Marketing Trends

There is an old saying that in every tragedy there is an opportunity. Sometimes it’s our darkest moments that we find a way to make the world a better place, and that’s exactly what Christine de Wendel, Co-Founder and CEO US Sunday sought out to do during the pandemic. Today marketers are all trying to create a frictionless experience. Or simply, a better buying experience for the consumer. But what is less seamless than waiting on the person to bring you the bill? Sunday sought to rectify this, and they did. “We said, if we want to get to market really quickly and take advantage of this incredible wave, and this opportunity that has come out of the COVID pandemic, we need to make [payment] really easy. And so our solution is we put a QR code on the table. We map it to the point of sale system. It allows you as a consumer to scan the QR code on the table, see the menu, order like many restaurants already had, but then pull up your bill and pay. And so we're transforming something that used to take 15 minutes and we're turning it into a ten second experience” Sunday’s technology is simple, but has innovated the restaurant industry in ways that has staying power.. Not only is it creating a smoother process for consumers, but it also has the possibility to give businesses a better sense of who they are working with while also creating more personalized experiences.. On Marketing Trends, Christine takes us through the process of jumping on an opportunity, how to scale quickly while finding good candidates regardless of market, and, the importance of a strong central branding and so much more on this episode of Marketing Trends.Main TakeawaysQR Codes should be an important part of your business.They help make payments smoother for your consumers.It’s important for a start up to over invest in brand identity.Hiring local experts when expanding globally is important to understand the culture and mindset of customers.It’s important to have a strong central brand, but allow for flexibility in local markets.When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re going to have extreme emotional highs and lows as you see your idea come to life.Key Quotes“We said, if we want to get to market really quickly and take advantage of this incredible wave and this opportunity that has come out of the pandemic, we need to make it really easy. And so our solution is we put a QR code on the table. We map it to the point of sale system. It allows you as a consumer to scan the QR code on the table, see the menu, order like many restaurants already had, but then pull up your bill and pay. And so we're transforming something that used to take 15 minutes and we're turning it into ten-secondnd experience”“As an early stage startup, you over-invest in brand.”“We've had great traction and great partnerships with most of the point of sales because they realize that it's a very fragmented market and that working with us means that we're really building something that's going to address 70, 80, 90, 100 percent of the market, as opposed to just their customer base.”“Entrepreneurs will tell you this every day, it is full of challenges and the ups and downs of building a company like this are incredible. Seeing your product live is so rewarding and the stress and the anxiety of making sure that you're building a really robust product that won't disappoint is also extremely nice. I love the enthusiasm we're getting, and am extremely appreciative of my teams because I never thought it would be such a roller coaster in terms of emotions. It's really a call out to other entrepreneurs that this is exciting, but this can be so hard. BioChristine de Wendel is the co-founder and CEO of Sunday, a QR-based payment platform that improves the ease of the guest checkout experience. Prior to Sunday, Christine became an expert in European E-commerce. Between 2020 and 2017, Christine was Chief Operating Officer of ManoMano, one of France’s fastest growing tech companies and Europe’s leading online platform for home improvement.  Prior to joining ManoMano, Christine spent seven years at Zalando, Europe’s largest online fashion retailer, where she built up the Paris office and managed Zalando’s French business.  Christine began her career as a consultant with Bain & Company in Paris and New York.  She is currently working on a new venture.Christine holds a BSc in International Affairs from Georgetown University, an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics and an MBA from INSEAD.  Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Christine has American, French and Austrian citizenship. She currently lives in Atlanta with her husband and three children after spending 15 years in Paris.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Technology has been disrupting the journalism industry to its core for decades. As younger generations come of age, the need to keep them informed in ways that reach and speak to them requires moving into new verticals, and maybe even thinking about who your competitors are differently. After all, what is news today? How is it consumed, ingested, and most importantly where is it coming from? Mayur Gupta, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Gannett, knows this because he’s living it, and if there on thing he’s focused on now, it’s reaching that younger generation.“We want to continue to index younger and younger. That's the growth segment we want to penetrate. So we are evolving and making a lot of investment in evolving our experiences, our content, the verticals. We are using a lot of those signals to identify what are the types of content? What formats, what type of experiences should we mark premium? At the same time, what does a premium experience look and feel like? And we know that as a user, you are living in this world where there's no dearth of great content. We don't compare ourselves with other journalism brands. We compare ourselves with the Netflix’s, the Apple’s, the Spotify’s of the world because in the end, it's all content. Their world perhaps begins and indexes more on fiction. If you ask me in one phrase, my vision for the company, me personally, I would love to build a Netflix for non-fiction content which is the premier source and destination.”Building a new brand identity in an established empire like Gannett is no small task. Mayur, listed as one of Forbes World’s Most Influential CMOs, explains how he taught marketing to himself while on the road for another job. In this episode he shows how he’s taken the helm at one of journalism’s most respected brands, and is driving the company towards reaching younger audiences as a growth strategy. He gives some insight into his strategy on unifying large and non-monolithic systems that have been in place for years. Plus, he shares some of the big lessons he learned at companies such as Freshly, and Spotify. All this up next on Marketing Trends. Main Takeaways:Index to a Younger Crowd: One of the best places to go when thinking about growth, as a legacy brand, is thinking about how to reach a different demographic or population with your product or service. Change the format, the style, the content itself, and then begin testing and looking at the numbers to find what’s working. Get creative with how you see yourself as an organization to open yourself up to more opportunities for expanding into new verticals. Building a Strong Brand: Also a unique challenge for legacy brands is thinking about how to quantify and show the metrics on an audioce that’s been following you for decades, and that you’ve never-before had this kind of understanding about. You just need to get creative with the numbers to help show the ‘top of funnel’ investment impact on efficiency of your growth marketing efforts. The Challenge of Unifying a Non-Monolithic System: One of the challenges in working with a company that has over 100 years of brand history and legacy also means that there might be a lot of piece-meal tech in place that you have to address. Updating the infrastructure for content management, and implementing a universal tech stack for the data ecosystem might be the best first step to take in order to have trust and confidence in your data moving forward. Key Quotes:“There was no marketing for dummies. I would go back because I would be into so much pressure talking to these guys who build these ad servers that are serving hundreds of billions of impressions. And they're talking about pixels and encryption, I had no clue. I didn't even know what a publisher was, what a target is, what a venue and a placement is because I'm coming from a totally different world. So I would go to Wikipedia. I would go back to my hotel, and I would understand, ‘oh, this is what they mean.’””There is something inherent for kids at least in my time who came from countries like India and many more where you have way more number of people and applicants than the opportunities that are within the ecosystem where when you get an A your parents don't get a back then the parents would not get excited. You got an ‘A’  grade. They want to know who else got an ‘A plus’ because [unless] you are coming first at something, you don't really have a shot at getting anywhere because they're just not enough resources.”