Transcript

Bennie F. Johnson 

Hello, and thank you for joining us for this episode of AMA’s Marketing And. I’m your host, Bennie F. Johnson, AMA CEO. In our episodes, we explore life through the lens of marketing, delving into conversations with individuals that flourish at the intersection of marketing and the unexpected. Through this series, 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, our guest is Dr. Sylvia Long -Tolbert, founder of Know More Marketing. She has been really everything you can imagine in marketing as a practitioner, a consultant, a university professor, and a researcher. She has taught graduate level marketing and e -commerce programs, for the Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins University. She’s taught in the Business and Innovation Program at the University of Toledo and at Drexel University. While working dynamically at an intersection of science and practice, Dr. Sylvia introduces business leaders to the conceptual frameworks, analytics, and theories from psychology and marketing science that impact our world and our business. With her guidance, marketers, and organizational change agents, and strategic problem solvers can build sound solutions to behavioral, social, and cultural shifts that are redefining our business markets and the world around us. I’d like to welcome Dr. Sylvia to our podcast. Thank you for joining us.

Sylvia Long-Tolbert 

Thank you for having me.

Bennie

It’s really a distinct pleasure and honor to have you have this conversation with us. When I think about the way you’ve been able to craft a really dynamic career that’s at the hybrid or the intersection of being both researcher, an academic professor, a teacher, a guide, or, and also a marketing practitioner. How did this road for you start? And it’s normally not the space where most people begin, but it’s an incredible space in where you’ve built a career.

Sylvia 

I was introduced to marketing in the 10th grade and I have really been focused on the same professional profile and skillset my entire career. And I am an anomaly in that way and that I discovered very early on what was of interest to me. So I’d like to give a shout out to the Distributed Education Clubs of America, DECA. Yeah, it’s still an entity.

Bennie 

Okay. Mm -hmm. Right. Uh oh, you gave a shout out to Deka, yes!

Sylvia 

And I worked with a team of students to put on a fashion show, but that project or endeavor required us to partner with a local department store, the Hecht Company, to provide the fashions and the other supplies that we needed to execute the project. But what intrigued me then was just the rich stimuli that we encountered as nascent marketers and all the decision -making that had to happen.

Bennie 

Hello. Okay.

Sylvia 

For us to execute. So that was the beginning for me. And upon graduation from undergrad at Howard University, I was fortunate to get my first job as a retail buyer trainee. And off I went, like one week after I graduated from Howard, I was moving to a different city, much to my family’s dismay because I’d never lived alone.

I’d never lived in another city and they thought I had absolutely lost my mind. But it was everything I was hoping for and the timeliness of the job offer just excited me. And so I worked for three and a half years as a buyer for the May Company department store. And that job as an assistant buyer never disappointed. And everything I learned in that first job has carried me through my entire career.

Bennie 

Right. Mmm.

Sylvia

So I’ve been really, really fortunate. And so each subsequent professional move was my strategic intent to just learn more about marketing in every facet imaginable. And I didn’t have the concept and there wasn’t a discussion at that time about being curious or continuous learner. I was just so energized by what marketing represented and I just kept going.

And so that’s what has led me to this day. And I still have that same kind of energy and enthusiasm and excitement about marketing. It eventually morphed into a deeper understanding around buyer behavior and consumer behavior, which is what brings me to this point in my career.

Bennie 

It’s really interesting to tell us a bit about some of those early lessons and truisms. It’s really fascinating that, you know, kind of your first experience, there were some lessons that you learned that you still hold on today. I love to hear what are some of those truisms that you learned front lines?

Sylvia

People matter. And I learned that on my first job when I started right out of undergrad. I was 21. I walked into a role where I was the supervisor for frontline retail sales clerks. About 20 of them on average age was like 60. That stays with me to this day because the only way to…really drive success there was to stand in their experience and in their shoes. I arrived in Pittsburgh just as the steel mills were closing down. Retail was the alternative career track for a lot of overqualified people who needed to then find new ways to make a living. And it was a tough scenario. I’m African American, I’m in Pittsburgh.

