How Being Human is Your Competitive Advantage - The Best Marketing is not B2B or B2C, it's Human to Human.

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Our guest today is Brian Kramer.

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He is an author, a keynote speaker and a marketer.

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Welcome to the show.

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Thanks, eric, I really appreciate you having me here.

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Absolutely so.

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Why don't we start off by you sharing with everyone just a minute or two about who you are and what you do?

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My entire career was spent in marketing, working my way up through marketing agencies in just about every position, and then started my own agency in 2001, or co-started it with my wife and partner, and we had Pure Matter for over 20 years, grew it to a sizable, small but mighty agency in Silicon Valley, worked with some really good, nice-sized clients like Netflix and MasterCard, cisco, ibm, all kinds of really cool companies, and I wrote a couple books.

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There's no B2B or B2C, it's H2H human to human which then spawned my second book, shareology human to human which then spawned my second book, shareology, and that sent me on the speaker circuit to speaking around the world over 200 days a year, which burned me out, to be quite honest, and then eventually got invited to give a global Ted talk on those topics.

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And that brings me to today.

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As of six years ago, I started doing executive coaching and advising of companies, and that's what I do today.

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I help executives make hard decisions.

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That's my niche.

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So there you go All in one to two minutes.

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Hopefully.

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I landed the plane.

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Awesome, yeah, because most decisions in business are not easy, right.

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And we make them every day.

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It's why I wear a black shirt every day, minus one decision I have to make.

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Why don't we start, then, by you sharing a story of talking about the marketing you've done really shines the most is the first influencer marketing campaign that we were involved in building for IBM, their first global influencer campaign.

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This would have been like eight or nine years ago, and it really lives on into a playbook of how the company and other companies and our agency started to build influencer campaigns.

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It was neat because we didn't take influencers that were already influencers.

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We took influencers that were up and coming influencers and we used AI believe it or not that long ago to determine, through Watson, who they were and how they were progressing and transgressing into the influencer world based upon their signals, and so we invited them into an onsite one day, into a loft in New York city, and flew them all in and actually built the future of what work looked like.

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Now, this was really neat because we invited not only them to participate but to also drive the future work, to figure out what was it and how was it going to look, and so throughout the day, we had people like doing drawings and pick, we had illustrators and all kinds of things going on.

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We had speakers and at the end of the day, we had them present back what that looked like, captured it all and and took all of that and moved it into content that they had basically co-created or co-written.

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We moved that into a whole content, lane a strategy for the next six months to 12 months and identified how it could be used and leveraged then to build revenue for products and services to come, based upon the future of work.

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It did some really neat things in that area, but what it really spawned was a neat little community, because once all those 30 people got together, more people wanted to become more ambassadors and futurists and trenders inside of and outside of IBM, which created a whole new level of infrastructure that they had never seen and that really built a level of community that they took on as a whole, nother arm to the company and how they could see that progressing globally around the company and building on new avenues of revenue through third-party creators, which weren't called creators, then influencers.

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And all of a sudden here we had this neat little bubble of people that were starting to create something new.

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It was neat, it was a really neat time and it was very human to human.

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It was all in person.

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We took them after hours to the International Culinary Institute where we had a surprise iron chef cook-off and we divided them into two teams and they were able to create their dishes together and then they had.

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We had it judged afterwards by some famous chefs.

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We had all kinds of surprise things happening throughout the weekend, so it was just more than creating content a vital part of marketing and building both what's the future of technology, but also how do we integrate that back into community and human-to-human relationships.

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So it really highlighted every area, every aspect of what I think marketing entails, which is why I love probably that campaign or that piece of what we did at Pure Matter the most, because of all the different touch points that we had.

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And what was the hardest thing about doing that?

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There's a couple of hard things.

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One was getting buy-in buy-in from the client to do this new thing.

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That involved bringing everyone together with an unknown outcome.

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We didn't know they were going to come up with at the end of the day.

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We didn't know what they were going to come up with at the end of the day.

