Sam Birkett 0:04
Welcome back to part two of our centenary edition of Marketing Meanders with Sally and Sam and we're looking back reflecting at what we've discovered over the last 100 episodes, and what we hope to discover in the next 100 episodes with various themes and topics, which we return to and various interviewees who we have worked with over the last couple of years. And well, please carry on listening and enjoy. I was thinking in the car on the way over here about an idea, I was thinking about my own abilities and areas where I hadn't weaknesses. So I think I'm probably on the spectrum of things a bit more creative and a little less organised, I would say, I'm definitely like that. But in order for me to work well, within a team, for example, if I can handpick a team to deliver a project, I probably make sure I've got someone who's really organised.

Sally Green 0:51
Oh yeah.

Sam Birkett 0:51
And then I'm perhaps more creative than someone else who's good at, you know, budgets in particular, you know, actually putting a team together. That's why it's so important with your recruitment, isn't it to make sure you've got the team that complements each other well, but also that there's enough communication, so you're able to cover each other when you know, because there are times when people are, you know, I mean, we've seen with COVID, there's disruptions, there's, there's things that happen, which are... you're not aware it's going to take place, and you need to be able to cover for things. But again, it all comes down to you know, people in the right place, but being open and understanding.

Sally Green 1:24
That's right, and you might want them, some people might be doing something that not only are they not terribly good at but they really hate doing it. Whereas somebody else might be going, some of their skills might be complementary beautifully. So why don't you talk to the teams, but why don't you give that to that person, and that person can give some of the things they don't like to you. So let the activity flow. Don't feel everybody. You're a marketing executive and you have got to do this. You're all a marketing executive, a or marketing sector b, but you're all different and don't feel we've all got to behave in exactly the same way. That's, you know, it'd be like having a football team where absolutely everybody was a striker. I mean, really, you'd lose very, very quickly.

Sam Birkett 2:04
Yes and that's really the evolution is it from like the under fives or the under sevens to the under 15. Seems either everyone wants everyone goes together in a group, don't they score that they turned into, okay, we've got a functioning unit here. We know who does what, who plays which part of which role? That's interesting, I think, isn't it about, you know, what we've seen as managing teams and what we see from going into other businesses because that's one of the things as a freelancer, I think sometimes you get to hear a lot of them, I say gripes not necessarily always gripes but just feedback and people can confide in you from different levels and positions and I think that's one of the things that I particularly like on the podcast enables you to bring out those stories from people and that understanding of why is it that that was an issue and why did that problem start, you know, why was there a breakdown in communication, or, as you say, somebody left the team, perhaps you have a very high turnover, and then you find out that everyone's doing the stuff they don't really want to be doing, as you say, or they may be quite good at, but they've not had the ability to stretch themselves. And I think actually, that reflects sort of more than modern workplaces. Again, I've kept coming back to like, you know, newly graduated people, or newly qualified people, or apprentices coming into a business. I'm working with someone who's sort of at the beginning of their career now and you look at them, you think, well, I want to sort of do everything I can to help you flourish in whichever direction you want to go in and I think there is that general trend we've seen, even in the last two or three years, you know, with COVID, again, the pandemic, and people having flexible working and, you know, teams have changed quite a lot. I think just very recently, and, you know, managers and people out there who are, you know, building teams or maintaining teams, you have to be very aware of that, don't you and how to, again, I mean, I think it all comes back to this, the human aspect.

Sally Green 3:57
It's incredibly vital and I think some things which break that human bit is because of that you arrive at your first office and you arrive first day exciting and you're given 92 systems to get the hang of, here's your 22 logins and you've got to do a different password for all of them, none of them work together and really, you have a go. So it's very, very common that you don't get trained properly and so you kind of sit thinking, Oh, well, I'll just press a few buttons. See what happens. This is particularly true of CRMs. People will say here's your CRM.