Bennie 

Mmm.

Sylvia

They never, many of them had a visceral reaction to an educated young black woman and they called me a girl. But when I found the sweet spot of being empathic with how they got there, what their experiences were, it was the best work experience ever. But I had no understanding of myself at that point that I was an empath. And so that was my first understanding and recognition that invest,

Bennie

Thank you.

Sylvia

in people is really what makes marketing in the retail sector a hum along and what drives impact, what keeps customers coming back, and what keeps people on the front line really representing the brand in a way that makes it valuable, build equity.

Bennie 

Right. Right. Wow. And so from that experience, you then continue professionally and you go on to get your MBA from George Washington University. What was the point that that led you to kind of go that path to then take a pivot and move into the MBA?

Sylvia 

Yes. I wanted to be more well -versed on all facets of marketing. The retail space was very unique. If you lived through a couple of cycles of planning in the retail sector, you pretty much understand the rhythm and the cadence. So I’m a quick study of most things and that I recognize. If I get one or two iterations of a process, then…

Bennie 

Right.

Sylvia 

Mastered it and so I want to say my curiosity about how else do you do this and how do you practice it practice marketing and other context is really what drove me to get my MBA. I moved back to Washington DC and I had a full -time job because second higher ed wasn’t structured the way it was with programming that really met the needs of the learners.I had to go to school in the afternoon. So I started my job at 6 a.m. so that I could leave by 2 p.m., leave work by 2 p.m. and go to school in the evening. And the goal there really was to be able to think more strategically because that’s when strategy as a concept was all abuzz and really coming online in terms of an academic offering. And so I did more advanced training and replicated a lot of my knowledge from my undergrad program, which was pretty cutting edge, surprisingly, because it was a relatively new program for Howard, but it had prepared me for graduate education. And so I got to do more advanced thinking and more project work.

Bennie

All right.

Sylvia

It took me back to, again, it was the beginning of teamwork, an MBA program, really being structured around teams. So I worked with a lot of mature workers. I learned more about building relationships and why people matter and leadership and lack thereof because there was a lot of tension, friction and conflict because people were coming in the evenings to complete the coursework and we all had different priorities and values. So,

Bennie

Right.

Sylvia 

Again, I learned a lot about people management. I wasn’t there for that But that was probably the real value of my MBA program. So I felt I was professionally maturing. And so that served me well. And immediately upon my graduation from my MBA program, I moved into the professional ranks at Blue Cross and Blue Shield. So it really was perfect timing. And that was my first frontline sales job. I worked as an account exec and group health insurance. So that’s how I made the pivot and leveraged my advanced graduate education. So it paid off handsomely.

And working in sales and on the front line of group health insurance, again, put me smack that in the middle of my identity as an empath. Still not understanding, you know, I’m going to sell health insurance. I’m not thinking it’s about people. It’s about the product. And boy, did I learn it’s still about the people. And so once again, I’m building this profile as an empath and really being able to manage client relationships and.

Bennie 

Right.

Sylvia 

You know, facilitate growth and the closed deals. And I really loved it. And that may have been the first time I was introduced to the concept of marketing research. And I subsequently left that job so that I could go work at an analyst at a public utility.

Bennie 

And so moving into that space of kind of research, you know, I’ll mention the Ohio State University is where you ended up getting a PhD. And at a time when very few people were getting PhDs in marketing and social psychology, there you were. Achievement, talk a bit about that.

Sylvia 

Yeah.

Bennie 

Immense moment of strategic move, but also the pride of being one of the few people to actually have this kind of focus at that time.

Sylvia 

Yeah, this is such an interesting question and it’s an emotional, you know, moment for me, such a nostalgia. I eventually ended up working at Freddie Mac and worked along a colleague who was all but dissertation done. And she was a divorced single mother and she was very structured, very rigid and very much a teacher.

Bennie 

Oh. And then.