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We didn't know what things they were going to present back.

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We didn't know how we were going to restrain or not restrain or put parameters around what that day looked like, because, on some level, we wanted to leave it open, because that's the kind of co-creativeness that we wanted to have as a feeling or an emotion or an impact, I would say.

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The other hard thing was organizing all the different pieces of the weekend or of the time, like, how are we going to fill this up without tiring them out and giving them an experience that was unlike anything that they had ever done?

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Remember, these are influencers that had yet to be influencers, so they didn't quite know what they didn't know and they're on their way up, so to speak, and so we needed to give them some level of parameters and yet keep it open to what it could be, what they could come up with and build on top of that.

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So there were unknowns and we had to walk in with that and we had to have a client be okay with that, and so those two things combined were a puzzle piece that we all got over and I think it worked out really well.

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So you had to be a little bit brave.

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There was definitely some risk involved, because success was not guaranteed and it's a big client.

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How did you ultimately convince them to do it?

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The idea of capturing everything and turning it into content was the winning ticket.

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So, at the end of the day, for them to walk away with a certain number of co-created content pieces, to know that they were going to have all this stuff pre-written or pre-baked or pre preconceived in terms of what, what they needed to use now for the next six to 12 months, the cost of what that would have been had they come up with that themselves, written by themselves Uh, we came up with the fact that it was a lot more money for them to come up with that many pieces of content than just to host this event and bringing them in and create the content that was then co-created by people outside of the company.

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So the pluses outweighed the minuses when you looked at it from a dollar to dollar standpoint.

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The impact for IBM was pretty good right.

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The impact was massive.

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They were able to see over 700 million plus as it went on in terms of revenue generated from the content that was created.

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They hit over a billion mentions that weekend from the influencers.

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These are up and coming influencers that still generated more mentions and more impressions than what we would have seen with typical influencers, because people were starting to pay attention to them simply because they hadn't.

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These are the up-and-comers.

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They wanted to hear from the up-and-comers, not the always on the mic people, and so between those two things, we ended up blasting way past our predictions.

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That's awesome.

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It's just great to see how AI was being used to identify those influencers so long ago eight, nine years ago, because people have been working on AI for well over a decade and I think it's now.

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It's ready for primetime, but it's a good reminder that it's been a long.

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Ai has been around for a long time.

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Google and Apple both argue this is what we've been doing all along.

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So those were the early days of social media and the start of influencer marketing.

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How do you view how, how influencer marketing has evolved from the human-to-human perspective, from a human-to-human perspective, I think it's both evolved and de-evolved.

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It's become a little bit more like TikTok didn't exist 10 years ago and chat was barely on the scene before we jumped on here.

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The short form videos and things that influencers are doing and the effects and impact that influencers have on sales and on influencing purchase services has far surpassed anything that I think anybody has seen.

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I think the thing that now matters the most is who comes across as the most human, the most genuine, simplistic, imperfect and empathetic way of being on video, and so you've seen videos that have surpassed and people that have surpassed video views that are homegrown videos.

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The homegrown videos beat the overdeveloped, overproduced over whatever you want to call it predict videos.

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So now that what that tells me is people want more human, they want to have that sense of this was.

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I would just had a view into your life in the day of, in the day in the life of the behind the scenes stuff.

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That stuff hasn't changed.

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It's just that the time that we have has gotten shorter and shorter.

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It's just that the time that we have has gotten shorter and shorter.

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The idea now is how do we connect more?

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Then you take that and you build on top of it, community, and how do you then create more connection within community?

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Communities are growing still and they're becoming more and more adopted by companies, but for the wrong reason.

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A lot of times it's to help you, we'll help you, help us, and that's just never going to work.

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It's got to be a two-way street, and how we see social media and influencers and community all bridged together is just becoming a more challenging piece of the puzzle.

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But I think human to human is the key, or it's the answer to how that's going to work moving forward.

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It seems that there's better and worse ways to implement influencer marketing.