Sam Birkett 4:34
Yeah, this is exactly and we've talked about this a lot. It's something I still keep on seeing, you know, when someone wants a new website, for example, and you know, the content management system, CMS, they're looking at I was talking to somebody who was involved in this project was going to be one of the main people who's editing the website in the future, but they were self-confessed "I'm not terribly technical. I'm not really you know, it's this stuff. But I have this in my role I need to do it well". So we were looking at, you know, the CMSs and thinking well is it good for GDPR, and this and that, and that and accessibility and lots of other concerns. But then at the end of the day, you say, Well, the thing is, we need a person to go in there and do the work on it day by day, and actually makes sure that it works, and that they can do it in a, you know, a timely fashion. And you come back to that again, and of course, whether that's training, whether that's you know, getting them involved early in the process to guide your decision making. That's probably pretty much the biggest consideration as you say that with CRM as well. We've both been involved in projects where there's been an all bells or whistles, amazing CRM, the potential is massive, isn't it, but then the biggest issue you've got, and the most important factor is again, the people utilising it and so you know, you've done all the build and get it in place, and all the technical stuff is done, you think great. So that's it, and we'll have to two days or maybe half a day of just introducing it to people and then off we go, and then that's it, and that there's no actual follow up to say, what are the things that you actually, the stumbling blocks you have and the understanding, you need to actually use this thing because it's a human being using it to the end of the day and yet so often, that still happens, isn't it?

Sally Green 6:19
I mean, I've worked one corporate where they had this very, as you say, wiziwig, wonderful, wonderful CRM system that could run everything wonderful ports, it was absolutely tremendous. But nobody had trained anyone how to write a report. So given that we have to worry about GDP are the only way these two people knew how to run reports was to download all the data into a spreadsheet, and run the report from a spreadsheet and you think this is wrong. So you've now got all this quite sensitive data sitting in a spreadsheet on somebody's laptop. How has this happened?

Sam Birkett 6:55
Yeah, exactly. It's like buying a brand new Lamborghini or something and then not having enough petrol to put in, or you don't have to put the petrol in so you end up sort of pushing it. Or perhaps the electric result, of course, will be petrol, maybe. But yeah, exactly. That's the thing, isn't it? And again, it just quite often, I think it speaks to that whole thing of the technological revolution, which we're going on through now, you know, is this understanding of great, I've got these systems, but can I actually make them work? And then, again, I don't know. I mean, as we've been talking, meandering along through this reflection of 100 episodes, there's that connection between, I don't know, just a general, I'm getting a strong sense of the generations of marketers, in particular, coming through and I think that there's an interesting point now, where you're trying to get people to, maybe this, who knows, maybe this podcast helps us in a way, understand both sides and try and link it a bit in the middle. So the whole the kind of, you know, there's a lot to be learned from having created a catalogue, and gone to the printers and done that for your audience and done things in a more, what might be seen as an old fashioned way, these days, with the great new skills coming into digital natives who are, you know, just amazing at coming up with these ideas and a classic example might be where, you know, you've got more specialised terminal experienced marketer, I suppose, rather than an old marketer, an experienced marketer, a slightly more venerable marketer, that's better, isn't it? A venerable marketer and in new markets, an apprentice coming in. And the venerable one says, you know, well, I gotta get insight about, you know, this is what people need. I've done some old-fashioned primary market research about how we need to talk to these people, but how can we, how can we do it in a cost-effective way, and then the new person comes in and says, Oh, wait, you know, what you can actually do a bespoke tailored campaign utilising this channel to deliver that very thing and this is how we could get them to, you know, generate a lead, for example, on this new app, this is what we could do there and then they have a solution and then the other guys have the insight. So insights and solutions coming together, perhaps, maybe that's too grand, but I think there are maybe those opportunities.

Sally Green 8:59
I don't think that is too grand and I think to be honest, I learned a lot from my manager, who was actually you know, when I was doing it design wasn't, you had to cut pieces of paper up and glue them onto pieces of paper to get into films into print. It's really old-fashioned cow gum, anyone out there that can remember cow gum? That really does age you and I have used cow gum, obviously, because I'm decrepit, but nobody would ever think now of actually the way they used to make catalogues was literally you'd print it out, cut it up with scissors and stick it on to a board, which was then printed by the printers. No, it really was old-fashioned, it was no digital, nothing. And people forget that. However, I will have learned from my manager for whom that was, you know, second nature, how to get things to look correct, how important it is to make sure that things line up properly, that your kerning is correct and your line spacing is correct. And that's just as important digitally as it is print-wise, to make sure that things look nice. So I think there are some skills and qualities that go all the way through and it's important that your audience can read it. It's all very well. We all want dingbats. Isn't that exciting, but nobody knows the faintest idea what that says. We're doing things in funny exotic fonts. Really? No, we don't, we don't like exotic fonts. Nobody can bloody read them and really, it kind of makes the whole thing pointless. So that's all these kind of fundamentals of marketing are always there. Think about the audience, make sure you're telling them the right thing at the right time.

