Mathew Sweezey is the Director of Market Strategy for Salesforce. Also a researcher, award-winning marketer, and keynote speaker at conferences around the world, Mathew routinely works with the world’s largest and most well-respected brands, including UPS and Home Depot. He is the author of Marketing Automation for Dummies, as well as his latest book, The Context Marketing Revolution.
In this episode, Mathew explains how he improves customer experience by looking at modern media, technology, and consumer behavior. Listen in to learn how to use contextual marketing to reduce friction for consumers, how to motivate buyers in the age of social media, and more.
Learn how to motivate buyers in the age of social media with @msweezey, author of THE CONTEXT MARKETING REVOLUTION. Share on X
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On Today’s Episode We’ll Learn:
- How modern media, technology, and consumer behavior intersect.
- The power of bad reviews.
- How to catch the eye of consumers in the age of social media.
- What contextual marketing is.
- How to reduce friction for consumers.
Key Resources for Mathew Sweezey:
- Connect with Mathew Sweezey: Website | Twitter
- Amazon: The Context Marketing Revolution: How To Motivate Buyers in the Age of Infinite Media
- Kindle: The Context Marketing Revolution
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Full Episode Transcript:
- 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. Joining us today is Mathew Sweezey. Mathew is director of market strategy for Salesforce. He’s the author of Marketing Automation For Dummies, and keynotes at conferences around the world. Mathew’s new book is the Context Marketing Revolution: How to Motivate Buyers in the Age of Infinite Media. Welcome to the show Mathew.Mathew Sweezey: Thanks so much for having me.Roger Dooley: Mathew for starters what does the director of market strategy for Salesforce do?Mathew Sweezey: I really focus on the future of marketing. Look at what brands, customers, do a lot of research. Then really be able to work that back into saying, “Hey, this is what we need to be thinking about.” Whether that’s internally driving product market direction, or for customers as well as then at large to the marketplace through books and articles.Roger Dooley: Mm-hmm. Before that you had a marketing insights position, which I guess grew into this. Really trying to figure out what your customers might want by looking at what’s happening to their marketplaces and so on to try and get a step ahead. Is that putting it correctly?Mathew Sweezey: Really what I focus on is if you can imagine really three intersections. Modern media, technology, and then consumer behavior. Understanding how those three things intersect and interact, and then being able to help our customers as well as ourselves know how to be better in the future. Being able to guide where we need to be going.Roger Dooley: Mm-hmm. I noticed in your own description, the word psychology appears in your job. Explain how psychology fits into what you’re doing on a daily basis?Mathew Sweezey: Anytime we talk about marketing, it’s really all about motivation. How do we motivate an individual to do something that we want? For us to really be proficient at that, it takes a deep understanding of modern psychology. Of how consumers make decisions? How does modern media affect those things? What are those demands? How are they changing? Really we can’t do our job effectively as marketers if we don’t have a deep understanding of modern psychology.
Roger Dooley: Mm-hmm. My friend and past guest on the show, Mark Schaefer coined the term content shock a few years ago. I noticed that Mark also endorsed your book. The subtitle of your book is how to motivate buyers in the age of infinite media. I’m guessing infinite media and content shocker kind of related concepts. Would that be true?
Mathew Sweezey: They are true. Mark’s a good friend of mine as well, one of the nicest humans in the world if you haven’t ever get to meet him, or have gotten to meet him.
Roger Dooley: Fortunately we’ve spoken in a few of the same conferences. I have a lot of virtual friends, but he happens to be one that I’ve at least met multiple times.
Mathew Sweezey: He’s a great guy. Actually it’s funny, so content shock was really written, I don’t know, four or five, maybe six years ago. Talking really about the glut of content. It was the whole content is king phenomenon. Me and Mark are very congruent on a lot of these theories and ideas. The difference between content shock and the infinite media era is slightly different. The content shock really just talks about that brands are creating a lot of content. What I’m talking about in the infinite media era, is the fact that the actual media environment has completely shifted. Why that’s important is, if you really want to get into science and psychology, it’s understanding how media environments change human decision making behavior, and the psychology in all aspects of everything that lives within the environment.