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The story you shared of what you did with IBM is definitely, on the spectrum, the better way to do it.

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When I say better, I just think about this as more authentic, more community-oriented and more genuine.

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I think on the other end of the spectrum, you have people who are being very transactional.

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You have people who are just being very salesy without being authentic, without any community.

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So there's a nuance to how people implement these influencer programs, right.

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Absolutely, and it's.

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The nuance, to me is how the invite happens.

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It's how the original initial connection is made with the influencer.

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There's a short-term transactional relationship that can be born, or there's a relationship-driven action or first invite that is born.

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Let me give you an example.

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When we did the IBM influencer campaign that I told you about, we didn't just reach out on DM and say here's a link, hope you'll do it.

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Or automate emails and say, here's, you're invited in this program, we'd love to have you.

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We crafted up three, three D physical boxes with kits inside of them that had personalized invitations and signature, signature IBM.

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That that really showed we want you, like, this is for you, and there's only 30 of you being invited.

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So this is a really honed in laser focused invite and we crafted it that way so that it would be that way.

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And so when they showed up, really feeling honored to be there, and we were honored to have them there.

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So it was a two-way street versus the other way that you see influencer relationships goes, which is that transactional invite.

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That, to me, goes back to your question, which is what is the one thing or the thing that will make the difference still today, which is that being a relationship-driven invite still today which is that being a relationship-driven invite.

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I think that's great.

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I think that's great advice.

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So let's talk a little bit about we met about 10 years ago, right around the time that you had put out your book on human-to-human it's not B2B or B2C and that's what launched you into doing the exhausting 200 keynote speeches and your TED talk.

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I'm curious, 10 years after you put this concept out there B2B marketing, b2c marketing has evolved.

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Have people embraced the human to human?

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Has it proved out, like you thought it would over 10 years.

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I didn't know it would last this long.

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I really didn't.

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I thought it was going to be like two or three year, maybe a year, I don't know Shelf life and, to be honest, no, it didn't.

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It totally blew me away.

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I wish I could have known what I knew now.

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But, yeah, we can all say that, like in the last few years, it's been an ink magazine and fast company and still been word of the year, and I'm just blown away that, the fact that it's still a thing and I think, to its credit.

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It's because of technology and the transitions that we've seen, the transformations that we've seen, the transformations that we've seen that have moved us farther away from each other.

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When we look at the pandemic and we look at other things to come, like AI and augmented reality and virtual reality and bots and automated emails gosh, everything.

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It's really made it more important now than ever and it's stuck around for that reason and I've still been invited to speak and talk about these things, which is really exciting and surprising if you went back to 10 years ago, me.

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It was a very different time 10 years ago in marketing.

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Some of my Gen Z colleagues that I was explaining this to it was hard for them to understand what it was like a decade ago when social media was still really new and it was really just about let's test some of these social media platforms to see if they can be new channels, if they can be successful, and how would this work?

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And particularly on the B2B side, proved out is the ones that are not authentic and more human to human channels have really stopped working and companies have moved away from doing them.

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One example would be the model of BDRs and SDRs just banging out 100 cold calls a day and having a huge team of people doing that.

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It's not a very authentic thing to do.

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One could argue it worked because picking up the phone made sense to get through to people, but ultimately people did not like that experience of being interrupted and repeatedly called for something they had never really expressed interest in, and so I think eventually companies realized the unit economics of that didn't make sense, but also the reputation issue for them didn't make sense.

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I think a lot of companies also relied heavily on just a lot of outbound emails that were unsolicited and that worked when email was newer and when people weren't 20 years into it and they hadn't subscribed to so many things.

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But at some point now the noise factor is so high that just blasting out emails doesn't really work.

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I think.

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One final example is just around online advertising.

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You could just hit it with a sledgehammer, spend millions of dollars in advertising, hard-selling people and it worked.

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But I think a lot of these channels are under a lot of pressure today from a financial efficiency cost perspective, and the channels that seem to be doing a lot better are the ones that have more authentic human to human components, like podcasting, which we're doing right now, and influencer marketing, which has really evolved in a lot of positive ways that I've seen.

