Sam Birkett 0:05
Hello everyone, welcome once again to Marketing Meanders with Sally and Sam, I seem to be saying it's not at the moment but I think we're recording again on a very dark and damp day. Even though it was glorious yesterday, I really felt very spring-like and far more positive with the world, which is not easy these days, in many ways for us, I'm sure with everything that's going on, but we're trying to keep positive and push forward with our topics that we're talking about and today, we thought we'd talk about, I think I'm gonna say straightaway, rather an overly used word, perhaps in companies business in general, which is I suppose, authenticity, being authentic. But this is also, I suppose, a wider topic, really. So looking at a drum article, we were surfing through this week and found a drum article, which was talking about putting the humanity back in marketing, and one of the key areas in that was about authenticity. So we thought, what does that mean and how could we measure it and how can we do it, not just think it? So I was gonna hurl this one stroke to Sally straight away and say, what does authenticity actually mean in the context of marketing and business?

Sally Green 1:24
You see, this is a really difficult question and you're right, what does it mean? Does it mean that I'm genuinely a marketeer? Does it mean that I completely understand my business? Does it mean, I'm doing it with my voice, not the company voice? Does it mean that my company shares one voice and I'm doing it like that? It's a really complicated thing to do and it's gonna vary depending on whether you're a sole trader, or whether you're, you know, a member of Amazon, and how much to be honest, do our customers notice? Because we all spend all our time saying, Oh, yes, we're being very, very authentic. But you don't often hear customers saying, you know, one of the reasons I buy from our handbag factory, is because they just seem so authentic. You don't often hear that and I'm not saying that the feeling isn't there, and people aren't feeling that we're authentic. But I don't think it's something that customers genuinely recognise that much, because I don't think we understand what it is either.

Sam Birkett 2:37
No, no, that's it, isn't it? I mean, I have to say, in my world of in particular, and yours as well, but you're looking at sort of executive education, things like that, and leadership, or from people talking about being an authentic leader, and other things and again, it's one of those terms, isn't it where you say, well, what do you mean by that? And what you mean by that, I suppose is a combination of the way in which you think about what it is you're doing and what you're actually doing, the actions you carry out. So as you say, if we're an authentic handbag producer, does that, as you say, does it mean, the product is authentic? Does it mean our approach is authentic? So what you see is what you get, when dealing with us, I suppose if you look at it as a sort of a cultural nuance, or a cultural idea about how you go about your work, so it makes me think about if the founding principles and we spoke previously didn't we, I suppose about the culture produced in an organisation, and if you're a small business, you know, you're doing something because you believe you want to produce the best and most affordable handbags in the Cotswolds.

Sally Green 3:44
Exactly, in the best colours with the most magnificent customer service and that's absolutely tremendous and we obviously do want to do that, that is our customer mission, business mission. But the bigger your business gets, the more difficult it is for individual marketers to really understand what the ethic of the company is. So yes, I may have a coaster, which has been put on my desk, which says, you know, polite, authentic, delightful, they are working words. But you know, what does that mean? How? So what are the ethics of the and if company is saying we want to be completely sustainable, that's one of our absolute ethics, everything we do is sustainable. That's tremendous. But how far down the line does that go so that if I am now doing some printed collateral, should I be checking with the paper that's going to be printed on comes from a completely sustainable source? In which case the budget might need to go up. So it depends how far with how far people are prepared to push this concept of authenticity.

Sam Birkett 4:57
Yeah, exactly. As you say, well, it is those manifestations isn't, as you say, I suppose, relevant to the context. So I suppose in terms of I mean, I'm just thinking the way you're describing about how do people notice, you know that how do our customers notice? How we're trying to be "authentic" in quotation marks? And is it about, I suppose, really, its expectations, if you say, well, we are a company that is 100% eco, we are here to, I don't know, say printing, you know, likes of eco printers who say, well, we're doing printing magazines, etc. It's all, not nasty print stuff. It's all clean, eco, recyclable, reusable, blah, blah, blah, really good stuff, we paper source responsibly, and the office is run responsibly and we have electric charging points for all of our staff and, you know, sort of, you're ticking all the boxes, if you were to do one thing that was less sustainable so that you do all that, but we've actually got a diesel generator to run the business and we, you know, we don't have anything to do with, you know, try to buy any renewable energy at all, that would be inconsistent with what the company is doing, I suppose. So from a marketing perspective, you're saying, we're really trying to connect with people who are particularly interested in sustainability, it's more expensive, a proposition for our products because we are 100% sustainable, and people get that and that's fine. So I suppose that relationship in a way, maybe it's sort of a way to look at it is is it? Am I being an authentic friend or colleague to someone with my actions? Or am I sort of say, being very nice to them, and then going behind their backs and spreading rumours? Maybe that way, it's quite interesting, isn't it.