Mathew Sweezey: This study of media theory goes all the way back to Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis, which is really where it is founded and starts. We really have to understand that media as a massive macro level, is really the determining factor of how humans make decisions. We really break it down into three aspects. Creation, distribution, and then access. When those things change, all things within the environment change. When I was able to prove out and why I was able to publish with Harvard Business this last book, was the theoretical foundation of we have entered a new media era. What does that specifically mean?
Mathew Sweezey: It doesn’t just mean that there’s more noise. What it means is that noise comes from a different player, individuals. Now individuals and their devices are the number one and number two largest creators of noise in the marketplace. The second is that noise operates in a radically different way. When noise was created by businesses, consumers react to it in a very specific way. In fact, I don’t know if you’ve ever had Doc Searls on the show. A good friend of mine, also over at the Harvard Business School, I think he’s running the Berkman Center of Innovation currently.
Roger Dooley: Great, I have not yet, but maybe we can do an intro. We’ll talk about that later Mathew. Anyway, go ahead.
Mathew Sweezey: Doc we were having a conversation he goes, “Listen man,” he goes, “There’s over 600 million devices with ad blocking on them. This is the largest boycott in the history of mankind.” We don’t really think about it that way. But that’s really what this is. When brands were the only people that could create media, consumers did not want that. There is no demand for a brand’s messages. There never is, never has been, never will be. Now when we say that now the individuals are the creators of the noise, there is a very different thing. We love noise that comes from each other. We are addicted to social media and who’s the number one creator of content on social media? Our friends, families and other individuals. Then finally the last key is access. When we lived in a world of limited media, consumers had to make decisions. A key aspect of a decision is information.
Mathew Sweezey: When information is hard to access, we create very specific methods of making decisions, hence why top of mind was so critical. Now that we offload all of our information to digital devices, there is no need to be top of mind. This radically changes how we reach consumers, how we engage with them, how they make decisions, and really changes the very foundational game that we must play, because the environment set the rules for the games. Now that the environment is in an infinite capacity is a new rule and a new idea of what marketing must be. Yes, we do agree that there is more content. However, mine is a much different aspect of talking about this from a scientific standpoint. Not just brands make more noise we need to think differently.
Roger Dooley: That 600 million ad blockers installed that really popped out at me from the book Mathew. It’s kind of ironic. We both write at Forbes, and I never actually used an ad blocker. I don’t really mind well behaved ads, but on some sites that one included, the ad content was just so intrusive that I finally broke down and installed one. The ads are shifting your content around, they’re blocking your view of the content, and you can’t close them. All these really horrible behaviors. It’s not just Forbes, I’ve seen that at other sites, Popular Science comes to mind. Not only that, these brands detect your ad blocker now, you can’t look at it unless you watch our ads. I’m wondering why is there this disconnect when you have people clearly voting in a certain way? Instead of trying to figure out, okay, maybe there is a way of doing this that doesn’t alienate consumers. Instead, it ends up being sort of an arms race.
Mathew Sweezey: It’s a simple, it’s a very easy answer. It’s anytime we’re in a transition, there is that transitional period of figuring things out. Those brands are old brands who were created in when I would call the limited media era. Meaning they were trained to operate and designed to operate in a very specific way. Now when we look at brands that then exist and were created in a different time, in the infinite media era, they have a radically different format. They don’t just have a different idea of marketing, they have a radically different business model, different structures, and they operate in different ways. Those brands that are old and are having to then transition over, it’s very hard for them to transition from old ideas.