Sylvia

And we spent a lot of time together. And it was my relationship with this random coworker who said, you don’t belong here. You belong in the classroom and you like research. But for me, the concept of research analytics was never a part of my professional experience in a meaningful way. So she trained me in everything she knew as an ABD.

Bennie

Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Okay.

Sylvia 

Professional and I learned everything about research from this colleague. She took me to meetings with her and really what prompted I think her recommendation that I go back to school is that my interaction with the research suppliers. The type of questions I asked and I was never really satisfied with the recommendations trying to get them to be more actionable and more behavioral. So subsequently,

Bennie 

Okay.

Sylvia 

She coached me through the admissions process and God bless her. She really did coach me. My first iteration of applications, I didn’t get admitted because I had no mental model about what I was doing. And I think I told her, well, I applied to three schools and I didn’t get accepted. And she thought that was unacceptable. So we did it together and I applied to three more schools and I was accepted at all three schools. But what happened in that…

Bennie

Yeah.

Sylvia

Process is that I reached out to the universities, contacted someone that did research that really piqued my curiosity, and developed a relationship with them. So I cultivated a relationship with someone at Ohio State. And when I went to meet him in person, he was a consumer psychologist. He wasn’t a business person. So he thought I was interesting because I brought along so much managerial and and applied experience and he thought we could be a good team. Hence my move to Ohio State. But what was interesting about that otherwise is that my father was born and raised in Ohio and he could never convince my mother to have his five children spend the summers in Ohio. And then I moved to Ohio. So yeah, yeah, yeah, my father is, he’s deceased at this point.

And I just felt like he put me on this journey. And so I love so much about my experience. But when I entered the PhD program, it was the first time I came to life. I knew I was a, I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew I was in the right place. And I was mid-career. I wasn’t young. I wasn’t as young as some PhD candidates are today. And it was a bold move.

It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And I had a lot of people coach me out of quitting, because like every term I was going to quit. Yeah, but my life transformed in the extent to which I embraced all of who I am. I’m very inquisitive. I’m very curious. And I’m a catalyst for change. I just needed a platform and mental models to help me navigate my vision of what marketing should be. And what I didn’t appreciate until I went to graduate school is all of my experience was around transforming maturing brands. I took something old and energized and re -energized it, rebuilt it and found opportunities for growth. But I subsequently have learned I not only do that for brands, but I do that for individuals. Now,

Sylvia

I have to be explicit about this. Teaching was never on my radar. Just like never.

Bennie

You said when you were in school, in grad school, this was the first time you really came alive. You know, to talk a bit more about, about that experience with the research and, and finding this space and teaching and learning and questioning.

Sylvia

Well, graduate school helped me to fire on all cylinders. I’m a critical thinker. I’m a deep thinker. And probably too much of a critical thinker when I was in practice. So I had to really figure out how to bound my thinking and my curiosity about behavior. Oftentimes in practice, we don’t care why something works. Let’s just keep doing it.

Bennie 

Hmm.

Sylvia 

And that’s where I came to life, that academia and being a graduate student was a place that we could explore those questions in depth, and it was welcomed. And so I really start the fire on all cylinders in terms of being analytic, in terms of trusting my gut and intuition about patterns and analogies that I brought with me from industry.

Bennie

Right. Mm. Mm -hmm.

Sylvia

All of the applied experience and managerial experience helped me frame problems. It helped me help others see the problems in a more granular way. And it also helped me considerably to take the theoretical and academic content and translate it into something actionable. And so that’s where I live and work today. I start at the end. Where are we trying to go and what does that look like?

Bennie 

Right.

Sylvia 

So I don’t start with the problem, I start with what the future state and what are we imagining? And then I back into what do we need to know? What is it we don’t know that we need to study or better understand to help us close the gap on our future state or an imagined future? And that’s the mental model I really follow when I’m consulting. I don’t go in listening to understand their current problem.

Bennie 

Right.

Sylvia

I come in to understand what information do you already have that informs your thinking and your strategies? Let me look at that and let me bring a different lens to what you already have. And I try to translate disparate data into meaningful frameworks about social phenomena, cultural trends, and behaviors to say to people, here is your intelligence.

