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The Marketing Millennials
7 Ways Brands Fail to Differentiate (and What to Do Instead) with Louis Grenier, Founder of Stand the F*ck Out | Ep. 345
00:33:25
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- [00:01]
A
Hey, besties. Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials. I'm Tamara Graminski, stepping in as your guest host while Daniel is off doing dad things. I'm a longtime product marketing leader and the founder of PMM Camp, a community and newsletter for product marketers. And today's episode is a fun one. I'm joined by Louis Grenier, the unapologetically French contrarian creator of Stan the F Out. Louis is on a mission to help marketers stand out without selling out. You might know him from his time at hotjar or from his podcast where he's interviewed folks like Seth Godin and Rand Fishkin. Now he works with companies to build positioning and brands that actually get noticed. And his book Stand the F Out breaks down his entire process. In this first episode of our two part conversation, we dig into the foundation of standing, insight, positioning and segmentation. Louise shares the six questions every marketer needs to answer to find their edge. And we unpack why fluffy Personas and over complicated segments are killing your marketing. Let's get into it.
- [01:06]
B
Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the up.
- [01:31]
A
Louie. Welco to the show. Bonjour.
- [01:33]
C
Bonjour.
- [01:35]
A
Bonjour. I'm Canadian, so I actually did study a bit of French growing up. Obviously not the right French, as you would say, but I could maybe follow along with a few French words.
- [01:44]
C
Don't put words in my mouth. That's. It's a different version of French. I love it. Actually, it French Canadian is. I've made a few friends along the way when I was traveling and I always find French Canadians funnier, whatever they say, because the accent make it way like they sing it more and they have a few words that we don't use that are just very funny to me. So yeah, don't be ashamed of that. It's all good.
- [02:08]
A
Maybe we'll sprinkle in a few French in this episode, but I want to start today with kind of the big idea that sits at the heart of your work, which is what does standing out even mean to you? Because you talk about standing out as being this like core part of what we should all be focusing on.
- [02:24]
C
I don't actually talk about standing out. I talk about standing the fuck out. And I know that might sound like a smartass answer, but I think it needs the additional swear word to really show the intensity at which nowadays, more and more, we do need to stand out, right? We do need to differentiate in a way that is honest. We need to do so by gathering insight that others might not find about our customers. And we need to take some risk in some way, shape or form in order to be distinctive, to be noticed in the market. So it's not just standing out. I think it deserves a bit more, you know, oomph and intensity to it. It's really about standing the fuck out.
- [03:08]
A
I love that. I do think the word differentiate gets tossed around a lot and has kind of lost most of its meaning. So I'm excited to dig into that today and see how we can get a bit sharper with standing out. One question I had that I was curious, just as I've been exploring your work, is like, what pushed you to care so deeply about this idea? Like, did you have an experience where you realized standing out, like not standing out, was detrimental to your success, or you saw a brand that was really inspirational that you thought was standing out?
- [03:38]
C
So let me take you back to my high school year. So around 15, 16, 17, at the time I was very contrarian already. And I was being contrarian to be noticed by others because I was craving approval, craving the attention of others. The only way I had learned to do so from my early childhood to then was, was to get attention this way, especially from my mom because she wouldn't notice me if I was being a nice little boy, right? So the only thing that I would do that would work was actually to try to pick, poke holes in her thinking or when she was wrong, or to do stuff that she didn't like me to do, like being contrite like that. And so that muscle started to develop on its own. And I used to do that with my teachers and with my friends and whatever. That kind of became my default way of thinking. And this didn't connect to my career until later on when I realized as well that the Internet was kind of a thing that I really liked to spend time on because as a teenager it was just the start of high speed Internet and making website yourself. So when I had the connection between, I started to connect the dots between, okay, I'm a contrarian, I like the Internet. But also I feel like I have a good emotional intelligence. So I understand people quite well. Or at least I have the curiosity to lead me to think, okay, why do people do that? Or why don't they do that? How do they think that? I always Kind of like that. So if you make the intersection of those three things, it creates a good cocktail of how do I use my contrarian kind of personality and channel it in a way that helped me to make a living on the Internet? Mostly by understanding how people behave and how they think. And I think the intersection of that is pretty much standing out. So finding ways to make brands stand out, finding ideas that are quite creative or that go against the grain, and doing so by still understanding how people would probably think, think, or react to those things. So took me decades to arrive at the point we are today. So that's kind of the backstory, briefly, or not so briefly. And the second catalyst was actually a conversation I had with Seth Godin on my podcast years and years ago, where we were talking about this exact point of standing out. And I asked him, let's say you take an Internet company that is just boring and that provides services just like the others, how would you make it stand out? And he said, I don't know if you made that mistake on purpose, but you can't ask this question this way. You have to ask, how do we make something remarkable that is different so that you stand out. Right. Not the other way around. Don't take something boring and average and try to make it stand out. But that answer frustrated me because he wasn't giving a map at all about how to do so. And I find it quite. I mean, I love the guy and I find him so inspiring, is one of the reasons why I'm in this field. But I find it a bit fluffy and a bit easy to say, not so easy to actually do. So years after that, part of the conversation kept popping up and popping up, and it became a niche I really needed to scratch. Up until I was starting to help other brands to do that. I was also working for Hodjar as a product marketer, as the only one on their positioning. And so I managed to revise my own kind of way of thinking about it. And so all of that led to the book Stand the Fuck out, and pretty much what I do today. So, as you can see, it took me, what, 30 years?
