Transcript

Bennie F Johnson

Hello.

And thank you for joining us for an episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. I’m your host, AMA CEO Bennie F. Johnson. In our episodes, we explore life through a marketing lens, delving into conversations of individuals that flourish at the intersection of marketing and the unexpected. We hope to introduce you to visionaries whose stories you might not yet have heard of, but are exactly the ones you need to know. Through thought-provoking conversations, we’ll unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. Today we have a very special guest listed as one of the top 20 most influential voices in marketing by Forbes, one of the top 20 chief marketing and technology officers by Ad Age, and former AMA board member, the one and only David Edelman.

David has spent 30 years as a chief marketing leader, most recently as chief marketing officer of Aetna, and building consultancy practices in the digital and marketing transformation space. He’s now currently teaching at Harvard Business School and serves as an advisor to top executives in startup, private equity, and large enterprises. David, alongside with BCG’s Mark Abram, co-authored the newly released “Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI” to support businesses as AI becomes an integral part of marketing strategy and customer experiences. Prior to being CMO at Aetna, David has held numerous leading positions at premier management consulting firms and digital agencies. It is this leadership that provides a foundation for his experience in career. It’s such a delight to welcome David to our podcast today. Good sir, welcome to Marketing / And.

David Edelman

Thank you, Bennie. Wow. After that, I hope I can live up to the expectations.

Bennie 

No, always. Well, you know, here’s the thing that I love and is so dynamic is the way that you continue to push and expand the role of executive marketing leadership. When we think about what’s required for a marketing leader today and what’s required when you were just coming out of HBS, how much has the world changed?

David 

Oh, the world has changed dramatically, of course. Let me give you an example about three years out of business school, 1989, so I’m aging myself here. 

Bennie

Mm-hmm. We won’t do the math, my friend. We won’t do the math.

David 

This is before the internet. Yeah. I had several clients who were asking, what can we start doing with customer information that we were starting to collect? And could they use that for targeting direct mail, for telemarketing, for customer service? And I felt this was just the beginning of something that was going to scale. And I wrote just on my own an article, Segment of One Marketing.

Bennie

Mm.

David 

And that article got picked up in the press, got me speaking, help me get clients for BCG and it started my rocket ship there. The internet happened, started getting into e-commerce, but as things started evolving, I realized that I actually made a big mistake that the title segment of one marketing limited it way too much.

And that really what we were talking about was customer experience. Customer experience pre-sale, during sale, after sale, that whole end-to-end experience, marketers increasingly had the capability, the insights, and frankly, the requirement to manage that in a more intelligent, integrated way.

Bennie

Right. Right.

David 

And the tools that evolved during the internet age, from basic e-commerce to all the tools to actually understand customer behavior, content management, and certainly now AI, really demand you think about how you compete based on the experience you provide increasingly, that experience is based on how you use customer information and how the customer feels you do it. And so that’s why we wrote the book. But it’s also why I keep pushing for marketers to think about their potential to be broader leaders in, I wouldn’t necessarily say owning the customer experience, because everyone needs to own it, but to help shape it in a way that’s going to be differentiated and impactful.

Bennie 

Right. Right. I think, you know, it’s an incredibly powerful point because over that time period, marketing leaders have gone from being curious and interested to nudging themselves into the conversation to now, you know, boldly taking leadership roles. And the expectation that to your point, this skill set and understanding the customer experience through data, through your platforms and apparatus is such an important part of success for the organization that the chief marketing officer or chief brand officer or chief experience officer, insert your favorite X in that space, needs to really own it and be a leader. I should say to your point, backing up, not necessarily own it completely. Maybe it’s a little bit of a time share in the organization that it needs to be collaborative, but we need to be in the leadership.

David 

Because if not marketing, then who? Because a lot of the data, the understanding of customer needs, the understanding of the competition, that’s the core of what marketers should be doing. There was no such thing as a chief marketing officer back in 1989. That concept didn’t really start into the 90s when it started scaling. 

Bennie 

Right.

David 

And I think now that there’s a lot of writing about how, maybe the chief marketing officer is no longer relevant. I don’t think that’s actually what’s happening. What’s happening is it’s evolving beyond marketing. You’re seeing, as you said, Bennie, it moving into chief growth, chief experience, chief brand, broader roles that recognize that marketing, which originally was a much more narrow functional discipline, is really much more of a strategy driver for the company.

