Transcript

Bennie F Johnson 

Hello, and thank you for joining us for a very special episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. I’m your host, Bennie F. Johnson, AMA CEO. In our episode today, we like to explore life through a marketing lens, delving into conversations of individuals that flourish at the intersection of marketing and the unexpected. We’ll introduce you to visionaries whose stories you might not yet have heard of, but are exactly the ones you need to know.

Through our thought-provoking conversations, we’ll unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. Today, we have a really special guest. In many ways, turn around this fair play. Our guest today is an innovator, a leader, and a fellow podcast host, none other than Barry LaBov, Barry’s founder and CEO of LaBov Marketing Communications and Training.

He is a two-time Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year winner. He’s an inductee into the Entrepreneur of the Year Hall of Fame. And he’s also something that’s near dear to my background as well. He’s a Better Business Bureau Torch Award winner for ethics. Barry has authored and co-authored over a dozen business books, including his most recent book, which looks at the power of differentiation.

In this book, he explores and shares experiences and actionable recommendations for leaders seeking to differentiate their brands and their products. My friend, welcome to my podcast.

Barry LaBov 

Bennie, thank you very much. You were fantastic in our podcast last week. I hope I can return the favor.

Bennie

My goodness, you are, just being here already. And I love the fact that I get to ask the questions this time. So, you know, one of the things in going with your bio, it’s always interesting what we choose to highlight, what that says about us in our space. And I love the juxtaposition that Ernst & Young calls you an Entrepreneur of the Year, but in the same breath, you’re winning an award for ethics in business. Talk to me about what it means for you to not only be a successful business, but an ethical business.

Barry

Well, I don’t think you can be one or the other. I think you have to be ethical in order to be successful and vice versa. If you’re a so-called successful company that’s not ethical, you’ve missed the boat. One thing that is so important today, and I really, really celebrate our younger generations, plural, is that ethics have become so important. Being a pretty old guy, when I started out, the goal was you get a job and you keep your head down and you work, work, work, work.

I thought of, I’m not sure I like how they’re doing business, was not a thought to me. Although my very first big job, I did quit over an ethics issue, but it had to be a big one for me. I love that today, our generations who are coming into this workforce say, hey, hold on, I want to do something I believe in and I want to work with people who I believe in. So I love it, that they think about it.

Bennie

Right. Right? Which is this powerful moment when we think about how we evolve as marketers, right? Our audiences demand it, our teams demand it, and we as leaders demand that space.

Barry

People are so smart and then add on to it all the technology and AI. If somebody thinks they can pull the wool over your eyes, they’re not going to do it for very long. It’s so ill informed to be anything other than transparent. That’s why I think we admire people that say, hey, here’s who and what I am, warts and all. This is what you have. Because you at least think, OK, I can work with that.

Whereas if it’s a brand that you know positions itself to do everything and you know it can’t or positions itself, You know penny how many so-called value price brands really aren’t because once you get involved with them. They lose their credibility. So ethics is at the top is at the top of the pecking order

Bennie

Right. All right, and these are all the things that establish that larger arc of trust, which is really what accelerates our marketplace, right? Having to trust the brand, the products, and the space, and the work that we do. Now, you’ve taken this role of being both an entrepreneur and an advocate for ethics, but taking it one step further and being a thought leader. So I have to start off by talking about the series of books that you’ve written. What really drew you into that from being a practitioner to an author? When did it hit you?

Barry

Well, well, you know, here’s what happened. I originally wanted to be a rock and roll musician, Bennie, and I fell short and I want to share with the audience and you being a very dear friend. I want to open up on podcast my music, Bennie, and we can all write down if we want to. My music sold well under one million copies.

Bennie

Uh-huh. Yes. Hahaha!

Barry 

I was a prolific songwriter and what happened for me was when I went into the marketing, advertising and training field, something happened. I had an epiphany and I know this is close to your heart because you shared how important it is about creativity. I realized one day that my calling in life was not to write a song. My calling was to be creative. I wanted to create something I had not been in existence before. That’s the genesis of it. That’s what inspires me every single day.

