Sam Birkett 0:02
Hello and welcome once again back to Marketing Meanders with Sally and Sam and now it's part two of our podcast. Anyway, I'll be quiet and let you carry on and listen to our conversation. Enjoy.

Sally Green 0:14
To be honest, 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 it 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 it wasn't good because the leather fell apart or whatever the reason is, just put some examples like that. But 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 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 you 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 I go on and on about how much I elephants and cream tea and on a Saturday afternoon, that's the most important thing in my life, actually, what does she know about leather handbags? What's all this about? So you've got to get the bias, right.

Sam Birkett 1:50
Yeah, yeah, that's it, isn't it I suppose, you say it's sort of that... you're establishing how does the things you're saying about this person tie in with the thing, why they work there almost.

A succinct way of putting it, yeah.

Sally Green 2:06
Yeah. So like, why did they work there? Why is that important to you? You know, because she's obsessed with quality, you know, anything that Sally does is quality and she doesn't care about the cost too much. That's why they're very expensive. But, okay.

That's a perfect way of putting it. Yeah.

Sam Birkett 2:24
It's that sort of thing or she's like no, she's really concerned about, you know, affordability and she's always looking for a bargain. Our handbags are very reasonably priced and that's our thing. I mean, I suppose. So as you say, it's sort of it's interesting is because I mean, it is really is one way of looking at the messaging, the authenticity of what you're saying and the relationships you're trying to build at the marketing end. I'm sort of drawing out here, my hands everyone who won't me necessarily, but I sort of say behind that the longer tail going right, the way back to the sourcing of the materials and the financing of the company. If you really want to be genuinely authentic, it's trying to represent what it is you do behind the scenes, of course, to say, this is how it's all set up, you know, the whole thing has been set up, not with just one single focus, but it goes back to the 'Why?' doesn't it really? So why does this company exist? And if you can get that all aligned, strategic alignment of an organisation, which has lots of stuff out there about then the marketer's job is so much easier, isn't it, because you're just saying, well, all I'm doing is telling the story well about what it is we do and why we do it. But that is tricky.

Sally Green 3:37
Yeah, it is, well, it gets trickier and trickier. The bigger the company becomes, particularly those companies, if you've got multiple brands, that can be extremely tricky, because they... clash is the wrong word, but they don't necessarily all tell the same story. Because you might have started your business with just one brand, and then realised that, but actually, this doesn't quite suit that audience that wouldn't. So we've got to create a different brand for that audience because we want to dominate the market. But at the same time, then those two brands are slightly different, telling a slightly different story. Which story do we prefer? Is it that this story is wrong? Or is it that this audience needs a different message, the bigger businesses become, the more difficult it is to do exactly what you've described and trace the brand back to the 'why?' it gets really hard. Yeah, and the trouble is you kind of... The other thing about authenticity is that we all sit there looking at our budgets very hard, and it's really, really hard to measure. So what value do you give to authenticity? So I'm being fabulously authentic, but because of being so fabulously authentic, that's going to alienate a little bit of our audience. So we're going to lose sales. Are you that authentic? Is that how far you go? Or is it just too difficult to measure? Say, we'll just have to hope it's all fine and just people seem to be happy. Is that good enough? Or are you going to have to up your marketing budget to be authentic and do this properly? And is the bottom line prepared to tolerate that? So it gets, how you measure it is a really interesting question.

Sam Birkett 5:26
It really is, isn't it. And I suppose that's where the real strategic and operational side come in don't and where you have to really work with all the areas of the business or the leadership of the business, that's where real leadership comes in, as far as I'm concerned around the okay, so strategic strategy-wise, the next three years projections of where we're going to be with our, you know, our market share, and what we want to achieve as a company, as an organisation is affected by this thing, which is what we've picked up. I mean, it's because that could start I mean, I was just thinking about the sort of ESG things and you know, sustainability again, the idea that you know, almost overnight, I mean, like we've seen with the whole current, you know, Eastern European crisis and fuel crisis, things like that, you might have to change things in the sustainability side of things. So say plastic straws, a few years ago, if you were a chain that... or you produced drinks, and you have plastic straws in all your drinks, that's a major change, because that's important all of a sudden, to your consumers. It's much cheaper to produce plastic straws, but from an authenticity point of view, because your company says we care about the world of tomorrow and sustainability, you got to you've got to change that and as you say, the return on investment, perhaps it's just the protection of your market share or does it give you the opportunity to get more market share from the guys who haven't pivoted and changed their production? But that's the sort of understanding and the projections, isn't it? And if the big changes, you're making the business, and then understanding what that means to the market, and therefore, you know, yes, it costs more, perhaps, but does it mean you can increase your price as well? All that is big strategy isn't it that you have to work out.