Bennie 

Right, right. And it’s one of those spaces where our language drives the moment, our language lags the moment, right? We don’t have a title for it. So then, chief marketing officer is not the space. But really what we’re talking about in terms of that leadership role, to your point, continues to evolve and expand and becomes bigger than that language that we’ve carried with us. But, you know, I always, I always look at what the responsibility, the impact and the budget lies, right? The title doesn’t really mean anything, every, go from organization to organization.

But where does that impact lie? When you talk to marketing leaders today, what bit of advice or a helpful encouragement do you give them? I know in our conversations, many of our chief marketing officers struggle with, they’ve come to the table with the skill sets of 10 years ago. And now the world is evolving around them and they’re in the leadership space. How do they keep up? How do they keep their business and their teams moving forward? What helpful advice do you have for, you know, that…that chief marketing officer who’s in the middle phase?

David 

Yeah, you know there’s two parts to that to think about. One is you have to embed in your own brain a deep understanding of the business model of the company, its goals, its financials, how the whole thing operates on one side. And then you’ve got to say, how do we make that better, different, more differentiated, more impactful with all the tools that marketing and customer experience type design can bring.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Right.

David 

But it starts with really understanding the business and of course understanding the customers. And then with that knowledge that you can speak the language of the business so you can connect with your peers in the C-suite, start to inject a sense of the art of the possible. And that only happens from a base of credibility where you’re showing an empathy with the goals and the challenges of the line business managers, the head of IT, the head of sales, the head of finance. 

Bennie 

Right.

David 

You have to have a connection with them based on your understanding of their situation. So I actually just did a mentoring session with a group of rising CMOs actually. And I have a framework that I have used repeatedly over the years that first when you’re coming into a situation where you want to have impact, you have to start with diagnostics.

You have to ask really good questions and you build credibility through the questions you ask and you also build empathy because you’re trying to understand where someone else’s head is at. What is their context? If they’re a line business manager or a functional peer, you want to understand that. 

Bennie

Mm-hmm.

David

Then after doing that, you have a right to start building credibility by starting to inject ideas. What if, how could we unlock the challenges that you’re facing? Is this something you’ve ever thought about? And through an back and forth conversation building credibility, and then if you’ve got the credibility, you could sell people based on your ideas. You could sell them on what you really wanna do and on you being the person who can lead it. But you don’t just jump to the sales.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

David

You got to start working away. And this is true, frankly, for sales. This is how good salespeople work. And you’ve got to think about that as a leader in a suite of executives who, in many cases, have never really experienced the full potential of what marketing can bring.

Bennie 

Right. You know, we talk a lot about this moment of having to market marketing and that being important in there and that that marketing is a space where everyone may have been touched by marketing, but it’s a space in which the adjectives matter. Right. So they’ve been touched by marketing. That doesn’t mean they were touched by great marketing. Doesn’t mean they were touched by effective marketing, right? Doesn’t mean they were touched by future forward impactful marketing. So you’re all the times working through, we find the baggage that somebody may have had with a bad marketing experience.

David 

Well, the baggage that somebody may have had from bad marketing or the baggage that somebody has from working with marketers who acted as if they were just working in a luncheonette where they took orders and just did stuff. And it was really much more of an operational function than one that was really helping a line manager.

Bennie 

Mm. Right.

David 

Think about the strategic possibilities that helps them say, okay, I understand your goals, but here’s what we’re learning about the customer and the competitive environment and what’s possible in the channels that we have to use. Let’s think about this instead of just doing our typical email bombardment, for example.

Bennie 

Right, right. Let’s talk a little bit about that knowledge acceleration, right? Because as the marketing role has changed and the function has evolved, we’ve also seen a dynamic acceleration of what customers expect. Where customers show up, there was one thing, if we put our plan together, that part of the world, that part of the equation would be settled. But today, you we know that there are new pieces that are coming in all the time. You know, so you’re, you’re a CMO and you, you’ve got the ear of your executive peers. You’ve got everything structured in there, but now the customers that you know, and love are all changing on you. You know, how does that Tuesday work?

David

Yeah, so this is another part of what CMOs have to do, which is get out and get to know your customers. And some of it may be quantitative surveys, but you’ve got to put yourself in your shoes, go through the kinds of use cases and journeys that customers shopping and using your products might do and put on different kinds of personas.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm.