Mathew Sweezey: There’s a great quote, author J. Toynbee and he wrote, I believe it was the magnum opus, the history of the world. You can find the title and put in the comments. But it was essentially this massive document, and it was multiple volumes looking at the history of the world. What he concludes, he says, “The failure of societies is not invasion from outside, it’s not famine, it’s not over consumption.” He says, “Really what it is,” he says that, “Societies that learn to solve problems in one way and are incapable of learning to solve new problems in new ways, are always the ones that fail.” That’s the same is true for business. We have entered a radically environment. That was why this book is so important. Is because it’s the theoretical proof that we have entered a new environment.
Mathew Sweezey: We must learn to play new games. Because the ones we were playing were designed for a different point in time. We can think about this very specifically. Just go back to a couple of the marketing mythos that we all believe and love. Being top of mind. To my response earlier, top of what mind? Can you tell me your spouse’s telephone number? If you can’t even do that, why would we assume you would remember brands? Now all decisions are considered purchases, because we can consider them. This is the biggest factor we must realize, there is risk in any decision a consumer makes.
Mathew Sweezey: Now that a consumer can pull out their phone and in 0.3 seconds, literally a third of a second, can receive hundreds of trusted contextual answers to their question. They now ask questions to mitigate that risk. This is for anything. We would normally think that only expensive things or traditional B2B purchases are considered. Google has found that the search term best toothbrush is growing at a rate of 100% year over year. There is risk in any decision. Now that they have infinite and instant access to trusted information, consumers now go to that to help them make decisions. We must rethink these games that we play.
Roger Dooley: Mm-hmm. I agree with that. Just from my own personal experience standpoint Mathew, I know that not every time, but often if I’m considering even an inexpensive purchase, a $10 item, I will check out Amazon reviews for example to see. Because I personally somehow, and it’s an irrational thing no doubt, but I drive some satisfaction from knowing that I spent a few minutes making this decision, and I got a product that was demonstrably better than most of the other ones. Because this one’s rated 4.7 with 1,000 reviews, and the others aren’t nearly as good. Chances are all of them, let’s say we were talking toothbrushes, chances are all of them would have performed in a more or less indistinguishable fashion. There’s just something comforting about knowing that hey, you spent a minute or two on this and you came up with a better answer.
Mathew Sweezey: You bring up a really good one, reviews. The age old mythos of there is no such thing as bad press. Completely false in the infinite era. Because all bad press is contextual. If you ask the infinite environment for an answer, and there is bad news, it brings that up. Ratings and reviews are an extreme example. Because it’s going to show you all of the bad information about a product. You can ask anyone. I love asking this on stage. I ask the audience, do you ever go to a restaurant or any place with below three stars? The answer is resoundingly no. That is how powerful bad reviews are. They will just stop people from going to you completely. That idea that there is no such thing as bad press is false now.
Roger Dooley: Mm-hmm that’s definitely the case. Now Mathew early in the book you mentioned some interesting research on the performance of marketing organizations, and how some outperformed others by 96 times, which is about two orders of magnitude. Can you unpack that a little bit? How did you measure performance? What was going on here?
Mathew Sweezey: Over the past, and this is the fifth year that we’ve been running the state of marketing research report at Salesforce. What we really have been trying to do is differentiate the differences between high-performing marketing organizations and everybody else. What we’ve been able to conclude is, there’s a couple of very specific things that separate these individuals. As you noted, it is a drastic difference. Now what we classify as a high performer, is an organization that one is completely satisfied with their marketing outcomes, and two, significantly beating their direct competition. Not only do they like the marketing that they’re doing, it’s actually working in the marketplace. Those are the classifications. Now then when we find the number one key differentiator between high performers and under performers, a lot of us would logically think that they’re probably using different technology.
Mathew Sweezey: Now, while that is the case, only to a slight degree. They may be following different thought leaders or using different tactics. Sometimes that’s the case. But really the number one key differentiator between high performers and everyone else, it’s one simple thing. They have full executive buy in to a new idea of marketing, not new marketing ideas. They have completely reversed the idea of what marketing is, and built it up a new. With that they then have different executive positions. We start to see chief experience officers, chief growth officers. They put in a new budget. They have increased budget to buy new technologies that are required to do the basic things that we understand such as realtime execution, omni-channel execution. But it all starts with that new idea of marketing, I’m an executive buyer into that.