Sally Green 7:09
Yeah, is it that authenticity only goes as far as you can press the price point, as you can push the price point. So that if you say, actually, all our products now are going to use absolutely nothing which has any kind of, say anything produced using any kind of fossil fuel produced energy. That's going to be really hard to track down backwards through the whole line of where does everything you produce come from, and if you are going to do that, I suspect your prices are going to go up considerably and how much are your customers prepared to be that... They might say, Oh, yes, we only buy from authentic companies. But do you? Actually?

Sam Birkett 7:59
That's the thing isn't it? I suppose it's how earnest you are with that, isn't it? Sort of if you could almost, not with weasel words necessarily, but if you could sort of say, we always endeavour to deliver da-dum, da-dum, da-dum. As long as again that I suppose everything else you're doing, it's almost the sort of the all the elements of the relationship that you have with your market on a particular product is sort of again, what are the drivers that make them think, yes, I trust these guys to do this and what's important to me, why buy from you and not the competitor? Is it price? Is it, as you said, is it actually it's all about sustainability. Therefore, if you had one thing that went wrong, then everything's chucked out the window, it almost reminds you a political sort of analogy, like with, obviously, the UK, the Liberal Democrats with student fees, and reviewers go in terms of I mean, let's look at this look at without getting too political, but they say a political party in power at the moment who perhaps have done something. I mean, let's face it, all political parties have made promises and broken them and sometimes they've admitted them, rarely. But if it's one particular, for one constituency, literally, well, not this, you want essentially one demographic of the population who perhaps you really had a good connection with and identified with and, you know, you then had to change or, you know, you have to go back on a promise you've made and it's one out of so many different promises about pain around the country and it's toxified a brand, should we say a political brand, for years, you know, this is now over a decade, isn't it? And it's still there.

Sally Green 9:37
Yeah, and they don't trust you now.

Sam Birkett 9:39
Yeah, exactly. And so it's almost sort of, I mean, to veer quickly away from politics, I suppose it in terms of relationships, what matters, isn't it? Is it just that is it one aspect, is it multiple aspects? And what does that mean in a commercial sense to your business? How are you also as you say, a return on investment, how are you aware of these things as we said right at the beginning? Are you aware of what an authentic relationship actually means in terms of what you do, and what your customers expect of you, because if you don't know, you could get a shock.

Sally Green 10:13
It's really, really interesting. It'd be really interesting to do a kind of actually plot it out. This is what an authentic relationship between us and the customer looks like. So produce a kind of, this is what a trusting customer avatar. So what do they look like? What's a trusting customer look like? Yeah, that will be really interesting and how much more are we prepared to pay or take off our bottom line to get more of these.

Sam Birkett 10:43
Yeah, exactly, and then having that... it makes me think about, you know, the abilities of people who can do agencies and research and projections. You'd probably get some specialists in, wouldn't you. Be on your existing marketing team to say, we can understand where that constituency people are and what it's worth, and then work out a plan of how to get to them. But as you say, it could be also initially the assessment of how do we protect this area of the market? The relationship we have with people if there is a high return returning customer rate, for example. Yeah, what does it matter? What really matters to them? And I suppose that's good old fashioned just knowing your customer, isn't it knowing the people? But which are the points that as you say that the matter the most? Because it could be one very small thing, one very small aspect of the product or the service or your promise, your ethos, that is actually the crucial element, couldn't it?

Sally Green 11:41
That's a really good point. Is it all of you that... is it kind of a whole holistic, you know, I trust this company like this, or is it just, I trust this brand? Which I don't even know what... I mean Unilever is really interesting, because Unilever now, I think, owns Ecover now. But they also do a lot of things that are deeply not green. So is it just the brand I'm trusting or is it the company that produces that brand that I'm trusting? So where does this authenticity go? What does it look like?

Sam Birkett 12:19
Well, it's interesting, because someone like Unilever, as well, I mean, I, usually, because I seem to finish my dinner or my meals quite quickly, with the kids round table, and my son in particular is very slow to finish his meal. So quite often, if we've got a bottle of something on the table, I'll also just, you know, pick it up and have a look and you know, oh, to see where was this made? Who did this and everything, and I still find it funny when you see certain things you're oh, I didn't know that was owned by so and so who also is a conglomerate who owns this and it's interesting, because I suppose when campaigns come along, and you say, you know, a lot of the time you're not aware of which conglomerate actually owns your bottle of favourite sauce, and you go, well, I just like the source, because I like the flavour and I've always liked the flavour, and I don't really care who produces it. I just like buying the sauce and it's a reasonable price, it's not ridiculous, there we go. But then if you were to hear that there's a big campaign saying, well, do you know the conglomerate who produces this has an awful palm oil, you know, thing going on and exploits workers and this is awful, that's awful. You might think twice oh, well, I do like that source, but that's really not good. Something needs to change there. But it's, as you say, but that they can have, you know, so many different brands, that your expectations, the nature of the relationship with my little bottle of sauce here with something else, which is another country to another consumer base, is totally different. So it's when it's mass scale...

