Think Do Say with Ron Tite

Welcome to Brainfluence, where author and international keynote speaker Roger Dooley has weekly conversations with thought leaders and world class experts. Every episode shows you how to improve your business with advice based on science or data.

Roger’s new book, Friction, is published by McGraw Hill and is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and bookstores everywhere. Dr. Robert Cialdini described the book as, “Blinding insight,” and Nobel winner Dr. Richard Claimer said, “Reading Friction will arm any manager with a mental can of WD40.”

To learn more, go to RogerDooley.com/Friction, or just visit the book seller of your choice.

Now, here’s Roger.

Roger Dooley: Welcome to Brainfluence. I’m Roger Dooley.

Today’s guest is a Renaissance man, or if not that, at least a guy who is good at a lot of things. He’s produced and hosted an award-winning comedy show, Monkey Toast. He’s the founder and CEO of Church+State, a Toronto based content marketing agency. He’s been an award-winning advertising writer and creative director of some of the world’s most respected brands. Brands like Air France, Fidelity, Johnson and Johnson, Hershey, Intel, Microsoft, and more. And he’s the author of Everyone’s An Artist or At Least They Should Be, and the new book Think. Do. Say.: How to Seize Attention and Build Trust in a Busy, Busy World. Welcome to the show Ron Tite.

Ron Tite: Well, thank you very much, Roger. That’s very nice of you. Such lovely words. I hadn’t in the past, but you know what? The next time I introduce myself, I’m definitely going to say a Renaissance man.

Roger Dooley: There you go, or you could say Renaissance person. That way it’d be a little more gender neutral, but in any case, Ron, you seem to straddle multiple worlds, art, business, creativity, humor. How did that evolve and how has that helped inform your work?

Ron Tite: Yeah. It’s funny that some people think it was part of this grand master plan in my twenties that I would map up out this 30 year career arc where all these things would come together, and it wasn’t that at all. I mean, I own my career. I pursued the things that I was curious about, and certainly there are some big buckets along the way. I think one of the biggest influences on how I see the world and how I approach my client work through my agency, as well as certainly how I speak and my perspective on that was my desire and my interest in doing standup comedy. I think there’s such a great lesson there where… There wasn’t a business opportunity. It wasn’t like I wanted to do it because I wanted a career, or I took the steps in order for me to be able to sell out Madison Square Gardens in a standup special.

I was really just curious about it. And I wanted to figure it out. I wanted to see the method to the madness. I wanted to kind of find how to do it, and would I enjoy it? And I started doing it and I thought this is a such a great creative pursuit, an outlet. And I just kept pursuing to make it better and better. And then the comedy evolved, as every artist their work evolves. And then I started really doing corporate work, and then the corporate work, I started to realize that it was weirdly the moments of silence that followed the comedy, the laughter that I actually really, really liked.

And so that I think was this huge insight in my career where I realized I really could balance the two and that the two complemented each other really well. That you can set somebody up to laugh, to kind of seize the attention, and then after the laugh is over where you’ve got them in the palm of your hands where they’re waiting for the next thing for you to say. You can deliver the message that you really came to deliver, the serious one, the strategic one. And I think that that is great for the stage. I think it’s great for books. I think it’s great for advertising and marketing and business strategy and just making our ideas contagious.

Roger Dooley: One thing I really liked about the book, I liked it because it kind of echoes my own thoughts. So we all like stuff that is similar to what we think. You skipped the traditional introduction and basically just say that you don’t have an introduction. About one short paragraph in my book, I also skipped the traditional introduction where you describe what the origin of the book was and the different parts of the book and all that stuff that usually goes in there and put a short fable in. But one thing that was even a little bit odd or different anyway, let’s not use odd, that’s kind of judgemental.

Ron Tite: Good. Judge, judge.

Roger Dooley: Right. What’s different is that you start each chapter with a quote. Now that’s not different. I do that too. But your quotes are entirely fake. Quotes attributed to people like Albert Einstein talking about 5G and Marie Curie and others. So I take it the fact checker didn’t totally choke on that.