Bennie

Right. And it’s that moment you get, right? Where it’s not what you create, it’s that you create. I’m going in. I’m sure that you had a ton of songs and I want to imagine that they were all good. They weren’t all good, but I’m sure the joy of creation was still there.

Barry

Well, that’s the beauty of it, but they weren’t all good. One thing I think is really great, you have so many creative people listening. I think this is a secret to knowing whether or not what you’re doing has some magic to it or creativity. And that’s when you lose sense of time. So if I’m hearing a singer perform her song and I lose track of time and all of a sudden she’s finished and I look at my watch, go, my gosh, was, it was five minutes ago that I looked at my watch and you go, my gosh, there’s magic. When you look at an idea or you read something or you see a beautiful beautiful photograph and you go oh my gosh and you stop and you go wait a minute I lost track of time and that’s because you were transported and I look for that every single day

Bennie

Well, you you jumped in, I was going to talk about your background. We’ve had some great conversations with writers and artists, musicians. We even had a magician actually on the podcast. But I love this notion of being the musician and songwriter, you know, something about orchestrating space. What lessons did you take from that in your work as a leader and a strategist?

Barry

Well, I grew up and there was this band called The Beatles.

Bennie

Yep, yep, little garage band, remember them, yeah.

Barry

Garage band out of Liverpool. And what they did, I remember reading this was what they did that was different was they didn’t just write a few hit songs and then do it over and over and over again and regurgitate the same song, which is what almost all of their competitors did. What they would do, and this fits everybody in the audience, they would finish their album, and by the way, the first album of 12 songs took 10 hours to produce, that’s all. But the next time they went into the studio, they sat down, they took a pause and they said, okay, let’s listen to our last record. And they all listened. And then instead of saying, let’s go do that again, they said, no, wait a minute. Where do we want to go next?

And that’s what inspires me. That’s one thing. Another thing that inspires me from my rock and roll days is that I run my business like it’s a rock band. And that’s bad. Bad. But what’s interesting is in a rock band, if you try to make people perform or do something that they’re not very good at, instead of having them focus on that one or two things that they do great, you’re going to be miserable. So if your lead singer can barely play the drums don’t have that guy on the drum set just have him sing lead and keep him away from those things. Conversely if your lead guitarist is great why are you having somebody else you know me on keyboards who’s not a great keyboardist why do you have me do it so have him do it let’s look for what people do that is so great that’s what differentiation is you know that’s what my book is about it’s the power of differentiation. It’s right in front of you. It’s something that you do or your brand does that’s unique, not necessarily superior or perfect, but it’s something you do in a certain way. And that’s what I learned from music. That’s why bands are so popular, you know, like the Grateful Dead.

Bennie

Right, let’s lean into that a bit because so much of our kind of modern business texts and modern self-hectic gets us trapped in the sense of, I take an inventory of who I am, I focus on the weaknesses and I obsess over the weaknesses. But so little of our focus is on, I have a passion, skill and interest in a space. And dare I say talent, let me double down on this.

Barry 

Right. And I gotta tell you, have, and this is where it can go astray in business, I’ve had people who literally were geniuses and their genius was valuable to my company for maybe 15 minutes a month. But it was brilliant. I wanted that talent, that creativity. And literally a lot of the other time, if I put them into different positions, they’re actually causing trouble. I know, they’re a ruckus there. I think it’s very important that we identify what we do and it’s not a hundred or fifteen things, it’s like one or two things we do that’s really good. And let’s double down like you said, let’s make sure we’re doing that great and let’s stop pushing people to become something they are not, they’ll be miserable and you’ll be miserable.

Bennie

So when leaders come to you and they’re looking for the actionable results to really separate them, right? Because oftentimes when leaders are coming to you, they’ve been through lots of coaching and refinement and they kind of play a leader on TV, right? We’re doing all the things that people project that we should do, right? How do you help provide recommendations through your experience and work? That help leaders really set themselves apart.