Sam Birkett 10:38
Exactly. I mean, it almost is these are things we could do. This is what we should do, though and you have to sort of it's the fundamentals, as you say about proving we should do this, because our, you know, research into this audience, this segment says that this is typically what they're gonna respond to and this is the persona we have and we've done that we're continuing to do the research and the best practice to make sure that we understand who they are and we've actually got live data to say, this is what they are doing, you know, so not what we want them to do, they are doing this, and therefore we're going to respond and work in a certain way. We can try new things, but we're gonna test it and justify it and work out if we've got the right money in the budget. So it's again, it's sort of it's lining up all those elements, isn't it really, as you say, there's fundamentals, and then getting them to work in a pragmatic sort of realistic sense. I think that's kind of, I hope, what we kind of come back to most of the time, rather than you sort of, you know, throwing out Hey, yes. Have you got what we say? We said at the top though, you can have a go at things, but I mean, it's then it's the understanding about looking into since trying to understand is it working against an objective, the whole planning elements of things and understanding that they are operating the way you'd expect them to.

Sally Green 11:51
And one of the first things when we first started doing this, because we want to talk about making the theory real because there are lots of books out there, and lots of students now when I was young, nobody did marketing as a degree that was completely unheard of, we were all sitting doing Latin or something. But now, there's a lot of theory out there and it's very easy to think, Oh, well, I've read the book, and I had to do it. Well, you do sort of, you almost know how to do it, you've never done it, then bump into some of the things that make it not quite as straightforward as you thought it might be, and we're very keen to make that we want the one thing we want to talk about was making the theory real.

Sam Birkett 12:33
And sort of the crux of it really there. I mean, it is that we've sort of said marketing at the coalface didn't we really, there's this whole idea of all these great ideas of what you can do. I mean, because actually if you do listen to, if you've consumed a lot of content about marketing out there on the internet, then there's a huge amount or every time we go to a conference, I think I always use this thing. We go to a conference, you see these amazing presentations, they say, we did this campaign, and we utilise this, this, this and this, and it was all wonderful and marvellous and perfect. And then you think, oh my goodness, again, going back to sort of...

Sally Green 13:01
I'm failing!

Sam Birkett 13:02
Yeah, inferiority complex, where you're thinking, we've got to be able to do these in this perfect, perfect way. But then there is the real life isn't there? Again, you take this theory, and then you start to apply it and you work out well, that's all great, like the CRM example actually looks marvellous, on paper or on the screen. But when it comes down to real life, you know, so and so got a cold that day, or had to pick the child up from school early, and they missed that training session. So what have we done to make sure that they actually, you know, get covered in what they need to do and what am I doing as a manager, and just all that, again, banging on the human aspects of it, you know, the stuff that you do encounter on a day to day, and I think part of that is almost saying it's okay, you know, life is messy. Marketing is messy, marketing can be chaotic. Obviously, you want to plan, do the right things, and make sure you've got that central, you know, plan and focus and budget, and so on and so forth, to keep you moving in the right direction. But it does get messy, and it's all right. It happens to all of us.

Sally Green 14:05
Yes exactly, we've all made mistakes. And actually making mistakes is kind of important a) you notice that the world doesn't end and the sky doesn't fall in, you don't immediately lose your job. And you never know you might have learned something. In fact, you will have learned something, other people around you might have learned something they might have learned that actually possibly, you need a bit more support, or the system doesn't work, or oh my goodness me, we forgot to train how to do that properly. So it's really important to make mistakes. Don't be afraid to kind of have a go just because you think you might get it wrong. I mean, the other thing that I think that is beginning to happen now is that because marketing is becoming more technical and not everyone can do everything. You're running into people's work-time balances. So this happens a lot, so I'm going to do a marvellous campaign. I need a landing page on the website to do that. So anyway, I need a landing page. Can I have a landing page tomorrow? Because the campaign is going live like the day after. Oh, no. So that the team that looks after the website, well, we've got six other departments who also will want landing pages, my favourite got nearly three weeks and all of a sudden you start tripping over things or running them without a landing page. So you're not making the best of things. So I think it's made it marketing now is a much bigger scheduling activity that you've got to put in place. It used to be yes, we can do that tomorrow and now it really isn't. Now, you really do need to think I really have got to do a lead time here of maybe at least six weeks to make sure you're gonna get all the right things. You also we've all got these wonderful CRMs, which are all tremendous. But actually, we don't want to overuse people's names. So it's another thing you can't just all of a sudden send an email out to 60,000 people, and then you send it out again to exactly the same 60,000 people tomorrow. That doesn't work either. So there's got to be a lot of scheduling and that's only going to increase I think, I think this ability to do things at the right time and in the right order is going to become an increasing skill.