Ron Tite: They were curious, that’s for sure. No, it was really-

Roger Dooley: Mr. Tite, we’ve unable to find the reference for this. Can you cite, provide a citation?

Ron Tite: That’s right. John D. Rockefeller talking about LinkedIn icons and emojis just didn’t pop up in the Wiki quotes. No, I have a perspective on quotes in that I feel that sometimes they’re unattainable. We quote people as speakers and artists and professionals, marketing professionals, and certainly for your listeners who are in advertising or marketing, we have just heard the Apple examples and the quotes attributed to Steve Jobs. And I think that, or worse, Gandhi or Winston Churchill. What, you want me to up to this ideal like Steve jobs? He’s one in 10 billion, there are only so many. He’s a generational talent and mind. And Gandhi, one of the greatest humans to ever walk the face of the earth.

And these are the people that we would say, “Live up to that.” Here’s some wise words from somebody who was one of the greatest humans to walk the face of the planet. And I just think it’s… I didn’t want to do that and I just thought I should be a little bit more serious. I remember seeing a speaker and it was just quote after quote after quote. And it was like, and what this person said and what this person said, and what this person said. And I turned to the person beside me and I said, “I think that people came to hear what you said.” And it may not be as eloquent, and it may not be as famous, but I think that I want people to hear what I have to say. And so yeah, so I thought, well… But it is a structural thing in books, so how can we have fun with that?

The same thing with the introduction where I hate when someone says, “Well, you have to do it because every book has that. That’s the thing you need to do.” And so that’s inspirational for me to go, nope, I just don’t want to do it. Because I think that those are limitations, and those are things that people accept. For years if you look at any deodorant commercial, it was, you had the two sticks of deodorant on pieces of cardboard paper or whatever. And it was like, that’s what you need to do. If it’s a food commercial, you need the bite and smile. If it’s a shampoo commercial, you need the lather shot of that person.

There’s all these things that we make excuses and that we default to because someone has told us that that piece of communication is not going to be successful unless you have that thing in there. And that to me is just an inspiration and a kick in the pants to actually not have it. To force myself to come up with something that’s interesting and successful without the thing that everybody else is expecting to see.

Roger Dooley: Ron, I’ve got one small example of why you should never copy advertising the way it’s been done. Years ago I was in the computer business and we had all kinds of products for computers including hard drives, and whenever you saw an ad from say Seagate or Western Digital or one of the big hard drive makers, you could always see those shiny silver platters in there. And so when we gave our advertising manager a few expensive hard drives and said, “We need some product shots on these,” she realized that to get the product shots the way they were supposed to look, you had to unscrew the sealed hard drive cases and totally ruin the product, but she got the shot anyway. And once we got over our horror, how much those shots had cost us, we were able to laugh a little bit at least.

Ron Tite: Oh yeah. I’ve been in so many meetings, especially with food clients and you’d present something and they’d go, “Where’s the bite and smile?” It’s like, “Oh, we didn’t include that.” And it’s like, “But…”. Their jaws would hit the table, “Well, you need the bite and smile.” I’m like, “No, I don’t think you do actually.”

Roger Dooley: Yeah. Change gears here, what is a pitch slap? I’ll say that carefully. Pitch slap.

Ron Tite: Yeah. In the audio version of the book, we actually put in this the sound effect. Well the pitch slap is when someone feels, a consumer typically, feels like they have blatantly been pitched. It’s a hard sell. And whether it’s somebody who wants to connect with you on LinkedIn, and you just know it from the second the invite comes in and I say to myself, I’m going to accept this because I want to give people the benefit of the doubt, but they’re going to, within five minutes, they’re going to send me an email in LinkedIn that pitches their products. And that to me is the utmost pitch slap. I literally had somebody-

Roger Dooley: You can almost count down, I found. You can accept it and it’s like, ten, nine, eight, bingo. There it is.

Ron Tite: Yep. Exactly. Exactly. I had a guy who, I will sometimes I will do coffees with people and I set aside one day a month where people who reach out and say, we’d love to get your perspective on something or advice or whatever.

