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- [00:00]
Phil
Today's episode of Nudge is a little different. I'm joined by Louis Grenier. Louis is a no nonsense marketing expert who ran one of my favourite podcasts, Everyone Hates Marketers and creates an absolutely fantastic newsletter, stfo. For those of you who know Louis, you won't be surprised to hear that this episode contains explicit language and lots of uncensored opinions. Now, rather than a typical episode of Nudge, which is neatly edited into a coherent narrative, usually 20 to 30 minutes long, today's episode is a totally uncensored, unedited conversation between the two of us. It is also an hour long. When you hear the topic Louis gets into, I'm sure you'll understand why this was necessary.
- [00:46]
Louis Grenier
But for those of you who do.
- [00:48]
Phil
Prefer the standard Nudge episodes, don't worry, they will be back next week. Okay, enough of the waffle. Louis Grenier's extremely uncensored take on marketing is coming up after the break.
- [01:01]
Louis Grenier
Angel City Football Club didn't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident. They did it with a little help from HubSpot. When they started, data was housed across multiple systems. But HubSpot unified their website, their email marketing, and their fan experience in one platform. This allowed their small team of three to build an entire website in just three days. The results were nearly as good as the results happening on the pitch. They saw 350 new signups a week and a 300% database growth in just two years. If you want to grow like Angel City Football club, then visit HubSpot.com to hear how HubSpot can help you grow better. So this is a bit different from a normal episode of Nudge. Usually I record the guest's audio, write my own script and overlay that on top. But today, for this very special guest and his very uncensored, unfiltered views on marketing, I thought we could just have a conversation and see where that takes us. Louis, welcome to Nudge.
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Merci. Bonjour. Bonjour.
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How are you feeling good?
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Feeling excited? As I told you off camera, I have prepared for this more than I've ever prepared for an interview on someone else's podcast. So I hope you feel energized by that fact.
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I feel suspect. Louis, I was very lucky to to listen to your fantastic talk last week. Last Thursday at the marketing meetup conference. It was genuinely brilliant. I think a lot of people in the room would probably rank that as the best talk of the day. I certainly did. Could you just tell the audience how you started that presentation.
- [02:56]
Sure. So Joe Glover, the organizer of that conference, introduced me on stage and I was backstage and I couldn't hear what he was saying. So the first thing I did was just put in my head the door to hear a bit of what he was trying, what he was saying. Right. And I didn't plan that bit, but people noticed it started to laugh already. So I felt even more at ease than I used, than I did before working on stage. So, yeah, I just walked on stage, said, bonjour, Bonjour, because that's the trademark. And then pause for a second and ask, raise your hand if you've ever had a colonoscopy. And I don't know what you've felt from your side as in the audience, but what I felt was like people were a bit laughing. You could clearly see, like they were like, what is happening right now? So there's a bit of laugh. There's. I think one or two people raised their hands. But after the fact, after the talk, a lot more people came to me saying they went through a colonoscopy. So how did you see it from your side? Because obviously you are on the other side of it.
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Yeah, I thought it was hilarious. And I immediately had my attention. I had absolutely no idea where you were going with it. And I thought, how's he going to link this into a marketing talk? And then you went down a route that I really wasn't expecting.
- [04:25]
Yeah, I mean, they went down a route I wasn't expecting to when they did the procedure to me. But if, if, you know, if I had to think about it in term of why I've done that, not just the topic, but just to talk about the. The question phrase like that at a marketing conference. Right. When I was talking to Rand Fishkin after it, he said, like, you're a troll. You're trolling. You were trolling them. Right. I never really thought about it this way. I just thought about it in terms of contrarian and trying to find a way to shock people in any way, shape or form. I'm trying that in the daily newsletter, trying that in the book. I'm trying that everywhere. That's just kind of, I think, a default of my creativity. I've actually looked that up. There is a concept called expectation violation. Don't know if you've heard of it. And so I've immediately referenced something that is completely outside of the expectation of anyone listening, even though they were probably expecting something from me, but not that. Right. So, like, you're at a Marketing conference you expect. Hello, my name is blah, blah, blah. I'm a consultant. I do this today. I'm going to share three tips to make your content better. And I started. Raise your hand if you've ever had a colonoscopy. Right. So completely different of the expectation. So that broke the norm. Right. And that snapped people out of kind of autopilot, taking notes and stuff like that. Right. You said like it definitely got your attention. So that was intentional for sure. And then another thing I saw that is really to do this is what they call in communication, disrupt and reframe, which is kind of a two step thing, which is like you first rattle people with an unusual thing and then you quickly present the pitch or whatever you have in a simpler, more appealing way. So you reframe and it's backed by. There was an experiment done where door to door salesman would either say these note cars are just 300 pennies. And then they mentioned actually that's $3, that's a steal. And so when the person, when the salesperson was using that Disrupt 300 pennies intro, they had twice as many people accept the buy the cards. So that's interesting to me. I didn't think about it before, but again for our conversation, I want you to like back a few things up. So yeah, from my side to summarize, it landed the way I wanted to. And I could tell that people were like completely thrown off by it. Like they just didn't know what to think. Which exactly is the place I wanted them to be.
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Yeah, yeah. We're pattern predictors, aren't we, as people? So we're constantly looking for pattern and our brain is able to just sit in that system, one relaxed, exactly unconscious state until that pattern is broken. And as soon as that pattern is broken, we pay attention. This is why those sort of viral ads that are made in paint, that are really badly designed go sort of viral on LinkedIn. But hilariously now they're so common that they're no longer breaking a pattern and no longer successful.
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Yeah, they are the unpattered.
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Yeah. That example you gave of the salesman reminded me of an example in Cialdini's book. He spoke about a salesman. I mean this is anecdotal, but he backs other stuff up with science. But his anecdotal example was a salesman who just realized that if he added the line, it was for a big B2B contract. If he just added the line before saying the pitch and before saying the price. If he just said, well, this won't cost you a million pounds. That one line was enough to sort of break the pattern, set a new anchor. And then when he did introduce the price of £20,000 or something, it was far more likely to be accepted. So it feels a little bit similar to your study. I like how you shared that, Louis. That was like hearing myself on a podcast there, citing a study and then going into the examples of it.