Sally Green 13:41
It's quite rare that people actually tell the company why they're not buying it. So that you haven't really got any way to measure, what are they not buying it because they've found that they've just got off the flavour? Are they not buying it because they found that the competitor's nicer? Is there a new competitor? Is it because we put the price up? Or is it because they've actually found that we're a completely unethical company all of a sudden? It's all very well to look at the bottom line and think, oh, well, our revenue stream has gone, why? What's happened here? People don't often go, oh, well, that might be because we're exploiting orangutans in Borneo by chopping down their camp there. That's very rare that that happens. You don't look at the price drop and go oh, that's that will be because of the orangutan killing.

Sam Birkett 14:34
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's the thing, isn't it? And I suppose, really, in many ways, it's that, you know, ongoing assessment, reassessment understanding of what it is, you know, because there will always be some sort of curveball anyway went there, which may or may not massively impact you and it's, again all the factors, isn't it I suppose, product, price, place, etc. and people. There's going to be something and if we go round to the handbag example because I like coming down to that small scale...

Sally Green 15:03
If we finish off with the handbag example that makes us both happy.

Sam Birkett 15:08
Of course, I was going back to the handbag example! It's like, you know if we're there and bought on the water with our pop-up shop and then we find out that we've been doing that merrily for the last two years and then all of a sudden, some big London fashion house comes in and really launched a new Cotswold line of handbags, which are, I don't know, just cheaper, there's more variety. They're really well publicised, they come in and set up their shop, it's a really nice shop with a little coffee bar at the front and the buying experience is just better, because they have more leverage, they have more resources,

Sally Green 15:39
They've got more members of staff...

Sam Birkett 15:41
Yeah, more staff, they've got an online, you know, they've got an app you can do, you can compare the colours with your outfits, and they can do this and that and it's all really fantastic and glitzy because they've spent, you know, three million quid on it and we're going well, we have a maximum of, you know, £300k to spend on everything we do. You've been outbid there, haven't you? But I mean, but then again, I suppose in that scenario, do you go well, do we try and match the big boys, if we can't, then what do we do? Do we go back to what makes us us, and at the end of the day as well, no brand, no product, no service has a universal right to exist and to be successful. Of course, I mean, it sometimes these forces just push you out of business, don't they?

Sally Green 16:29
Yeah, you're absolutely right, and you have to be careful about slagging off your competition, because it might be very tempting to for us as a little handbag shop saying oh, well, they've come in, but look, they kill orangutangs to get their leather, you know, beautifully made in or they use slave workers in India to make their leather so soft. That's not terribly authentic. It's a bit bitchy and ridiculous slightly and when it comes down to it, you begin to make yourself look stupid. So marketers have to be careful about how far they push that button.

Sam Birkett 17:00
Yeah, exactly, I suppose focusing on what makes you trustworthy and indifferent, as opposed to hey, look at them. They're rubbish, we're better. Because again, in terms of inauthenticity, you do start to lose that veneer, don't you really? So it's, that's important. But oh, well...

Sally Green 17:19
Oh heavens we've covered a lot!

Sam Birkett 17:22
I think we've managed to get around that! Again, as ever, there's lots of offshoots to this and I suppose around, you know, we've said around, you know, sustainability and importance that consumers attach to that these days. And, you know, the about us how we communicate, who works in the company, the culture of the company, or the planning, projecting of market share, all those things as well, which are fascinating. But yes, I think in terms of that article, in terms of what it pops up in our minds, hopefully, we've...

Sally Green 17:52
Got us talking over it!

Sam Birkett 17:52
Yeah, got over it. But as ever, we'd love to know what you guys think as well. I mean, how important is authenticity? Or do you just think sort of rubbish and go no, well, authentic authenticity, it's all just jargon and I don't care. But there is going to be something there, there's going to be grain of a relationship there isn't there which, which is important. So you may call it something different. We may have an interest in all, but there must be there, I think. I think that's what I challenge back to somebody. But

Sally Green 18:18
Yeah, that's really interesting, what is your truth? Yeah.

Sam Birkett 18:21
Yeah exactly, and the whole thing about what are the important factors in your relationship with all the segments of your audience? Have you mapped that? Do you understand that? And, you know, how do you monitor that developing? You know, that would be really interesting for people to consider, I think.

Sally Green 18:40
Oh, so much more to talk about!

Sam Birkett 18:43
So much more, so much more! And we will be back to talk about more of it as well very, very soon and which will be great. And yes, in the meantime, if you want to get in touch, you can find us @meanderspod which is on Twitter, meanderspod@gmail.com, and then on Facebook and obviously the podcast itself, Marketing Meanders with Sally and Sam. Please share it as well with others who are interested because we'd love to have more contributing and, yes, let's know what's going on. But thank you very much.

Sally Green 19:12
It's been great to talk to you, thank you very much!

Sam Birkett 19:12
Yeah, take care everyone. Bye for now!

Sally Green 19:16
Bye!