“It’s an unusual challenge and a role that I took on and feel very grateful and fortunate to have been given the opportunity. It's an evolution from a hundred-year-old legacy advertising-led media business that has been typically obsessed with eyeballs and traffic to now fundamentally pivoting, to becoming a subscription content business that needs to be obsessed with user value and no longer eyeballs. That's a 180 degree turn all the way from what data you store and what KPIs and what north star metrics are relevant to the mind and the culture and so on.” “When you build that strong brand, that is culturally connected the challenge that we have on our site that we have to own is ‘how do you prove that incrementality with data, not just with emotion, how do you get creative with data and prove that the growth of your top of funnel investment, the growth in that brand of affinity actually has an impact on the efficiency of your growth marketing efforts in terms of efficiency in your cap, in terms of incrementality in your retention rate or a higher lifetime value until we bring that data.”“We are investing just as much in data engineering and cleaning that up and looking for an organization like us, which is a portfolio of 260 brands within local markets. That's the massive challenge because this company has grown with a series of acquisitions and mergers over the last four or five decades. We are not on a monolithic system. We've come a long, long way. We now have a universal content management system. We now have universal instrumentation and we are now getting a universal stack when it comes to our data ecosystem. So that's the mechanical part, building the muscle to understand how we apply all these different levels and variables to predict the future.”“We want to continue to index younger and younger. That's the growth segment we want to penetrate. So we are evolving and making a lot of investment in evolving our experiences, our content, the verticals. We are using a lot of those signals to identify what are the types of content? What formats, what type of experiences should we mark premium? At the same time, what does a premium experience look and feel like? And we know that as a user, you are living in this world where there's no dearth of great content. We don't compare ourselves with other journalism brands. We compare ourselves with the Netflix’sthe Apple’s, the Spotify’s of the world, because at the end, it's all content. Their world perhaps begins and indexes more on fiction. If you ask me in one phrase, my vision for the company, me personally, I would love to build a Netflix for non-fiction content which is the premier source and destination.”Bio:Mayur Gupta served on Gannett’s Board of Directors from October 2019 to September 2020, when he was named Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer. Prior to joining Gannett, Mr. Gupta was Chief Marketing Officer at Freshly, a growing food-tech company. Mr. Gupta has led digital initiatives at several companies, including VP of Growth and Marketing at Spotify and as Executive Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer of Healthgrades, a healthcare scheduling platform. Mr. Gupta was the first Chief Marketing Technologist at Kimberly-Clark. In 2014, Mr. Gupta was recognized as one of the “40 under 40” leading marketers in the industry by Brand Innovators.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Your employees are arguably the most important part of your business. Giving them a good employee experience means keeping up-to-date on important HR deadlines and notices, such as giving raises, as one example. Amy Frampton, Head of Marketing, BambooHR, wants to help both parties, employers and employees, navigate the sometimes frustrating process of onboarding and managing staff. “Everyone's worried about onboarding now. Folks who are in construction or retail may be worried about onboarding remotely, and on-site versus in a home office. We break it down into [questions] What are they most worried about? They're worried about their culture. They're worried about their experience, and people being connected. They're worried about things that are just mandatory to get. Making sure people get their time off and making sure they get paid well, and all those things are pretty consistent.”Keeping your employees happy and feeling valued will keep them around longer, and that’s good for the bottom line. In this conversation, Amy goes over her thought-making process behind its current channel mix, and how she thinks about aligning her strategy to customer signals. How BambooHR is getting creative with the nudges they’re able to program into apps such as Slack to improve employee experience. Think more about how you might be able to relieve onboarding stress at your business for both your employees and your managers in this conversation with Amy here on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysBots at Their Best: A.I. can be used in a variety of ways. One such use case is  to nudge employees and managers to help them stay on top of their game on HR tasks, thereby creating a better employee experience. Making those important connections about pay, benefits, or time-off is easier when you don’t even have to remember to set a reminder. Onboarding Overload: The workplace has changed for many the past year and a half and as many companies are staffing back up in a big way, fears about onboarding new staff are mounting. Each industry has its own concerns about best practices around even just the most simple things, such as staying up to date on benefits and time-off.Notice Shifts in Your Customer’s Patterns to Keep Providing Value: The best brands and marketers stay agile because people are always evolving and changing themselves.  To serve their needs, you need to think about the ways that major world events are impacting their lives and the ways they interact with your content. Key Quotes“We're looking at how we think about nudges employee experience is the ultimate goal of those that use Bamboo. My company's growing super fast. I need a great employee experience. We know there's the ‘great resignation’ going on, but we also just want a great employee experience better for our teams, better for our customers. So we are looking at A.I. nudges right now within slack and in other places where we can say things like, ‘Hey, did you know, so-and-so hasn't had a raise in a year. You might want to look at that; or [they] haven’t taken time off or, ‘Hey, I saw you just got a raise. You might want to look at your 401k contributions.’ Automating some of those nudges so that it gets easier and easier to make those connections.”“Our partnerships are super important. Our HR users can do everything they need. Our payroll is U.S.-only so we've got great partners in Canada; we've got great partners in the UK etc. We've got a hundred partners in our marketplace through API and they can basically build a custom platform for their country.”“Everyone's worried about onboarding now. Folks who are in construction or retail may be worried about onboarding remotely, and on-site versus in a home office, but they're still worried about onboarding and we break it down into [questions] What are they most worried about? They're worried about their culture. They're worried about their experience, and people being connected. They're worried about things that are just mandatory to get. Making sure people get their time off and making sure they get paid well, and all those things are pretty consistent.”