Here’s how you should ground your thinking about what to do next. And what’s missing then becomes my research proposal. Let’s go learn more about these things because I think we have a solid grounding on the current state that’s very reliable, empirically based, and this is how the world looks today. And we can kind of rely on that as a starting point rather than reinventing the wheel. And so what I’ve learned over time, is that so much information is siloed within corporate settings and in organizations. My job is to go find it, unleash it, and then add value to it before we make any additional investments. And so it really is integrating information to add some intuition and a new analytical lens that then gives you some intelligence.

Bennie 

Mmm.

Sylvia 

For which has more enduring value.

Bennie 

So talk a bit with our audience about the power of inquiry and the power of shaping good questions. I think about it, when you come in, it’s that lens in which you’re able to come in and provide inquiry that helps out. How can our listeners unleash the power of asking good questions in their own practice?

Sylvia 

I think you have to bring as much information and bits of data to the table as a starting point. So you defer judgment about what’s good or useful information. Just bring the information and let’s look at it and discuss it and have the subject matter experts and the people in the room, the informants in the room kind of walk us through what we have. And we can call it what we know, but bring it all.

Don’t say we don’t need to know what accounting knows. Just bring whatever you think is important. And I think conversations help us really cover the real domain of the situation or the environment. And we can start to separate out symptoms of things. What’s symptomatic? And let’s aggregate those symptoms and then label them something. And so sometimes our problem solving,

Bennie 

Mm -hmm.

Sylvia 

really get stuck or siloed or centered around symptoms. But if you look at it in a more random way and just put it out there and see how things start to converge in terms of experiences, in terms of sentiments, and in terms of performance, we can start thinking about the relationship between this data and we can look at patterns. For example,

Bennie 

Mm -hmm.

Bennie 

Right.

Sylvia 

I worked in the health insurance sector for two different entities. And what became clear to me is that they have a recurring pattern of reserves and growths where they pay out more claims, you know, like year three or four, they have a bad financial year because they’re paying out more claims. And looking at those patterns helps us understand what type of marketing programs.

Do we implement when we hit year three or four understanding that’s recurring pattern. But if we’re looking at, we’re not talking to the actuary, we’re not talking to the claims processors, we’re missing information about where there’s opportunity to ride out these issues or these troughs to really make us still effective, still service oriented, and still delivering a good experience in tough times.

And so back then we didn’t have data analytics and we didn’t have AI to help us massage this data. So we needed people to come and tell us what’s troubling you, where are the problems in your performance and outcomes and where are opportunities. And so we started to look externally and just gather market data to understand that every insurance company had this ebb and flow. And we became much more effective marketers.

Bennie 

Hmm.

Sylvia 

It provided a wealth of information and recommendations for actuaries to think about how we price policies when we bring on new features and benefits where we can make money rather than lose money. So I think that the real added value is bringing the diverse disciplines into one room. Let’s separate what’s a substantive general problem versus what are all the symptoms of the business that really just provides context. And let’s ask questions and let’s then think about what our brand value proposition is and build priorities around that.

Bennie 

Wow. You know, I’m sitting here as we talk and I listen to you. I just have to remark again, what an incredible time for us to practice and be engaged in marketing. When we think about the shifts in behavioral, social, and cultural moments, what an incredible time. What are you most excited about for the contemporary practice of marketing and this near future of marketing?

Sylvia 

Yeah. What I’m most excited about is this is an incredible time. So the theory and academic discussions and discourse that I’m very well steeped in now resonates with the average person in industry. All the students that I touched over my 25 teaching, my 25 year teaching career now have an appreciation why I would say to them.

Bennie

Yeah. Mm -hmm.

Sylvia 

your job is to be just a little bit of a scientist and ask the questions. Because now that you’ve been trained at a graduate level and you understand behavioral research and how we change behavior and how difficult that might be, we now have good stewards sitting in practice who may not have a PhD, but they’re emboldened because they do have enough knowledge and experience to ask the questions.

