What Today’s Marketing Leaders Are Missing

Summary

MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
Episode: What Today’s Marketing Leaders Are Missing
Release Date: November 28, 2024
Host: Benjamin Shapiro
Guest: Brian Solis, Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow, Futurist, Author

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Introduction

In the episode titled "What Today’s Marketing Leaders Are Missing," host Benjamin Shapiro engages in a profound discussion with Brian Solis, a renowned futurist and the Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow. The conversation delves into the evolving landscape of marketing, emphasizing the critical elements that modern marketing leaders are overlooking and how emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) can bridge these gaps.

Brian Solis: An Elevator Pitch

Timestamp [03:25]:
Brian Solis opens the dialogue by presenting his elevator pitch, highlighting the rapid acceleration of technology, particularly generative AI, and its disruptive impact on business operations. He emphasizes that while technology is advancing exponentially, leadership mindsets and frameworks are not evolving at the same pace. Solis introduces his book, which aims to guide leaders in adapting their thinking and strategies to harness technological advancements effectively.

Brian Solis: “Generative AI was the first true disruption that's going to require us to transform, not just adapt... it's a book about change, but it's a book about innovation at the same time.”
[03:25]

The Missing Element: People

Timestamp [07:00]:
Solis asserts that the primary element marketing leaders are missing today is “people.” He explains that in the quest for metrics like open rates and audience engagement, marketers often overlook the human aspect, focusing instead on data and transactional details.

Brian Solis: “When I say that they're missing people, we look at eyeballs, we look at audiences, we look at Personas... and we sort of miss the humanity in all of this.”
[07:00]

AI as a Tool to Enhance Human Connection

Solis argues that AI should not be seen as a distancing tool but rather as a means to enhance human connections through personalized engagement at scale. He provides the example of Carvana, which utilized AI to create hyper-personalized animated videos celebrating individual customers' car purchase anniversaries, making each interaction feel unique and special.

Brian Solis: “AI... can help us be more human, to personalize at scale engagement by understanding more of what people do, who they are, what they value.”
[07:38]

Balancing AI and Human Authenticity

Timestamp [09:42]:
Shapiro raises a critical point about the balance between AI and human authenticity, expressing concern that reliance on AI might disconnect marketers from their audience. Solis responds by emphasizing intentional use of technology. He stresses that the intention behind deploying AI determines whether it enhances or detracts from human connections.

Brian Solis: “It's all about intent. We genuinely use technology... to deliver the type of experience that they're going to remember at a very human level.”
[09:42]

Real-World Applications of Intentional AI Usage

Solis shares examples illustrating how AI, when used thoughtfully, can foster deeper human connections:

1. AI-Powered Therapy Bots: Designed to engage men who typically avoid traditional therapy settings, these bots create a more comfortable and engaging environment, resulting in higher participation and satisfaction rates.

2. Interactive Doctor Consultations: Implementing AI-driven interfaces in non-traditional settings like shopping malls to make medical consultations feel less intimidating and more approachable.

Brian Solis: “People will never forget how you made them feel. And that's how I use AI.”
[13:02]

The Evolving Purpose of Marketing

Timestamp [14:00]:
Solis posits that AI is changing the practice of marketing rather than the fundamental purpose. The integration of AI allows marketers to redefine their roles within the customer experience landscape. Instead of distancing themselves through impersonal interactions, marketers can leverage AI to create meaningful and personalized engagements that build trust and confidence.

Brian Solis: “We're not going to get companies to suddenly change overnight to say that they need to be more human. But we do need to show them that there are other ways to use technology...”
[14:00]

He further explains that when customers perceive a personalized and trustworthy experience, their spending increases significantly, citing data that shows a 25% uplift in spending when customers have confidence in their interactions with a brand.

Key Insights and Takeaways

1. Human-Centric Marketing: Despite the influx of data and technology, keeping the focus on human experiences remains paramount. Understanding and empathizing with customers on a personal level can drive more meaningful engagements.

2. Intentional Use of AI: The effectiveness of AI in marketing hinges on the intent behind its deployment. When used to enhance personalization and customer experience, AI can bridge the gap between data-driven strategies and human connection.

3. Adapting Leadership Mindsets: As technology evolves, so must leadership approaches. Leaders need to embrace innovative frameworks that allow them to anticipate and respond to technological disruptions proactively.

