so hard into what the numbers tell them that they forget about that people are are consumers feel and they think, and they're unrational creatures who sometimes do things that make no sense. That's an interesting place to be. And I guess it goes back to my question. Maybe we're we're rambling here. But it's the idea of marketing that you that can't be measured but works in different ways. And that's since you see see a lot of your videos on LinkedIn, what you talk about and what I'm feeling as an undercurrent these days in marketing conversations is the idea of brand awareness. And the idea that, as you've mentioned recently, that only five percent of consumers are actively thinking about buying a product right now or buying your product right now. The other 95% are not thinking about it. It's not top of mind. But brand awareness is such an important thing to make sure that you're part of their world in some way. You're touching them in some way. You're making them think about that at some point, when they get around to thinking about a decision, you might be part of that consideration set. And do you think that marketers are underestimating the power and the need for brand awareness these days?
Gee Ranasinha: I think we are slowly seeing one of many U turns that the marketing industry seems to go through pretty much every few years. It's usually a genera generational thing as a a new person gets into a certain role. They seem to reinvent stuff, which actually we've known about forever. And we have to give it a new name because otherwise the new people in those positions won't look at it because it's deemed old fashioned. The thing about sales activation stuff, okay. What is now rebranded performance marketing as though anybody wants to do non performance marketing, but the the great thing about sales activation marketing, whether it's digital or otherwise, is the attribution side of things. Sure. It's a lot easier to track touch points and all that cool stuff that people like to get really excited about. And brand awareness is certainly much harder to measure. And this is usually where the finance department comes to blows with the marketing department, because what the finance department wants is a clear cause and effect correlation, but that's not how it works. And I think that's why brand awareness marketing is not frowned upon, but it's at a lower priority level within the business because it's a slow burn. Business owners and senior managers are being increasingly pressured to increase revenues, lower costs, increase efficiencies, and deliver tangible differences within a financial quarter or certainly by the end of the annual report. What we're talking about is a slow burn. It's a longer, more measured strategic initiative, which won't deliver results in ten days or ten weeks. Over the longer term, it's actually delivering as much as other slower burn areas of the business in the same way as R and D is or product development is. We're all looking at the same thing. We're looking to increase business growth and make incremental growth that much more effective. But business owners and senior executives have their backs against the wall. They're being pressured to lower costs. And since they have to show results in a short time frame, such longer term strategic thinking goes out of the window. I think the brand awareness stuff is coming back into fashion because people are realizing the disproportionate returns on investment of purely digital advertising from a sales activation standpoint. Mhmm. Right? There's plenty of examples even recently about how very large businesses, how they've looked at their digital marketing spend, their digital advertising spend. A few years ago, I think it was about three, four years ago, something like that. May have been before COVID. It's funny how that those COVID years, you just excuse and jump between pre and after, and you forget there was actually a couple of years in between. So P and G, the world's biggest advertiser. Right? They turned off $200,000,000 of their digital ad spend. Okay? They saw zero change in their business outcome. Okay? Uber did a similar sort of thing. They they had a $120,000,000 of ad spend, which was specifically designed to drive more app installs, and they turned off a 120,000,000. And the result was zero difference in the rate of app installs.
Mark Evans: Yeah. And I think I think Airbnb did the same thing too.
Gee Ranasinha: Airbnb did the same thing. Chase did the same thing. EBay did the same thing. There is a caveat here. They didn't reduce their marketing spend. They just spent the marketing dollars that were apportioned to digital. They spent them somewhere else. That's why I think we're seeing the shift back to brand because we're having a shift back to what their marketing industry knows that works since it's been proven and demonstrated at least 10 times longer than digital marketing has even even been around.
Mark Evans: It is interesting that we rename things so that they appear to be sexy. So performance marketing is a classic example. And the other ABM. ABM's another. ABM. Basically, selling to a very targeted group of customers. The other thing Good that
Gee Ranasinha: good grief. Really? That is this is that what works? Good grief. Nobody thought of that before, did they?
