Reasons "Brands" Don't Trust What Others Say

Thirty years ago at Eddie Bauer, I'd receive a Monday call from a sales person responsible for weather software. Not a call every few months. A call every Monday.

"Hi Kevin, it's Tom from Weather Solutions. How's your family doing? Listen, I don't know if you noticed, but there is a cold front coming down from Ontario that is going to change everything. Temperatures will be fifteen degrees below normal in New England this weekend. Are your stores ready?"

I'd explain that we were an outerwear brand. I'd explain that our stores were always ready for a cold front. He was undaunted. "Kevin, imagine the sales gains you'd experience if you followed the advice of our software like leading brands do, and you put your outerwear at the front of the store? Customers would notice. Sales would surge. All because of our software. That's the opportunity you are missing out on."

We'd have the same inane discussion in May. "Kevin, it's going to be fifteen degrees above normal in Ohio this weekend. Imagine how sales would surge if you had this level of intelligence and put swimwear at the front of the store ... all because of our software."

For this guy, every problem was a problem that would be solved by moving products to the "front of the store".

After awhile, I'd see his number on caller id and take the call just because I wanted to hear this week's sales pitch.

And awhile later, I stopped taking his inane calls.

He probably thought ... "another dumb brand with employees who just can't see the future."

You're probably dealing with somebody who wants to solve your "AI Problem" for you. You know you'll solve problems with AI in the future. But you won't hire this guy. Nope. Because you don't trust this guy, in the same way I didn't trust the weather pundit from 1996.

Or, you're dealing with somebody who wants you to focus on neuroscience that generates emotional engagement. 

I used to deal with a Forrester Research sales professional who spent months figuring out the weak link in our salesperson defense program (it was a Credit Vice President). I'd attend a 10:00am meeting, walk in the room, and there was the guy, smiling at me with a look that said "you can't beat me". Well, I can beat you ... as a consultant I never once recommended Forrester Research because I couldn't let my clients run into this guy. Short term gains, long-term pains.

Sometimes "brands" simply don't trust what you are saying ... the employees aren't stupid, the employees simply have been burned so many times by vendor reps who make life miserable for their victims that they simply shut down and stop trusting anything.

We've all worked with vendor partners who are brilliant, kind, and have our best interests at heart. If you find an individual like this, hold on to him/her like grim death.

Email Marketing Article From 1996

Here it is ... click to see who the author was/is.

Old-school articles were different, weren't they? Here's an image of the bottom of page one of a twelve-page missive from Don Libey in 2005.

On page three, he discussed the political polarization (caused by economic disruption) that began with Ross Perot and would dominate our discussions in 2026. He missed the jet fighter fluid that would be poured on the topic by Fox News, for nobody is perfect. He argued that people studied individual trees when they needed not just to study the forest but the regional and global issues that influenced the forest. A good analogy for 2005. Imagine if he'd seen the forest fires coming and tried to explain why they would happen? He'd have been mocked (more than he already was for trying to tell you about the future).

Back to the email marketing article.

I've worked with more than three hundred "brands" in my twenty years of consulting. Here's a quiz question for you. How many of those brands did a good job with email marketing, the kind of job that Seth Godin would be proud of?

1. 2 clients.
2. 17 clients.
3. 29 clients.
4. 50 clients.

The answer is (1) ... two clients.

Two!!

The first client had a young female employee who presented her findings to the Executive Team, showing all the profit she generated for her company. As she left the Executive Conference Room, one of the Executives whispered to me "God, what a nerd". 

It's easy to lose faith when you hear those comments. 

I was once asked to speak at a conference - the conference asked me to attend a dinner for Executives attending the conference. One of the CEOs, sitting across the table, said "Why should we listen to you, you are just a nerd? Meanwhile, we run businesses!" The table chuckled. Yeah, ha ha. Funny. I later created a term to define this person. "Lemonhead".

Two years after Seth Godin wrote the article at the start of this post, Management at Eddie Bauer asked him to speak to Leadership. The most used phrase I heard from co-workers after he described his premise of "Permission Marketing" was "we're not going to do that". Of course, Eddie Bauer went bankrupt multiple times since then, but that's a topic for another day. Any vision of the future that goes beyond standardized, routinized, templatized work is one not likely to be embraced. 

There are reasons that nearly every single company scrubs the humanity out of public-facing work.