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It's all now prepared.
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I believe you now. I believe you. So you started the presentation by asking that question. You broke people's patterns, and I think you left the audience with really no clue about where you were going to go next. Could you share with us where you did go next?
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So that I essentially said, well, I've had my first one five months ago. So now they understood, okay, that question was to start a story. And my story was that I noticed some changes in bowel movements on some. Like, I had some sharp pain and, like the left side of my stomach that would come and go. And I had a feeling that something wasn't quite right because it just. It just connected back. Back in my brain. I was thinking about, you know, just. Just those. Those symptoms felt weird. Never happened to me before. There was not link to anything. So I went to my gp. My GP took it seriously enough to send me for a colonoscopy. And so there I was, right, Laying down on the bed. You have to lie on your left side so that the colonoscope goes easier down there, right? I had the IV line in my arm. I was half sedated, so I was still awake. I could watch the screen. And within two minutes, like, literally two minutes, I saw this big, massive tumor looking at me. And I knew it was bad news. It was bleeding. Actually, I didn't realize I was bleeding internally, but it was. And before the colonoscopy itself, I didn't share that in the talk, but we were chatting, like, with the doctor, the nurse, having a good time. They were like, definitely pattern expecting. The expectation for them was, it's going to be a routine colonoscopy. He's young, so it's probably going to be Crohn or something, like a digestive issue. Nothing major. Like, he wasn't concerned whatsoever. You could see it in his face. And the nurse as well. They're all cracking jokes. We're having a good time. And it didn't bother me to show my ass to strangers. Like, I don't care about that. So as soon as that thing appeared on screen, the mood changed dramatically. I mean, boom. I knew Straight away, okay, tumor. That's cancer, right? That's the big C. I knew it was cancer from the start. And the first thing that the doctor said was, it's very treatable. It's very treatable. That's all he could say. And he was clearly shocked. And then they had to continue the colonoscopy. So they went around the tumor. They were able to go past that. Sometimes they are not. Sometimes the tumor is so big that they can't put the colonoscope through. So they were able to. Which was kind of good news. And then silence, like you. And it was just silent throughout the procedure after, like, it was just like, I was shell shocked and all of that. So, yeah, I chose to share that story for the very first time on stage to that conference because I felt comfortable doing so. And there is a link to marketing. Right. In all of this. And there is silver lining. There's good news at the end of it. But that's why I started that question, and that's why I've introduced my story.
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Yeah, I think that that example you give of the atmosphere and the room changing is. Is very easy to picture and terrifying hearing it. So it must have been absolutely petrifying being there. But what was. What happened after that, Louis? Like, yeah, what was the next steps? What's happened to you?
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So they called my wife to come in, which was the procedure. Anyway. So after a colonoscopy, at least in Ireland, they want. You need to be picked up by someone, and they need to verify that that someone is here. Because with the sedation, like, you can't drive or anything. So she came in, but she knew something was wrong because they called her twice to make her come quickly, quickly. So after a procedure, I was laying on bed for a few minutes, then she arrived. Then I told her what it was. I remember she was like, just shocked as well, because no one was expecting it. And she was holding my shoulder and just crying behind me. And I was holding my daughter because she came with her, my daughter. And I was just shocked. I wasn't crying yet. I was shocked. We went to see the doctor, the same person who performed the colonoscopy. And I remember he asked me, do you remember any of the procedure, anything? We said, it's like, yeah, I remember. I know it's cancer. Like, because sedation actually might. You might be awake, but you might not remember anything after. Oh, I did remember. And he explained, we're going to take a biopsy of that tumor, but I'm so certain it's cancer that if the biopsy comes back negative, I'll ask for another biopsy because it's for sure cancer. Like it's just textbook cancer. And then. Yeah, the next 24 hours were like a blur. Shock, just completely shell shocked or. The only thing I could think about was I don't want my daughter to. Yeah. I don't want her to be. To, to be raised without a dad. I don't want her to be without me. Not from a ego perspective, selfish reason, but for her. Like, I don't want her to be raised with a single mom. And that's all I could think about. Yeah. So that was tough. Not gonna lie. I think I cried. The only time I really cried, cried was with my wife when we were talking about this. Like, I just don't want Robin to be without me. That's the only thing I could think about.
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Yeah. And I remember when you said that in, on stage, there was a real sort of reaction in the audience and I think, yeah, it was. People pictured that and it's quite an emotional thing to even think about, let alone go through. But then you talked on stage about how you had this sort of mind set shift and you thought, well, it's time to fight this thing.
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Yeah.
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And not panic and get over it. And that I found quite inspirational. Could you, could you share that?