Roger Dooley: Mm-hmm. What’s an organization for example, that you could hold up to our listeners as, okay, here’s a company that has gone through that kind of transformation, and is really hitting on all cylinders now?
Mathew Sweezey: That’s a great question. I’m just going to start with one that not necessarily had to transform, but one that started in the new era. Because transforming is very difficult, and most likely transformations happen in very small pointed cases. Let’s talk about a macro and then a micro. A macro case, Mercedes verse Tesla. Mercedes is almost 100 years old. They were created in the limited media era, and their business structure is build, market, sell. Up until the last year, they were known as the world’s best luxury car manufacturer. Now, if we compare the number one most comparable Model Tesla 3 to the Mercedes-Benz C-Class, we see a very specific storyline unfold. We can see the differences in these ideas of marketing and how radical they are.
Mathew Sweezey: In Mercedes, they build a car, marketing is then a byproduct of production, and then takes that product and then tells the world about it with the goal of then selling that product. Now they spend on average of $926 in advertising cost per car sold. In 2017, they sold, I believe it was 86,000 units of the C-Class. Now let’s look at Tesla. Tesla is about how many exactly, I think it’s 13 or 14 years old at this day. Their market cap as of last week was 150 billion, Mercedes is 50 billion. Three times market cap. Now the advertising cost per unit on the Model 3 was six dollars, that’s one, one hundred and fiftieth of Mercedes-Benz. They sold 276,000 units domestically. That’s three times as many cars. The most resounding fact of that number is not that they sold three times as many cars, it’s that the car didn’t exist when they sold those.
Mathew Sweezey: They had never made an economy car before in the history of that brand. Now then we look at the business structure. The business structure is different. Remember, Mercedes, build a car, market a car, sell a car. Tesla, market a car, sell a car, build a car, continue to market through an amazing experience across the entire customer journey. Two radically different ideas. Two radically different outcomes. We can see it from a very high level. Now on a very specific or pointed case, one of my favorite examples is Lego. The title of the book is the Context Marketing Revolution. We haven’t really hit on that yet, so I want to bring that out real quick. The foundation of the limited media era was attention. All of marketing’s games were about grabbing someone’s attention and stealing their attention.
Mathew Sweezey: That was the way that we then told our story. But remember in that media environment, it operated for us. It operated for the brands. We were the ones that had the capital to break through. Now that we live in the infinite media environment, and the owners of the environment are individuals, it now operates for their means and their goals. That is context. We have to understand there’s a new foundation for the new era. Now, if we look at a company that’s been around for 100 years plus, it’s Lego. One of my favorite examples of contextual marketing is Lego and the perfect gift buying bot Ralph. In 2017 Lego said, “All right listen, we understand parents you have a problem. If your kids say, we want Legos and you come to our website, there are thousands of Legos to choose from.
Mathew Sweezey: It could be daunting to understand to buy the perfect Lego.” A lot of parents bounce, leave the site without purchasing. Lego said, “Hey listen, we’re going to create a contextual experience for those people.” Here’s what they did. They put an ad on Facebook. To anyone that had been to the Lego website in the past 30 days, but not bought anything in the past 14, they were served an advertisement on Facebook. Right here most people are going, he’s talking about retargeting, but that’s the exact opposite of what I’m talking about. See, they could have done that. But all that is doing is just forcing a message onto a person, which is really not contextual.