4. Trends Shaping Marketing: Solis highlights three converging trends impacting consumer behavior:

   • Attention Economy: The battle for consumer attention in an oversaturated media landscape.
   • AI Economy: The transformative role of AI in how consumers search, research, and make decisions.
   • Introvert Economy: A shift towards more introspective consumption patterns post-COVID, with increased preference for home-based activities.

Concluding Thoughts

The episode underscores the symbiotic relationship between marketing and technology. Brian Solis advocates for a balanced approach where AI serves as a catalyst for deeper human connections rather than a replacement for authentic interactions. By focusing on people and leveraging technology thoughtfully, marketing leaders can drive sustained business growth and foster meaningful customer relationships.

Brian Solis: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
[13:53]

Final Quotes

Brian Solis: “If you intend to design an experience... it's like that Maya Angelou quote, but people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
[13:53]

Brian Solis: “Data shows that they will spend at least 25% more per product with you because there is trust and confidence.”
[14:37]

Additional Resources

• Brian Solis’ LinkedIn Profile: Brian Solis on LinkedIn
• ServiceNow Website: servicenow.com
• Brian Solis’ Personal Website: briansolis.com
• Book: Mindshift by Brian Solis

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Stay Connected:
For more insights and exclusive interviews with marketing leaders, subscribe to the MarTech Podcast™ on your preferred podcast platform. Visit martechpod.com for episode summaries, guest applications, and our weekly newsletter. Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @MarTechPod, and connect with Benjamin Shapiro on LinkedIn Benjshapp.

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Transcript

[Podcast Announcer]

The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the iHear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, iHear everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

From advertising to software as a service to data across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate.

[Brian Solis]

Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Better than TV advertising. Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours. If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.

[Podcast Announcer]

Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's a host of the Martech Podcast. Benjamin Shapiro.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Welcome to the MarTech podcast. I'm your host, Benjamin Shapiro and today we're going to discuss the future for marketers. Joining us is Brian Solis, who is the head of global innovation at ServiceNow, which develops a cloud computing platform to help companies manage digital workflows and enterprise operations. But Brian is also a futurist, a keynote speaker, and the author of Transforming Leadership, Driving Innovation and Reshaping the Future. He's a top voice on LinkedIn and we're very excited to have him here on the Martech Podcast. And today, Brian and I are going to discuss what marketing leaders are missing. But before we get to today's interview, I want to tell you about what I'm listening to. Ever wanted to sit down to a candid conversation with marketing leaders from the world's biggest brands? The Current podcast is your chance. On the current podcast you'll find exclusive interviews with the experts and trendsetters who are on the front lines of digital advertising. And they always leave the ad tech jargon at the door. So subscribe to the [e-mail] or anywhere you get your podcasts today. All right, here's the first part of my conversation with Brian Solis, the head of global innovation at ServiceNow. Brian, welcome to the Martech Podcast.

[Brian Solis]

Benjamin, it's awesome to be here and I gotta say I've enjoyed every conversation that we've had and just excited to finally get it out there live.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

I have to say there are some interviews when I see the application come through our system that I'm like, what does this person do you're a futurist. Like, okay, show me the crystal ball. Tell me how you know what's gonna happen down the road. And then once we connected our pre interview Stu, I was like, oh, this guy actually is brilliant. Knows what he's talking about. I haven't been this excited for an interview in a while. I'm thrilled to have you here. Why don't we start off with an elevator pitch here? Let's pretend we're in New York City. We're going up 50 floors. You've got a lot to tell us, Bing. Go ahead and give me your elevator pitch.

[Brian Solis]

All right, well, I'll give you the elevator pitch for the book. Realizing that I'm already on floor three here. The reality is that technology is accelerating and exponentially increasing like never before. Generative AI was the first true disruption that's going to require us to transform, not just adapt. And what's not happening at the same speed and velocity and extent is the evolution of leadership mindsets and frameworks and measures. So I wrote a book to help people understand in an approachable way how to think differently, how to see opportunities differently, how to look around corners and how to make sense of it not just for yourself, but how to make it a competitive advantage and how to bring people along with you. So it's a book about change, but it's a book about innovation at the same time.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

So we've seen a fair amount of change for marketers. As you went through the process of writing your book, tell me a little bit about how much you focused on marketers and are there any big headlines that marketers should be thinking about that they can take from your book to understand how to have the mindset shift to be able to change?