“You have to think about what little nuggets can you give people during their day to allow them to engage with your brand without assuming that they're doing all the things they used to do. [For example,] right now I personally love a shorter podcast because I'm not driving to work. I used to drive an hour and 15 minutes each way.”BioAs head of marketing at BambooHR, Amy focuses on creating compelling marketing experiences with the product, people, and brand together. Amy joined BambooHR in April 2020, bringing with her almost 20 years of marketing and leadership experience at several companies including Smartsheet, Microsoft, HPE, and Vulcan.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Marketing leaders are faced with a litany of challenges, an ocean of tools, and seemingly infinite amounts of data, which can all get a bit overwhelming. Ingrid Burton, CMO of Quantcast, is passionate about the industry and on Marketing Trends she discusses with me some of the obstacles the modern marketer faces. “The challenges of today's CMO are very different than the challenges of even five years ago, 10 years ago. It is such a fast-moving space and CMOs have to be well versed in strategy and data in understanding the market. It's such a big job now. I wonder how my fellow CMOs are doing, because like I said, I started my day at four-thirty this morning because I lay awake at night with all these asks and I [wonder] how am I gonna get it all done? Do I have the right team on the field? Can we really execute this? Can we measure our results and make sure we're getting the attribution that we need. We need to be thinking about how we make sure CMOs don't burn out. How do we make sure CMOs are able to lead through this? And how do we make sure that the expectations are realistic?” There will never be an end to all of the additional things a marketer does, another channel to add to the mix, but be careful not to push yourself or your team beyond your limits. In this episode, Ingrid unpacks what they mean at Quantcast when they talk about providing a free and open internet. She delves into her passion and in-depth knowledge of machine learning, and how marketers can best utilize their endless amount of tools. She also explains why ESG is going to be a main driver for them next year and how they’re ensuring true Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion. There’s so much to enjoy, up ahead with Ingrid here on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysThe Challenges of the Modern CMO: The rapid pace of the software-driven industry is a lot to keep up with. Getting more data and analytics capabilities has driven a lot of growth in the last 5-10 years. The constant rush of information combined with the constant demand to put information out can lead some of even the most passionate marketers to burnout. Guarding against that is going to be what separates the leaders of the future. The expectations of many CMOs and marketing leaders are very high. The Value of a Free and Open Internet: The value of having clear and factual information widely acknowledged and accepted in culture is essential for unity. The internet disrupted the journalism industry, and this change has brought about the conversion to subscription fee-based models over the traditional ad-based mode. This means that some people don’t have access to the factual information they could be learning their news from. Machine Learning - The Power of Noticing Patterns: Pattern recognition is one of the most useful tools in leadership and in scaling business. Machines that can be taught to recognize certain patterns can do so and scan the entire database instantaneously. If you can notice patterns in marketing that can help you predict what your customers may be interested in or looking for at certain times of the year, times of day, devices, or locations. The power of machine learning in marketing is just in the early stages.Key Quotes“Hopefully I don't say ‘I’ too much. I always want to say ‘we’ - We did this. We did that. I'm just the guide; here's the north star we want to take. Or as I put it, here's the mountain we need to take. I put that out there very early on. I think my team here was very surprised. And when I showed them just a few baby steps of how you're gonna climb small hills to get to the top of the peak, they saw that they could do it. They accomplished it. Some of it's confidence-building and having them believe in themselves.”“Who can afford to subscribe to all these news publications. There's gotta be a different way. I'm afraid for a society that if we charge for every piece of content, what's going to happen to people that can't afford it [is that] they're gonna be left behind. They get left behind because they're not getting the right news. The internet is a great equalizer and we need to make sure that it's not a fee-based internet.” “One of the things that's unique about Quantcast is we have this unique, real-time data set and it's one of the largest in the world behind Google and Facebook. Since we started the company, we have established a relationship with all the publishers out there. This is Hurst which is huge, Conde Nast...we have a hundred million websites. Their data is feeding into this anonymized data set. That is one of the largest actually running in the Amazon cloud, one of the largest that they have. We're using machine learning to find patterns and make predictions about the behavior of what's happening in this data set.”“The challenges of today's CMO, are very different than the challenges of even five years ago, 10 years ago. It is such a fast-moving space and CMOs have to be well versed in strategy and data in understanding the market. It’s such a big job now. I wonder how my fellow CMOs are doing, because like I said, I started my day at four-thirty this morning because I lay awake at night with all these asks coming at me and I [wonder] how am I gonna get it all done? Do I have the right team on the field? Can we really execute to this? Can we measure our results and um, really make sure we're getting the attribution that we need. We need to really be thinking about how do we make sure CMOs don't burn out? How do we make sure CMOs are able to lead through this? And how do we make sure that the expectations are realistic?”BioIngrid Burton is a unique leader in the world of tech as she bridges the gap between technology and marketing in leading teams to unparalleled successes driving strategies for market trends including AI and machine learning, Java and HANA technologies, SaaS, Cloud Computing, Open Source, Internet of Things (IOT), community engagement and Big Data that have had a positive impact on the evolving technology landscape.Ingrid’s career includes her role as a member of the board of directors at Extreme Networks. She also held the role of Chief Marketing Officer at H2O.ai, the open source leader in AI and machine learning, where she led marketing teams while positioning the company through its growth stages. Prior to H2O.ai, Ingrid advised companies including DriveScale, MapR (acquired by HPE) and Paxata (acquired by DataRobot). She was CMO of Hortonworks, a Big Data company, where she drove a brand and marketing transformation, positioning the company for growth and subsequent acquisition.Ms. Burton led the Product and Innovation marketing team at SAP, where she was the marketing leader of SAP HANA, analytics, and mobile offerings, and where she co-created the company Cloud strategy. As CMO of pre-IPO Silver Spring Networks, she positioned the company for their IPO as the leader in energy networks. While CMO at Plantronics she reshaped a 50-year-old brand into a modern and exciting communications model for both consumers and business.Previously at Sun Microsystems, Ingrid held various leadership roles including head of marketing for the company, driving both the company and Java brand, global citizenship, championing open source initiatives, and leading product and strategic marketing teams. Early in her career, Ingrid was a developer.Ms. Burton actively engages with and mentors people in both technology and business functions, and provides guidance for them in their careers. She has received numerous awards including the 2005 Silicon Valley TWIN award.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Bringing new people into your business is exciting and it’s important to get the right match, all the way down to someone who fits that stage of the company. Through experience building great teams in her career, Amanda Malko, now the CMO at G2, knows what to look for in job candidates. Going beyond assessing their ability to complete tasks and looking for a future team member who is right for this stage of your company. High-performance team building takes an added layer of thoughtfulness as she explains.