Sally Green 6:38
Yeah, I think we have to remember that, because our customers are part of this authentic relationship and it'd be interesting to know how tolerant they would be, suppose you've been running your company with your diesel generator, and you suddenly think, oh, lordy, this is wrong, we're gonna have to change that and you suddenly stopped buying wholly renewable electricity, but it hikes the price up, and you have to pass that price on to your customers and it will be interesting to know whether your customers still felt, oh, well, that's such an authentic company, I will keep supporting them, even though the price has gone up by 10%. It's when it comes down to the little nitty-gritty bits that you think this authenticity, it's all very well, it's a nice buzzword, but is it a nice... does it actually flow through to people being prepared to take on some of the companies, pains, etc. if they decide to change? And I think that's, I would wonder whether... I worry a lot that people might go "well, yes, but..."

Sam Birkett 7:37
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, I suppose it's almost one of those words, which if it's actually genuinely happening, that you don't need to mention it, like we've said before, with the sort of company values that say we're honest and we are innovative, we're reliable, we're really reliable. It's reminded me actually, I was watching a Louis Theroux, one of his latest documentaries last night, and some really quite dreadful people who are extreme right wing, and they basically qualified saying, well, we're not, you know, we're not racist, we're not misogynistic, we're not this, we're not that or rather, this, what I'm saying is not any of those things, but, and then they're going to have it. So yes, you've just basically qualified that it is all of those things because you're talking about it. But in plugging this in a positive light, not a negative light, you just say when companies go on and on and say we're really authentic, and we really genuinely connect with our consumers and blah, blah, blah, some sort of alarm bells start ringing. So it's more of the sort of the unspoken nature of it. So, I suppose in my mind, it means that from both a marketing and customer relationship point of view, you need to be focused on develop, you know, knowing what your customers need, I suppose, that the basics in the end of knowing what they need, know what they expect and then from the marketing point of view, communicating that effectively and I suppose through stories of experiences customers have with you.

Sally Green 9:12
I was just going to say, the perfect thing is to use case studies, you will appear authentic, if you have customers coming back to you and saying it was a marvellous experience, everything went smoothly, the price was very fair, etc, etc. And that's, that's what you need, you need your customers' voice in there to prove authenticity.

Sam Birkett 9:28
Yeah, absolutely because otherwise it just becomes a nice oppose. Again, if it's, it's sort of like trying to refind or restructure, redirect things, you know, sometimes when you say larger companies perhaps have lost their way a little bit and maybe they, I suppose, is another big question actually, for another podcast, I suppose about when customers have become detached or estranged from the... I mean, obviously, you know, there's multiple reasons why a business starts to fail or just you know, has a diminishing market, competitors coming in, so on and so forth. But if it's more a question of, you know, someone's coming in assessed, you said, gosh, well, for the last, I don't know, eight quarters, we've seen a gradual diminishing of our customer base, people are leaving us suppose. Doing the effort to find out why, at that point, that's a very interesting extra difficult exercise. A very interesting exercise and I suppose, maybe there is that re-establishing of the relationship to discover what were the things that really mattered, which perhaps you've forgotten about in your search to grow.

Sally Green 10:33
Probably one of the most important words which is trust, you've just used the word trust and that's exactly what an authentic relationship requires is complete trust from both sides. So you have to trust your customers as much as your customers trust you. So that you know that when we sell the customers the perfect Cerise handbag, we need to trust that they're going to be happy with their handbag and tell their friends and relatives that our handbags are brilliant, and that people should buy one. So it's trust both ways. So they've got to trust us with their handbags good and then we've got to trust them that they're going to tell other people that the handbags good.

Sam Birkett 11:12
Yeah, yeah, exactly and I think that connects to those words of trust back to the sort of the title of the article reading really about, you know, getting humanity back in there and it's again, it's sort of, I kinda I bang on about this all the time. But I think it's just it's, I suppose the trick really is if there's a trick, or that the hard ongoing piece of work, rather, is the understanding of, you know, putting almost... does sound very simplistic, I suppose we're putting like a human relationship at the centre of what it is you are doing, whether it's selling, even if it's selling production lines for packaging peanuts, to South America. There's a human relationship, there or multiple human relationships there, which needs to be established trust and that's one of the first things they talk about with business schools and cross-cultural negotiations and things is, is trust, it's right at the heart and it's in dealmaking as much as marketing and you know, the first marketing message someone sees is that first, hello, this is me, this is us and then beginning that sort of path of trust and establishing a relationship, isn't it really. So...