David

Think about yourself as different kinds of people as you do it and get out and talk to people. Just make sure because what’s going to be most powerful in the suite is bringing back stories. It’s not only about data, it’s about stories and marketers have to be good at storytelling.

Bennie

Right. Right.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

David 

Otherwise, you’re not a good marketer. You’re telling stories to customers to motivate them to change their behaviors. You also need to create the stories internally to help people understand that your customers have changed. Sometimes that is also, though, grounded in data. I’ll give you just a really good example. When I came in at Aetna, one of the things we sold was Medicare Advantage, and Medicare Advantage is sold to people 65 years and older.

Bennie 

Right.

David 

And there’s a prevailing belief that people 65 plus are not digital. And so we shouldn’t be thinking as much about digital channels, or at least that was the case when I came in. But when we actually looked at the data, you know, 45% of the traffic to our website came from mobile devices yet, not even digital- mobile devices!

Bennie 

Right.

David

And when you looked at the number of interactions, you know, it was over 60% of our total interactions were coming through mobile channels. These are people who are online. These are people who can be influenced. They’re doing research online as well.

Bennie  

Right. Right. Right. 

David  

And so some of that you got to bring data helps. And then you also have to be able to get out and talk to customers and tell the stories of what that data really means.

Bennie  

You know, and I think, you know, the important point there is it’s just not stories for the sake of stories. Data helps us validate the stories, right? Provide, if this is the prevailing narrative, there should be some artifact, you know, insert data in space that reinforces it. And to your point, you start to look around and finding these insight moments that can help make or break your audience. 

David  

Right.

Bennie  

As you said, if you start to look at our customers evolving around us and looking up one day. We had an incident. We had a situation earlier. I was speaking at a conference event and I looked around the room and realized that we had offerings for about 75 % of those who were in the room. But there was a group, an audience that was sitting in front of us and they’re the fastest growing space of new marketers. And I’m looking in front of me and I’m seeing our research play out in front of me and everything it reinforced the other marketplaces.

But here was this huge audience that was coming to us. We’re right in the middle of me as I’m sitting there in the conversation, looking me in the faces. This is the audience. And it allowed us to come back and completely rethink the offering for this space because when the offerings were built 10 years ago, this audience was very small. 

David  

Right.

Bennie

At 10 years, and this is where the audience is expanding the most.

David  

Yeah, and this is the problem with too much targeting. So I think one of the things that also changes the game now with the data that we have is not being so reductive. So a big chunk of what’s changed is we used to come up with programs, campaigns, and we said, who do we want to target? And so we bought media to hit that target, which is inherently reductive. 

Bennie  

Mm-hmm.

David

You’re saying, who do I want to just focus my money on? Whereas another point of view that can drive growth says what are all the different potential markets we could have that are all in different states in terms of their journeys, their understanding of our category…

Bennie  

Mm-hmm.

David 

And how do we think about a much broader portfolio of stuff that can go to market that responds to the signals that each of those customers are sending, especially if they’re interacting with us through digital channels?

Bennie  

Right.

David 

And so it’s a much more responsive way where you’re looking at all the possibilities out there. Now that requires thinking through who are all those segments coming up with the content for that, lining that up in the channels. But AI is making that all possible now. It’s making it a lot easier, faster, cheaper. And so the potential to think about how can we hit different kinds of people in new markets…

Bennie 

Right.

David

Is a lot easier than before when you just came up with something and I only want to pay to hit the people who are just going to resonate with this one message.

Bennie  

So let’s talk about, let’s pivot to talk about AI. And we’re to start off with this phrase as a possibility tool. You know, it allows us to using AI to allow us to kind of parse through the data faster and more efficiently to expand the things we can do. Just as you were talking before, someone may be daunted to see 50 segments in front of them, but AI makes that manageable way meaningful.

David  

Yeah, let me give you just another simple example. So one client of mine that’s actually a B2B company in industrial distribution, okay? So they’re competing against folks like Amazon getting into the drill bit business, selling drill bits, but there’s a lot of different companies that are out there doing that. 

Bennie

Mm-hmm, okay.