Barry

Many, many leaders are such great men and women and they are willing to change or do anything in order to get better, to make their company better. And I come in and I go, stop. Before you do that, let’s discover what’s right in front of you that you are doing already. And many times they pause and they go, what do you mean? We don’t have enough markets here. We got to do more and we’re going, hold on. We need to determine what you’re doing. In many cases, these companies have been in business for 10 years, some of them 200 years. I have a 214 year old client. Okay, they gotta be doing something right. And what we do is we come in and instead of, you know, they’ve been looking at all their numbers and their statistics and they’re very, very competitor bound. They’re looking at what their competitor does and they wanna be like that competitor. We’re going stop, stop.

We say, let’s look first and discover what you are doing. And we go into their facility and we examine and study all the things they’re doing. It could be in a factory, it could be a technology center. And we will find things they’re doing, Benny, that are unique. And 99% of the time we go, hey, this looks interesting. And they go, yeah, yeah, it’s not important. Does anybody in the world do it? Well, I don’t know.

Bennie

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right.

Barry 

Well, how long have you been doing it? I don’t know, 40 years. Okay, maybe this is a good idea. And what we find, every single time, we find a small group of magical uniqueness that they have not leveraged. And I’m going to tell you very quickly why this is so important. If they focus on those two, three, four great things they’re doing, and we help message it, and we also have a little secret involved in it, which is we celebrate it with the most important people first, which is their team, their employees.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Barry

If they focus on those three or four things and really say, you know what, we’re not for everybody. We’re not perfect. Man, nobody does these three things like us. Bennie, they can wake up every morning and go, you know what, I know what we need to do. It’s what I do best. It’s what we do best. And you know what, we won’t get every job, but we’re going to do great. And by the way, we’ll find clients who actually like this and we can charge fairly. We can charge a premium. That’s a deal.

Bennie

Right. You know, and you’ll find in the marketplace that when you excel at certain things, you’ll find new audiences that find you through your excellence. I have a dear friend of mine, he always tells a story about his family’s business. They did a body of work and they performed so exceptionally well that the administrator said, okay, you’re going to do this other project for me. And the team paused and said, no, no, no, we don’t do that. And he said, you deliver on time, under budget at a zero risk environment. You do this now. And it was that they were doing all of their right things right. And they did, its approach to work. It opened up for his company a whole new line of business and industry that they never would have even gone into. But it took focusing on the areas. And those are the hallmark of their business that then gave them this new category.

Barry

Well, that’s because they did not fully understand what was in front of them that they did well. It’s kind of like when I said a few minutes ago, I thought my role in life was writing music. I was too close to it. My role in life was being creative. Now, it could be music. That could be a website. It could be an app. could be technology. Same thing with your friends. They did something that if you talk to their customers, those customers loved it, and they craved for it.

Bennie 

Right. Right. So when we think about the age of being an entrepreneur today, never before have we had so much access to resources. I think about this for friends all the time. I’ve always been a serial entrepreneur. But I think about how many barriers we had 10, 20, 30 years ago to get in. And we take those things for granted today. We can pop up platforms, digital communication, supply chain through the course of this conversation. What advice do you have for entrepreneurs today that kept you steady in the past?

Barry

to go to sleep every night, wake up, high anxiety that I needed. I felt like I needed to sell 80,000 clients today by the end of the day or I’m gonna die. And finally, my wife was very supportive of me, finally had it…Don’t I mean that number one, could not take on that many clients. Number one, two, I would probably fall over dead if I tried to. In reality, number three, I needed a couple new clients. I believe that what we have to look at is let’s take care of the right client in the right way. And then we grow as opposed to the 100 X and 10 X and 50 X scale formulas that really guarantee you’re not

Bennie 

Right? Right.

Barry 

We all know AI is out there, technology is out there. If you think in terms merely of scale and mass numbers, AI is going to get you. I say let’s take care of each of our client opportunities one-on-one as if they were the only ones in the world. Whether they are a large client or a small client, they are the only client. I used to explain that to new employees in our company because we would literally have Harley Davidson, Audi of America, have McCallan Scotch, and then we have some small company down the street. And they go, well, that’s a small company. They’re not important. And I go, no, they’re the most important. And they go, what? And they go, yeah, if we’re working on their project, they’re the most important company in the world. And that’s how I think we have to look at it. That’s what I look at. Here’s one challenge. Even though today it’s easy to ramp up, get the technology and all that.