Mark Evans: The other thing when it comes to brand that I find interesting is people like Chris Walker talk about the dark web and dark social. What they're talking about are these backroom conversations, these things that you can't measure. You don't know they're happening, but they're powerful. They're influential. They're things that matter. And those conversations happen because a company has done a really great job of amplifying their brand and the value that they deliver. People know about them, and they're aware of them. And as a result, they talk about them. But we wrap them in sexy terms like dark social and dark web when we're really talking about brand awareness. And we are going back to the fundamentals, but I think no one really wants to admit it because the fundamentals are boring. They're not terribly exciting. And as you mentioned, if you're a company and it's all about marketing automations and efficiency, you can't quantify brand awareness. That's hard to quantify. But that's just the world in which we live in, and I I I think it's a struggle.
Gee Ranasinha: Some things don't need to be measured. You know? Some things just first firstly, there's a lot of things that we're measuring, which we shouldn't, but we do just because we can. And there are other things, hard things, which cannot be measured in a traditional way, especially in b to b. 90% of buyers have been in that funnel far longer than we think they have. And so to suggest that a single piece of content is compelling enough to deliver a particular action is just bonkers. It's just naive. Some customers aren't single channel targets. Correlation doesn't imply causation. Whether Uber and P and G and all these guys, they they they prove that. The reason why I bought that can of Coca Cola yesterday I didn't, if I did, if I was into Coca Cola. The reason why I bought that can of Coca Cola isn't because of the TV ad I saw last night. It's because of the ads I've seen in the bus stop, in the metro, in the cinema, in the magazine over the past thirty five years. And then the second reason, you alluded to before is about this 5%, 95% being 95% of the people who actually see your messaging are out of market audience. Right? This actually came out of LinkedIn, Ehrenberg Bass, the Ehrenberg Bass Institute in Australia, they did the research study for LinkedIn, which goes into much more detail. So clearly and dark social plays into all of this stuff as well. But it's clear that branding and brand awareness marketing is a vital component of the mix for any business. Now that doesn't mean you don't do the sales activation stuff because you can lead the horse to water, but it means you have to have a balance and it needs to be weighted in favor of brand awareness marketing. And there's plenty of evidence to show the effective of this approach in The UK. There's work done by, Les Barnett and Peter Field going back like ten years, culminating in the book, the long and the short of it, which goes into plenty more evidence about not only does the brand awareness stuff work over the longer term, but it increases the efficacy of the sales activation stuff. Because if you think about it as a graph, you spend money on sales activation, you get a uptick. And then once you turn the taps off, it drops back again. And that's the cyclical approach that goes on again and again. But by having this brand awareness work going on in the background, that that sales activation stuff, yes, it goes up. But when it comes down, it doesn't go back down to zero like it did before because now there's a threshold level. There's an awareness. There's what Ehrenberg Bass, what Jerry Romanowicz could call mental availability. It's you're now within the category. You're within the consideration set of the buy. You have that mental availability, so you're not coming back down to zero. So the efficacy of your sales activation stuff actually becomes better and clearer. But like I said, we're talking about a longer term approach, which many business owners and senior managers don't have the luxury for, or maybe they don't see the benefit because it's too far down the line.
Mark Evans: On a related note, and this is a really great segue into another topic that I wanna explore with you is, and Okay. A topic that can't be quantified in many ways is brand positioning. I love doing brand positioning. I think that brand positioning has a direct impact on marketing and sales, product development, HR, raising capital, customer success. When people ask me, how do I quantify the success of brand positioning? I can't come up with a good answer. I can't there's not a KPI that I can point to or a metric that I need to use. And in some ways, brand positioning, like brand awareness, is a leap of faith. You have to believe that by telling a clear and compelling story, it's gonna be something that will resonate with target audiences and make your brand the obvious choice. That's a a message that a lot of companies have a hard time understanding or accepting. And as a result, they see brand positioning, if they see it at all, as a nice to have as opposed to a need to have. I think it falls into the same camp as brand awareness. It's an important part of a marketing foundation, of a corporate foundation, but it certainly doesn't get the respect and investment that it deserves. My question to you is, am I riding this pony horse too hard? Am I so vested in the value of brand position that I'm missing something here? Or do you think that, like brand awareness, a lot of companies don't appreciate and understand how brand positioning can make an impact on the entire organization?