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You see, it's one of those things where like, by the way, just before I tell the rest of the story, a few people, at least 10, came to me after the talk and said that they were moved by that part when I was talking about my daughter. A few of them had lost one of their parents through cancer. A few of them had gone through the same journey, not necessarily the same cancer. So it's touched I realized how it's. It's really touching everyone. Right. Cancer is just. I think 50% of people will get it in their lifetime. It's fucking nuts. Right? So obviously the probabilities that anyone you know or yourself will have it someday is incredibly high. So that felt. That felt much bigger than I thought it would be as of an impact. Because I wanted to share my story. I felt compelled to do so because I wanted to just to just share it because I hadn't. I kept it for myself for a long time. But seeing how much it impacted people on a personal level wasn't something I expected. I just didn't know really what to expect on that side because that's not really. That obviously was the first time I talked about it. So to go back to Your question? I. I know some people would say, oh, it's inspirational and whatnot, what. What. What we did next. But in my head anyway, I just had no other choice, like, what else am I supposed to do but fight for this? Like, am I going to just give up? You know, like, there's just. It didn't even enter my brain. I was like, okay. After the first 24 hour of shock, I was like, let's go. So, CT scan to see where the tumor was. They confirmed it was very close to the rectum, to the end of it, which is not good news, because if the surgery doesn't go well, it could leave me with a stoma, which is like a little plastic thing that is tied to your digestive system to take over the. The bodily functions. Right? So that was a big. That was a fear. But so. So CT scan, met with the surgeon. She did a beautiful drawing of where the tumor was. And essentially the course was, it's very treatable because you can remove it, which, if you compare that to pancreas cancer, for example, pancreatic cancer, very, very impossible, in fact, to operate because it's such a tiny organ and it's interconnected with so many things. You can't remove anything from there. That's why it's such a lethal cancer. So in my bad luck, the good luck was the fact that, yes, it is treatable. All they need to do is cut the colon before and after the tumor and you get rid of it. Unless. Unless it's spread. So the way it works, spreading, is that the tumor could then pass the wall of the colon and move to lymph nodes, which I didn't know we had so many, but we had, like, hundreds and hundreds of them. So we went through surgery. I stayed in the hospital for four days. I think I started to walk a few hours after. I hated the morphine. It made me delirious. So I just. After that, I was just paracetamol and ice cream. And, yeah, I left for four days. I was working fine, no problem. But the big unknown was, did it spread? Because even through CT scans and anything else, they don't really know until they remove the section of the colon and all the lymph nodes that are remotely connected to it. And a few days after, actually, no. The surgeon came to visit me in my room, the hospital room, within a few hours after surgery. And she said it went really well, took four hours. We removed 52 lymph nodes, and from her perspective, what she could see, it didn't spread. So she knew already that like from what she removed, it didn't look like it passed the wall of the count. So that was really good news. Plus I woke up and the first thing I asked the nurse was, do I have a stoma? And I remember she, she opened my blouse and she looked, she said no. I was like, yes. So that was good news, right? So two very good news back to back. And then she called me later on during the week and said they checked the 50, the 52 lymph nodes and none of them have cancer, which means it didn't spread. Which means that essentially the surgery that I went through removed all the cancer, which is also very good news. Right. And they just gave me a cure of adjuvant chemo they call it, which is on tablet form. So I don't have to go to the hospital to get like intra to get an IV line or anything and to just be sure to be sure. Because I'm so young, they said if it raises the chances that it never occurs by like 3% or 4%, something like that. So, so just to like, to be sure to be sure. So I'm still taking them at the minute. I'm more than halfway through my cycles. Side effects are minimal, just a bit of fatigue and stuff, but like no problem. So yeah, that's the next part of the story.
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Quite a story. And I think there is, we will try and be marketing dicks and try and make a marketing story out of this and find a way to link this. But before we do, I think it's important to cover the medical story of, you know, you caught this early because you were serious about the symptoms and you didn't sort of ignore them. Right.
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So here's the connection to marketing. In the back of my head, I remember thinking those symptoms are serious because I remember seeing a couple of times leaflet about bowel cancer in the pharmacy and on the tv. I remember, I think there was a few TV ads on this and it wasn't like, it wasn't something I was thinking every day, all day before it happened. It wasn't that, it was just like, you know, this kind of back of mind feeling. I remember that those things are, you need to take them seriously. And I think this is kind of where it all connects back to marketing. And the real power of it is that when you show up for long enough with a clear message, because that leaflet was like extremely clear with symbols and very simple text and stuff, you actually can start being remembered and trusted and noticed by the people you Seek to serve. Right. So that's one core example, honestly. And I'm not saying that because I'm a marketer, but I genuinely think that if it wasn't for those leaflets that I seen a couple of times, I wouldn't have taken it as seriously and I probably wouldn't have gone as early as I did. And that's not me trying to reinvent history. If I really look back at what happened, those flimsy thoughts, those little things back in my mind, were the reason why I took it so seriously. So that's the first connection to marketing.
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And just quickly, what were the symptoms that you noticed?
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Sure. So changes in bowel movements, meaning, like, you know, you know, if you go. If you go number two once a day for your entire life, and then all of a sudden it's four times. And so that was one. The other one was feeling like it's never done. So I all. I. I started to have this feeling of whenever I would go afterwards, I still felt. I still felt full. Right. Still needed to go. So that's a big one as well. There's other stuff like blood in the stool, unexpected weight loss, fatigue. Some people develop anemia or close to being anemic. So there's a lot of stuff there. But if you're listening to this and you have any of the symptoms, it's very unlikely to be what I had. However. However, just to be sure, to be sure, colonoscopy is a very easy procedure. Like, they make you feel at ease, you're sedated, you don't feel anything done and over. So if you're unsure, absolutely, get checked. There's also, in the UK in particular, you can buy, I think, test home tests in pharmacy to check your stool for any sign of cancer, if you have any of those signs. So take them seriously. But, yes, that's the. Those are the symptoms I had. And, yeah, I. I probably would not have gone that early if it wasn't for those leaflets.
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Yeah. Well, I also think stories are very powerful ways at changing people's memories and encouraging them to act. I remember a story from my childhood of a friend of mine who had meningitis.
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Right.
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That story has always made me care about rashes and really take those things seriously because it's. It was such a scary story and it stuck in my mind. So I hope this story and you sharing your story will do the same thing for folks and potentially stick in the mind and get people to remember things.
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Yeah. I mean, if you can. If I can. If I can Help one person take it more seriously. And because. Because that's the point. It's going early that matters. Right? The earlier, the less likely to spread. And if it doesn't spread, it's easy to remove. If it did spread, that's another story. Right. So sorry to cut you, but it's.
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Important to say no, I totally agree. You did it. You caught it. You're. You're smash. You're smashing it. Should I say that that's maybe not the right. You're thriving now and you're giving fantastic marketing course talks.
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That's the. That's a terrible. That's a terrible way to say. I would never say I've smashed it. But, yeah, look, it's, it's, it's funny because I entered the marketing mode as well with my own friends and family. So I started a WhatsApp group. Not a group where people would comment, but a broadcast where I would share any updates and I would like go out of my way to make it super clear. Bullet points, like, extremely clear. So there is no ambiguity for them because I knew that they were more worried than I was because I felt in control. The broadcast was like super, like straight to the point bullets and clear communication. Anticipated questions they might have had, and I just turned into that because I felt like it was the best way to help them so they knew exactly what was going on and overly communicating it and repeating a few key points and making clear to them. And yeah, it was a little marketing project inside that as well, to see how well I could communicate under pressure.