Sally Green 12:26
What's interesting is it's that page on your website that very often gets ignored. You set it up once the About Us page, and you set it up at the beginning and then nobody ever revisits it. It just sits there the same photographs for 50 years, or however long you last, and people don't revisit it and actually, maybe marketeers should be using that About Us page as something to market to our customers and say, look at Sam, who's just achieved this, he's doing this, this is what he believes in. This is why you should buy this product and we don't we tend to be all about the product, and not enough about using the staff members to market the product.

Sam Birkett 13:09
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I've got a live example of that, actually, with, I was looking at a website for somebody the other day, and just doing a review of, you know, the most visited pages, you know, just a very top level kind of Google Analytics. So what how's the site actually used? And how do we want to repurpose and use it? And the most popular areas was the About Us, the people pages and that wasn't too startling for me, given the nature of the business that this company works in, you know, where a lot of it is individuals working with individuals or small teams. So that's really important and getting that across is so important and then all the mechanics of how can I get in touch? How can I see what this person is up to? And you know, almost feeling a little bit like you know them before you meet them, or put them in a way.

Sally Green 14:01
Exactly. I mean, to some, Google actually, when I put a meeting in my diary, Google would say, would you like to find out more about this person? Actually, that'll send me off to your Google connections. So I suddenly know more about you and I can look at your LinkedIn. So that kind of getting close to your customers and being honest. It's all about honesty and saying, this is what I do and what is important to me, is kind of matters. But I just think the About Us page ought to be... sometimes you can't even find the about us page on websites. They're kind of, it's there, but it's way off the edge and it's kind of falling off the edge of my screen so I can't actually get to it and that's wrong. To be genuinely authentic, maybe it ought to be right there on the homepage.

Sam Birkett 14:51
Yeah, definitely. Definitely and I suppose it's that connecting through of content as well. So if certain members of staff are creating content or involved in something and it's connecting up the job, joining the dots on the website so you can find the stuff they're doing, who they are, what they're proud of, what they've done in the past, things like that. And then, yeah, how they're connected to alumni clients effectively, I suppose, as well. So you can see that. I mean, it's funny, though, isn't because I remember working with someone quite few years ago now, actually, they said, we want to get a new About US page, but we don't want it to be one of those ones where you know, the ones lots of agencies kind of start where you have, hey, this is Johnny, and he's just mad about elephants and he likes kite surfing at the weekends and his favourite phrase is, you know, "nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition" or something like that, favourite film, favourite quote. I suppose there's a place for that and everything but I suppose because it when it was first done, it was probably like, wow, that's... like lots of these things.

Sally Green 15:58
Used to be brilliant!

Sam Birkett 15:59
Yeah, they don't age as well, do they? But it's almost, and I think again, really just that understanding of what your audience is interested in, in terms of the importance of the relationship they have with you, if you're doing something, say it's the solicitors or something and then you've got all these sort of fun, crazy facts about you know, Kim, who does this and does that. Is that as important as, you know, stuff that you can present well, of course, about the work they've done, but of course, it doesn't need to be all sparkly like that. It's more about, yes, they're approachable. Yes, they're knowledgeable and they're good to work with, I think, trying to get across the fact that whoever you're working with, again, go back to the product, you're selling the service, you're selling, what's important in that relationship to establish rather than they run stuff necessarily, but it's interesting, isn't it? Balance it.

Sally Green 16:51
It is interesting, because it's very tempting to make you to be like sometimes the About Us page doesn't need to tell you that much about us. It just needs to say, you know, Sally works here and she too believes that all handbags should be made of the best quality leather, she only wears the best quality leather shoes herself, and has been known to change a handbag because the leather fell apart or whatever, whatever the reason is, just put some examples like that isn't it's but it's that honesty is quite hard to find and you often read websites that have obviously been written by a copywriter and you can completely notice it's been written by a copywriter and that's inauthentic. That's where authenticity starts going wrong when you just go oh, but we've got to put these buzzwords these keywords in here and we've got to make Sally look fun and enthusiastic and that's not Sally. That's this copywriter's impression of Sally and she's only ever spoken to me once on the phone and it's just not happening and that often is where people fall down or they just think oh, well they don't put the customer first. They don't think about what the customer might want to actually buy off Sally. You know, is Sally, you know if you have to go on about how much like elephants and cream tea and on a Saturday afternoon that's the most important thing in my life, actually, and what does she know about leather handbags, what's all this about? So you've got to get the bias right.

Sam Birkett 18:32
Well, that's it everyone thank you very much for listening today. In the meantime, if you want to keep in touch you can find us @meanderspod on Twitter, or you can get to us on Facebook. You can also email us which is meanderspod@gmail.com So hope to see you or hear you or you to hear us next time anyway and good luck everyone. Take care bye for now.