One thing I did not deal with competitively was when I started this, there were less competitors. It was not a worldwide market. And today it’s a worldwide market everywhere. My company does work worldwide, but we did not start out worldwide. It took us decades. Today you can do that, but that also means you have competitors all over the world nipping at your heels.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Right. Right. Right? So yeah, it’s not just that the markets are open up for you. Those markets are open up for that competition to come here as well. You know, we look at some of the design work and brand work that’s coming outside of our US borders. Amazing, amazing stuff and work and that brands can access that. And you look at some of the large global brands, we have development centers all throughout. The world, I tell our team all the time, the new ideas are not necessarily coming from down the street.

Barry 

That’s right. And many, many, I work with some people that are offshore. Many of those individual people are so great, so hungry, and they have talent. But that’s the new world. They’re all over the place, and they’re grateful, and they’re going to work extra hours to get something to you overnight.

Bennie

So in that space, how do you set yourself apart? Yeah, well, if I’m a new creator, if I’m a new creator creating my agency today, how do I set myself apart?

Barry 

How do I? Well, I’ll tell you what. You have to realize that you cannot be all things to all people. And you’ve got to look internally first, OK, what is it that I do that seems to be drawing our clients in? You ask people, you say, what should I never, ever change? And it could be, oh, you know more about this than anybody. This is the way it is to work with you. It could be your experience. But you identify it. You constantly test it. build a rally. Build and rally the people into an army of believers. So if you have a one, two, three, four person company, or I work with 30,000 employee companies, you have to share. And this is a part of marketing, Bennie. You’ve got to share and celebrate what you do that’s unique and different because people need to feel significance. And that’s one of the secret parts of our process that very few people do. We tell clients before we launch this new brand or this new product for you, you must launch it to the most important people. Your employees could be your dealer, distributor, network, whoever represents you. They must believe they have to feel a sense of significance. Otherwise, think about how they don’t have significance. There’s no meaning. OK, they’re not going to care if you sell or don’t sell. And they won’t do a great job from a quality control standpoint. Rally people, whether you’re tiny or large.

Bennie

Right. And to your point, your employees are the first expression of your brand. They’re going to drive that brand authenticity, that through point. That’s who I’m going to contact when I have a problem, when I have a question, when I’m celebrating. I’m going to reach out.

Barry

Right. They’re the ones that are to come up with the brand new idea because they’ve worked for you for three years and they go, know, Bennie, we keep running into this one issue. I think I got a solution to our problem, Bennie. And that’s because we’re all excited. If you’ve got that, you have a chance to succeed.

Bennie

Right. They’re the ones on the front line who I noticed this hack, this opportunity. I use the product every day.

Barry

Right? And they connect with your customers, which is another reason you take care of each customer one at a time, because your employees connect with them. And to your employees, those customers become humans. Instead of just numbers or instead of whatever, they’re human beings and your employees care. And then guess what? Your customers look at your employees and go, wow, they’re great. I love those guys.

Bennie 

Yes. Let’s, you know, I’m going to stick on this human thread and this human note because we’re often having conversations, as you can imagine, and you’re having as well, that always begin middle AI, right? It’s AI on the front part of the conversation, AI in the middle of the conversation, AI on the end. We talk about this space that’s coming up quickly where everyone has access to the same AI tool sets. What’s going to separate you apart?

I think people feel some tension today because, my goodness, this group has a better set of AI tools than my group does now, and there’s a chance to separate. But what happens when we reach a point where everyone has access to the same tools, everyone has the same inputs? How do we as humans win?