[Brian Solis]

Yeah, I wrote it for executives and leaders in general. As someone who's personally been involved with CMOs and marketing leaders basically my whole career, I was even a former CMO at two companies. It's the same thing. You have to be able to recognize how people are changing, how decision making is changing, how influence is changing, and what is causing that. What are the catalysts causing these changes? So that you can then reverse engineer to then use today's tools to use this innovative and disruptive technology to your advantage. So, for example, I just wrote a piece. It's not in the book, but I wrote a piece inspired by the mind shift that I had around consumerism for Worth magazine, and it explores the rise of three converging trends. One is the attention economy, which I think we all know about. Especially if we use TikTok or know people who use TikTok or Snapchat. The other one is the AI economy. So how is generative AI changing how people search, how people research, how people make decisions, how people get informed. And then the other one is what's called the introvert economy, which is this sort of legacy trend, this silent trend that's getting bigger and bigger, resulting from COVID where people aren't spending their time and their money in the ways that they used to, they're not planning for the long term the way that they used to, they're staying more inside, consuming Netflix and playing online games versus going out late night or having late night dinners. And so these three things were the result of me using the books exercise to rethink for an event that I was participating in for CMOs and advertisers, how the consumer was changing and what was the mind shift. I needed to recognize what I couldn't see before, how to identify the trends and then how to take those trends and inform me how to market differently to them once I understood them. And it was really an exercise in empathy. And once you feel it and once you see it, you can't unfeel or unsee it. So that's one example. This framework and the methodologies in the book can be applied to marketers, but it could also be applied to business leaders.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

So I want to jump in and talk about the first major topic we're going to cover today, which is from your research, what are marketing leaders missing? So let's jump back in here. Can you give me one word? What's the word that you can use to describe what marketing leaders are missing today?

[Brian Solis]

People. And I say that with all the love in my heart. I speak to a lot of marketing leaders and they're under pressure for driving business growth, they're under pressure for increasing market share. In fact, in many cases, marketers are faced with a lot of the things that business leaders should also be thinking about. So when I say that they're missing people, we look at eyeballs, we look at audiences, we look at Personas, we look at transactional details and we sort of miss the humanity in all of this. And I actually believe that AI, for example, is a tool, a very smart tool that can help us be more human, to personalize at scale engagement by understanding more of what people do, who they are, what they value, and using it within our campaigns, one to one to many. And it's been a holy grail for many, many years. But I think we're finally there. And all that requires is using AI to be more human in your engagement at scale. So one example, it's an early example, but it's still one of my favorites, was when Carvana used its data from those individuals who purchased cars, location, day, type of car, et cetera. And they used that to personalize this really cool animated video that celebrated, I think it was either the anniversary of their car purchase and it told a story that was unique to them based on that data. So it was episodic, it was templatized, it used AI to fill in the details, almost like Mad Libs, but it was hyper personalized. And if you received it, it was a lot of fun because it made you feel special.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

It's interesting you said that the word that marketers are missing is people, which really resonates to me, and I want to talk about that a little bit. At the end of every one of my podcasts, I always say something to the extent of focus on keeping your customers happy. Because I feel like often as marketers, we forget about the people that we are serving. We're always focused on lead generation and finding new people and using data. And we forget that we are fundamentally trying to understand what our market is so we can effectively communicate to it. Something conflicts with what you said where you're saying marketers are missing people, but we need artificial intelligence to help us be more human. That breaks my brain. Artificial intelligence seems like it's making us less human, like it's disconnecting us. Sure, we can personalize everything. We can write different copy for every experience, but I'm not sure that that necessarily makes us more human. Talk me through that. Where, like, we're using this new technology to help make better connections, it seems like it would be more personal. Personal connection makes us more human.

[Brian Solis]

Yeah, well, it's all in intention. I always say, may I have your intention, please versus may I have your attention, please? Because I believe it's something that needs to be earned. When I say that technology, like AI, has an opportunity to make us more human. It's all about intent. And what that means is that we genuinely use technology and have used technology. And this isn't just true for marketing, this is true for customer service. This is true for employee experiences and human resources. We have historically used technology to get further and further and further away from people. So we scale engagement, we automate engagement. If you think about customer service, for example, from 80s 90s, 2000s, we were deploying technology systems that made you hit a button to Try to get a customer representative to help you with whatever problem you're having. And then we could use voice technology to be able to do that. And your true test of character comes out when you have to say operator or representative a thousand times just to try to get your problem solved. If you think about the early iterations of chatbots, they were just essentially smart decision trees that still got you to nowhere where you still ended up typing representative.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Talk to a representative. Talk to a representative. Talk to a representative. Presses your. I hear you.