- [07:19]
A
That's fair. I love that. I love that you've kind of been, like, evolving your thinking as we go. And today we're going to spend quite a bit of time on the concepts in the book and the canvas that you've built. But before we get to that, I'm curious about your philosophy around. It sounds like you believe that being contrarian is a way, maybe not the only Way, but a way to stand out. How do you balance that with once you've kind of captured attention by being contrarian, with also providing a sense of belonging? Because I think in order for someone to want to buy from you or stick around or buy again, I believe that there needs to be a sense of belonging. Like, wow, this was made for me. Obviously, Seth Godin talks about tribes as well. Do you view those two things as in opposition or am I making some assumptions here about your philosophy overall?
- [08:03]
C
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you're making assumptions which are normal to make based on what I said earlier. So the concept of standing the fuck out is bigger than me. I realized the power of it when I started to talk about it. I just had run a class about it years ago and people used the term to describe their way of doing so, of using their courage and taking some risk and whatever. And so I always say that this isn't a method to replicate my way of thinking. And to be a French contrarian, far from it. In fact, it's like there's millions and millions of possibilities. I mean, probably billions really, if you actually do the math. So I never teach people to be like me. I teach people to. One, find insights, the reason why people behave a certain way. Find little insights from your markets that competitors can't find. Two, developing a unique positioning that gives them a compelling reason to pick you. Not a bullshit reason, but actually a compelling reason. Solving problems that competitors have overlooked and then developing a distinctive brand that gets noticed. There's again millions of ways to do so and finally finding the right people at the right time. So it's really not about being contrarian and steering the pot on purpose at all. It's pretty much to your point. It's about connecting, giving. I mean, I don't go as deep philosophically in terms of sense of belonging and all of that and creating loyalty, because that's proven by marketing science. That doesn't exist. But we can talk about that. I can rant about that for a bit. The only thing I try to give people is a roadmap that they can use, that is universal, that won't change to enable them to stand out in a crowded market, whatever they are doing. And it's based on first principles of marketing psychology, stuff like that. And this is kind of the answer that I was looking for that I couldn't find anywhere else in marketing books and wherever.
- [10:08]
A
Totally fair. One of the things I love about the framework that you have is that it is so clear and easy to follow the steps are laid out. So why don't we dig into a few of those? What I love about how you start the framework is that you start with insights and research, which I think a lot of people skip over. I think when most people hear the word, oh, I need to stand out, they immediately go to maybe some of the more brand components of standing out, like, oh, wow, we need new colors, we need a new logo, we need a slogan, whatever it might be. But your approach starts with, as you said, first principles, foundations, customer insight. Why is that so important to reaching the final conclusion of being able to stand out?
- [10:47]
C
I changed my tune on this. I used to swear by just research. You need to do research, you need to interview customer, you need to send surveys. If you don't do that, you're a loser. I've changed my tune because I've realized over the years you don't necessarily need to do brand new research, meaning gathering new data. You don't even need sometimes to just dig old data. Sometimes your intuition and experience in the field is way more than enough to actually lay out the things that you need to construct a unique positioning, distinctive brand and continuous reach, which is the way to get customers. So finding insights doesn't necessarily mean doing research like what we would call research, like the product marketing customer research. You don't necessarily need to do so. But what matters is that you ask yourself the right questions. And there's six questions that you need to answer. If you answer them properly, deeply, then you already have far more than what most brands or companies would ever have. So what is the actual thing that people want to accomplish? What other things have they tried or considered to accomplish this job? What are the problems, struggles, whatever pain points, whatever you want to call them that prevented them to reaching that job? What is the category of thing, products, services that belong to where you belong in your market's eyes? What events or specific situations have compelled people, your customers, to act and to actually do something about it? And then what group of people would be the most compelled to act based on those struggles? What struggles do they have in common that lead them to act and pick you over the other? So I think I would say that instead of focusing on research as the keyword for this phase, I would say it's more those questions about how people behave or think. And once you have that, just by asking yourself the right questions, I think you're already pretty far. And if you don't have experience, don't have a lot of intuition about what's going on, if you try to Create a brand in a category that you don't know about, then yeah, you're gonna have a bad time because you're gonna really struggle to answer those questions properly with specificity, which is a word that I use all the time because you need to be specific in order to find opportunities. So yes, then it means you can do research, but it doesn't have to be hardcore customer interviews. Hardcore like 20 question survey could be a simple conversation with a customer who already bought something from a competitor. It could be analyzing chat transcript that you've had the last week and just the questions that people ask could be mining reviews on Amazon or whatever else. So there's many, many different ways to gather those insights. So yeah, it's not always about research, but it's always about those six questions.