So I set a day of these back to back to back. So one of them was a call, and I don’t know how the person got through to get on the calendar and stuff, but this person gets through and happy to have the call. His the first question is like, “So we both work in advertise,” I’m like “Oh, that’s… Okay, great. Like how can I help?” “Well I was wondering how often do you think about out of home advertising?” Oh, well. And remember, I just stopped him and said, “Is this the countdown to when you’re pitching, your pitch slapping me with the fact that you have an out of home advertising solution that you would like me to buy? You would like me to suggest and recommend to my clients? Is that what you’re telling me that you have booked this time to just pitch me?”

And, and he was like, “Well, I…” And he tried to justify and I’m like… It’s just come on, that does not work anymore. Real people don’t work… It doesn’t work on real people. And the fact that you can send 10 million out with one click, it doesn’t mean there’s just 9 million innocent bystanders who get taken down by your pitch slap just because you think you’re waiting for the .005% who stupidly respond. So I have really strong feelings of being pitched slapped, as your listeners might be able to tell by the tone of my voice.

Roger Dooley: Yeah. Well, do you think that’s sort of characteristic that indicates a problem overall with advertising and marketing these days?

Ron Tite: I think so. I think there’s a couple things wrong with it. The first is that somebody always has an anecdote. They always have the anecdote. “Yeah. Yeah. But I know this guy and he does it and it worked.” And we just talked earlier about our friend Mitch Joel, and Mitch had Seth Godin on his podcast a little while ago. And I love this line that Seth had and it was like, “It’s not that it doesn’t work. Nobody has ever said this stuff doesn’t work.” Although I may have just said that two minutes ago. But it’s not that it doesn’t work on some level, it’s do you want to be the person who’s doing that? Do you really want to be the person who spends your days doing cold calls? Who is spamming people’s inboxes because you can generate an anecdote that two people last year responded to it favorably? And you’re discounting all the innocent bystanders that you’re taking out.

So I think there’s that. That it does on some level work, and people justify it that way. Secondly, it’s so much easier. It is so much easier to do an eblast or to pitch slap people on a LinkedIn invite, or to book a meeting where you just pitch your stuff. It’s so much easier than organically building a business from the ground up with great foundations. I mean it is way easier to take a pill to lose weight than it is to control your nutrition and your dietary habits and to get up every morning and run five miles. So people are looking for that fast, quick hit where they can get a little bit of success, and so it’s way easier. And the results when they do work, the little peaks come in, they work pretty quickly. So I think that’s what people get addicted to and they just keep chasing it.

I think the third part is that, and it’s kind of an extension of that for marketers and agency people, I include us all together, is that people are chasing tactics because they feel that that is the easiest thing to do. And so they’re just like, “Oh well, our strategy is just to be on Instagram,” and I scratch my head, and that is not a strategy. I mean come on. So it’s this need for quick fix for quick hits for short term, and not playing the long game and not having the patience to cautiously build a business. And on some level, I guess that’s the fault of the shareholders, or the people who are expecting these quarterly people to meet their quarterly numbers.

Roger Dooley: Yeah. Well maybe. I think that, like you, I get all kinds of strange pitches. the LinkedIn ones where I’m really hesitant to connect to people with certain keywords in their title because you just know it’s going to result in a spam contact right away. But because I’ve got a podcast, because I’ve got a blog, I get constant pitches to be on the podcast or more often, “Gee, I want to create a guest post for you, and the purposes we’re going to create some kind of a crappy guest posts so we can put a link in to our website or our client’s website and we’ll get some link juice that way.” But these things are so poorly done, they demonstrate no knowledge.

I think that even though you can say, well yeah, you can send out 10,000 of these and yeah, you’ll get some percentage of responses. So maybe it’s somewhat cost-effective, but the results aren’t going to be what you want compared to if you said “Now what would really be a good fit for my link to be on? This blog, okay, I’ve got the right content, I’ve got… It’s relevant,” and you wrote a little personalized note. Yeah, that would take a hundred times as long as sending out a blast. But if you did that, you’d probably succeed 20, 30% of the time or something, assuming that you were reasonably skillful and had something to offer.

Ron Tite: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I got one that was like, “Due to your expertise in software as a service…” Where in my profile does it say anything about my expertise in software as a service. That’s ridiculous.