Barry

When I was in a rock band, the world went digital for music and all of a sudden you did not have to keep beat because you could press a quantized switch and it would fix any errors in rhythm that the player had. But yet, decades later, we still need people to write songs and to sing songs and to perform as an example. I believe the way we look at AI must be that it is a wonderful tool. It can bring, and this sounds like I’m being negative, I’m not. It can bring mediocre, competent work at lightning fast pace. By the way, some of us have worked in environments where it takes a month to get mediocre.

Bennie

Right. Right, right, right, right, right.

Barry 

You can get that in 10 seconds, okay? But what we have to maintain is conscience. We have to have a conscience, not just that, well, I didn’t really create it, yeah, that, but also is this really the message I want? Is this really our brand? Is this really my customer’s brand? Or is this just pablum? Does it just sound good, feel good stuff? So I think what we have to do is utilize it, have it get us to a level of competency quickly and then we have to dig in and refine it and take ownership of it. Otherwise, mediocre work done quickly is a lot better than somebody paying an agency a lot of money to get mediocre work. So I think that’s our only option. We take ownership and have a conscience.

Bennie

Take ownership, have a conscience, and then that separates us, right? It creates the differentiation that we talked about before. When we think about your work with creatives and agencies, as we know, it’s one of the areas that you have a space where you can separate yourself, right? Creators by the very definition. How do you counsel others at discerning what’s good, what’s dynamic, what’s solid creative opportunities, right? Because it’s one thing to be the creative and to separate it. It’s another thing for being on the client side and actually know what you’re looking at.

Barry 

Well, I think… I talk to the client side a lot as well as the creatives. And one thing I harp on and truly believe is that everything you do, so let’s say it’s a design, there’s gotta be a meaning. There’s gotta be a purpose behind it. I don’t believe you create something and it looks cool and that’s it. I don’t believe you create a logo and you go, it’s geometric shapes, you know. Everything must have a purpose. It must have a reason so you can tell the story of a local. What I share with clients is that what’s most important if they want to get the most out of their agency is to make sure they are not, and I’m going to share a term you may enjoy, they are not seagulls. Like the bird, the seagull swoops on in.

A client’s a seagull, which means they’re not involved with their group or their agency for a while. And then they swoop on in, change everything. Their group is completely decimated. The agency’s going, my gosh. And then that client leaves. What happens is you’re killing morale. So I talk to clients like that and I go, look, you need to set the course of what vision you want. And instead of trying to come in every once in a while and prove that you’re in charge. Refocus and partner up with your group internally as well as your firm and accept imperfection as long as it is headed toward progress. Meaning work with your groups.

Let them know the bigger picture. Don’t just give them an assignment. You know, like my company, when we work with a client, I’ll tell them before we start, go, look, we are not going to be great order takers. I mean, we can do it, but there’s a lot of other order takers out there. We have to have an understanding of what your goals are. And then what we need to do is have that right. And Bennie, you mentioned this on my podcast when you were my guest, that agent needs to feel the right the opportunity the extraordinary benefit to be able to challenge traditional or accepted thinking that you And if you as a client don’t accept that you’re missing out on potential successes That’s what I look for. I tell my clients you got to be hungry. You got to be vulnerable. You can’t just force feed a little bit of information and say go to work.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm.

Barry 

You know, I have a client I’ve worked with. mentioned Harley Davidson, and it was like a eureka moment. The first time I started working with Harley, they called me up. They said, Hey, we have trouble. We’re suffering in the middle of an economic downturn. We need help. And I said, Okay, and they go, Look, we’re ready to jump in and roll our sleeves up with you. And I almost fell over. I said, Are you serious? They go, yeah, they got 24 seven. What do need? I go, Okay, we’re on it. And literally, if I call that client at 9:30 at night, he’s picking the phone up, go, what do you need? That’s what I think is the best opportunity. You have to be vulnerable.

And as the client, I can always say to them because they get scared. Well, I don’t know what if I don’t like what I hear? I said, well, you’re the client. can say no, but you want their ideas. You want somebody to challenge your thinking. There’s too much problem out there. There’s too much same old same old. Look at 90 plus percent of any of the marketing out there. Most of the time I’m going, I don’t even know what they’re trying to say. I don’t know what the message is. So it’s up to the marketer to say,

Bennie

Right. Right.