Gee Ranasinha: I think it falls between sort of two stools, really. One of the issues with actually doing proper real brand positioning work is because it's hard to do. It's part of marketing strategy. And just like every kind of strategy, it means having to put a figuratively stick in the ground about who you are, the problem you solve, who you serve, and why they should give a shit. But by stating who you are, you are also in, by inference, stating who you're not. Right? Like in Michael Porter's book strategy is about what you say no to. And that scares most business owners and senior managers to death because they want to say yes to everything. They don't want to be pigeonholed yet. That's exactly what they need to be for the customer to make any sense of what their value proposition is. They need to be able to compare them to something that they know. That's number one. And the second one is that, like we're talking about for brand awareness, we're talking about a longer term financial payoff. It takes time and it takes effort to implement any positioning efforts throughout every touchpoint of that organization, not just within the organization and the sales team. You might have partners, you might have distributors, you might have resellers. It's not a five minute job. It's not seen as a key component of competitive advantage, sales success, or the inherent market value of the business. And I think that's one of the biggest areas which business owners and seasoned executives can turn things around by having a more easily identifiable message as to those basic questions, who you are, problem, all that stuff,
Mark Evans: Yeah.
Gee Ranasinha: Yeah. Which they don't bother. They go straight into product or they go straight into features, and they debase the value of whatever they're selling by comparing themselves with the competition. And if they can't make a big enough differentiation in terms of how they're positioning, then the customer will default to price as being the ultimate arbiter for foreclosure. So it's it's like they're shooting themselves in the foot.
Mark Evans: It explains why, to your original point, is why a lot of marketing is generic and boring is that I think a lot of companies are terrified of being different. It's easy to run with a pack. It's easy to say things that everybody else is saying and to highlight the same benefits and features and price, it's hard to think out of the box. It's hard to say we're not that. We're different. We're over here. We take a different approach. We have different things that we focus on, and that's a very challenging place to be. And if you're a marketer and you wanna talk like that and you wanna walk like that, then there's risk involved. To your point about marketing being all about efficiencies and productivity is that it's hard sometimes to pull that off when the benefits are long term as opposed to short term. If you start talking differently, it may take the market time to to understand where you're coming from and why it matters. And in a short term focused world, that's a really difficult place to be, which is why I think positioning doesn't really get the attention it deserves.
Gee Ranasinha: Absolutely. That's why we have so much generic vanilla cookie cutter type messaging created either by marketing automation or by AI, dare I mention the term, because people are defaulting to what everybody else is doing. Everybody wants attention, but nobody wants to stand out. Right. There's the dichotomy there, right? You take the top five players in the category, you look at their customer facing collateral and you cover up the logo. The words and pictures are usually interchangeable. Nobody's standing out anymore. Everybody's too frightened to stand out because they may alienate a customer base. But the thing is those customers weren't your target market in the first place. So what's the problem?
Mark Evans: It's fascinating. And I think that there's gotta be more risk involved in marketing, more out of the box thinking, more experiments to stand out in very crowded marketplaces. Just on a little bit of a segue because you did mention that word that we're talking about
Gee Ranasinha: all of I'm sorry. I'm I'll go into the naughty step, Mark. I apologize. I didn't know. But no.
Mark Evans: No worries. But you did mention that word that every marketer is talking about these days, and that's AI. And there's a lot of places we could go with that. But one area that I've been thinking about recently, and I was on a LinkedIn meeting, and they started talking about the mechanics of this using generative AI for image generators. What that means in terms of how the data is being manipulated, what the outputs are, and and what the future means in terms of these image generators and the biases that they throw off. Do you think about this particular part of the AI ecosystem, and are there things that you're worried about when it comes to AI for image as opposed to copy?