Roger Dooley: I just got one that was kind of along those lines. They gushed at what a great article I had written, and they provided a link to it, and no way was anything I had ever written or had anything to do with. So it’s like, okay, nice try, not quite.

Let’s talk a little bit about customer centricity. And you’ve got a little anecdote about Satya Nadella that one of the things that he did on his way up to ascendancy in Microsoft was create Microsoft office for the iPad, which is something that customers had been asking for. And at one level, I look at that and say, “Well duh,” if customers are asking for something, it shouldn’t take a genius to say, “Okay, well why don’t we give it to them?” But why does it seem to be the exception sometimes in big companies?

Ron Tite: Well, there was a… and full disclosure, Microsoft is a current client and I’ve worked with them for years. Before I had my own agency, I was executive creative director at an agency called Havas. And we were not their AOR, but we did a bunch of work for them. So as a creative guy, I’ve been in the halls of Microsoft for years, and I would go in and we couldn’t bring out a Mac, and you’d get the full stink-eye, and I would get people…. Like I’d be running PowerPoint. I would be running Microsoft word on a Mac and they would still give you the stink guy. And literally I’d said once like, “Oh, we Googled this,” and someone in the room goes, “Don’t you mean you Binged it?”

And I was like, come on. How far is your head up your ass that you think that that’s the way people operate? And that’s just not true. And so within organizations we can get so insular, and we can get so inside our own heads that we think that everybody does or should be exclusive to our respective ecosystem. And so that when Microsoft, if you didn’t have a Windows phone and you weren’t running a PC and you didn’t have all the software that you weren’t a true Microsoft customer. But that’s not how people operate. That’s not how consumers operate. It’s very rare for someone to be completely rare to an entire ecosystem in every possible way. And so I think that’s what I love what Satya brought in was, not only did he do Microsoft off for that, but he actually presented to the organization from a Mac and used Google Chrome as his browser, and that sends a clear message.

When I was at Havas, which at that point was called Euro RSCG, our New York office through then, my then global boss Jeff Kling created the most interesting man in the world campaign for Dos Equis. And what I’ve always loved about that, and I remember the first time I saw the storyboards for the campaign, I asked Jeff, “Who sold the line?” And the line was, and I think they still use the line in their second generation of the campaign, was, “I don’t always drink beer, but when I do I prefer Dos Equis,” and that is such an honest line, because that is how consumers drink beer. Nobody says, “Oh, if you don’t have a Bud, I’m sorry, I don’t want it.” But they don’t, and they don’t only drink beer, they drink a million different things. And I always loved that, and I think that’s what we need to get, that what brand people need to do is to be honest with the role that their brands play in the lives of consumers. And spoiler alert, they’re not as important as you think that they are.

Roger Dooley: Yeah. One campaign that you described from Xerox Canada sounded to me, I haven’t seen this in person, but describing it, the president of Xerox Canada looks at the camera and earnestly tells customers, “The last thing I want to do is sell you another copy. Or the first thing I want to do is save you money.” And to me that is a really powerful statement. And I think we’ve probably all love that auto mechanic who you go in because your battery’s dead, and you figure you’re going to cough up for a new battery. And some say, “Hey, it turned out it was just a loose wire, you’re good to go.” We’re going to love that guy and trust him for life. And so to me it’s a powerful message, but the people who are actually in contact with the customer are salespeople who have sales quotas and their job is basically to sell copiers. So I don’t know, how did that work out for them?

Ron Tite: Well. Yeah, that was such a great… I love the campaign. And I came in on it on the back end of it. So I think I executed the TV spot or inflight spot or something like that. But it was created by Simon Billing was the strategist, and Mary Seeker was a writer, and Liz Faulconer ran the account, and the three of them worked on this thing that was called the document cost index. And it was like, can we analyze the costs of what your documents cost you? And where are you in relation to your competition. And then that would open up the conversation and say, “Well, here’s how you can decrease that cost,” because your documents are costing you more than your competition, because your copier’s outdated or because you’re using the wrong ink or whatever.