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Such a little marketing nerd, aren't you? Such a nerd.
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I know.
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Let's think of the communication strategy.
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Takes one to no one.
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Yeah, it does. Anyway, at this stage of the talk, you sort of shift gears. You say, I didn't panic. And I thought about this rationally and I tried to come up with the best solution for me and my family. And then in the talk, you then switch gears and you say, in a way, we're facing something similar with marketing.
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Where people really exactly said, you didn't.
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Say it like that. Nay. How did you not know?
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But again, another shocking, another expectation violation or whatever you want to call it. Disreput, reframe. I said, now I'm pretty sure you're like, that's a cool story, bro, but we want to hear marketing stuff. We want to hear the tips, the hacks, the secrets, right? So the cool story, bro, was like a kind of a nod to say, obviously it's a very big and heavy Story and me just brushing it off as cool story, bro. Like, I share the something stupid was also a way to like, lighten the mood again and go back to a more, you know, an easier way to listen to me. So, yeah, cool story, bro. And then the connection was when I got this diagnosis and everything that happened after. Yeah, I didn't panic. I didn't left leave my wife. I didn't feel like I wanted to travel for like six months in Guatemala in the jungle. I didn't feel like I wanted to travel, sell the house and just travel the world. I didn't feel like I wasn't surrounded by the right people. I didn't search for weird alternative way to treat cancer that wouldn't include surgery. I didn't. I had complete trust in the medical team. So I essentially went back to my foundations, like, foundations like the people I was around communicating about it in those clear way, like just. Just focusing on foundations. And so the connection was then that in the marketing world, especially nowadays, everyone is so overwhelmed by information, by AI, by competitors, by LinkedIn Bros telling you that you must panic, that everything is dead or whatever, that you essentially have two choices. You have the choice of panicking and trying everything and just feeling like you're completely. Like you're on wobbly ground all the time, like you're shaky ground. You don't know what to do. You just do random acts of marketing and you panic and read all the new books and you just feel like you're completely underwater. So that's choice number one. Choice number two is instead to rely on foundations that will never change. One of them being the thing you are a big nerd about. Right? The psychology behind how people make decisions and act, which is something that will never change despite new technology. As well as core foundations of marketing. There's a few scientific facts about marketing that have been proven time and time again in different decades, different markets, different countries that one must rely on. And that's the connection. When you're faced with all of this, there are foundations that you must lean on. And at least that's the way I do it nowadays. I never really panic when I see a new tool or whatever because I know that I have very, very strong foundation. And whatever happens will figure it out.
- [28:33]
You've said in the past, embrace the chaos. Marketing is messy. Yeah, that feels relevant to what you're talking about here. And I think it feels relevant to how most marketers feel at the moment. Could you explain that?
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So that's probably one of the key foundations that I shared in the talk that people repeated back to me that seem to have struck a chord because if I think about earlier in my career, that was something I was really afraid of or didn't like. I didn't like the chaotic thing and I always tried to like, try to make sense of it in a way that was super controllable, right? Like this fear of not having control, losing control, not being in complete control was always top of mind for me. So, you know, the need to create those fancy notion dashboards and fancy spreadsheet and just trying to like really put everything into a nice little box that I could feel like, this is it, this is the thing, this is what's going on. But that's not what happens in real life. Never, right? If you look at any companies like we both work for hotjar, it looked that they had their together from the outside. They never did inside. There's always new stuff, there's always panic. There's like, it's just, you take any company, any. Anyone businesses, it's always like that. It's always messy in there and it's meant to be messy. I've just made peace with that. And I think it's much easier to say, actually it is messy, it's fine, let's embrace it, let's find ways to handle it instead of trying to fight something that is just much bigger than ourselves and using resources to do this. So now I embrace the chaos and in fact, I like it. Right. I genuinely enjoy the mess. The fact that we can still post stuff without a strategy behind it that, that we can have a conversation that is unscripted. I like that aspect and I try to lean on it more. So, yeah, that was one of the key stuff that I shared that people seem to like.
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I distinctly remember the day, probably almost 10 years ago now, when I was working at a junior marketer in the first tech company I worked at, and I was invited into a meeting room with the CEO, the CTO and the cpo. And I was like, well, this is it. This is where I learn how everything works and how these big dogs make all their decisions. And I went in and they were talking about something like the blog strategy. And I just realized, no offense to them, they're all very smart people, but they had no idea. They were just as clueless. There were no answers. And it was quite an enlightening moment to be like, oh, just because you're at the top of the hierarchy probably doesn't mean anything to do or doesn't have any link with your level of expertise or intelligence in specific areas, you're not going to have all the answers. There could be any number of reasons why you're there, and of course some of them are very positive, but a lot of them are totally random.
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Exactly.
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And it links to, I think, something you've said as well, which you say there are no marketing secrets. And it's kind of hard to hear that because I love the idea that there's a secret that will help me. Everyone likes that Triple X, my podcast. But you say that and why.
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Right. Like it's interesting to think of the psychology behind it. Why do we as humans seek the secrets, the hacks, the shortcuts? Right. And I think it goes back to the, this, this need to feel like we can beat the system, that we can. We're smarter than the system, we're smarter than others. There are definitely biases around the fact that we think we're smarter than, than the average. Right. There's like surveys with people who say, oh, I am. 90% of people say they are smarter than the, the average. That's impossible. Right.
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80% of UK prisoners think they're more caring and law abiding than average.
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Exactly. So it's like we all think, we think we are better than what we actually are. And one way to, to do that is, yeah, it's trying to beat the system and then there's status around it. Like we want to feel good about ourselves. We want to feel good. Like our ego needs the feeling that we're smarter than the rest. And it's a way to signal smart and status to others to say, hey, you know, I found that loophole, I found that hack, I found that whatever. So, yeah, when someone says there's no secret, it implies that infine, that you're not as smart as you think you are and that you can't really hack the system. Everything is in the open. It's not that complicated. Which also goes back to one other bias, which is the fact that we tend to think as something complex to be smart and more effective. So the smarter, the more complex something seems to be, the more likely we are to think it's working. Right. And that's also something that I like to teach, the opposite, which is now actually the simpler you make something, the simpler the strategy. The simpler you can explain something, the more effective it's going to become.