Sam Birkett 16:12
Absolutely, I can definitely see that, as you say it is that scheduling. And there is very much that that insistence, I've got to do this now, we've got to, you know, get things because you can do things very quickly, theoretically, again, you almost feel that you should do them quickly. But again, it doesn't take into account, other teams other people's time and again, as you said that there are so many options, I think marketing has become more pervasive, it's gone into more areas of the business and all of a sudden, you know, this lifetime customer value and customer centricity and everything, it can effectively take over the entire company, which you think will great in a way that we're now we're actually controlling so much of the customer journey, and it's going throughout all the thinking of everything everywhere, but just means there's a lot more to do as well, of course, and you've got that issue of how to shedule, resource, work with others to make sure you don't get too much friction coming off again, as you say, like scheduling, whatever it might be, or if you're a large company, as well, you as one marketing team, and multiple marketing teams with the same audience or similar audiences and carving out your niche. It's almost like, yeah, the complexity is probably increasing, if anything, isn't it, and the technology is allowing us to do these things. So we have to really pick and choose what we're going to do and have a clear, again, a clear understanding of way of pushing forward with that.

Sally Green 17:32
That's absolutely right and I think we don't want to go backwards. But it might be that, I'm a big, big, big fan of before you take a step forward, write a marketing plan and I don't mean a 52-page document. I mean, one single-page marketing plan saying who's it for? What's it going to say? And what do we think it's going to achieve? And what tactics we're going to do to get there? Okay, off we go with a bit of schedule and just spending the time doing that can give you a breath of fresh air to say actually, now I've done that and I've sat and written this down, maybe I don't need to do this or maybe yes, I do. But I've got another plan that I thought I wanted to do and just swap them around and just write it down and make sure that everyone else has shared it as well. So share your marketing plans with the sales team and probably most importantly with the operations team because if you're about to run a marketing campaign for your bright pink widgets which are brand new just come in and our handbags, keep forgetting that we run the handbag business as well. So I've just run the whole campaign for our brand new, for Christmas, red Santa handbags very popular, they've got you know, white trim on them and I'm doing a whole campaign to it and very very popular particularly with millennials whole thing I'm targeting them, they're very popular and it's I've done lots of market research on this, not that I've told anyone about this obviously, but I believe they really are very very keen for this, they're unique it's gonna I've got an exactly the right size everything else does right. But I haven't actually spoken to the warehouse at all about this campaign which is going live tomorrow and the orders are going to start flooding in online from tomorrow because I've done a one-off offer, that if you get your order in the next six days, you get 50% off. Haven't spoken to customer service about that and customer service have three people on holiday. And all of a sudden what you thought was a great idea it may well fail because nobody can get through on the phone.

Sam Birkett 19:33
Yep, exactly. And you've made just critical error haven't you, just not thinking the whole thing through and thinking beyond your existing team and your own operations as well to the operations team you know and that's so important I need to mention the fact that we managed to get this entire way through without talking about the handbags before now and that's been our go-to example hasn't it, the Cotswold handbags the whole way through which is so important but I mean like you say I mean, yeah, that example is just so critical in terms of again, just, it seems like a straightforward thing. But it's so easy to get lost, you know, particularly these days as a marketer isn't in all the detail and then go, oh, shit, I didn't say anything to these guys about this actually happening, and therefore that key component is not going to work. So it's all been almost for nothing, or we have to delay the whole thing four weeks, five weeks before we can start again.

Sally Green 20:26
That's exactly right and Christmas is one of these things that will not move. No, no, even if you ask it nicely. No, it's I've always had it. It's just incredibly unhelpful. Those elves, for goodness sake.

Sam Birkett 20:37
They're just work-shy arent they really. Gosh, I don't know we seem to have sort of explored almost all the themes, do you think of things that we've gone into? But the thing I would say is what's interesting, again, reflecting back and it's all comes out as you think about it, doesn't it? But if anyone was listening back to the last 100 episodes, there's probably we've said this thing that we say regularly, but it is those things, again, something I was thinking about on the way over here was about sort of incremental change and the fact that you know, so often in life, we sort of think, well, we want to do one big thing, like, you know, I'm going to be, I was talking about being organised. I can sort out all my paperwork and I'm going to sort out my paperwork this Saturday. No, no, oh, no, I'm busy now. So now I'll do it next Tuesday and then you put it back and back and back. And you expect this one day when you sorted out your paperwork to be the day that everything will then transform.

Sally Green 21:22
Yeah, the world will be completely different. You'll never be late for anything ever again.