“I look for people who are right for the stage of the business are excited for whatever stage that is. I've worked with very large enterprise companies and I've worked at smaller startups. And in my experience, people are at different life stages ready for different size companies, and excited about the opportunities and challenges that those companies provide. So not just hiring for skill and skill fit, but also hiring for stage fit is really important.”Not everyone who’s good at working at a corporation is good at working in a startup environment, and the sooner you find that out, the better! In this episode, Malko, an expert in the world of martech, gives insight into how she thinks about testing new tools, and the way she determines usefulness. She shares great insight from personal experience about how to get the survey results you need to make the best choice for your business. Get a pen, and get ready to take some notes on this episode of Marketing Trends. Main Takeaways:Over-Indexing on Immediately Gratifying Ad Spend to Your Detriment: Keep your marketing budget diversified across channels, resisting the temptation to over-index on the immediately gratifying or easy to measure. It is easy to get drawn into the depths of marketing analytics because that is important and essential to running a good marketing team.Every Detail, Down to Word Choice Impacts Survey Results: Direct communication with your customers is the best way to know what they want from you and your product or service. Running a useful and accurate survey is more complex than dropping some questions into a Google Form and blasting that out to your email list. Every word that you use in your questions, the way you order the questions, and the format you choose to allow your respondent to select will all impact the data that is generatedRetention of Customers is Essential for Growth - Don’t Over Invest in Acquisition: Especially as a new business or brand, it’s easy to get caught up in the hustle for new eyeballs. Even as a newer company, you should have already been thinking about what is going to keep people around. The value of a returning customer is the foundation for a strong business and for the growth of the company.Key Quotes:“We hear a lot about sales and marketing fighting for credit. It's really hard for that to happen if you have shared goals if you're both driving towards the same pipeline of revenue goals and you're getting at it in complementary ways, but if you each have your own targets and they don't align at the top that is where you get a lot of that.”“Because more things are going digital and you can measure more. As a result, we tend to over-index in what's measurable and immediately gratifying. That's true to who we are as humans. Social media is instantly gratifying and that's [also] true with our budget. You put a dollar in and within three months you see the dollar out, who doesn't love that?”“I really look for people who are right for the stage of the business and are excited for whatever stage that is. I've worked with very large enterprise companies and I've worked at smaller startups. And in my experience, people are at different life stages ready for different size companies, and excited about the opportunities and challenges that those companies provide. So not just hiring for skill and skill fit, but also hiring for stage fit is really important.”“A lot of software businesses are waking up to [the fact that] retention is sort of the foundation for growth. If you over-index on the acquisition, you're going to find that in a couple of years, (maybe even in a year) you've got a leaky bucket. Make retention the number one metric, if you put those acquisitions. And so we do; retention is our number one metric, followed by acquisition.” “Some best practices [for surveying] are: Be focused on what you're trying to achieve. In surveys the longer the survey, the less likely are you to get [a lower] number of participants, but [also lower] quality of the feedback. Be really clear about what's essential and what's kind of nice to have. Definitely know how you're going to evaluate it cause that'll inform what tool you use. Ask the right questions.” Bio:Amanda Malko is the CMO at G2. She is a go-to-market leader who thrives on leading high-performing, cross-functional teams. Her career focus is on hyper-growth companies working at the intersection of marketing/creativity/technology.Formerly she was the lead of the partner marketing and programs team at Mailchimp, Inc's 2017 Company of the Year and G2's #4 Best Software Company, and before then she was CMO of 360i, named one of the 25 most influential marketing agencies of the 21st century (acquired by Dentsu) and CMO of Tongal, a global creative marketplace with 120,000 writers, directors, and animators. She’s served as Head of Marketing of IgnitionOne, a SaaS ad tech platform, and was the first sales and marketing hire at Massive, a video game advertising platform (acquired by Microsoft). She is a regular advisor to SaaS startups and media companies.She frequently writes and speaks on marketing in the digital age, and has appeared in publications and on stage with AdAge, MediaPost, Mashable, AMA, 4As, Forrester Marketing Forum, CMO Assembly, and others.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

The next business frontier, in terms of physical spaces, is not one you can physically walk on. I’m talking about outer space, and I’m talking about it today with my friend, Jason Held, CEO of Saber Astronautics. I got to know Jason a few years back by chance, and immediately was captivated by his story, his passion, and his ground-breaking work in the space industry. Based in Boulder, Colorado, and in Sydney, Australia, Jason and his team are creating access to new areas of the space industry through better game-like user interfaces. Navigating business ‘friendly-enemy’ relationships in the industry and operating in the complex world of business to government relationships is no small feat, but Jason saw an opportunity as a new graduate and couldn’t say no. “Business to government, if you know how to play that game, is really lucrative. Fast forward, I did my Ph.D. in Australia, this was about 2007 when I was graduating, and there was a new category of satellites called CubeSats. If you think about the size of a spacecraft back then for an industry-level mission and things that are doing satellite communications or, or earth observation, things that produce large amounts of money, these historically are half a billion-dollar spacecraft, massive infrastructure required to do something like that. Well, the new category was what had just been embedded between 2005/2007 and they were the size of a toaster. The cost for starting your space company was less than half the cost of a juice bar range.”Lowering that financial barrier to entering the space industry was all it took for Jason to dive in. In this episode, he walks us through his process of disrupting the space industry by creating Saber Astronautics. He talks about the complexities of their business model working with both governments, and businesses. Jason shares about how their innovative PIGI software was created,  and the rise of downstream space industry service companies and micro-industries like this. He’s predicting cool things for the future in space - all this up next on Marketing Trends. Main Takeaways:Business to Government Model: It’s not one talk about a lot on this show but it creates some fun challenges in every aspect of the business. Biggest words of wisdom are, be ready to fight. The contracts are lucrative which means there’s some fierce competition for them. When you get into government contract work, know that the voices of doubt won’t just be coming from inside of your head; the government contracting industry is cut-throat. Space Traffic Regulation Is Coming: The amount of space debris, and operating satellites spinning constantly over our heads is increasing every day, and therefore so is the need for regulation and safety policies. Who should set these, what exactly they should be, and how they would be enforced are all up for debate in the community at this point, as companies and governments alike race to capitalize on the next ‘gold-rush’ of business opportunity. Space For All: What Space Democratization Means: For the space industry, and for business, the creation of CubeSats removed a massively prohibitive cost barrier to both businesses operating in the industry and students learning how to work in it. Companies like Jason’s could raise a normal business-sized amount of capital to start building out software, which they have done. Key Quotes:“It was a fistfight. We competed against companies that were 20 to 100 times our size, two of the largest defense contractors in Australia were our primary competitors, and they led up to, everybody said we couldn't do it. I was getting calls at two in the morning from our competitors saying, ‘what are you doing? You're never gonna make it.’ And we persevered and we made it there. “We have a very strong product and very strong brand in that part of the world and everybody recognized that. We were told by the companies we were talking to that we had to prove that we were good enough and that's how the conversation went. So there wasn't a lot of incentive for partnering in that case. The other part was we started getting a lot of calls from people asking us if we were bidding. The volume got high enough and we said, let's go for it.”“Business to government, if you know how to play that game, is really lucrative. Fast forward, I did my Ph.D. in Australia, this was about 2007 when I was graduating, and there was a new category of satellites called CubeSats. If you think about the size of a spacecraft back then for an industry-level mission and things that are doing satellite communications or, or earth observation, things that produce large amounts of money, these historically are half a billion-dollar spacecraft, massive infrastructure required to do something like that. Well, the new category was what had just been embedded between 2005/2007 and they were the size of a toaster. The cost for starting your space company was less than half the cost of a juice bar range.“Historically space tools are bespoke. It's like the matrix. You've got a whole bunch of words on a screen and operators trying to figure out what is going on. ‘We said, why don't you turn that into a video game?’ It's easy to use this human interface, this user interface, modern UI UX design, and reduce the barrier to entry to actually make space as easy as flying a car is our goal. So normally, like you need a Ph.D. or a Masters 15 years experience to get trusted with, with the satellite. We've got undergraduate interns, 20-21 years old, and first time we sit down, have a go.”“There is no space traffic solution globally. The U.S. military has been running it for most of the Western world, but they want to be space warriors, not space traffic cops. So much more material is coming out there. We've got 7,500 satellites that are active in space today and I think that's going to grow to 40,000 by the end of the decade. Some people are predicting a hundred thousand satellites and for every satellite, you've got 10 times more in pieces of debris floating around and it's all traveling at eight kilometers a second. If you get hit by one of those, that'll ruin your day. We do a lot of work in that field.”“We need someone to do it [patrol space traffic.] It can't be military; can't be a single government; it has to be a consortium of governments. I think it should be a public-private partnership because right now a lot of companies like Saber are competing for tools to be a part of that next gold rush. It's a hard thing to justify because it's related to the safety of flight.”“PIGI is our mission control software. We use it for entry-level design. With it, you're able to design all of your orbits and plan any orbit from it, pretty much any planet in the solar system, and use the outputs of that to plan your business. Students use it for their student projects but we really made this useful for entrepreneurs, people who want to start their own space businesses someday. They use it to calculate the addressable market for their mission plan.” Bio:Jason is a space engineer with 20 years of experience in spacecraft, operations, mission control, and team leadership. Space is a personal passion of his. He founded Saber Astronautics as the mechanism to contribute to this industry. For the last 10 years, this has been a practical application of machine learning and 3d graphics making space easy to control and to solve operational problems such as flight diagnostics, swarm control, space weather, orbital dynamics, etc. Saber now sells to the US Air Force, Australian Air Force, and a growing range of commercial satellite owners. Before founding Saber Astronautics, he was a US Army Major for USSTRATCOM (Space Command) and deployed internationally during wartime. He taught at the Interservice Space Fundamentals Course and served as an active duty engineer at Army Space and Missile Command Battle Lab. Military service also includes 5 years in the field of artillery deployed to a range of hazardous duty locations. As a civilian, he wrote flight software for the Hubble Space Telescope (Wide Field Camera 3) and testing for the International Space Station.As an academic, he lectured for the IRS Space Station Design Workshop, University of New South Wales, and International Space University. He led a research expedition in the high Canadian Arctic and is actively growing the "NewSpace" community co-founding teams such as the Delta-V SpaceHub Accelerator and the University of Sydney space engineering laboratory.He served on the Australian Government “Expert Reference Group” designing their Space Agency and is also active with international think tanks Global Access Partners, NSI, and the Economist, and I'll occasionally provide expertise to Australian News programs. Both through active teaching and through Saber's internship program brought over 250 people into the industry.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Mentorship is a sexy topic that gets thrown around in a lot of interviews, but this week’s guest does more than just talk about it. We caught up with her JC Lapierre, the U.S. Chief Strategy and Communications Officer at PwC as she was wrapping up with a regular mentorship session that she offers to her team. If you really want to see change, make some changes to your schedule; allocate time to things that you say are important, such as molding a younger generation of leaders and do something about it.“You have to listen through informal channels. Before I jumped onto this [interview] I was in what I call a coffee chat with about 15 members of my team. I do these three times a week. I open a sign up for 15 people if [they] want to just have coffee and talk for an hour. It is one of my most effective listening channels. It takes time. It takes effort to listen, but if you really pay attention, my team tells me what I need to do. My team tells me how I need to communicate better. They help tell me what steps I need to take to make it better for them. And to help us have more impact on driving our results. But it all starts with taking the time and creating the spaces to listen.” JC leads by example through active listening to her team and their clients, and she does that through her actions as opposed to just rhetoric. In this episode learn more about the ways JC is focusing on stakeholder and audience personalization, a bit about the new partnerships at PwC, the need for good communication in a large organization, the shift in the ways that people are consuming media. Plus, JC provides us with an update on PwC’s new strategy more than six months into its launch. Hear more from JC and PwC on this episode of Marketing Trends. Here we go! Main TakeawaysWe have Lost Valuable Strategic-Friction Time in Our Day: Amidst all of the disruption and change in the past couple of years, one of the things many people have lost is their commute time, whether that be flying to meetings in other states, or just driving or walking to the office. That friction in your day, used to allow you to reset yourself a bit in-between parts of your day and parts of your life. Having lost that means losing valuable time to be quiet, and think, and it’s important to realize this loss and create intentional space in your day to let your brain wander.Focusing on Stakeholder and Audience Personalization: Stress less about making sure that every single media channel is broadcasting the exact same message. The more you can personalize your messaging for individual stakeholders and for individual audiences, the better. When we talk about personalization, it can mean swapping a customer’s name into an email, but really you need to be going much deeper than that.  