Mathew Sweezey: Instead, what they did, is they invited you to have a conversation with Ralph, the perfect gift buying bot inside of Facebook messenger. That ad would bring you right into Facebook messenger, and you would have a conversation with a chat bot, Ralph. The average, this is the amazing part, the average conversation with Ralph was three minutes. The average order size of those orders, was twice of that of the order on a website. The Ralph gift buying bot accounts for 25% of all online holiday sales in 2017. Because it helped them solve the goal of the moment. That is context. We need to help people solve the goal of the moment. That’s what the focus of our marketing should be.
Roger Dooley: Mm-hmm. What you’re describing reminds me of an experience I had shopping for a computer not that long, about six months ago or a little bit more. I was hunting for a replacement, and switching from a Mac back to PC, for reasons we don’t have to get into now. I visited a few of the major players sites. In one case, and I’m trying to recall, I think it was HP. In order to look at products, first I had to decide if I was a business customer or a consumer. I’m thinking well I’m using this for business and I want business potential. It’s for my business, but I’m not going to be buying 50 of them. Immediately I was stymied, and I couldn’t really get any farther. I wasn’t sure if I chose one if I was limiting what I would see.
Roger Dooley: Where maybe the perfect machine was in the other category, but somehow by doing that… To me this was purely an organizational thing. They had different teams for the two areas, and that’s how they divided up their process. Where you talk about chatbots on dell.com. I had a question about one of the products I was looking at. Amazingly enough the chatbot answered that question very easily within just a couple of seconds. It was truly easier than interacting with a human, which I think we probably had those bot interactions where you ended up being really frustrated because they’ve got a limited menu of options to offer you.
Roger Dooley: You keep wording things different ways and they keep coming back at you with stuff that isn’t all that helpful. But in this case, she, I forget what her name was, but it was a she bot, interpreted my question correctly. Which was something to do with the specifications of a model, and gave me the exact data I was looking for. I think that you really can ease these interactions with the right technology. Also, as you point out, Mathew, with thinking the way your customer might think. Because a customer like me may not know if this is a business purchase or a consumer purchase.
Mathew Sweezey: Let’s take this concept one step further. Bots are a tactical execution of something much, much, much, much grander and larger. This is the convergence of a couple of things people talk about in the marketplace that we see. Voice, number one. When everyone’s talking about Siri, Alexa voice how is voice going to change things? Two, we’re talking about chatbots. Really what we need to be thinking about is conversational interface. Just bear with me for one quick second. Let’s think about one of the richest men in the world, Bill Gates. How did Bill Gates make all of his money? Well, it’s off of three simple letters. GUI, graphical user interface. Before GUI it was a dull space world, and to interact with technology humans had to command the technology via lines of code, command, green screen command DOS.
Mathew Sweezey: Then we move into the GUI world. It was a point and click interface. We are now moving into the conversational world. Don’t think about voice in chatbot, just think about conversational interfaces. How can those solve the friction problems inside any experience? You already brought up one really expertly, not even knowing it. It’s a form. Forms don’t solve needs of consumers. No consumer ever filled out a form was like, “Damn, that was the best experience I’ve ever had in my life.” Because they’re not designed for us. Forms are designed for brands. They don’t help consumers whatsoever. They’re only there to input information into a system in a format. That’s it. But now if we then change that and say, how can we do this in a conversational format?
Mathew Sweezey: We remove all of the problems that consumers have, and now it is a good experience like you just said. We need to think about these things, and then how that then changes the desires of consumers for all experiences. We talk about digital transformation. This is a major thing that we have to think about, of how people will interact with our brands, and via conversation is one. I mean really simple example. For me to pay a bill with my bank, it’s seven clicks. If I had a conversational interface or a bot, all I had to do is tell the bank who to pay and how much and it would be done. Zero clicks, zero friction. That is a better experience via conversation. That’s what I think we should really need to be focusing on is conversational interfaces.