David 

Now you can have a lot of data from interacting with different customers over time that help you gradually understand different segments. There’s gonna be people who are just shopping you on price, people who have sudden urgent needs and who need something right now. There’s gonna be people who value more technical advice. There’s gonna be ones who wanna talk to somebody and get comparisons. And over time, if you’ve been building data about customers, you can use AI tools to start creating the clusters of different customers who are exhibiting different kinds of behavior and so they are doing that and with that…

Bennie

Mm-hmm.

David 

They start to think about prioritizations and what kind of content and interactions are appropriate for each of those customers. Then using AI tools, you can start generating content for those different segments. And then using other AI tools, you could manage rapid cycle testing of those different creatives. In fact, you can do multivariate testing where it’s not just simple A-B testing, but now with AI you can do A-B-C-D testing.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Right.

David  

And so you can create an engine where you’re constantly going through all of your data to find different kinds of behaviors and segments and the triggers that characterize somebody as being in a segment, then start to use a generative AI to come up with ways to engage them.

Bennie 

Great.

David 

And then constantly test that in a rapid cycle, test and learn, test and learn, test and learn. But that’s a very different end to end approach than saying, okay, we’re going to do our 20% off this month and next month’s going to be free shipping. You know, that’s, that’s not what this is about now. 

Bennie 

Right. Right, right.

David 

This is about really understanding the customers using the tools to create things that are

thoughtfully more appropriate, but then testing and learning, testing and learning.

Bennie  

Right. You know, it’s a completely different mindset. I’m going to ask you, you know, as you’ve spent time as a teacher, are you finding that students are coming in with a higher level of marketing maturity than we did when we first came to school?

David 

Well, it’s a loaded question. They think they do. 

Bennie 

But that’s what you’re here for. Right, right.

David

They think they do. So students coming in think they know marketing because they are receiving marketing. But actually, Harvard Business School, they don’t have that many people who have marketing backgrounds, per se, who are coming in.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm.

David  

So they think they have an understanding from being online and using their phones and all of that they’re still the basics of marketing strategy. They tend to think about it very tactically. Oh, we got to figure out who the influences are in this category and what would be the economics of supporting the influences. 

We got to start with the strategy. So who are the kinds of customers for whom we are serving? What is the value proposition? How are we differentiated? How do we want to tell the story of our differentiation? How are people making decisions in this category? How do we want to influence their journey and the way they make decisions? 

Bennie  

Mm-hmm.

David 

So there’s just a lot of the basics of marketing strategy, even with all the AI and all the new channels and everything, you still need to figure out, you know, who are the segments? Who do you want to target? What’s your positioning? You know, you need the four P’s, you know, what’s your product? How you think about pricing? Now, AI can allow you to test things and learn more to fuel that.

Bennie 

Right. Right. Right.

David

But smart humans have to make those decisions and they have to actually go through the thinking process of coming up with the strategy. And repeatedly, about halfway through a semester, students come up to me and they say, I never thought of marketing as being so strategic. Never really thought about the kinds of things you got to work through. I always thought it was just about creating ads and spending money and thinking about how to optimize that, but never really thought more upstream about the strategy. 

Bennie

My goodness.

David  

And I did a lot of executive ed too, not just MBA students. And I get the same kind of feedback, which is shocking, that they just hadn’t really thought that through. And once they do and they see it and they go through cases that lay that out, they understand the value.

Right. And we see it, you know, over the last 25 years of companies, you see the case studies of those who understand marketing strategy succeeding, right? And moving beyond there. And they’re not always the direct consumer brands, right? It’s just they may be, we see it in B Corp space. We see it in nonprofits. We see it with, you know, every types of organization can spend those who understand the strategic drivers of marketing win.

BREAK 

Bennie

What, you know, when you think about executive ed and people who are in their career and actively working in the space, where do you see an opportunity for us to better market marketing? You know, it’s interesting, as you said, you were coming in and it’s like, well, wait a minute, well, you’re actually, you have the job, you’re working in the space in there, you have a marketing peer to the left or right. What can we do to kind of galvanize that? Understanding of marketing and marketing as a resource to help achieve the bigger aims of the organization, to help put the mission in order, to help grow stakeholder value. All of the KPIs that we all want to have in our organization. How do we integrate marketing better into that space?

David 

Yeah, I think one of the challenges that marketing marketing has is that we only talk to marketers. And so we’re trying to sell marketers on a new view they can have of marketing that can empower them to do more. And we can do that. We can arm them with insights and techniques and ways of engaging their executive teams. But what I’ve actually found is really helpful is if you can have sessions with a line business manager and a marketer and go through an exercise and say together now, let’s go through a workshop.