Curating messages for customers and segments of your audience based on their other interests is the best way to get attention.Evolving Channel Landscape and Consumption: As things change rapidly on the media channel front, it’s important even as a large company to stay nimble and willing to try new things and experiment in channels that you are not as familiar with. You can read stories and reports about what the best new tools to use are, but testing it out is the best way to find out what works for your own brand and message.Key Quotes"It all starts with listening, no matter what role I've been in. A I've had like nine lives, nine careers in my time at PwC, but one of the most important things anyone can do in any relationship, personal or professional, is to truly listen and to ask really effective open-ended questions, without judgment, questions without assumptions, embedded assumptions, and to really try to understand what is it that you aspire to do? What are the impediments or obstacles to getting there? What's the opportunity? And then when you've listened to a whole bunch of different data points and a whole bunch of different perspectives, you can start to build.”“You have to listen through informal channels. Before I jumped onto this [interview] I was in what I call a coffee chat with about 15 members of my team. I do these three times a week. I open a sign up for 15 people if [they] want to just have coffee and talk for an hour. It is one of my most effective listening channels. It takes time. It takes effort to listen, but if you really pay attention, my team tells me what I need to do. My team tells me how I need to communicate better. They help tell me what steps I need to take to make it better for them. And to help us have more impact on driving our results. But it all starts with taking the time and creating the spaces to listen.” “We call this the ADAPT framework. There's five forces that are pushing on the world in significant ways. First is Asymmetry. We see asymmetry primarily in the income inequality gap, but you see it in other ways in which you see haves and have nots. D [stands for] disruption that gets at both technological disruption, as well as climate disruption. The second ‘A’ in ADAPT is age. In the U.S. we have an aging population; we have fewer workers than we used to and that trend is going to continue. [This means] we are going to have fewer people to work in the workforce. The P is for polarization, I think we all see it's happening within our four walls; it's happening across the globe, but that increased polarization is growing. [Finally,] the T is for trust.”“The more we focus on stakeholder and audience and personalization, the easier it becomes. The team doesn't have to keep recreating stories or recreating what they are that they're doing [across every channel.] We have to just be consistent, simple and measured in terms of how we bring our audiences along.”“Our people are some of our best brand ambassadors. [I want to] make sure that they feel confident, not only in telling our story, but that they are enormous parts of the story. They are executing our story and they're building that strategy every step of the way with us.”“The way people consume information has shifted. That’s where we (broadly not just PWC) aren't sure what is going to land and what are the best channels to use. So we are going to try everything. [Example,] the work [we did] with Hulu and streaming is outperforming all of the metrics that we set out for it. We are [even] starting a Tik Tok channel. We are going to go to a whole bunch of different places so that we really can understand how information is being consumed and what is the easiest way to share our messages with people that might be interested in hearing them.”BioJ.C. Lapierre is the U.S. Chief Strategy & Communications Officer for PwC leading communications, marketing, brand, and creative teams with heart. Redefining the industry with the best team and technology to better serve our clients as they seek to build trust and deliver sustained outcomes. Committed to my nieces and nephews, adventuring around the world, upskilling teachers in Kenya with Flying Kites and cycling in Boston's Pan-Mass Challenge to raise funds for cancer research and treatment.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Taking the plunge into unfamiliar territory, such as investing, can not only be a difficult fray to enter, but scary at the same time. When should you buy? Should you sell? What is the right stock for you to buy?. The world of finance and largely, participating in investment has long been the domain of the few and privileged. Now, thanks to the companies like Robinhood, becoming a part of the finance world is as easy as downloading an app from your favorite app store. The challenges of communicating with this new class of investors excites Rashad Drakeford, Head of Content Marketing at Robinhood. And Rashad told me all about how e knows that asking the right questions of his audience will help him to guide them through the process of investing, and to their goals. “What we're developing at Robinhood over the next three years is: how do we inspire people to think, feel, and act? How do we make them feel confident about their financial future? How do we tell stories of people that they see themselves in? There's a new class [of investors] that's being born out of this moment; how do we invite them in? How do we have our arms wide open to let them know that they're not alone?” This future-focused mindset, paired with an incredible background in politics and entertainment, gives Rashad a unique perspective as a marketer. Whether it’s been through his time working on the 2008 Obama Presidential campaign, or from his experience at Apple, and working on Beats by Dre Rashad’s experience has touched multiple industries and he shared his wealth of experience with me. In this episode, Rashad and I dive into the way he thinks about his influencer marketing strategy, he speaks about some of the incredible leaders he has been influenced by, and you’ll hear about what makes the most compelling content marketing campaigns. Get ready to enjoy all that Rashad has to share on this episode of Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysLeverage What You Have: It can be discouraging as a small business marketer to look around and see all of the cool campaigns with fancy bells and whistles that big companies with massive budgets can produce. The key to getting the most out of your own brand and budget lies in the quality of the stories you have to tell. Good stories resonate, and a good story can help you compete with the likes of fancy, high-dollar productions. The human touch of a great story can have just as much impact with your audience as some fancy production elements. The point is to lean into your strengths as a business and lean into your strengths as a marketing team to compete against bigger players. Picking the Right Influencer: When thinking about your own influencer program, bigger numbers are better, but there are some additional factors you should be considering to make the best partnership decisions. The quality of their audience engagement is critical and the overall alignment of their mission with yours are two of the factors that, when aligned, will serve both parties well. What Does a New Class of Investors Need? The opportunity to reach a new audience is one that excites a creative marketer. First, the challenge is to educate and inform. The best way to do that, to draw in a new audience, is by asking them the right questions. Seeing things from their perspective will help you to craft your message and really connect with your audience. Key Quotes“The way we leaned into our ability to create branded content across social and digital; We were doing virtual reality concerts. This was back in 2013 [when] no one was really doing that. If MTV is able to create interstitials and vignettes that live on linear TV because they have 80 to a hundred million households, what's our value prop? What we landed on was, we have phenomenal storytellers. We have great content creators. We're going to go and create content for brands that we'll use across all of our social media and our digital and linear. And on top of that, we'll white-label it and give it to you to use however you want across your channels. And so we were able to really be innovative in that, in that space.”