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People like immediate rewards. That's, that's very clear in the literature that they will pick $5 today over $20 in two weeks time. And I Think that comes into this idea as well of we like to be sold a secret, we like to be sold a solution. We want to hear about the silver bullet because we're drawn towards those things. But, but you make the great point that those things don't work in reality. In fact you make quite a lot of then you then went on to make quite a lot of points. Some were great, some I want to ask you more about. So you said loyal customers won't grow your business, find new people. I feel like that's one that some people in the room were thinking, oh whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second, this is different from what the textbook told me. Exactly what do you mean by that?
- [34:23]
So I lean on the shoulders of giants, right? That's not my thinking. I'm literally just learning from people who are much smarter than me. And one of the key body of work that I've rely on for years is the work from the Heron Backpass Institute of Marketing Science led by Baron Sharp. And there are two books, how brands grow, part one, part two. They've also did a few things around B2B with LinkedIn, how B2B brands grow. And one of the key scientific facts about marketing that has been proven for decades, different countries, different industries, is the fact that you will lose people on basis of just things that you can't control. So customers will leave because they die, they leave because they move to a new country, they leave because they change job. There's so many factors that explain why people churn that are completely outside of control of any marketers, which again is something that is very hard to hear because we feel like, oh, we can fix churn and make churn negative and all this shit. So that means that in order to grow, the effect of like loyalty programs on anything like that has been proven to be extremely small, if not almost non impactful because it reaches people who are already loyal. And it's not 80% of customers who are 20% of customers who are responsible for 80% revenue. The real figure is 20% of customers responsible for 60% of the revenue. Now you might say, oh, tomato, tomato, it's the same thing. It's not. That means that 40% of your revenue must come from what they call light buyers. Folks buying just once, I never see you again. And that's the difference between making money and not. And that's any given time. Meaning that the churn like it's just when you apply the 60, 20 over time, the number of people who stay in that 20% gets lower and lower. So not only do you need to find those light buyers, but you also need to find new loyal customers to arrive to be replaced. So when you think about it this way, it's obvious you need to just continuously reach new people. And continuous is an important thing. It's not a one time and you forget. It's like you need to constantly stay in front of the right people, being noticed, being remembered, because you want to slightly raise the chances that I'll ever think about you when a specific trigger happens. So this is why it's so. I just, you know, if you go back to the start of this conversation, I just like those pattern interrupt things. If I reverse engineer the way I like to communicate it, I like to use those quite a lot. Like, I love to just go against the grain in a way that is provable. Right. And so, yeah, the loyalty is not going to grow your business. Loyalty programs don't work as much as you think. And you do need to attract light buyers all the time.
- [37:18]
Yeah, I definitely felt my pattern interrupt when you said that. Because I do still believe that loyalty programs can work. I do genuinely believe that they will increase your revenue. But I accept that they're overplayed in their potential revenue generation. And it made me immediately afterwards when I challenged myself to think about it. Think about the listeners for this show and this, like, incredible realization I had one day when I was looking at the stats, which is something like the total number of people who have listened to this show just on the RSS feed, not including YouTube, was like 400,000 or something. It's an insane amount of devices. And yet the actual listeners per episode is likely to be around the 20,000 mark. So what's actually happening there is, I'm hoping, Not that 380,000 people hate me, just heard it and they never came back and went listen to something else. I think what actually happens is it's extremely hard to get someone to build a habit behind your behavior. It's extremely hard to get people to listen to a podcast regularly. People's life changed. Maybe they were commuting one day and then they stopped. Maybe they went on holiday one day and then they didn't. And it's almost impossible to convince everyone to do.
- [38:29]
It's impossible to become loyal.
- [38:30]
It is impossible. So it'd be useless me creating a loyalty program for those 380,000 people, because the vast, vast, vast majority just aren't commuting to work by car anymore. So just won't be listening to a podcast or Just I've moved out of a marketing world so I don't care. So I do think you're right. And then you, and then you go on to another point which then I think really interest me as well because I started to see this whole thing in a different light, which is that retention, this is something I've always been taught. Retention is cheaper than acquisition. Fix the holes in the leaky bucket first before you try and bring people in and you interrupt the pattern by saying that's not true, retention is not cheaper than acquisition.
- [39:08]
Yeah, so the quote is usually seven times cheaper or something like that. There's no proof whatsoever, no body of science behind that claim. We don't even know where it's coming from. Exactly. It just appeared out of thin air like a lot of stuff in marketing and everyone is repeating it because it makes sense, but it doesn't actually. There's no data to say that retention ship or not an acquisition, it's very difficult to calculate in the proper way. The only thing that can be proven is that marketing for penetration, meaning reaching as many people as possible, light buyers and loyal buyers together, is way more effective at driving profit than just going for loyal customers or just going for light buyers. So this is why personalization and hyper personalization and all of this kind of stuff that companies are trying to make happen is not happening. It's because you do need extremely high penetration. You can't afford to over optimize for reaching every people at the right time or whatever. You have to reach more people to go back to that claim. It's just a false claim. It doesn't exist in reality. Especially if you start looking into the pattern. Like those loyal customers at any given time are going to disappear soon enough and need to be replaced and it's just not cheaper. It's not my thinking. Right. All of this is not me. You're not arguing with me on this. You're arguing with studies that have been done by smarter people than me across way longer than I've been alive. And it's just me repeating their excellent work. So another thing they say is, yeah, loyalty program's effect on sales is very weak. Only the most loyal customer will join the program. So you can't compare non members with members. Consumers who rarely buy a brand don't see the loyalty program and if they do, they can't see the point in joining. That's just one thing about loyalty. So yeah, I think when you see the world the way it really is and how customers actually behave, it removes a Lot of, a lot of pressure on your shoulder, I believe. Because once you know that loyalty is not going to work long term, you need to rely on others. You maybe stopped obsessing over, oh, let's fix that leaky bucket. You stop obsessing over things that you can't control. Like you can do the best job possible as a podcast host. You are going to lose listeners all the time. And once we're loyal, it's just a fact. It's just. And you can't do anything about it. So let it go. You know, to quote the famous Elza from Frozen, like let it go. Right. It's okay.