Garden variety Managers and Analysts don't want to do the additional work because they won't be recognized for the brilliance required to do it and they won't be compensated for their efforts.

Directors and Vice Presidents don't want to do the additional work because if the additional work "doesn't work" they won't be believed/respected the next time they want to implement something important to them.

C-Level Executives and Owners don't want to do the additional work because it doesn't align with their "vision" for the future.

So nobody does the work.

Which means the competitive advantage of "doing the work" has never been greater ... even for a discipline like email marketing that is three decades old.

Subscribe To Our Channel On YouTube

Here's the image from Skagit Speedway on Friday night on FloRacing (if you didn't understand a word of what I just said, no worries, that's our modern world, where things only matter within the 10,000 people who care).

"Subscribe to our YouTube Channel". If you do that, you can watch every race on Saturday night for free instead of paying to go an hour north of Seattle / an hour south of Vancouver to pay $20 to watch the races.

That's what a small dirt track that features sprint cars north of Seattle wants you to do.

One of you recently told me that "video is not who we are" when queried on the topic.

Really?

Does what Midland Paper thinks more closely align with who you are?

I mean, read that ... my goodness. "Emotional Engagement". Notice there are two things not mentioned in the word salad ... sales increases ... and profit. #telling

There are frustrating days. Today is one of those days. Come on people, a dirt racing track in Northwest Washington should not be a better marketer than you are!

They're Testifying About (Checks Notes) Pickles

Here's the article about a music industry blogger and pickles (click here).

Here are his readers testifying about said pickles (click here). Read the comments about how his readers interacted with marketing.

Here is their Instagram - 600,000+ followers. Spend 10 minutes here, please. Here's a marketing tactic. Another one.

They're selling PICKLES for crying out loud.

Somebody has to be excited about what you sell. Get some stories going, folks.

An Unpopular Message

Like this one, for instance.

"Stop Hiring Humans".

Multiple things can be true at the same time. We're about to go through a painful process where work is reinvented. Coders, for instance, who were able to command salary premiums that were offensive to other employees (I've been in the HR meetings where salary band discussions get pretty lively), become a line-item-expense that is compared to what a computer might be able to do cheaper. That's a significant transformation. The same transformation is coming for marketing. Ten years from now, your marketing department is unrecognizable. A CMO told me his future department is him guiding the controls like an airplane pilot while bots do everything else for him. It's hard to argue with his vision for the future. He told me the only reason you needed a marketing staff was because technology had not caught up to the needs of modern marketing. Once technology caught up (it's about to catch up), no more marketers.

The other thing that can be true at the same time is that it's probably not brilliant to rub people's noses in change. "Stop Hiring Humans" is rubbing your nose in the future. When you rub somebody's nose in something too often for too long, backlash happens.

We don't know what "backlash" will look like, but history tells us backlash happens.

Regardless, this is a time in history where you want to understand "how business works". Knowing how "paid social works" means you get automated out of the customer relationship. Knowing "how business works" means you get to direct the automation of the customer relationship, with or without AI.

P.S.:  If you want the opposite of "Stop Hiring Humans", here's a different perspective about AI. FYI, there's swearing in the article, so don't read it if you don't want to see those words. Those who have been in business since 1990 have witnessed an endless number of scams, from the dot.com era to mortgage securities to Bernie Madoff to omnichannel strategy to social media to mobile to non-fungible tokens to politics to crypto to Kalshi/Gambling to the use of the phrase "at scale" to AI and "tokens" (and I'm just scratching the surface here). You know what pyramid schemes look like, you know when you're being taken advantage of and/or lied to. The article (on several occasions) references the term "Business Idiots". I frequently call these individuals "Lemonheads".

Theorists

Sometimes you run into what I'd call a "Theorist".

Theorists hold companies back, in three ways.

1. They don't bridge the gap between theory and practice.
2. They alienate co-workers via hubris, thereby stopping any possible progress.
3. They don't understand "business".

Say you have a Marketing Director who "skews Theorist" and wants to leverage AI in email marketing to boost conversion rates. Seems like a good idea. She doesn't have any in-house capabilities. She likely has a Theorist in IT that talks a good game but knows little. She probably has to work with a vendor to accomplish her goals. This can be a bumpy process. The vendor could care less about "inventory position" in specific items ... thereby recommending an algorithm that personalizes the merchandise assortment for a group of customers. The assortment features popular selling items (in an effort to boost conversion rates) ... of course, those items sell out quickly and the algorithm doesn't recognize this fact so customers are inevitably disappointed and the inventory team loses faith in "AI".  The inventory team and the merchants grumble about the Marketing Director, the CFO wants to know why the Marketing Team is spending $$$ and conversion rates are only up from 3.0% to 3.1%, questioning whether that would have happened without "AI" and the "AI" vendor doesn't recommend AI/No-AI testing so you can't answer the CFO's question and the wheels come off the bus.