So it was more of a consultative solution sell than a product sell. And so we came out with that, or they developed it and then I executed the TV spot, and it’s great. You’re right, there is nothing better. We literally in the spot, we had the president unplug the photocopier. He was in a big room, and he went over and was like, “The last thing I want to do,” boom, unplugged the photocopier, “Is sell you another copier.” And then of course the value being the first thing I want to do to save you money. The problem with that is that the culture of the organization just wanted to sell copiers. The salespeople were commissioned to sell copiers, and everything about the organization was selling copiers. So it was something that was dreamed up in an agency boardroom that the rest of the organization outside of marketing never really embraced. And so I thought that was… they’re lovely people and I thought it had great potential, but it just didn’t work because the entire organization didn’t behave in a way that supported that message.

Roger Dooley: Well, yeah, I guess you could also say that the very guy recording that message is to blame, because he was probably in the best position to try and make that message reach not just customers, but to the whole organization. Because I think that when you’re in that kind of position, you can see how a customer sees you as a valued partner as opposed to somebody trying to sell them stuff that you could be in there for life, and your salespeople would be trusted rather than feared that somehow they’re trying to put one over on me or sell me something new. But it seems like that’s kind of where the ball was dropped.

Ron Tite: Yeah, and given that I’ve had a lot of large global clients, I get the challenge of it. So it’s really easy for me as their speaker and ad guy to say what they did wrong. I respect both people, but I think I kind of have more respect for Hubert Joly than I do for Jeff Bezos. Hubert Joly of course turned Best Buy around. I think it’s significantly easier to build something than to turn something that large around. You’ve got legacy systems, you’ve got… you can’t just fire everybody. You can’t just start over. So that, what we call an internal coup d’etat, or you need an internal coup. That’s really, really challenging.

And that’s why startups are eating the lunch of the establishment now. That startups are… they don’t have those legacy systems. They don’t have those old relationships. They don’t have a group of people, and often they don’t have revenue. So it’s really easy to kind of build it from scratch.

I was giving them a speech in Sarasota, Florida for a hundred CEOs, and I can’t say who it was because of Chatham House Rules, but there was one CEO of a very large global eCommerce company that was a startup many user years ago, and that person said to the other CEOs, “Here’s why startups are taking you down, or at least starting to eat in your profitability.” If I have a great idea that the end consumer or customer or client will like, all I need to do is I need to go to Sand Hill Road in San Francisco, and I pitch it the VC number one and VC number two and VC number three, and I just keep pitching. And keep going until I get my money. And then I get my money and that’s all I need. All I need is one yes with all the pitches. I get one, yes, I’m off to the races. I now can build the thing I want to build.

Within very large established organizations, your assistant brand manager may have a world changing idea, but they have to pitch it to the associate brand manager, who has to goes to the brand manager, who has to go to the director, who has to go to the VP, who has to go to the EVP who has go to the SVP, blah blah blah, all the way up. And so while the startups only need one yes to make their idea a reality, established organizations only need one no, and the whole thing dies. One no at anywhere in the chain and that great brilliant idea dies. And so there are a lot of great ideas that are just left on the editing floor within established organizations. That’s why it’s just so difficult for them to turn that around.

Roger Dooley: Plus changing culture is hard just in and of itself. If you have an established culture, I mean you can change some things pretty easily. You can rip out your IT infrastructure and it’s going to be expensive and probably a pretty horrible experience, but you can change it out in a year, year and a half later it’ll be new. But if you’ve got hundreds or thousands of people trying to change the way they think without just swapping them all out for new people, it’s pretty darn tough.

Ron Tite: Yeah. It’s totally tough. Culture is such a huge challenge to turn. That’s why Hubert Joly, I think I just have so much respect for what he did with Best Buy.

Roger Dooley: Yeah. One of the other stories you relate in the book Ron is a Western hotel unit that used data to customize your experience. And I’m wondering if it was fun, but if it also was a little bit creepy at some point or maybe not. Why don’t you explain what they did and how it made you feel.