Bennie

Right. Right.

David 

Where we start to think okay what are the compromises customers are making when they engage with our category? So what, what is going on that holds back their full potential?

Bennie  

Right. Mm-hmm. Right.

David  

What are we seeing in terms of missed opportunities to go? And let me just give you an example of not good marketing, probably done because of pressure. And I hate naming names, but I’m going to.

Bennie 

Right. It’s a somewhat safe space.

David  

Yeah, well, it’s a podcast, but still. So I recently moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and we treated ourselves to an espresso coffee maker because I love the espresso. And it’s just it’s a really nice experience. So I get the Nespresso coffee maker. It comes with 100 pods.

Three days after I get the Nespresso coffee maker and all the pods, I start to get bombarded with offers to buy more pods. All kinds of that….

How much coffee do they think I drink? And yet we’re not a small, it’s very easy for them to realize they have my home address. They could find out that that’s not a commercial address, that it’s a residence. That’s pretty easy to figure out and they just bombard me and then two weeks in they start promoting buying more machines. Okay, so this is a complete waste of my time, of their money, it is changing my present, what they could have done if you actually, so just think about what led to that. 

Bennie 

What?

David  

What led to that is, marketing just feeling under the gun to sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, managers who are in charge overall of the Nespresso brand, just saying, got to sell more pots. We got to sell more pots. And neither stepping back and saying, what’s the real experience here? Because what they could have done is three days after I got the coffee maker, contact me saying, how do I like it?

Bennie 

Right.

David

How often, how many people in my family use it? How often do we use it? Did we know we can make iced coffee, not just hot? What flavors do I like? Would I like to explore more flavors? Would I like to go on an auto replenish program? They could have done all of that, but they did none of it, none. So that’s where you’re having…

Bennie 

Right. Right.

David 

A situation where not just marketing, but product managers too, together saying, what’s going on in the journey of your customers when they buy and use your product? And from that, you start to say, we should be rethinking the customer experience. Well, who’s going to do that? It’s likely going to need to be marketing to take the lead in doing that. And that opens things up.

And so I find that when I became chief marketing officer at Aetna, I was the first chief marketing officer there. They had no idea what a chief marketing officer would do. I had great air cover from the CEO who hired me, but my peers were like, who is this guy? He’s coming in, he’s just gonna spend our money on TV ads? That’s what they thought. And so coming in and coming back to what I was talking before about diagnosing, asking questions, gradually building credibility and then selling, I started asking them a lot of questions about their customers and what it takes. 

Bennie 

Right. Right.

David  

What do we want for our members? What do we want for the employers who buy our health plans? And really get them thinking about the customers and where we fall short, where the customers are frustrated and face compromises, and just started a very different kind of dialogue with them.

Bennie 

Right.

David  

I think marketers can do that, but something like the AMA can also create forums by which marketers invite a plus one and do it together.

Bennie

Right. I think that’s a really powerful idea about having that plus one. Right. When we go into it, I know years ago, I did work with, with the HR industry and association, and it was really important when we started embedding HR business partners in the business. know, prior business managers just thought of the HR partner as giving them forms and a link to benefits. But when they became a part of the business, we started having conversations about talent strategy.

David 

Yeah. Right. Yeah

Bennie  

Then it looked a little different, right? And then it’s like, no, well, I have great information about how we can get the best talent together. I think that those are those opportunities on the marketing side, because we have an entire portfolio of superpowers, if you will, that the rest of the business doesn’t know how to access the strength in those muscles, right? Because we have a blind business ladder who may have no idea the depths of understanding of customers that we have.

David 

Yes, and that’s going to become more acute in the age of AI because there’s from the research that I’ve done, companies that are going through an evolution of using AI go through three steps. The first step is where individuals are using AI for themselves. So it’s for me. I call it the for me stage. I, as an individual use Chat GPT, Microsoft Co-Pilot. I’m using it on my own, maybe even surreptitiously. 

Bennie 

Okay. Right. Right.