Barry 

Here’s what our end goal is. Can you guys figure a way to help us get there and we will be right there with you.

Bennie

Right, because you don’t get to different through the same, right? It’s really as simple as that. You don’t get to be different. You don’t get different results. You don’t get different impacts. You don’t get different ideas if you’re deeply committed to the same.

Barry

You’re right, I’ll sometimes talk to a client and we’ll say, now, here’s an idea, what about such and such? They’ll go, no, we won’t do that. And my people will be a little demoralized and will walk off and they’ll gee, it’s too bad they didn’t like it. I’ll go, no, no, no. Give them time. This was a strange concept. It was not the same concepts they’ve been hearing from other people. And not always, but quite often we’ll hear back and go, Hey, you know, I’ve been thinking about this. I feel kind of good. Let’s get into this a little deeper because they’re human beings.

Bennie

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I was recently having a brand conversation and an idea was pitched and was completely off of the standard naming convention. And we had the, and I counseled everyone, be calm for a second. Let it sink in. Let it sink in. And it was all the reactions were the reactions you wanted. Well, it’s different. Yes, that’s what you wanted. It’s no one else is doing it like this. That’s what we want.

Barry

Yes. That’s right.

Bennie

And we can own it and it’s understood and it’s a little rebellious. And wait a minute, it started to get in there. It’s like, you know, I kinda like this. And it took that time to reveal, right? It was a slow reveal.

Barry

Well, right. So many of the marketing programs out there are just rehashes and it’s already been done. And I think the most exciting thing is to be able to work with a company and say, OK, let’s do something that you haven’t done. Let’s focus on your strengths, but we’re going to have to look at it. And a lot of times people don’t understand how important words are are 200,000 words in the English language. How many brands use the same 10 or so, know, selection value integrity of, know, and I’m going, my gosh, we can’t use the same words.

Bennie

And here’s a secret, my friend, that’s not a secret. Of the 10, seven of them aren’t good. Right? Right? You think about it, we’ll pick a word that’s not really understood, that doesn’t really capture the concept of the feeling, but because it’s the standard fare, everyone uses it. It wasn’t a good word to begin with.

Barry

That’s right. Right, well the word value made sense 40, 50 years ago because it meant one thing, something good. Now you have entry level value, premium value, platinum value. Okay, now it’s a description but it means nothing. And who’s gonna offer a product that doesn’t have value, right?

So that’s what I think is the most exciting part of this. We’ll go in and we’ll work with a client and we’re finding what’s in front of them and we’re going, okay, now we gotta use different language. And they go, no, we like it this way. We go, okay, I know you do, but this is the language. The language you like is what your competitor uses. So you’re gonna talk like your competitor. Let’s talk like you.

Bennie

Well, I think one thing that our conversation is alluding to is the fact that these aren’t stationary levers, right? You think back to the music and the level in there. So the language is changing in the context of the market. The brand is changing in the concept of the market. The customer’s expectation and receptivity is changing in space and air. Because like you said, if I’ve heard value 20 times, I’ve got a declining scale of what that means.

Barry

That’s brilliant. You’re 100 % right.

Bennie

See, I should just end the conversation right there, my friend. You said I was brilliant. I can take this up and pass it on to my mom. And I think I’ve done for the year. But no, we won’t leave it there because we’re going to challenge ourselves on this basis. As brands evolve and they look for what’s new and what’s next, what counsel do you have for brands? When we need to shake up ourselves, right? I get the benefit of being in charge of a hundred-year-old brand.

And it’s always the conversation of, your past performance is not an indicator of future success, but it’s our past success that opens the door for this future conversation. So how do you balance? I was the value guy and now value means something different.

Barry

Well, you do, what we talked about a few minutes ago, the thing the Beatles did, which is, you know what? Sit down and we reassess our brand and we go, where do we go next?