Ron Tite: Yeah, sure. So I was there, it was at the Western Grand in Vancouver. I’m in Vancouver a fair bit and when I get to choose it, I don’t always get to choose, but when I to choose I stay there. And I was there once and I tweeted out like, “Oh, I love the Western Grand,” and they write back, “We love you, too” and what can we do to make your stay better. It was common procedure. And actually, there was no shampoo in the hotel room. So I told them there was no shampoo and then that afternoon replaced the shampoo obviously, but then they sent up a note, and nothing big, chocolate and some fresh fruit and a karaf of ice water just saying thanks. And so then the lovely handwritten note.

And so I talked about it all over the world of how I just thought it was so great that the leaders empowered their people to live up to the brand promise. And it didn’t have to be anything fancy. It was a handwritten note and I thought it was so great. So I talked about it a lot. So the next time I went to the hotel I checked in and I get to my room, there’s a note saying… clearly because people would… They knew I was talking about them because sometimes people would tweet to them or something. And so they just said, “Hey, thanks for all for mentioning us in your speaking engagements. That’s great and here are some snacks.” So I as my good friends know I love… I just can exist completely on Diet Coke and barbecue chips.

So then there’s two Diet Cokes in the champagne bucket, three types of barbecue chips. So I thought, that’s amazing. Went into the bathroom, they’ve got 20 shampoos waiting on the counter, which I think is the best part. This just shows a great sense of humor. And then they had downloaded and printed a picture of me with our two dogs put in this silver frame, and with a note, hope it feels like home. So I loved it. I absolutely loved it. They clearly did their homework. They found out what I liked, they went to my social profiles. They made this amazing experience that it’s not even close to the photocopied letter from the general manager that says, dear guests, it’s just not even on the same page. And it took 20 minutes and eight bucks or whatever.

It was just no big deal. But my wife is quite private in social. And when I showed her what they did, her comment was, “Well they’re just lucky that they didn’t put the picture of me in your frame, and say that it felt like home because then that would’ve been really, really creepy. That just crosses the line for me.” And so when I went back to the hotel, I asked to meet the guy who did it, because I want to know. So it was Mitchell Faucet, and I just said, “I just loved it. But I wanted to give you some feedback. My wife said that if you would’ve put the picture of her, it would have been creepy,” and that’s the best come back ever was he said, “Well we have a policy that we’ll only put pictures of the people who are staying in the room in the frame, because you never know who’s bringing who to a hotel room.”

And I thought that was… actually I said, “I’d like to hear about the incident that necessitated the need for that policy please.” But to me, what’s really important about that is that… and we and all of us do this, and I certainly do it in speaking in and writing, but we take these one off things that people do that are really magical and really create an amazing experience, and we put them on a pedestal and that’s amazing. And I think that short changes the idea. If that idea then, which created so much goodwill for the brand, doesn’t then get operationalized, so that the point that where becomes repeatable behavior. And so the terminology we use is that it goes from being a concept car to being on the assembly line.

And so what the, we have a policy we’ll only put pictures of the people staying in the room in the frame says to me, is that entire thing is assembly line. The whole thing. I mean they knew the process, they knew where to look. They knew what the photos were, they had the frames or they know where to get the frames. They’ve done it enough times that there was the one time it didn’t work out so well, and then they changed it and they adapted and they made a policy so that wouldn’t happen again.

And so they did it the one time at some point where it was a great idea, and they probably saw great rewards from it. And then they said, “Let’s do this every time or a version of this every time.” And I didn’t feel any less special knowing that they had done that, or assuming that they had done that because it was still completely targeted to me. And so we have this as marketers, there’s the structured data versus unstructured data and where are we going for these customizations? And to me what I love about it is it’s not about some data infrastructure or some process heavy stuff, but it all started with the one person who just had a genuine desire to live up to the brand, and that was it. And then everything else, then it goes on the assembly line.