Gee Ranasinha: AI generally. Okay? AI and LLMs have proven themselves as being amazing tools across many industries, not just marketing. And they're great in marketing for things like data analysis and research and spotting trends. Actually, you could argue even more importantly, spotting outliers, automating disparate marketing tasks. AI is great for all of that sort of stuff. And yes, I think many people have mentioned about the quality of text. If we're looking for anything which is emotive or dare I say it, the word creative, know, whatever way you want to describe it. But the thing is about images, which is really interesting. There's a fantastic piece of research conducted by Bloomberg technology, two people by the name of don't ask me. I've studied this a lot. So I know their names are Leonardo, Nicoletti, and Dina Bass. They did a really interesting experiment. The base premise is that the images created by AI image generators, any of them, mid journey, DALL E, stable diffusion, take any of them. They offer a distorted view where biases according to gender, race, age, skin color, whatever, are exaggerated and more extreme than they are in the real world. So they did this experiment where they used stable diffusion in this particular example, and they prompted it to generate pictures of workers in various professions. And then they did generate like 5,000 images or 10,000 images. They sorted the resulting images by skin tone and perceived gender. And they found that the higher paying professions, CEO, lawyer, politician, that sort of thing, were dominated by images of people with lighter skin tones, while lower income jobs, cleaner, janitor, fast food worker, produced images of people with darker skin tones. Right? If you ask an AI image generator to make an image of a CEO at a desk, you're more likely to get an image of a white middle aged man. And what gets really interesting is they've got a similar story when they categorize by gender. Higher paying jobs produce disproportionately higher males than females. The racial and gender bias split was found to be substantially more than the data from the real world because they compared it to the data they got from the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. So for example, they asked AI to generate pictures of the doctor. And in reality in The U S thirty nine percent of doctors are women, but the results from the AI had them at seven percent. So there's a fantastic YouTube video that I can send you. But the point is that AI, whether it's text images, video, whatever, it's working on large data sets. If there are biases in the data sets, then the AI engine are working on those data sets and it's going to result in a biased output. So what then happens is those biased results get fed back into these large data sets, invariably compounding the errors that are being made. Right. I think it's also important to remember that there's no such thing as an unbiased dataset. Right. So trying to compensate for this is a much harder question than we think. And the video explains this much better than I can. But I think regardless, I think this is something that shouldn't just concern marketers, But all we seem to want to do with AI is produce some generic vanilla seemingly original thousand word blog post or 300 word outreach email and call it a day.
Mark Evans: That is the world we live in, and that's the the dangers of AI is that we're going through the motions in many ways, and there are obviously benefits to AI. I mean, talk about image generation. There are downsides. We could probably spend an entire podcast talking about that, but we have covered a lot of ground. For people who are interested on the nonquantifiable side of marketing, this is a great conversation. If you're a data geek, maybe what we've been talking about is sacrilegious.
Gee Ranasinha: If you're a data geek, I apologize in advance. I I'm a data geek too. Data's important. It's just we need to concentrate on the right type of data. And, inevitably, we focus on the stuff that's easy to measure, which is not necessarily the best data to measure.
Mark Evans: I think at the same time, as marketers, we talk about this mythical marketing mix in which we're pulling levers in different ways for different target audiences. And I think that data and things like brand awareness and brand positioning, they're all part of the marketing mix that we have to be aware of. We've covered a lot of ground, and I thank you for your insight and your perspective. Where can people learn more about you and Kexino?
Gee Ranasinha: We can go to kexino.com, kexino, but the easiest way to get hold of me is on LinkedIn. That's where I hang out mostly. Please reach out, and let's have a conversation.
Mark Evans: That is where g hangs out, and that is where he posts what I feel are some of the best videos on LinkedIn. They're short. They're sweet. They're impactful.
Gee Ranasinha: Fairly kind for you to say, Mark. Checks in the post.
Mark Evans: That's very kind. And I'm a I'm a big fan of them. If you enjoyed this conversation, rate it and subscribe by Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and, of course, share by social media. If you're a b to b or SaaS company looking for more sales and need but struggling to do marketing and makes an impact, we should talk. Reach out to me via email, Mark@ParkEvans.ca, or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.