David 

Then the next level I call for us, which is where a functional team usually like marketing is using AI to change how they do something like get content out the door, run more concept testing, do better segmentation. In the legal area, you’ve seen a lot of this in terms of how to handle legal documents using AI. And that’s for us. And most of those are geared towards efficiency.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

David  

Being able to do things faster and smarter, but then the higher level is not for me, not for us, for our customers. And it’s rethinking the value proposition and the experience that you can offer based on using AI increasingly for more personalized interactions.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Okay.

David  

It’s thinking about competing very differently. So I’ll give you an example of a company that’s gone through this really nicely. So Sysco, food, not the technology company, the food distribution company, SYSCO. So they sell to restaurants, eating establishments all over the country and increasingly outside.

Bennie 

Okay. Okay.

David 

And if you’re running a restaurant, you do not want to spend a lot of time buying stuff on a regular basis. You’ve got narrow margins. You’ve got to get stuff done. When you open the Cisco app on your phone to place an order in 300 milliseconds, that app knows who you are, where you’re located, aspects about your geography. Is that a tourist area? Is that a business lunch area?

Bennie 

Right. Hmm.

David 

Is that just a locals going for local meals area? They know your menu. They know your price points. They know whether you buy in bulk or whether you buy spot. And they also know the nearest warehouse and what’s in that warehouse because it’s food and they got to move it. 

Bennie

Right. Right.

David 

And so if they have stuff they want to move on discount they will give you ideas for menu items and recipes that use that food. And they’ll do it in line with the kinds of things you serve in your restaurant. And so that’s rethinking. So we talked when we wrote the book, we talked to customers of Sysco and they said, it’s just a no brainer to use them because I feel like I’m getting good deals. I’m expanding my sense of menu and it’s super fast.

Bennie  

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

David  

And since Sysco launched this over the last three years, they have grown at 50% faster rate than their competitors.

Bennie 

Wow. Wow.

David

So they’re using all this AI capability. And so the ideas for this, it certainly came from the top, but marketing was absolutely key in helping everyone think through the fact that just because originally they would say, we’ve got something, let’s just discount it. But then marketing saying, well, that restaurant doesn’t buy that stuff. They don’t serve it. You got to help them figure out how to use it. That’s a marketing thing.

Bennie 

Right. If you’ve a vegan establishment, it doesn’t matter if chicken wings are on sale, right? That doesn’t matter. But I think to your point, and we see it in direct to consumer and you see it in B2B and B2C, it’s having that permission to engage in this marketing back and forth. You know information about me that’s important to help me get better deals and more efficient spaces in there. 

David 

Right.

Bennie  

Because to your point, if you had that space where there’s a truckload of chicken wings for sale and I’m a vegan establishment, there’s no quicker path to breaking that relationship.

David  

Right, yeah. I mean, the chicken wings, you’re not going to be able to give a menu idea for that. 

Bennie  

Yeah, yeah, really, you know, I don’t think that’s gonna work for you. 

David

Don’t even bother. Yeah.

Bennie

But in your case, your personal story, I think back to you’ve got 100 pods, right? But the 100 pods, you’re getting a fair sampling of flavors in space. But what are their food sensitivities? What are their taste sensitivities, right? So offering another generic 100 pods to you doesn’t really, you know, bring joy in  household. But let’s say you had a pension for hazelnut and they could offer you the next 20 pods of hazelnut knowing that they’ve got a customer.

David 

Right. Exactly. But that’s not, they’re not thinking about how to empower the customer. They’re focused on manipulating the customer. And that’s the way I see it very dangerously skidding down towards because with AI, you can create all these triggers and create all this content and just bombard people. And that’s, you know, that’s a tragedy of the commons.

Bennie  

Right.

David  

And so we’ve got it. It’s less is more, but less done smartly.

Bennie  

Right. Let’s talk about the smart trust that we’re space in there because there is this, you know, we as consumers love the power and magic that AI and we as consumers simultaneously are fearful and afraid of the power and magic of AI. 

I was reading an article the other day and it talked about our imagination with AI and it looked at a series of Hollywood films over the last 20 years that deal with artificial intelligence. And it’s something like 90% of them are doomsday scenarios. There’s only like one or two that are the positive joy. So it’s no wonder when we have our conversations, we immediately go to Terminator 2 to anything that’s happy.

David

Right.

Bennie

But we know our world is more opportunistic, more optimistic than that. What do you see as the benefits in this phase for AI and customers? What should customers be most excited about? What should they feel empowered by with AI? I want to lean into the positive before we go back to the fear.