- [41:51]
You are standing on the shoulders of giants there, aren't you?
- [41:53]
Yeah, well, Elsa is a big, she's a big figure in my life.
- [41:57]
Yeah. I think we can prove this with an example. I think if loyalty was, was real and people did stay loyal to brands, Coca Cola would have stopped marketing and advertising a long time ago. They wouldn't bother to create ads. They wouldn't bother to slap their logo on top of every umbrella in the south of Spain. They wouldn't bother to fill subways with pictures of their brand. They wouldn't do Christmas ads. But they do. And they probably spend more on marketing than any other drinks company. Probably more than most soft drinks companies combined.
- [42:27]
Probably more than any companies, more than any company combined.
- [42:30]
And they do that. And again, this is us standing on the shoulders of Byron Sharp who talks about this exact thing in his they do that because they know that the majority of their buyers are not loyal. They are one time purchasers. They're people like me who do not buy Coke every day. But occasionally at a pizza restaurant when I don't want a beer, I might get a full fat Coke rather than a Fanta or whatever else it might be. It's that. And then that explains why. And this is the last thing, last sort of lesson of yours I want to ask you about before I've asked you how you apply it with your book. The last thing that I really liked from your talk which links this Coca Cola point is you say share one thing a thousand times, not a thousand things one time. So Coca Cola share their same message a thousand times. They don't come up with a different message 1000 different times. And I'm imagining this is partly because they know that they're reaching. They need to reach as many different people as possible and they're not just constantly messaging the same person. But I'm also interested in your take on this idea. Why do you think that is so important.
- [43:30]
So this is less about like global scientific facts, like the loyalty stuff. It's more like personal experience. And how I've stopped trying to, like how I've stopped burning out, frankly. Creating content, or whatever you want to call it is again, I think it removes the pressure to think you're not that important in people's life, right? The spotlight effect and everything makes you feel like you are, that people listen to you and care about everything you say they don't. And so that frees up your mind to think about. Okay, that means I can say the same thing all the time and people won't give a shit. In fact, unless your accountant complains about your message being repeated over and over, you need to keep going. You're only starting, right? So you're not that important in people's life. They don't think about you all the time. They barely think of you whatsoever. You're just in the back of their mind somewhere. If you've done a good job, that's as far as you can go. And therefore, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel every time and come up with different things and new ideas, just take one and slice and dice it in different ways. That's all you need to do. Just take one core message. I'm not saying to share it the exact same way. You can change the format, you can change the delivery, you can change the channel, but the core of it must be there. So like for Coca Cola, their distinctive brand assets are always the same. The logo, the color, the characters, the sounds, everything. McDonald's. I mean, to take over this massive brand, that's what they're doing. They're sharing one thing 1,000 times, and that's all. So again, I think it's another way to remove the overwhelm as marketers to think that you're not that important. And that's good thing, and just focus on one of the few core ideas you have and just find new ways to talk about them, that's all.
- [45:14]
And there is a lot of scientific evidence that backs the this up, the mere exposure effect. But even before that, there's the Millwood Brown study, which shows that if you put more than one message in an ad or an email, whatever it is, the likelihood of any single one of those messages being remembered goes down. So an ad with one message will be remembered. An ad with two messages just means neither of those message gets remembered because you're complicating the story. And then let alone when you're sharing these stories multiple Times, if you're sharing multiple different stories every time, it's far less likely to be remembered. And the mere exposure effect shows something very interesting, which is that the more you see of the same thing, the more you start to like it. Very weird studies where if some, if this was done in a university lecture hall, a random stranger sits in the university lecture hall when a lecture is taking place with other students, doesn't do anything, doesn't say anything, just sits there. In one study, in one of the variants, they sit there just one time. In another variant, they sit there five times on five different lectures. In another, it's 10 times, in a final one, it's 20 times. At the end of each of these different schools, they bring these strangers up to the front of the class and they ask, or show a picture of them on screen, maybe they ask, how likable is this person? How attractive are they? How willing would you be to go and talk to them? And remember, they've been advised not to talk with anyone in these studies. And the finding was that the longer they had been in the class with them, that person who sat there for 20 times was more likeable, considered more intelligent, more likely to talk to people, just prefer things that they become friends, familiar with. So as marketers, when we think, oh, let's change our strategy, let's come up with a fresh slogan, let's try something different, you, you think you're doing something beneficial because you, you, you're actually taking action. But in reality, the science says that you might, you might be causing, you might be cannibalizing any progress that you've already had.
- [47:01]
Yeah, I love that fact, right? The liking. That's why you need to show up all the time. And that's why it took me, that's why I keep trying to show up. It's been years, almost a decade, I think I've been showing up consistently online and I still get new customers from people who've been following me for five, six, seven years, which is fucking insane. Like, first ever time they've actually paid me. Money is like six, seven, eight years after they discovered me.
- [47:23]
And what I like about you, and what I like when I follow you, is you apply these things to your own work. And you don't just tell a marketer what you do, you show them how to do it. One of the ways you've done that is the way that you marketed your own book and how you sold it and how you got people to buy it. And I think you've applied many of the Principles we've talked about today, but also some other ones that I'd love to chat through in a bit later, maybe on a separate episode, we will talk about the actual content of the book, which is also fantastic and worth talking about. But I'd love for you to talk the listeners through how you applied some of these ideas to your marketing of your own book.
- [47:58]
Right, so first, what's the name of my book, Phil?
- [48:01]
Oh, what's the name of your book? Stand the Fuck Out.