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I think, things like in-person events, like you mentioned in your example those continue to be really good, so that's the evolution I've seen.

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Have you seen that or similar things?

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Yeah, I think that's right.

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I think you hit the nail on the head.

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The other thing I would say, I would add on to that, is more personalized communication.

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Taking the top 1% or top 10% of the most engaged people or the people that are most likely to engage any of the indicators that show who is potentially either a fan or in a really loyal fan, loyal customer base, just taking the sliver of the top percent and then turning that into a human to human campaign and which then could look like individualized communication, like real one-to-one, and so then that way you're not triggering a mass army on the entire list, so to speak, like you're saying, like emailing everyone, but taking a real focused approach on the people that are willing to and want to be a part of whatever it is that you're doing.

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They're waiting for you to do that, they're waiting for that invite, they're ready and willing.

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It just takes a little bit of action and some planning and strategy to make sure that you do it in the most human way, but I see that as a huge opportunity.

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Absolutely era of AI that we're in right now.

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There's potentially a risk for marketers to whitewash or beigeify themselves with AI, and I think people should be thoughtful about the use cases where they leverage AI, because I think, ironically, it can take out some of the human component of your past stories, your past experiences, which are sometimes some of the best part of the marketing, and they replace it with hyperbole words which ChatGPT is really good at, like virtuoso and maestro.

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So do you see that challenge there for marketers today with AI?

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Absolutely.

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Yeah, we're all testing, right, that's the essence of a marketer is to test and try, or at least the successful ones.

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And I think, using that technology and trying to figure out what works and what doesn't, I still think that it takes you 30 to 70% of the way there, depending upon what you're doing, and then it takes a human to bring it home To your point.

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It's not going to use all the right words, not all the right words.

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It may be a brainstorming buddy right now more than anything else, and so we've got to be able to distinguish what it's good at and what it's not.

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And because it's so new on the scene, we may not know what exactly what that is, and yet it's evolving faster than social media did.

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Social media came on the scene and didn't take very long to take off, but AI, since its launch, it's progressed faster than social media did, in both speed and of our using it, and also in technology advancements of it, how it's progressing, how they're building in it.

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Yesterday, chatgpt came out with its own version of Her if you've seen the movie Her and you're able to talk to ChatGPT and it has, and you're able to talk to chat GPT and it has emotions and it's able to talk back with you in real time and you can interrupt it and you can create and use it as a camera and write out math problems or use it as a transcriptionist, or the ideas behind it are great.

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Again, we're going to go all tinker, as we do as marketers, and we're going to see what works and what doesn't and realize that it takes us yet again 40 to 70% of the way there and we're going to have to then finish it.

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The human will finish what's there.

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So that's where I think it is now, where it's going.

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In five, 10 years I couldn't tell you.

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I would be a much, much different.

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This would be a different conversation if I knew I like that.

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Today, ai is a brainstorming buddy.

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I think that's a great summary of where the capability is at today.

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It'll be interesting to see where it goes, and the OpenAI event, with what they released, did remind me of the 2001 Space Odyssey movie.

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Like good morning, dave.

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What are you doing, dave?

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It's very interesting that, from that to Star Trek, the voice prompting of AI has been a concept for 35 years.

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So it's interesting to see this evolve and we live in interesting times.

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So any final thoughts you wanted to share?

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If you remember one thing from today more than anything else, just remember that being human, right now more than ever, is your competitive advantage.

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Bell bottoms are back, things are cyclical.

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Everything comes back to being human, and so if you were to stand up and be more human today, it's a lot more than most are doing.

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That's what makes it your competitive advantage.

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Awesome.

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Thank you so much, Brian, for sharing your story today and your insights.

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We appreciate it.

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I'm going to link to your website and the show notes so people can easily reach out and get in touch if they want to learn more about these things that we talked about today.

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Thanks for being with us today.