David 

Yeah, yeah, I think the main thing is when it’s done right, it is empowering. It helps you do things you couldn’t do before, discover things you couldn’t learn about before. I mean, I’m a music fanatic, and Spotify helps me discover bands that I would have never found before. And then I start…going down a great rabbit hole about those bands, finding out more about where they came from, listen to their music, where are they playing? And that comes from AI. Spotify doesn’t say, is AI on your brain. They just give a great value proposition. The experience is positive. And Sysco, same thing, when I talked about the app for buying food, it’s about the experience empowering people.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

David 

It’s when you feel manipulated. And there’s a fine line. There really is. There, know, some people may feel more manipulated. Some people may feel totally comfortable with it. When we were writing the book, BCG did research with customers, consumers around the world about their attitude towards businesses using information about them. 

Bennie 

Right, right. Mm-hmm.

David

And interestingly, about 70% of people said that they have given more business to companies who they felt were using information about them to help them. But then on the flip side, over 60% said they have stopped doing business with companies who they felt were using information about them inappropriately. So.

Bennie  

Right. It’s not, and to your point, it’s not a steady state because I can feel great about the data usage with a company for the last 18 months, but a change in policy, a change in strategy or approach can throw that all out the window for the next 20.

David 

Yep. Yep.

Bennie  

So I love your comment about Spotify because in that moment, Spotify is cooler than your friends, right? And it’s a partnership in there. Your friends aren’t telling you about the new band that you want to hear. That’s a guilty pleasure based on your listening, right? Your friends are going to judge you. Your friends don’t have all the data, but Spotify is there for you. And there’s a sense of partnership, even if it’s not announced. 

David 

Yep.That’s right.

Bennie 

But when you move in and it’s health data and their comments that are about lifestyle choices and changes in there and you didn’t want to have a conversation about that with AI, it gets a little tense.

David 

It does, it does. And when I was at Aetna, and one of the things we were trying to do is get people to do healthier things. Because if they did healthier things, they’re healthier. They save money, we save money, it’s all good….

Bennie  

Right. Right.

David 

But, what gets you motivated, Bennie, could be different than what motivates me. And so you gotta test and learn, test and learn. You gotta be really careful about how you frame things. You gotta put guardrails on it. So it’s a very cautious dance. We actually found a lot of success in doing that, but it took about 18 months till we got our groove.

Bennie  

Mm-hmm. Right. Right. And to your point, you’ve got to be committed to this dance, right? This isn’t a set it and forget it. I’ve had success here and that’s where, you know, marketing’s role as kind of cheap scientist, you know, comes into play, right? We kind of cheap trust science. We get that there’s a push for the business to achieve certain results, but how do we get there and how do we build it in a way?

David 

Yep. 

Bennie  

So with the new book, you’re really taking a push into the future, like a future of customer strategy in this new age of AI. You know, highlight, what message of empowerment do you have for our marketing community in this moment? What are the things that they should think about that empower us forward? Whether we’re just starting off, we’re running a brand for team or we’re in the executive leadership role. What sense of encouragement do you have?

David 

I think that the sense of encouragement is the opportunity for innovation is so much higher than before because you can use the AI to help you learn things that can spark ideas, help you automate the creation of mockups and prototypes to see what those ideas would look like. You can automate how to put them in the market. You can measure the impact of those faster.

I think the opportunity for innovation is way higher. And therefore the art of the possible is and your ability as a marketer to influence how your business is working with customers, how it’s delivering value is broader than ever before. Because things that would have taken a lot more fixed cost and complexity to do are much more streamlined.

But you gotta think of those. That takes you accepting some degree of risk and accepting some degree of agency to come up with those ideas. But that’s exciting. That’s what marketing is about and that’s what drives growth.

Bennie 

I think my friend, that’s a perfect way to end our podcast, understanding that marketing is about the possible. is about you driving growth and creativity. Marketing is about optimistically how we can build a better tomorrow. Appreciate it, good sir. Always a pleasure. Your insights of marketing and personalization, AI and strategy in this new space are invaluable. Thank you for joining us.

And thank you for listening to this episode of AMA’s Marketing / And once again, I’m your host, Bennie F. Johnson. We encourage you to check out David’s writings and the new book, “Personalized Customer Strategy in the Age of AI.” Thank you.