Bennie

Right.

Sylvia 

And to help shape the dialogue and conversations that are happening every day when you look at KPIs, when you look at product roadmaps. And that is, I think, the most exciting thing. Behavioral sciences of practice, applied behavioral science is something slightly different than what I’m referring to. But I’m talking about the mechanics of knowing, thinking, and influencing how people think and act in an enduring way. because my focus on really transforming practice is to have us understand how we’re going to drive enduring change, which means we’re changing people’s underlying beliefs about what the brand is, can be, and will be. And I think that this is the most exciting time because the knowledge is accessible to a much more general population.

Bennie

It really is that we talked about the fact that marketing is everywhere and everything is marketing. And the fact that, right, the ideas, the resources, the tools are more accessible. As you think about this kind of next phase, I’m going to bring up the magic phrase that dominates all our conversations. What are you seeing with the impact of AI on your approach or the approaches that you’ve seen to marketing?

Sylvia 

Well, I think the first my first thought is individual professionals in corporate brands need to establish what are their real core competencies. And this is this is a conversation people don’t like to have. You know, what are you building on? And does AI infringe upon that? And if the answer is yes,

Bennie 

Mm -hmm. Right. Right.

Sylvia

Then there’s a pathway forward. If you identify core competencies for which you perceive your brand and company resources will be complementary to what AI offers, you’re in a good place. And there’s another pathway. And I just think that is on a case -by -case basis. And certainly you could have instructive use cases around sectors and around

Bennie

Mm -hmm.

Sylvia 

specific professional profiles. But the way I like to think about it and what it drills down to me is where are your core competencies where AI and human ingenuity are collaborative and complementary? And I think the underlying skill and point of differentiation for me is human judgment.

Bennie 

Okay, yeah.

Sylvia 

Human judgment, because AI, we do things that AI can’t. And we make a lot of decisions. Humans can pivot on a dime, psychologically, mentally, and analytically. I haven’t met a machine yet that can out -think me.

Bennie 

Right.

Sylvia

I haven’t met a machine yet that makes me feel insecure about what I’m able to do in the realm of marketing research. I’m just not there yet. And it may happen eventually in my lifetime. But understanding the underpinnings of judgment and decision making within the context of marketing, I think is our unique capability. AI doesn’t have sensing capabilities.

Bennie

Right. You’re right.

Sylvia 

that human beings have. AI can’t really build out analogies on a dime. And a lot of that is about the practice of marketing is really contextual and the stimuli driven. And that’s hearing, seeing, thinking, touching, I’m missing something. It’s five of them, I’m missing something. Smelling, well, yeah.

Bennie 

Right. You haven’t hit smelling yet, but we digress, right? Yeah.

Sylvia 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the technology is there, even there, you know, we can smell through the ether, but we can respond and process stimuli at a faster rate and more precisely than technology. And the world may change eventually, just like we’ve been blindsided by generative AI, we may get there, but for now, our unique core competency and our competitive advantage is to leverage our sensing capabilities to make optimal decisions and in some cases we’re gonna make the best decisions and I think all the other soft skills that are garnering attention a matter being adaptive and Again, and I think those all matter but it’s not what information we had It’s what our mental models are for using the data we have and you know Generative AI and AI gives you a data dump somebody still has to synthesize it and bring some level of intelligence and some level of knowing and integrating that information into something that’s coherent and value added. So you see the disclaimer on most AI software, this technology makes mistakes. Oh, no joke. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, the applications…

Bennie 

Right, right.

Sylvia

are numerous and there will be some advantages across different facets of marketing. But really what it suggests to me, our capacity for deep critical thinking is still our advantage because we’re going to take the massive amounts of information that we’re given and figure out how we integrate it. The other thing I think is most important around judgment and these sensing capabilities is AI is looking at patterns.