Roger Dooley: Probably want some checks and balances in there, because I’ve had Alexa add some pretty bizarre stuff to my grocery list. I have no idea what fluffy bunnies were, or what I told her that ended up with that on the shopping list. But you wouldn’t want to accidentally empty your checking account or send your 401k contents to somebody. But no, I totally agree. I’m curious as to how you see the conversational thing going. One friction area that I’ve been focused on lately is market research and customer experience research. I’ve proposed that much as Heisenberg said that when you try and measure something you change it. When you try and measure customer experience with a 25 question form, where everything is rated from one to 10, you have greatly diminished that experience. Since you were particularly or you were or are part of the insights group, how do you see that area evolving? Trying to find out what customers thought about the experience.
Mathew Sweezey: There’s a couple of very easy ones. So first off, don’t ever create a bad experience for an individual, and a survey is a bad experience I don’t care how you do it. We need to get past this concept of surveys as a way of scale. We now have a much better way of scale, and that’s artificial intelligence to be able to connect to humans together at the correct right time, guiding the conversation. Let’s just think a little bit farther out. Surveys are horrible methodologies. Like you say, first off, if I ask a consumer what was my experience, it’s not in the moment. Now we’re asking them to reflect on something, and they may not actually have the right remembrance. There’s a lot of problems with asking for surveys. Do I agree with NPS? Yes.
Mathew Sweezey: NPS is a cool thing. Doesn’t need to happen everywhere. Let’s just talk about some tactical ways to do things in very specific scenarios. One of my favorites is this concept of what are marketers even measuring? A lot of marketers measure these large scale things. Did you have a good experience? But now let me pose this question to everyone listening. When was the last time you picked up the telephone and called an individual to ask them about the content that they just experienced or downloaded, to ask them if it actually met their expectation? That’s a simple question. You know how many people have done that globally? Less than one percent have ever done that.
Mathew Sweezey: Now, how many of those have then made that a regular part of their routine? Very few. Here’s why that’s critical, because if we’re only looking at the download metric as it’s a positive experience, more people downloaded it, it must have been a better experience. Here’s what I asked, I did the research. I asked 400 B2B buyers, “Have you ever been disappointed by contents you engage with from a brand?” 71% of them said yes. The most astounding part is not that people have been disappointed, it’s the level of disappointment. 25% of them said that they were so disappointed they would never engage with that brand ever again.
Roger Dooley: That’s pretty disappointed.
Mathew Sweezey: Right, now go back to… But here’s the reason, it’s economics. Go back to Mark’s point about content shock. Opportunity cost. There is so much content out there. Content is a commodity. We don’t need you as a brand to get content or to get answers. Everyone’s making them. If you give me a bad experience once, why would I ever give you another chance? I don’t have to. I can bypass you. That’s the thing we need to think about. That’s really what we need to ask about. We need to actually follow up with people and ask them humanity. Ask one… Three simple questions.
Mathew Sweezey: All the review needs to be is three simple questions. One, when did you come across this? What part of your journey were you? What were you trying to figure out? Two, did this experience meet your expectations? Three, have you found better? Three simple questions all can happen in literally no time flat. You only need to ask six or seven people and you know how to fix an experience if it’s bad. We need to think about these things in different ways and stop trying to force people into bad experiences to help us, and really be more human and just talk to people.
Roger Dooley: Well I think often that data fits into spreadsheets really nicely though. When you’ve got these very granular ratings and all these little categories, it’s great for reporting but not very good for the customer. Of course, so few people actually go through that process it ends up not being particularly representative anyway.
Mathew Sweezey: Here’s my favorite. The worst is when… I’m a massive traveler. Going all over the world, talking at conferences and brands. The thing I hate the most is when I go to a hotel and they send me a how was your stay survey, but never send me my folio. They have my email address, they can communicate with me. But they don’t communicate with me in the way that they should. Rather they say, tell me how I can be better rather than making my experience better.