- [48:05]
Yeah, that's it. Stand the Fuck Out. So, yeah, you can search for it. You'll find it on the usual place you buy your books, Amazon on my own website. But see what I did there? So, yeah, let's talk about. I like the fact that you said that because it makes me fuzzy inside that you like me, that you like my work. But it's also because, yes, I genuinely do try very hard to apply as much of the thing I learn and I want to share with people to my own work. One of the things we haven't mentioned that I've shared in presentation is that I always try to do things that light me up, that make me laugh. And that hasn't been the case for a long time. And that's prior to my cancer diagnosis and whatever. I didn't have this come to Jesus moment then. It's just a few years ago I realized that my best work comes from a place where I laugh. It makes me laugh or I really hate it. It's either way, right? It's something that really fucking light me up in any way. So one thing I've done, one of the challenge for me was how can I write and produce a marketing book that my daughter would like even though she can't read because she's three, Meaning something that makes her laugh or something she remember what? Like, can I create a book that is just that just looking at the COVID would make people laugh or. And my daughter will be able to describe it to a friend or my nephews would actually be able to describe it back to me. So my nephews call it the Chicken Book. They couldn't believe that I wrote the chicken book. That is me who wrote the chicken book. My daughter. Every time she sees the chicken, she just laughs. She just loves the chicken. She takes stickers of the chicken and put it on my walls behind me there's a massive, massive sticker, but there's also tiny ones and she just loves playing with it. And I also have anecdotal evidence from customers who bought it to. To whom I sent stickers or giveaway stickers and any other stuff that their kids love it right? Their kids love the chicken, love the faces that he makes.
- [50:12]
Phil
Hello Phil here, cutting in. I should at this point describe the book's cover Stand the Fuck out pictures a giant rooster or chicken if your Louis nephew's and the rooster wears a purple beret and the typography Stand the fuck out is plastered in large letters to the left of the rooster. There is no denying that this book stands out, but to make the book a success, Louis needed much more than just an eye catching COVID After the break, Louis will share his ingenious tactics for promoting the book.
- [50:46]
Louis Grenier
The podcast I'd like to recommend today is Creators are Brands, hosted by Tom Boyd and of course brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Creators Are Brands explores how storytellers are building brands online from the mindsets they use to the tactics they apply, including some of the business troubles they get into. This podcast breaks down what's working so you can apply the tactics to your work. It's a fantastic show, so listen to Creators, Our brands wherever you get your podcasts. If you're anything like me, that period before you have to come up with.
- [51:26]
Phil
An idea for a campaign is terrifying.
- [51:28]
Louis Grenier
You don't know what to do. You don't want to just rely on gut instinct. It's hard to think of a good idea, but there is a very interesting solution. It's GWI Spark, your free AI powered research assistant. GWI Spark gives you fresh insights on your target audience in seconds so you can get inspired, validate hunches and build smarter campaigns backed by rock solid consumer data. Don't go into your next campaign blind. Use Spark for your next big idea. Sign up for free@gwi.com podcast that's gwi.com podcast okay, welcome back.
- [52:09]
Phil
Let's cut back to me asking Louis how he promoted his book.
- [52:13]
Louis Grenier
You've really applied some stuff in interesting ways with your books, not just in terms of how you've built these wonderful brand assets for it and how sure you've marketed because you self published as well. And maybe you could talk a bit about this. You've been able to do some quite interesting approaches to how you sold it and how you market it and how you to read it.
- [52:33]
So okay, so let's break it down in a few parts. The pre launch part to talk about the liking effect, the mere exposure effect and sticking to something and say the same thing over and over again. I've been marketing the book, started marketing the book two years, I think or even two and a half years before it actually went available for purchase. So I've counted, I've talked about it more than 100 times to my list in different emails, in different ways. I've asked people to contribute examples to the book when it was being made. I explained how I lost 36k working with my previous kind of hybrid publisher. I talked about, I was sharing snippets of it, I was sharing how I struggled with it. I was sharing everything on like just, I just, I just kept talking about it because first I knew that this would stick to people's brain after a while. So many marketing books like how are you supposed to make a difference? And the second reason was pure, a selfish reason, which is more and more of my marketing. And the way I see the world is trying to be selfish. Not in a fuck the others, but more like if I do something that helps me, it's going to help others. And I've used those emails on this communication on LinkedIn to stay accountable. Right. It just helped me so much to put something out there publicly because then therefore people would knew nobody would talk about it to me and therefore it's not my thing anymore. It's everyone, everyone else's. So that helped me tremendously. So that pre launch, I mean you can call it a pre launch but it was essentially building in public or whatever trend buzzwords you can use. And that was, that was like, that was done on purpose. That was 100% something that I had planned that I wanted to do. I knew that talking about it prior would help. The second thing was the beta reader program. So that's by far the most valuable activity I've ever done in my business life, not just the book. So the way it works is that on March 20, 2024, so like nearly a year to the, to the the time we are recording this, I sent a public promise to people and I said, okay, I'm gonna promise you that by this date I'm gonna achieve that. And I also want to invite you to my beta reader program. The only thing you need to do is fill out this form to tell me who you are, why you want to help. This is what you'll get in exchange, like a free copy of the book, signed copy stickers, blah blah. And I got 249 applications for this, which I felt very good about. That allowed me to really hand pick folks who would be the ideal profile for the, for, for readers. So I try to Get a mix of professional marketers, reluctant marketers. So like folks using marketing their own business, but don't call themselves marketers and in house marketers. And. And then I'll try to pick beginner level as well as super experience. And I brought them to a tool called help this book.com, which is a tool created by Rob Fitzpatrick, who wrote the Mom Tests Write Useful Books. The workshop. He wrote one about workshops as well, which is pretty good. It's essentially Google Doc that is built especially for this purpose. So you invite people in, they can read your book and they can leave comments, but the comments have to be into a certain category. Like, it's not clear or, you know, it guides people through. And I did three rounds of that. So imagine this. So I had. I mean, you'll have to imagine yourself, Phil, because you went through it. We can talk about that. But for folks listening, imagine this. So like, my first version of the manuscript was really drafty, was definitely a shitty first draft, was by like not ready at all to be published. But I just felt like, okay, I need to get it out there. I just felt I needed the input because I was so much in my head. I just needed other people to read it. And they left more than 1,000 comments in the first round. Like, just 22 people selected for the first round. 