- [13:58]
A
I love that. So what I'm hearing is like you don't always need to complete new research, but you need to go and look at the information that is available to you to answer those questions. One thought I would love for you to tell me more about is like how you view the connection between best customers and segments. So when you're approaching this work, are you looking at all of the insights that are available en masse and then kind of refining and breaking into segments at the end, or are you taking a bit of a, a lens, an opinionated lens at the beginning to say, hey, I want to actually focus on this best customer group and I'm actually refining into mini segments within that as an output of the research.
- [14:39]
C
That's a great question. And I don't say that lightly. It's a great question because I've asked myself this very challenge when I was developing the methodology and writing the book. It's like, it's almost a chicken and egg situation because to learn from a group of people to gather this insight, you kind of need to make a guess at first. So my approach now is I ask people to pick to think about their last, their best customers of the recent past. I usually work with smaller brands, but for bigger brands you can use the exact same with the sales team, customer success, or even the CEO and whatnot. And I purposely don't necessarily give them too much like, detail about what I mean by best customer. I basically say, you know, the ones that you might have enjoyed working the best with. Or like, if you really were, like, if you had $100 in front of you and you knew exactly who was behind each, like, who would you knock on first? This kind of stuff just to make them think about beyond the demographic Firmographic, bland deconstruction of customers. So I make them just visualize those people. So I force them to actually think about one or two or three persons, but real people. And just like then once we know those you have them in mind, then let's try to answer those questions. And then once we have answers to those questions through research and whatever this is when we kind of go back from the beginning and try to only find one core segment. So I know the question you want to ask at the very end, which is the marketing that I'm willing to die on. There's so many, many hills around there that I'm willing to die on. One of them is product marketers, brands, marketers in general, over complicate segmentation to the point where I'm actually, I want to vomit a bit every time. So because they forget about the reason why segmentation is important. Segmentation is important. Not because someone told you so, not because niching is in niches in other. In the riches or riches are in the niches or whatever the fuck. You need to understand why first of all. So the reason why we must pick a specific group of people is because we want to give a specific group of people a compelling reason to pick us over the alternatives. And we do so by solving problems that they struggle with a lot. Doesn't have to be a crazy amount, but at least there's stuff that they can't achieve their job because those things are in the way and they are important to them and are not solved at all or not properly by alternatives. So therefore, when you are there and propose a solution to those things, even if you're not known, the likelihood that a group of people who share the struggles more than the average, who feel them more than the average, the likelihood that they'll pick you is higher. So this is why niching down is, is so important, especially as a challenger brand. This is why you need to focus your attention on one core segment. And so instead of starting with, okay, we have five different Personas. So we have marketing mark, marketing mark is 35 and is it Boston? Whatever. No, that, that doesn't do anything to you because it doesn't explain the struggles they have in common or what makes those, this particular group of people suffering from those struggles more than the average. So the question is not what age or what fucking demographic are your Personas? The question is who tend to suffer from those struggles that you've identified that others don't really solve. Well, more frequently or more acutely than the average, because then that Gives you a group that is more likely to respond to your thing and the answer to that question is your core segment, then yes, you can split it in different ways to target sub segments inside there. If, for example, you go on LinkedIn ads and you need to pick specific demographic demographics, you can, you need to target that group in one way, shape or form. But the only thing you should care about when you define a segment is the attributes that they all have that they all share that explain why they struggle more than the average.