Sam Birkett 21:26
Yeah, you will be organised and you will have everything wonderfully done. But actually, it's the incremental changes, it's the things that you need, you need repetitive habitual change and sometimes there are things that we know, perhaps we talked about where you need to come back to, and lots of things you need to remind yourself like, you know, as you said, you started out your marketing plan. Have I budgeted this in the correct way? Have I spoken to finance? Do they understand what we're looking at? Have I spoken to operations that we're doing this? Am I checking in with my team enough? Are we managing communication? It's all those things, which, you know, if you were to listen to this, hopefully in a regular basis, then you would come back and go, yes, good points, good points and you're just checking in, because if you don't do that, it's unlikely if you just listen to one all-encompassing episode, then you'd go right, well, I've got it all day, now, it's just gonna happen, it's you yourself have to be a, I say a better marketer, or an ever-improving marketer because we're all learning all the time is to try and do things on a regular basis, I guess.

Sally Green 22:26
And I think the reason we do quite often repeat things, so you will probably hear kind of whistling cookies and loud noises, occasionally all the way through. But we repeat things, because they matter because we've experienced and it comes, this all comes from our experience, really, we've experienced how much they matter and what we're trying to do is help you understand without having to be as old as we are. If you're one of the younger people, one of our younger listeners, that actually these things, you really do need to concentrate on these things, that these things that we keep going on about, like budget, communication and audience really needs to come at the top.

Sam Birkett 23:01
Yeah, yeah and they're not just going to fix themselves are they? These things will come up, perhaps in slightly different guises as things develop as well, but they're always going to come back, it's always going to come back to these things, which are the typical, you know, day-to-day issues of the marketer, you know, or someone doing marketing. These are things that will come up and there's lots of others, we say lots of other areas and technical understandings and you know, even though I mean God, I haven't talked about the AI stuff yet. I keep getting these things on Facebook saying, hey, I can do what you've got a copy creative here, and I'm sceptical to put it mildly. We'll park that for the time being because that's another episode and I need to do some background research, I think on it on more of it. But anyway, there's all this stuff going on, all this noise and a lot of it is I would hope, you know, after 100 episodes, you say it's repeating the things that hopefully matter and are important to keep in mind and hopefully, that's useful and interesting as well to consider So, yes.

Sally Green 24:00
But I can't believe we made 100, I think we might make to 200 You never know!

Sam Birkett 24:04
well, this is the thing I was gonna say I was gonna sort of end on the beginning, really and say, Well, what, we've got plans for the future. I think one of the things would be as we've spoken so much about the generational thing, why don't we get somebody in who's you know, apprentice and someone who's been doing marketing and scoring, maybe they're approaching retirement and they're sort of saying right I'm now checking out someone else's checking in the space between you know, what is it that they can learn from each other, for example, would be interesting and talk about mentoring and stuff like that, I suppose and AI, there's another one we've got another one there. So I think we've got plenty more to talk about, haven't we?

Sally Green 24:39
I can't think we're going to stop chatting really. It would be anathema.

Sam Birkett 24:42
I know exactly, and why not when we are chatting, sort of record it and then share it with the world. But that's the thing, I suppose as far as it would be good to sort of get more you know, feedback from people about what they think as well and, you know, we might do some more polls and things like that and understand, when do you come across these issues? Do you have examples? What's a question you'd want to ask? That will be really good, wouldn't it?

Sally Green 25:06
Have you got solutions that you found through your career that you know, this went wrong and I did this and it worked terrifically, all those things it's really helpful to... I mean, I think one of the main reasons we do this is to share it's all about sharing, we talked about communication a lot and it's about sharing skills and experiences and how to get things better.

Sam Birkett 25:23
Exactly. I think that's exactly what we want to do. So on that note, I think we probably need to wrap up so we've gone for a good long time. It's amazing. That's another thing I would say wherever we record these the meander just like going down a river bank just melts away the time does for us, it seems anyway. But anyway, hope everyone's enjoyed that and great to be here in the studio recording this 100th episode with Story Ninety-Four who've done a fantastic job for us and very much enjoyed being face to face. So thank you everyone. If you have any feedback or anything when you can find yourself, Marketing Meanders just Google us and you find us on Twitter and Facebook, in various places and also meanderspod@gmail.com, which is our email address if you want to email us, but thank you very much Sally, I've enjoyed this.

Sally Green 26:15
Tremendous. Thanks very much.

Sam Birkett 26:16
Here's to the next 100! Yeah, centenary edition. So this is good. Thank you very much!