It’s what you did with the BBB when you took over the messaging years ago and you said, you know, trust is really important. But today, trust means something different than it did 100 years ago. Trust might mean privacy issues. might be technology. I think we sit down, we do our assessment. We look at what do our customers and employees say don’t change, what makes us unique? And then we go, where do we go?

Bennie

Right. Hmm, very nice. Where do we go next? Which I think is that question. And what I love about it, it’s a question that we continue to ask ourselves, right? A good brand, a good leader is going to continue to ask that because that answer is going to evolve. And the answer should give us comfort and challenge at the same time.

Barry

How many digital agencies say, hey, we’re going to do a new campaign for you. And all it is is 99 % the last campaign that you did, this one. And they’re just going to try a little bit of a different media mix. OK, that’s not where do we go. That’s where we’ve been. And yeah, I just think that’s most exciting part.

Bennie 

Great. So I’m going to ask you this question, because we’ve talked about the parallels of songwriting and creativity, and we’ve talked about books. What’s next? This last book was about separating us from where we are and allowing us to be different in the brand practice in there. What’s top of mind for you now? What are you thinking about the next conversation?

Barry

What I’m doing now is… fulfilling the goal that we had which was we want to inspire 1 million people with our message. So what’s happening now is keynote speeches are starting to appear in front of me to perform in person or virtually. Meeting with universities, sharing with Cambridge University what we’re all about, programs for colleges where the students are able to ask questions and really get them engaged. It’s my podcast spreading that word. That’s what it is. You talked about music. You’ve got your songs. You’ve got your greatest hits. Let’s go out and perform them to as many different audiences and really grow a following. And that’s what we’re doing.

Bennie 

And really grow a following that space in there. So that in effect, you’ve created these platforms that allow us to get better in the space in there. If you had, know, songwriters are great at turns of phrase, right? If you had one phrase to inspire our audience as we close out today, what would it be, my friend? Now I’ve hyped you up, so now you got to say something good. I’m just saying.

Barry

I’ve got two. I’ll give you a bonus. Number one is words create worlds. So words create worlds. That means we have a lot of words to choose from and let’s make sure the worlds we create are the right ones for our brand. And the second one is do not confuse differentiation with superiority. You can have highly differentiated brand and product and that does not mean your product is superior in every way. Those are the two.

Bennie

I love it. Being different does not mean it’s superior, which implies there’s still work to do. Being different means you’re interesting. It doesn’t mean you don’t have to still keep working, right?

Barry

You know, one thing in my keynotes, I talk about the famous actress and model Cindy Crawford who had the birthmark, right? She had that mark or mole as some people call it. She did not get it removed. And most people when I’m sharing that story in my speeches, they go, yeah, because she understood differentiation. No, no, it wasn’t. It’s because her mother said you cannot go under surgery under the knife and remove that because it might leave a scar. And here’s what’s interesting, Bennie, when we remove what makes us unique, even if it’s not perfect, it could leave a scar. We could lose the hearts and minds of our employees. We could lose the loyalty of our customers because we remove that thing. And you know what? It was our differentiation.

Bennie

Right. I love that in effect, the narrative has come full circle to be one of self love and self focus and embracing that as our brand is our strength. I love that your final words as a person who understands words, rhythm and meanings is that words create worlds. And what a great world that we have in here. Thank you for being a part of this podcast, my friend. Thank you for providing a playbook that I hope all our listening will take advantage of that what makes us different, makes us interesting, and helps to make our brands matter.

Barry 

And Bennie, want to tell you, you, Amy, and the entire team do a phenomenal job. The guests that you brought on with your podcasts are great. And your passion for the marketers and for that 17-year-old who is really dabbling in her career and wondering, how do I do what I should do? And should I go into technology or whatever? You’re making such a difference for all of us. So thank you.

Bennie 

My goodness. Thank you, my friend. And thank you all for joining us for this powerful episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. Once again, I’m your host, AMA CEO, Bennie F Johnson. We encourage you to find more resources on AMA.org, and we encourage you to follow Barry’s thought leadership and think about the power of differentiation in your own life and brand. Thank you.