Roger Dooley: And I think that that level of personalization, obviously I imagine people are listening saying, “Well yeah that’s great if you’ve got the resources to do 20 minutes of research on your customers and then do this other stuff. But geez, our pricing is such, our staffing is such that we can’t do that.” But you can get something like that experience for awhile, I think it was maybe Wyndham Hotels when you sort of filled out a little form when you registered for their rewards program, the loyalty program, and you had your snack preference, your beverage preference and when you showed up at their hotel there would be a bottle or two of Sam Adams in a bucket or in the fridge, you might have some chips or whatever your preferred snack wise. And even though that was totally data-driven, I mean there wasn’t somebody actually figuring this stuff out, they’re saying, “Okay, what have we got that this guy likes and stick it in his room.” It still felt very personal compared to a couple of bottles of a drinking water or something that everybody gets.

And to me, that measurably improved my experience there even though it was not particularly expensive for the hotel to execute.

Ron Tite: Yeah. And what I find is that, especially within large organizations that are predominantly driven by marketing, the old CPGs and stuff, is that when we talk about customization of messaging, and obviously they default to that being a consumer focused behavior and an external behavior. But I think what’s really important is that that applies to the organization, not just to the customer facing activities. So, a lot of people are saying, “Oh, we need to be a customer experience centric organization.” And I put my hand up and say, “What about the person who doesn’t have a customer facing role? What about Mary in procurement? What the hell does she do?” And so that’s why I refer to it as, who do you do it for?

And so if you’re Mary and you’re in procurement or if you’re Todd and you’re a marketer, that this customization and personalization can happen with your colleagues. And when you have enough of those things so that procurement can customize their message, and who are they doing it for? Well, they’re doing it for the CFO, not the end customer. And that if Mary does her job in procurement and she behaves that way to her colleagues and her superiors, and then you get a culture of people who do that and that behavior, it seeps out. It can’t help but seep out into your customer facing activities. So that’s where I know that excuse that people going, “We don’t have the budget, we don’t have the resources to have a data infrastructure,” and I’m not telling you, I’m saying, start your email to Mary with, “I heard you’re at a Paul McCartney concert. How was that?” Before you get into the Q4 forecast.

Roger Dooley: Yeah, I’d just be happy if some brands acted on the information they already had about you. United Airlines knows that I prefer and isle seat because I filled that little check box in my profile. But often if I get an upgrade or somehow reassigned to a different flight, their computer doesn’t pick that up and sticks me in something else. Even when there is isle seats available. Now, I mean that’s not rocket science, but even that would be a start. Well, anyway, I’ll just probably-

Ron Tite: Or the credit card comes in and says, “Please enter your 16 digit code,” your credit card number, and then you enter it in and the first person you speak to, and they go, “Can I have your credit card number, please?” You’re like, I just literally put it into your system.

Roger Dooley: Well, yeah, in Friction I talk about that sort of thing where you provide information once and then you have to re-authenticate another time or even more times every time you talk to a new person, or you go from a machine to a human and you say, “I just entered that.” Well, yeah, but I need it. It drives me crazy. But anyway, enough of that. Well, let me remind our listeners that today we’re speaking with Ron Tite, founder and CEO of the agency Church+State and author of the new book, Think. Do. Say.: How to Seize Attention and Build Trust in a Busy, Busy World. Ron, how can people find you?

Ron Tite: Well, it is one of the nice things of having seven letters and your first and last name, so it’s just on Twitter it’s @RonTite, on Instagram it’s @RonTite, on LinkedIn it’s /RonTite. And a you can go, not surprisingly, you can go to rontite.com, you can go to thinkdosay.com, and Church+State is churchstate.co.

Roger Dooley: Great. Well, we will link to all of those places and to any other resources we mentioned on the show notes page @rogerdooley.com/podcast, and we’ll have a text version of our conversation there too. Ron, thanks for being on the show. It’s been a blast.

Ron Tite: Roger, thanks so much. I really appreciate it. And a big thank you to all of your listeners for listening in.

Thank you for tuning into this episode of Brainfluence. To find more episodes like this one, and to access all of Roger’s online writing and resources, the best starting point is RogerDooley.com.

And remember, Roger’s new book Friction is now available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and book sellers everywhere. Bestselling author Dan Pink calls it, “An important read,” and Wharton Professor Dr. Joana Berger said, “You’ll understand Friction’s power and how to harness it.”

For more information or for links to Amazon and other sellers, go to rogerdooley.com/friction.