Roger Dooley: Well, I actually wrote a Forbes piece about hotel surveys. How annoying they were, and even at the end of the day, how they failed to ask the right questions. Even if you answered all 100 of their stupid little bubble matrix questions, you would not have necessarily hit on the one thing that you wanted to tell them about that was either really good or really bad about your experience there. That just drives me crazy. But do you see chatbots as a way of conducting that kind of research? I have not encountered this anywhere, but perhaps particularly after an online interaction if a friendly sounding bot said, “Hey, do you have a minute to answer a quick question,” I might engage with it.
Mathew Sweezey: I don’t have any data on that. Once again, I think that it could be useful, it could be beneficial. However, the exact same time, a human could just pick up the phone and be prompted to do that. When we start to really scale how much data do you really need to understand if it’s a good experience or not, it’s really not massive amounts of data. The reason we have to ask so many people is because it’s such a bad experience, not many people that fill out those surveys. If we just really create a good experience and get correct data, we really don’t have to do it all that much to really get the numbers and the data that we need. I truly believe that we can simply get to that information via automation and artificial intelligence. Just simply using basic Boolean logic. If then, then do this. If this scenario then have this person call and follow up, ask these questions put it back into the system and we’re done.
Roger Dooley: Mm-hmm. I keep advocating for really simple forms that might include say three or four or five emojis about your total experience, and then a big open space where you could comment anything that you found was important. I think then you might get far more people responding, instead of the 0.1% that fill out these horrendously long surveys. But you bring up another point there in how people like to communicate. Because I would not want to get a call from a brand after an experience there, That I would find annoying. Believe it or not today, just before we chatted or we’re chatting now, I had my own weird experience of being shoved into a method of communication that I didn’t want. I had shipped something by FedEx yesterday.
Roger Dooley: I dropped it off in one of their boxes. I arrived there well before, like 20 minutes before the pickup time. I noticed the flag was up saying that it had been collected, but I assumed that was an error because it was so much before the time. I dropped my box in and then, well later I checked and FedEx.com, and indeed it had not been picked up. In fact they said there was an exception on the shipment because you failed to drop it off on time. It’s aggravated me because I was on time, they were way early apparently. But I said, okay, I’m just going to let them know. I looked for a contact form or an email, and all I could find were toll free numbers to interact with them. I hunted around, I couldn’t find anything.
Roger Dooley: Finally I sent them a tweet and I said, “Hey, I couldn’t find a form or an email. I just wanted to communicate about this.” This may or may not surprise you. They did respond quickly. They have apparently a good social media group. What did they say? He said, “Hey DM us your phone number so we can call you.” Which is basically the interaction that I was trying to avoid. I just want to let them know about my experience and not really engage with them in a conversation. But it’s when you get locked into this is how we do things here and if you want to interact with us, you got to do it our way, I think that upsets customers.
Mathew Sweezey: For certain. Because we’re trained that in our world when it operates for our needs, we can get anything in the way that we want it. That’s one of the biggest problems that brands have a problem with in two ways. One, is being able to scale to all the different ways that people would like to interact with us. Making it efficient and effective. Two, the fact that we now have to be in all these places at a high level degree of efficiency to create positive experiences. It’s a problem, but those that solve it have great returns and are thriving in the marketplace.
Roger Dooley: Mm-hmm. Mathew in your examples you named a couple of big brands. Not every company has an Elon Musk on Twitter, which is a pretty powerful marketing tool. Lego has considerable resources themselves. What about smaller organizations? How should they be thinking about this?
Mathew Sweezey: The easiest thing we need to be thinking about is human to human. How do we connect two humans together? Often the time brands think, how can I create a message that’s so compelling that I can force it out into the marketplace, and everyone’s just going to love it and it’s going to do everything I want to do? That’s how most of us are trained to think about marketing. Singular grandeur. But what we really need to think about is human to human experiences, and make sure they’re connected. It’s a different thought pattern. Think about a couple of basic ideas. One, social media. Rather than us creating a message and forcing it out, what if instead, basic concept, employee advocacy? This is not a new concept. But why it works is because those are messages coming from individuals.