That's what happens when Theorists run the show.

What happens the next time the Theorist wants to do something? It's the image above, that's what happens. In other words, nothing happens.

Many of you are going to go through a significant transition over the next five years. You will be well-served by not letting the Theorist get anywhere near your transition, even though the Theorist will be the first in line to encourage the transition.

2014 - 2018

When I look back on what my clients have endured over the past decade, I cannot help but reflect upon the era of 2014 - 2018.

In 2018 a Private Equity individual reached out. We had worked together for the past half-decade. His firm owned a brand, and he was looking to fill out the Board of Directors. I asked him what he wanted to accomplish. His response caught me off-guard.

• "I want to collaborate with bright people and I want to have fun."

Since 2018, how many of you have genuinely had fun at work? Not an enjoyable day or two, but consistent, satisfying fun?

Can I use Macy's as a proxy for something?

Here is a fifteen-year net sales trend for Macy's.

There were a few positive comps before 2014, a handful through some of 2018. From there? No fun. By and large, the business began contracting in 2015. There is some evidence in the top portion of the chart that Management might be bringing this flight in for a safe landing.

Meanwhile, click here to look at Amazon's trajectory over time. From the link, here's the image that matters.

It's not hard to see that began, unabated, in the 2014 - 2018 timeframe.

Maybe more interesting is what began at Shopify in the 2014 - 2018 timeframe.

They went from $0 in the 2014ish timeframe to $12,400,000,000 in the most recent twelve months.

The 2014 - 2018 timeframe was one of massive transformation. Either we were paying attention, or we weren't paying attention. We're suffering today if we didn't pay attention back then.

Two distractions since 2018 ... COVID ... and now AI. Both distract us from actual changes in customer behavior and competitive balance.

Example:  A few months ago, one of you emailed me, wondering why I don't require you to pay for a subscription to my blog? I responded that I can't ask you to pay for something I've given away for free for twenty years, and that if somebody wanted to compensate me for my content they could purchase a booklet. They professional then said "nah, at minimum you should at least have a Venmo-enabled tip jar on your blog, nobody wants to buy books but people do want to say thank you for your content". Over the weekend, I'm watching a storm chaser who was about to lose a $100 deposit on a hotel room and within seconds his 3,000 viewers donated $100 so he'd break even. He raises $500 a day from his viewers to pay for his gas. He raises $3,000 a month from his viewers to cover travel costs.

• Not long ago, I took up the professional on his "tip jar" comment ... but in a different realm. I started a pickelball Substack. Dollars started flowing in.

Why bring up the "example" above?

There are subtle changes that happen, and if we don't pay attention we miss them even though they become standard across our industry. When the Private Equity individual wanted to "have fun" back in 2018 with a catalog brand, he kind of missed out on what that catalog brand needed to pay attention to. Today, I go back and look at Elite Program results from the 2014 - 2018 timeframe, and I'm struck by how so many companies missed out on how business was changing.

• Rise of Social Media as "dark matter" in creating awareness (even though it has been doing that for two decades). It's not a source that an attribution model appreciates, nor should it be ... it serves a completely different purpose. It's "dark matter".
• Rise of Amazon at taking away your ability to grow your own brand.
• Rise of Shopify at birthing new companies who take away your ability to grow your own brand.
• Post-COVID, rise of video and trust in causing customers to stick with you when they aren't buying merchandise. If a customer buys from you twice a year, you need to have something to keep them interested the other 363 days of the year.
• Post-COVID, the rise of "alternate revenue streams" ... the Orvis-Endorsed Adventure model, for instance, or the role of a Gorsuch cafe in then month of December.
• For my catalog audience, the "land grab" transfer of wealth from brand p&l to paper / printing / postage net sales ... maybe necessary from a capitalism standpoint to keep the paper / printing world in business, but completely devastating to my client base to see their trusted partners turn on them.

What do you think we'll look back on in 2034 and say "we missed that in 2026"?