1,000 comments. And I was like, I was so happy. I was so happy. You wouldn't believe how much joy I felt. And it's not because people loved it to the. To the opposite. It's because I knew then that it would make a much, much, much better book just by just the sheer amount of insight they were sharing with me. I remember that's a phase that my first publisher, who scammed me out of 36 grand, was super reluctant not to do. They really don't want me to do any of this. And they didn't want me to do any of this because they are afraid that nonfiction authors, when they ask for feedback, they get then brought in into this world of you have to listen to everyone and incorporate everyone's ideas and please everyone, right? So it is a very tricky exercise. But I've learned over the years, right? I have experience now. Like, I work for Hodja, I work for other companies. I did my own agency before I. And I have strong guidelines in terms of how I wanted the book to be, that I knew how to take feedback and I knew which one to consider, which one to avoid. For example, there's a few people who complain, for lack of a better word, about my quotes where I quote Star wars and I say, I don't say it's Towers. I just say, let the hate. Like as a famous emperor would say, let the hate flow through you. Just that quote, right? Just that thing. People saying, oh, I think you should remove this. I don't, I didn't understand that, right? And if I didn't have the experience that I have now, I probably would have agreed. But then I was like, no, you just don't understand it. And that's fine. The ones who would understand it. And it made me laugh. So I don't care really, frankly what you're thinking. So anyway, three rounds total, 5,000 comments. And one of the most valuable piece of feedback I got was from the cutest little British blond hair podcast hosts in the world, yourself. And you did it as a kind of, as an experiment, as a reciprocity type thing. We can talk about that as well. Which was like the weirdest. Anyway, so your insight was so valuable because you took the time to actually take distance from the manuscript and share more. Like the big things that I tend to do that didn't really work. One of the stuff was when I introduced a concept in the book, I didn't describe it immediately, so that was like throwing you off. And I found that so helpful because then I literally just went, every time I explained new concept, I would define it. The next sentence helped so much for clarity. You also said that I was naming my chapters. Like I would title my emails, but like it was completely. It's two different approach. Like I would write emails that are very like, curiosity led and to make people click. But for chapters in a book you want to make, you want to be clear, right? So that helped a lot. And then you also said that my best writing was my storytelling at the time. I had just a couple of stories throughout the book. And based on your comment and a few other people's comments, I realized I must have a story for every single chapter and I must dig hard to find new personal stories to share. So all of that made much, much, much better book. And when he went to market, I knew it was good, right? I didn't have this fear of, oh, is it gonna land well, I knew it was good, so I had this confidence and distrust in it and I was so proud of it that I just had no shame in promoting the fuck out of it.
- [60:35]
And I, I think you're. You've seen it from the right point of view there, which is that getting this feedback helps you improve your work and but the behavioral scientist in me can't help but see it from the other point of view, which is that by asking all these people, 250, 50 people feedback and getting them to spend time giving their own thoughts into the book, the value they then associate to that book is so incredibly high. Like I'm. I love, but a big part of that.
- [61:06]
Well, you love it, but let me just say something. You love this book, right? But in the best books that you like in your LinkedIn post, I mean, the fucking additional bonus list. Oh, by the way, this little tiny icon is your book. And so please, I love this, tell.
- [61:22]
Me about this to read in 2025. That's because I hadn't actually finished the final draft when I created that reading list. I do want to let you know that. And I still added you in because I've thought, well, I need to get, I need to get Louise book in there because I love it. So relax, mate, 2026 is your year. 2026 is your year. Anyway, I do love this book, despite what I also do. Not to blow my own trumpet, but I do read a lot of books and it, it is genuinely a fantastic book. But part of the reason I think that is because I have spent time invested in it. I feel invested in that book. I feel like, you know, because I've been asked my feedback on it, that I've helped shape it in some way, that makes me value it more, that makes me want to share it more. And that will make all of those 250 people far more likely to want to share such a genius marketing strategy. Because not only will obviously all of those 250 people read the book, love the book, rate the book like we've all done, they'll then go on and tell whoever they can about it as well. This is a study from Cialdini's book where people are asked about a fictional restaurant called Splash. Some were just asked, would you attend this restaurant? And some were asked, could you give some feedback on how you would improve this restaurant? They did. And then were asked, would you attend? And they were something like seven times more likely to attend. I don't know the actual figure, but if you invest time into something, you'll value it more highly. And I think this is what, when I've seen you create your book, this is a big part of how I've seen you market it as well. Of you have showcased the effort, toil, energy that went into it and that makes all of us value it more as well. Your example of losing 36,000 pounds or euros to that publisher dollars. That is something that a lot of publishers would hide, a lot of authors would hide because they would think, well, this makes me look like a failure, or this makes me embarrassed. I shouldn't share this. You were. You were immediately very open with that, and I think that helped your. Your success because people saw Jesus. He's invested time into this, he's invested money, and we value it more.
- [63:18]
Yeah. So what is that called? The labor illusion? No, that's.
- [63:22]
It's input bias is what it. Labor illusion would be if you hadn't done any work, but you claim you did, which it might be a bit of that as well. Yeah. Well, you've done a fantastic job. And I think. I think I could probably do a whole episode on all of the nudges and psychological tactics you've used to promote.
- [63:40]
Yeah, you should.
- [63:41]
Maybe I will one day.
- [63:42]
Phil
Now, Louis and I did have time to record more. In fact, Louis went on to explain how differentiation really works in marketing, and I challenged him to apply his ideas. All of that is coming up in a future episode of Nudge. But for now, let's wrap up what is probably the longest episode of Nudge I've ever released. I want to say a massive thank you to Louis for coming on and sharing his story. His book, Stand the Fuck out is genuinely fantastic, and I'm not just saying that because I invested time in it. It is a bible for anyone looking to create differentiated marketing. I've left a link to it in the show notes and to Louis, great newsletter, STFO as well. Do go check both of them out. The newsletter is free and the book is well worth however much it costs. If you don't want to miss Louis next episode of Nudge, then please do sign up for my newsletter. I'll send you an email as soon as that episode goes live. Plus you'll get instant access to all my bonus episodes as well. To sign up, just click the link in the show notes or go to nudgepodcast.com and click Newsletter in the menu. That is all from me. I'll be back next Monday with another episode of Nudge. Cheers.