[Brian Solis]

Yeah, absolutely. And so now you're seeing, let's just take one example of AI. If you power AI with whatever LLM, whatever data sources, whatever rag models necessary to be able to hyper contextualize an engagement for whatever scenario might be applicable to that moment, you could essentially put together a very human, a very fun, a very engaging chatbot that could help you solve problems and have fun with it in the process. You can use it. For example, if you read the Worth article I wrote, you would now be able to see that your consumer is different and becoming far more conscious in the brands that they're looking to engage in, the things that they're looking to buy, and the ways that they're looking to spend their time. Those insights would then give you direction on how you would use artificial intelligence tied to certain data sets to figure out how to be more meaningful to them. Whether it's in the moment, top of funnel, whether it's trying to get someone's attention, whether it's putting them through a customer journey that was more meaningful and personalized, more dynamic. So the point is, the intent of how we use these technologies leads to the innovation and how they're experienced or leads into the innovation of how I connect with you. So for example, one of my favorite technology demos that I have seen is it's out of market, but it's still human, it's still about people, is in therapy. And the scenario in this case is that men in general have a hard time opening it up to therapists, so they'll choose, if they can, to avoid it. But in the tests that were conducted, they were given the option to talk to a very fun and very intelligent therapist within this specific type of therapy. And they found that more people were engaged, more people left feeling helped, and more people return as a result. And a similar case was done. They're putting these, essentially these private boxes within shopping malls as an experiment to see if we can get more people to talk to doctors in a safe environment that isn't beige with clipboards and daunting and frightening.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Very comfortable chairs. You think that they would solve for that right now?

[Brian Solis]

Yes. Very outdated chairs. So, same thing. The Doctor is powered by AI. The Doctor is personal. The Doctor listens. And what they found is that more people are willing to open up in those types of scenarios. So essentially, if you intend to design an experience, if you intend to design an intelligence platform, if you intend to design a more engaging campaign, if you're taking people in, mind you are using technology in a way that delivers the type of experience that they're going to remember at a very human level. And it's like that Maya Angelou quote, but people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. And that's how I use AI. That's how I view every technology in any kind of experience I've tried to develop.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

All right, so answer this for me. Trender trash AI is changing the purpose of marketing.

[Brian Solis]

It's changing the practice of marketing. Truth. What we're talking about is changing the purpose of marketing and the role that marketing can play in customer experience. Because we're not going to get companies to suddenly change overnight to say that they need to be more human. But we do need to show them that there are other ways to use technology rather than distancing from customers and trying to cheapen the experience and instead invest in growth. Because if customers believe that they're going to get a good experience, data shows that they will spend at least 25% more per product with you because there is trust and confidence.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

It seems like the answer here is it's a trend. If it's trend or trash, it's like, yeah, marketing is fundamentally being changed by artificial intelligence because of the level of personalization, which helps us build better experiences. That wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Brian Solis. He is the head of global innovation at ServiceNow. If you'd like to get in touch with Brian, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show Notes. You could visit his company's website, servicenow.com he's got a personal website. Brian solis.com b r I a n s o l I s dot com. That's where you can find a link to his book mindshift. A special thanks to the current podcast for sponsoring today's interview. If you're looking for candid conversations with marketing leaders from the world's biggest brands, then give the current podcast a listen on the current podcast, you'll find exclusive interviews with experts and trendsetters who are on the front lines of digital advertising, and they always leave the ad tech jargon at the door. So subscribe to the [e-mail] or anywhere you get your podcasts today. Just one more link I want to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head to martechpod.com we've got summaries of our episodes. You can apply to be a guest speaker on the Martech Podcast if you're interested. That's where we have the link to our weekly newsletter. You can also reach out to us on social media martechpod M A R T E C H P O D Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. I'm on LinkedIn. My handle is Benjshapp B E N J S H A P and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, we publish episodes every day during the year, so hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to focus on keeping your customers happy.

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