Days of Thunder: B2B Marketing Lessons from the 1990 Tom Cruise Movie with Director of Content Marketing at Fictiv, Ricky Frohnerath

What do a marketer and a racecar driver have in common? You’re about to find out. 

One thing we can say is that going as fast as you can leads to burnout. That’s one of the things we’re talking about in this episode.

We’re taking marketing lessons from the 1990 Tom Cruise flick Days of Thunder with the help of our special guest, Director of Content Marketing at Fictiv, Ricky Frohnerath.

Together, we talk about being strategic instead of fast, speaking the same language as your team, and building contingency plans in case your campaigns don’t go as expected.

About our guest, Ricky Frohnerath

Ricky Frohnerath is Director of Content Marketing for San Francisco-based Fictiv, leading comprehensive content strategy and execution for all marketing campaigns, across all funnel stages and audiences. He specializes in building and managing cross-functional marketing teams for manufacturing and technology organizations. He's the A proponent of agile marketing methodology, servant leadership, self-management principles, and empowerment, his focus is on people first, then process, and then technology. A longtime resident of the Tampa Bay area, his education includes the Pinellas County Center for the Arts, St. Petersburg College, and the University of South Florida. Ricky is an amateur racing driver and avid enthusiast of electric vehicles, who believes in the power of uniting personal and professional values to drive positive change. Thus, he's passionate about accelerating sustainability by sparking and sharing conversations with leaders in electrification, motorsport, and industry.

What B2B Companies Can Learn From Days of Thunder:

• Be strategic, not fast. If you try to go as fast as you can, you burn out or make mistakes. Slowing down just a bit to make sure your work is high quality and highly effective actually means you’ll work faster in the end. In Days of Thunder, Ricky says that Cole Trickle’s “quest is to find ultimate speed. He's actually over driving the tires and he's driving faster than [his competitors] can. And what happens when you're over driving the tires is that they get greasy and they start to degrade faster. So this is a problem because if you destroy your tires, then you have to come into the pits and that takes time.” So instead Cole learns to drive more efficiently by speeding up or slowing down strategically based on his coach’s advice. So slow down to work more efficiently and effectively.
• Speak the same language as your team. Communication becomes so much more efficient and effective when you share shorthand and jargon. Ricky says, “When you're on a team, you need to be speaking the same language. You need to have a shared lexicon so that there is this transmission of understanding. You need to know what's working, you need to know what's not working, and you need to know what you're talking about.”
• Build in wiggle room in case things don’t go right. If you hit a bump in the road, giving yourself a little extra time in the planning process for your campaign takes the pressure off. Ricky says, “Things are not going to go according to plan. You need to build in some agility and the ability to kind of compensate when it comes time to actually execute.” So give yourself room to breathe with your next campaign timeline. That way, you can correct any issues without stressing over deadlines. In Days of Thunder, it’s like when they plan, design and build Cole Trickle’s car and then it gets destroyed in an early race and they have to figure out how to pivot.

Quotes

*”I think it's fairly common for there to be conflict, especially between marketing and sales. One of the ways that you can overcome this is by having a shared language. Understand and adopt the KPIs that the sales team are going after. So, for example, one area where marketing and sales become misaligned is marketing likes to talk about big metrics, like impressions, eyeballs, even things like conversions. But these are KPIs that really don't translate well into the sales world. Like they are interested in leads and they're keeping an eye on sales and revenue and things like that. So make those metrics, your metrics and understand how the marketing activities roll into those KPIs. It's not to say that you don't keep track of impressions and a lot of other things that kind of get labeled as vanity metrics, but understand how you go from an impression down into revenue.”

*”If you're overdriving the tires, you're effectively leading to burnout. I think the same is true when we think about high performance teams. The best that somebody can perform is at the limit of their abilities. There is no 110%. You can only do the best that you can at the peak of your ability. You can't give that extra 10%. So forcing you to do that is actually going to have a detrimental effect. So I think that's super important to keep in mind for marketing teams.”

*”Marketers in general just need to have a very good understanding of who you're connecting with, who you're marketing to.  And I think in general we do a pretty good job of that. I think that authenticity is so important for a very targeted audience and especially one that is  extremely cognizant of inauthenticity.”

Time Stamps

[0:55] Meet Ricky Frohnerath, Director of Content Marketing at Fictiv

[7:05] Behind the Scenes of Days of Thunder

[12:32] Passion Projects and Marketing Lessons

[21:35] The Story of Days of Thunder

[23:44] Marketing Lessons from Days of Thunder

[25:33] Planning and Agility in Marketing

[28:40] Communication and Trust in Teams

[32:54] Burnout and High Performance

Links

Connect with Ricky on LinkedIn

Learn more about Fictiv

About Remarkable!

Remarkable! is created by the team at Caspian Studios, the premier B2B Podcast-as-a-Service company. Caspian creates both nonfiction and fiction series for B2B companies. If you want a fiction series check out our new offering - The Business Thriller - Hollywood style storytelling for B2B. Learn more at CaspianStudios.com. 

In today’s episode, you heard from Ian Faison (CEO of Caspian Studios) and Meredith Gooderham (Senior Producer). Remarkable was produced this week by Meredith Gooderham, mixed by Scott Goodrich, and our theme song is “Solomon” by FALAK. 

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