“Robinhood really did lower the barrier of entry and democratize information and democratize people’s [ability] to participate in the wealth generation process, especially for folks that have been historically, and systematically left out of financial empowerment in this country. I felt like there was an incredible opportunity to come here and help tell stories, to help inspire people to get involved in their financial health and wellness.” “hat we're developing at Robinhood over the next three years is how do we inspire people to think, feel, and act? How do we make them feel confident about their financial future? How do we tell stories of people that they see themselves in? There's a new class [of investors] that's being born out of this moment; how do we invite them in? How do we have our arms wide open to let them know that they're not alone? “The way I have the team approaching [influencer relationships] is avoiding one-offs, and [istead] developing a real partnership with talent that not only pushes forward our business goals but also helps the talent reach their goals. I never walk into a partnership conversation with a fully fleshed-out plan. [I’m] making sure that our missions are aligned because this is not just about someone cashing a check. [I’m making sure] we're both invested and passionate about what we can do together. I don't let how many followers someone has be the determining factor on doing a deal or not. Numbers you see on Tiktok and Instagram and Twitter are important, but what's the engagement and what's the conversion metric from past partnerships or even their own work?”BioRashad Drakeford is the Head of Content Marketing at Robinhood - Head of Content Marketing. Previously he spent time at Apple as their Head of Global Social Media. Before that, Rashad spent some time at REVOLT MEDIA & TV as the Senior Director of Digital Content Development. Because of an opportunity, he came across while he was in college, as a student he became the National HBCU Outreach Coordinator for The 2008 presidential campaign of United States Senator, Barack Obama. This campaign position led to jobs for him as the Obama-Biden Transition Project, as an Associate and Public Liaison in Intergovernmental Affairs, and then took a position in the government at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) as Special Assistant in the Office of the Secretary. ---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

As the methods of communicating messages of love, sympathy, celebration, or holiday cheer have evolved in the last 100 years, the 20 billion-dollar greeting card industry continues to adapt to serve multiple generations of ‘caring-connectors’. This term ‘caring-connector’, used by Hallmark CMO and SVP, Lindsey Roy, to describe Hallmark customers of all ages and demographics, is an illustration of the relational way they think about their consumers at this legacy brand. For more than a century, Hallmark has been giving consumers the tools to make holiday moments of gift-giving and connection unforgettable. Lindsey Roy, CMO and SVP, Hallmark, brings two decades of experience as she helps people connect with each other in meaningful ways. “If I was going to narrow it down to the biggest source of change, it's consumers wanting flexibility. You think about 10, 15, 20 years ago, you played the game as the manufacturer, or retailer. [But now ] ‘I want it how I want it, when I want it, where I want it.’ Whether it's grocery shopping, or buying your presents for Christmas, whatever it is, people are completely demanding flexibility. That's a huge insight into how we're thinking about where we reach people. We always try to have authentic conversations in our marketing.” Giving your customer that flexibility they demand for when, where and how they want you, whether that be via the tap of an app or at a retail location, shows that you’re truly listening to and serving them. In this episode Lindsey and I dive into the role that data plays in every aspect of Hallmark’s strategy including innovating; the ways and thought processes behind Hallmark’s testing and uses for A.I.; how Hallmark’s data strategy is redefining and its rewards program, and a bit about Lindsey’s leadership style. Excited for you to enjoy this conversation I had with Lindsey on this episode of Marketing Trends. Here we go!Main TakeawaysHiring Smart People with Agility over People who Only Check the Right Boxes: Sometimes when it’s time to hire, your team might already have a great need to be filled, but don’t be tempted just to hire the candidates who look good on their resume. Get to know your new hires and focus on finding people who are flexible and open-minded team players. You can always teach people how to use new tools and software, but you can’t teach passion and dedication to the mission. Allow for Your Vision to Iterate and Morph in Practice: When you spend so much time and effort building a particular marketing strategy, it can be easy to over-commit to certain elements or aspects of that original plan. Don’t get too caught up in the details, though. You need to stay agile and be willing to iterate and try new tactics as the data informs, so that you can react to data about the way that your message is being received by the audience. The quicker you can course-adjust to a more connected message, the sooner you can fill the needs of your audience. Addressing Consumer Needs Across Multiple Generations: When you’re a brand that serves everyone, looking across generational needs is important when thinking about where and how you’re going to reach your customers. The new modes and methods for connecting with Gen Z are going to be quite different from those you’ve traditionally used for the Baby Boomers, for example. New social media apps drawing the attention of younger audiences, compared to older generations that may be more prone to read a longer email, for example. Key Quotes“We care about getting people with diverse perspectives. We try to have people with short tenure, long tenure, people who've been in the agency world, have been in the brand world, everybody from the college intern, to somebody who has 25 years of amazing experience, different backgrounds, et cetera. We are very purposeful about that. I'm a believer in hiring good, smart people with learning agility. Sometimes that's more important than ‘check these three boxes. Have you done X on Salesforce? Have you done Y on Adobe analytics?’ I think [when you hire] good smart people that want to learn, and can learn, you can't go wrong.”“From my vantage point, if I was going to narrow it down to the biggest source of change, it's that consumers want flexibility. About 10, 15, 20 years ago you played the game as the manufacturer or the retailer. Now [it’s about the consumer] ‘I want how I want it when I want it, where I want it.’ People are completely demanding flexibility and that's a huge insight into how we're thinking about where we reach people. We always try to have authentic conversations in our marketing.”“[When you ask] what are your perceptions of cards? You learn a lot of amazing things. There are what we would call the ‘caring connector’ archetype: that person who believes that the world is inherently good, that person that believes that relationships are the glue and they're willing to put in the time and effort. These people exist at 12 [years old] and they exist at 92. To figure out what they need and how to tap into what would make sense for them, that's the key to relevance in my mind. Be open, ask the hard questions and make sure that you're investing in innovation to answer those questions.”“We look for what we call ‘when’, W-H-E-N data. And that means, if you are a 28 year-old mom of two, who's a caring connector who shops in these places. It's also important for us to try to have a conversation where we maybe learn when your birthday is, or when your significant other's birthday is, things like that. That kind of part of the data genome around those people who are most close to you, those people who you might want to activate, and we can do that. I'll give you a really basic example. If you buy a card for your sister on August 12th and you have some relationship with us, we can then maybe tell you next July 30th, ‘Hey, you might have a birthday need coming up.’ And people find that helpful if they're like, oh yeah, ‘I’ve got to get that.’ in their mind.” “We always believe that the more personalized is super important. We're doing a lot of experimentation [with A.I.] The biggest live-use case we have with A.I. right now is in our chat bots that come to life in our digital experiences. Consumer care is also part of my world. I get to work with an awesome guy who leads that part of our business and we've launched this year, a couple of chatbots because it's easier for people to interact oftentimes with the chat bot and we have some great A.I. that feels very Hallmark and very helpful, and it can hopefully get people to accomplish their task in a fraction of the time.”BioLindsey Roy is the SVP, and CMO at Hallmark. She oversees Hallmark Global which includes gift wrap, greeting cards, stores, etc. A tragic boating accident while on vacation almost claimed Lindsey¹s life and left her with an amputated left leg, severely injured right leg and injured right arm. Through a challenging recovery process, Lindsey learned impactful lessons on how to harness disruption and find clarity in the chaos. A fresh voice on the speaking circuit, Lindsey has been heralded for her authentic style and universal message. Lindsey has spent over eighteen years in the corporate environment, leading teams in innovation, digital development and product merchandising. She was named Vice-President at Hallmark Cards at just thirty-two years old, one of the youngest VPs ever in a company with over a 100-year history and in the top 1% of brands worldwide. Lindsey combines her unique life experience, corporate background and emotional intelligence to truly connect with audiences.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Content is a word that gets thrown around a lot, and the truth is, today it is easier than ever before to create content. A big reason for that is thanks to companies such as Røde Microphones, which create budget-minded products that constantly push the industry forward. For Røde, innovation is the name of the game and no one knows that better than Damien Wilson, the CEO of Røde Microphones. Damien has been with the company since its early days, growing into his leadership role and scaling the business in a rapid timeframe. But even for him, despite the success, the last decade has been a wild ride.“I'm a kid from the Western suburbs, which is not necessarily a nice area and I never thought I'd be sitting in New York doing business, or sitting on a couch with Guns and Roses. When I walk into Guitar Center on Sunset Boulevard and I see a Røde product, I get excited because I listened to that music of the eighties where Sunset Boulevard was the place to be.”The transformation of the audio industry has been accelerated because of the way companies such as Rode have democratized audio equipment. It no longer takes a fortune and an entire studio build-out, to get professional-sounding content. On Marketing Trends, Damien took me through how Rode has muscled it to the top to compete with legacy brands within the space. He also touches on the unique hiring challenges that Røde has been facing in Australia during the past 18 months, and how the company has been able to pivot through innovating in their use of manufacturing equipment. He also discusses how Røde handles customer feedback to ideate its product line, and how influencers can push your products further. I’m excited for you to enjoy and hopefully learn from this conversation with Damien up next on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysThe Secret Sauce: Innovating with Product Manufacturing Equipment: More than ever, supply chain management and sourcing are critical to the success of any business that sells products. Finding the best, most cost-effective tools to build your products might not be created for your industry. You may have to think creatively about what other industries use similar manufacturing equipment that can be modified to build your goods.It Takes Educational Background to Create Great Content: Having an education-focused mindset is a foundational part of good content creation. When you create materials that educate the consumer on products, even if they are not your own, you're building trust with the consumer. This kind of content helps build a community which helps to further push consumers down the funnel.Where to Look for New Product Inspiration: Assess all the other products, aside from your own, that your customer also uses to see where to expand product offerings. Other tools and tech they use to create their finished product could also be an area for you to cross over into. Key Quotes“One of the things that I brought immediately to the company was that style of video-based education, style marketing. Because one of the things that I thought was the big problem with audio brands, especially anything music-related, you needed to sort of teach people how to use the product and that gave them the ability to purchase.”“We have a machine that is specked for making parts for watches. Every high-end Swiss watch manufacturer will have one of these machines. It's the same machine made by Citizen, but we use it to make backplates for the microphones because the precision and the tolerance is so insane. They're making a hundred thousand dollar Rolex's, but this is for a $200 microphone. Other mic manufacturers are not thinking in that regard; they're not thinking about how we can take that machine out of that industry, put it into our version and then create a product around it. That's really the secret sauce.” “One of the things that we did a few years ago was look at our ERP system and look at how we were running the business end-to-end, and sit there and go, ‘Okay, what are the improvements? What process improvements do we need to put in place right now?’ And before we didn't have a mature supply chain team in house, but we grew that super quick. And it was just at the right time, because then COVID hit [and] we started to see some interruption in supply chains. We had the ability to be able to pivot into making things that were completely available to us onshore in Australia. That meant you needed to have the right amount of raw material and all those bits and pieces, which was a testament to the supply chain team getting an AI pay system up and running quickly.”“What we're looking at now is adjacencies that we can move into. We look at our customer and say, ‘What is our customer's workflow? What are they doing?’ They’re podcasters; they’re content creators. ‘What sort of equipment are they using?’ Oh, they're wearing headphones, and those headphones don't say Røde. So maybe we need to work into that adjacency.” “Where Røde has risen to the top in terms of customer sentiment has been the fact that we deliver a product and we keep on enhancing it. And it becomes a schedule of, every three months, let's add something else to this particular product. So the customer goes, ‘Wow, you've done it again.’ And it also shows that we're listening to feedback.”“I'm a kid from the Western suburbs, which is not necessarily a nice area and I never thought I'd be sitting in New York doing business, or sitting on a couch with Guns and Roses. When I walk into Guitar Center on Sunset Boulevard and I see a Røde product, I get excited because I listened to that music of the eighties where Sunset Boulevard was the place to be.”“When you get big it's like the mistakes are just amplified, right? In the past, if we made a mistake in a launch and maybe there was a component wrong, or the testing was incorrect, you may be thinking about 5,000 units. Now you're talking about, you know, 500,000. We can't afford that. So we need to have everything upstream and downstream sorted. So we know that we're not going to replicate any of those issues.”BioDamien Wilson is the CEO of The Freedman Group, home to RØDE Microphones, Aphex, Event Electronics, and SoundField. He is a multi-talented senior executive with over 25 years’ experience in advertising, sales, marketing, and business development.  Prior to the Freedman Group, Wilson was Creative Director of boutique advertising agencies The Shop and Peer Group. He joined the Freedman Electronics/RØDE team in 2007 as Marketing Manager and within a year was made Global Sales and Marketing Director. He acted as General Manager of RØDE Microphones, LLC in the USA until 2013 before returning home to Australia as the new CEO of the Freedman Group in 2016.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.