- [18:52]
A
You are preaching to the choir with this one. I am a big segmentation nerd. Also allergic to the word Persona, I always say, because I think Personas are completely useless 99% of the time. My philosophy here is if you can't clearly identify your anti segments, then you probably haven't refined your key segment close enough. Right? Like, you need to be willing to alienate people in order to be as resonant as possible with that best customer. And you know, I've worked in a lot of tech companies and often I will get pushback from executives, the CEO, board members who like, well, what about all of these other customers that give us money? Or like, what about the TAM over here? And I always say, like, when we think about best customers of this key segment, it doesn't mean we're not going to serve someone else. Like, someone can come and buy my product if they want it. I'm sure there's people who buy your book who you would not define as your key segment. Right. You're going to take their money, hopefully they get some value out of the book. That's awesome. But you're not going to market to them. The COVID of the book was not designed for them. You're not going on podcasts to promote to them. And so there's, I think, an important difference there for people to recognize.
- [20:00]
C
It's a gigantic difference. Right. And I don't know if you agree, but to me, it's not a marketing or business problem. It's a psychological problem. It's. It's a, it's a problem that stems from our need to feel like, what are we. The fear of missing out. Right. The fear of, of what if. If we don't get out to this group, we're going to miss out on so much money and whatever. So better reframe, like a helpful reframe I found, is to ask yourself instead, what are we missing out on by not focusing on that group? So we might miss on, like, better knowledge of that specific group. We might miss, like, Better insight. We extra revenue because all of the attention and resources would go to this group. So therefore we can upsell to more things. We can learn about that, whatever. Right. So like, you are missing out on way more by not focusing your attention, especially nowadays, more and more. Because if you really want to give a group a compelling reason to pick you, you really have to go narrow specific or else you're just going to blend the fuck in.
- [21:04]
A
Yeah, I love that. I'm going to definitely borrow that question. That's. That's a really good prompt. I want to turn a little bit after we have these insights. So we have the insights, we look through them. We feel like we have alignment on who this key segment should be. And then the next step in your framework is the actual positioning itself. And you recommend a specific positioning statement format. And I'm just keen to hear, like, how did you land on that format? Are you actually sold that that format is the one that unlocks the rest of the standing out, or is this. You just had to make a call on one? Because I'm sure as you know, as a product market, so many different positioning formats we could use.
- [21:42]
C
Yeah. So I'm not married to the exact structure I'm using. So like, the structure is something like, unlike alternatives, we are the only whatever in that category that solve those struggles and help this segment reach a job or something along those lines. And the reason why I'm not very specific about it or anal about it is because it doesn't really matter. What matters more than just following the exact structure is clarity of being able to write briefly your positioning in one sentence, even though grammatically it's correct. But then you wouldn't put that on a website because it's very long and convoluted. But are you able to summarize and distill the reason why people should pick you over the alternatives in a compelling way in just one phrase? And if you're not, then you don't have a positioning because you're just not making the right choices. So it's what I try to really instill is like, you can follow any template, I don't care. But it needs to give them enough to give the reason why you're uniquely positioned to give a specific group of people a compelling reason to pick you.
- [22:57]
A
That's fair. One thing that I noticed about your work is that where a lot of positioning expertise stop, like let's say April Dunford's framework, she kind of stops once we get to this positioning statement. You take it a step Further. And you have two whole steps after one of them being this like distinctive brand component and you specifically talk about the brand kit. And I'm curious, when you think about someone walking through your framework, do you view this as being like one individual who now is kind of moving on to step three and four or is that more. Well, I might hand this off if I'm a product marketer or marketer leading the first part. Now I'm going to hand this off to a more focused brand marketer. Who do you envision being able to. I just feel like there's a lot of mix of different skills once we get to the back half of your methodologies.
- [23:45]
C
Yeah. So like, credit to April Dunfield on her fantastic work. She inspired me to actually dig into the topic a lot more. I think her approach worked really, really well. When you have a product that is innovative in some way, shape or form, meaning that within that product there are features that are offering a compelling reason for customers to purchase you. And it's mostly for B2B tech companies that have a lot of budget and true innovation and all of that. So distinctive brands, all of that. I understand why it wouldn't be that necessary for that specific group, but for everyone else, which is most people listening anyway. When you want to start out in credit market with many direct competitors and no true, true, genuine, compelling reason to be picked that you need to actually engineer, then you need more than just positioning. So you do need more than just a unique positioning. I like to say that the compelling reason, the positioning itself, that's more the rational side of things. It's more something that your devs and everyone else can get behind. The distinctive brand is more the irrational side where you're going to have to do some weird stuff to be noticed. It doesn't have to be crazy, but it has to be distinctive in order to be noticed and cut through. Because if you don't, nothing's going to happen. You can have the most beautiful, unique positioning in the world. It's going to be very difficult. So, you know, it's funny because you mentioned brand marketer versus product marketer and stuff like that. That's another heel I want to die on. I would be willing to die on is that product marketing shouldn't exist. It's one of the most awkward fucking discipline because marketing, like product has always been part of marketing and we just create that function because most in B2B and tech companies, we're so enamored about our product and we're so complexifying everything that we do need actually people who are competent enough to re explain it simply so that people fucking understand it in the first place. So if you learn the true foundation of what marketing is, you understand how people think and how they behave and how they notice you and how they remember you. And if you don't have brand in there, then there's no point because that's how people construct concept in our mind to help them think about stuff. Brand is not a product of marketing. Brand is a product of how people think. We need brand to make decisions in our daily lives. We can't start from scratch and make decision about new cereals every day. We do need some categories and nice little boxes that we can have in our head so that we can take decision fast. So branding is not a mental construct or else it would have disappeared. So like, I know it's a very, you know, zigzaggy way to answer, but I wouldn't try to create those barriers if you truly want to make the company you work for or your company stand out, meaning selling more to a group of people who want to buy from you and, and finding where the demand is and growing. Whatever definition you give or whatever like segmentation inside marketing you give, it doesn't matter because you need all of this.