Mathew Sweezey: When I say human to human, let me define human to human and put it in context of what came before it. One-to.one. One-to-one is a methodology where one brand creates one message for one person and that moment. But that’s still one brand to one individual. Now what do people trust more than a brand? They trust other humans. What’s the apex? It’s human to human. One human talking to another human on a brand’s behalf. That could be an employee, that could be an advocate. There’s so many different avenues that it could be. If we start to think in those ways, we can now start to scale. Having messages come out from our employees. If you do this basic mathematics, social organic reach.
Mathew Sweezey: If you have a brand, the average B2B brands a smaller scale SNB, 50,000 person audience. It only takes five employees sharing to eclipse the organic reach of a brand with 50,000 followers on any social channel. That’s a really simple concept. Another simple concept is the idea of with not on. Let’s stop trying to come up with ways that we can creatively force our messages on people, and start to work with them to create these things in the first place. SeemLy is a great example. They’re a small clothing company. They work with their audience. Remember that model from Tesla, market, sell, build.
Mathew Sweezey: They are working with their marketplace to actually design the clothing. Then selling it before it’s ever made, then building it, and then continuing to market through an amazing experience as we all know what a good retail experience should be. But that’s a small company. We need to just start thinking in different ways, and these ideas apply to everyone of large scale to small scale. They’re just the games that we have to play given the new environment, and it doesn’t matter how big or small you are.
Roger Dooley: Mm-hmm. That reminds me of one little statistic that I’ve used. I think it came from Clayton Christensen may he rest in peace. Great loss for the industry. But he said that 95% of all new products fail. I would guess he was in most cases not referring to customer design products, rather these are products that somebody either in production or maybe even in marketing had a genius idea, said, okay, this product is what consumers are looking for. They create it, and it ends up not selling. Where if you’re taking the approach that you described, where you are pre-selling the product before you even make the darn thing, that product is probably not going to fail. The idea might fail initially, but you’re not going to have a product failure on your hands.
Mathew Sweezey: You’re much less likely to have a product failure when you’re working with the marketplace. There’s a lot of pushback. People are saying, “Well, Steve Jobs would have argued against that theory.” I was like, well yeah, not everyone is Steve Jobs. Not all of our companies are headed by Steve Jobs or Elon Musk to your point. Those are rare creatures in a very rare world. We must think about how do we scale these ideas, and how must the rest of us work and operate? Not to mention he had plenty of failed ideas. Steve jobs was not everything that he touched to turn to gold. There are lots of failures in his past. Yes, working with our marketplaces. This then brings up a lot of other themes, right? Customer centricity, market centricity.
Mathew Sweezey: There’s a great… I don’t remember who posted this the other day, but he was talking about let’s look at all these brands. Tesla didn’t win because they created the best electric car. No, they were the best attuned to the market. Uber didn’t win because they created a ride share app. No, the taxi industry totally just messed up, and didn’t even understand what customers actually wanted, so a brand that can actually deliver what customers wanted wins. We just must really make sure we work with the market and stay glued into what consumers are actually wanting, rather than just trying to come up with ideas and force them on them.
Roger Dooley: That seems like a really good line to end on Mathew. Today we are speaking with Mathew Sweezey, director of market strategy for Salesforce and author of the new book, the Context Marketing Revolution. Mathew, how can people find you?
Mathew Sweezey: I’m on LinkedIn. You can find me Mathew Sweezey on LinkedIn as well as on Twitter. That’s M Sweezey on Twitter.
Roger Dooley: Great. Mathew if you are searching has one T, which is not necessarily the most common spelling. If you want to find Mathew on Google, use one T. There is an E in Sweezey. Anyway, we will link to there and to any other resources we spoke about on the show notes page at rogerdooley.com/podcast. We’ll have a text version of our conversation there too. Mathew, this is a really timely book. Thanks for being on the show.
Mathew Sweezey: Thanks for having me.
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.
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