- [26:56]
A
Yeah, what I'm hearing is you need kind of alignment. One continuous thing. I will have to fight you on that marketing hill though.
- [27:01]
C
Please.
- [27:02]
A
You know, everything I do is related to product marketing. I do hear you though. Like, one of the pains of being a product marketer is that we often feel like, you know, no one really recognizes us as their team. So like we are almost an outsider to product. We're an outsider to marketing. And I do think we've overcomplicated what the role is meant to do. However, based on my experience working at many startups and scale ups, most marketing teams are not equipped with the skills or mindsets to actually complete those activities. And so we absolutely need.
- [27:38]
C
Most marketing teams are communication teams.
- [27:40]
A
Yes, exactly.
- [27:42]
C
Which is, if I'm not mistaken, 4% of the job of marketing. That's one Mark Ritson, who splits those three stages like diagnosis. I'm going to fucking butcher it. Now I have it. It's basically a simple equation with the four Ps and the three core stages and essentially communication is just a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of our responsibility. So I completely agree. In a perfect world, the marketing team would be trained on foundational marketing skills, which includes what we do. And product marketing doesn't have to then have its own thing it's like go to market gtm. That's another hill I'm willing to die on. Go to market is one of the stupidest thing I've ever come across. Reverse engineering, recreating the fucking wheel and calling it the different names. I mean, go to market. What else is the marketing supposed to do apart from going to the market, coordinating with whoever creates the product? I mean, yeah, it's just a symptom of B2B tech who's just creating problems out of nowhere and stuff. And hopefully they will like anything that the pendulum is going to swing back soon enough. But, yeah, it just drives me nuts.
- [28:57]
A
Me too. We could have a whole episode just of the marketing hills that we would both like to die on.
- [29:02]
C
Oh, yeah. Like it's a. It's a chain of volcanoes for me.
- [29:06]
A
Yeah. Before we, before we get. Before we wrap up the episode, I want to chat a little bit about maybe one or two brands that you love that you think are standing out and doing a good job. Whether that you think they followed your methodology and you've worked with them before, or if they're just brands that you appreciate.
- [29:25]
C
I think we should do two episodes, right? We'll break it into two parts so we can talk more.
- [29:30]
A
I love it. I'm down. So we will leave it on a break where you can tune in to hear more about how this actually comes to life. So before we end today, then I will give you one chance to share one more marketing hill that you would die on that is separate from the ones you've already shared today.
- [29:47]
C
But you have to promise me that I can add another one later on as well.
- [29:50]
A
Then I promise you will get one per episode. One per episode.
- [29:54]
C
Okay. One is the fact that marketing is not changing and that it's the tactics and the tools that are changing. So anyone trying to sell you this idea that marketing is changing is full of shit.
- [30:05]
A
Okay. I love that. Tell me more about that. What does that actually mean?
- [30:09]
C
Well, that means that the very foundation of marketing are based on psychology, scientific stuff, people, the way we behave and think. And this is not going to change anytime soon. We are product of millions of years of. Of evolution. We are a species that is like a social species, whatever. And it's not because we have iPhones in our hands that we are changing the way our brain cells are configured. So anyone who trying to tell you that marketing is changing either trying to sell you something so that you'll buy their $99 product, or they mean the tactics in order to reach customers and understand them are changing and you need to update, you need to adapt, which I completely agree. But the very fundamental of marketing is not changing.
- [30:53]
A
Okay, I buy into that. I buy into that. Okay, well, thank you for coming on for part one of our now two part conversation and we will stop here and listen to our next episode to see how we continue.
- [31:08]
B
Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.