So it really is focused on how data is aggregating and clustering. Opportunities lives in the margins and on the fringes and only a human being will tell you why this doesn’t make sense. Why this is an opportunity when it falls outside the boundaries of the patterns. And that’s where people like me apply their creative understanding and interpretation of theory.

I want to see what’s hanging in the margins and out on the fringes and why it doesn’t fit in. And this isn’t fundamentally different from multivariate analysis that we do in a conventional way. But we’re looking at scaling and looking at massive amounts of data to really look at the patterns. In my mind, it’s just a more advanced way of data mining. And as a trade scientist, I would never support.

Bennie

Uh huh. Right.

Sylvia 

data mining. So when you give me data from AI, I still want to go back and evaluate it and look at it through another lens because I want to see if we change the parameters, will the patterns then tell us something different? And so you have to have some, you know, we have thinkers and doers in the corporate environment. We need to figure out how we get more doers to think more critically about what they can do and learn from AI. And that’s a process. And some of it is going to be automatic and immediate. We can leverage it today. But I think the skills training and upskilling that needs to happen is getting more doers to believe they could be thinkers and then build those competencies more broadly so that we get a larger proportion of professionals thinking and doing.

Because right now we probably have 20 to 30 percent of marketing professionals doing the deep critical thinking. And they don’t all need to be functioning at that level, but they all are going to find their own strengths and bring value if we encourage them to do a little bit more thinking. Hence, it goes back to my original point of pride as an academic. I convince people that they can be just a little bit of a behavioral scientist and they believe it and they go read.

Bennie 

Right.

Sylvia 

the theory and frameworks and things that they wouldn’t have leaned into otherwise, now that they understand the coding, the analytics can be handled by the computer. We need you to sit at the interface of technical knowledge and ingenuity and find your sweet spot.

Bennie 

Hmm. Mm -hmm. That’s a I was going to ask what advice you had that was going to be my next question. But I mean, my friend, you completely slayed that part of the question before I even asked to give the information to our younger marketing leaders who are growing and progressing in this contemporary space that that balance of thinking and doing and thinking, right, kind of continuing to add into that strategic space in there. If you had to reference. one text or one space to help those listening become a little bit more fluent in being a behavioral scientist. What would you recommend?

Sylvia 

Hmmmm. It’s an older book. I have to think of the name of it. It’s Attitude, it’s the elaboration likelihood model. Cassioppo and Petty. And it probably is circa 1979 or 1983. It’s fundamental around how we learn.

Bennie 

Okay. All right.

Sylvia

And how we change people’s behavior. And there are no tricks to it. They map it out to help you understand it’s complicated, it’s a process, but it starts with people’s underlying beliefs. And this is where I come back to, this is how I was trained by these individuals. And I still believe in the world of thinking fast and slow. I’ve read all of these other.

Bennie 

Mm -hmm. Right.

Sylvia 

Two route models and paradigms, but what’s different about the elaboration likelihood model? It helps you to understand if you don’t under unpack and examine one’s core beliefs about race about poverty about sexual orientation If you can’t get to those core beliefs, you cannot change those behaviors

Bennie

Mm -hmm.

Sylvia

Over time and permanently. You might get some intermittent or short change or knee jerk responses and people respond once. But we’re talking about tough social phenomena that for us to have a better world and more successful business outcomes, you need to get to the core of their beliefs about obesity, why they overeat, what influence government has on their life.

Who gets to be rich? Who gets access? What’s the impact of privilege? And so it overlays with all these modern day interpretations of thinking fast and slow, but fundamentally when people are really comfortable and entrenched with old beliefs, they don’t process information thoroughly or deeply or critically. And this is why we can’t drive change quickly.

Bennie 

Mm.

Sylvia

This is why it’s difficult and stubborn and it could be about some of the most benign things. So that book to me is still the gospel.

Bennie 

Awesome, and we’re going to make sure that that book reference is available in the link to this recording as well so that everyone who’s listening can have access as well.

Sylvia 

Sure, and I’ll share it with you. So yeah, but I still live by the fundamental teachings.

Bennie

I love it. But you know, it’s one of those things where it’s interesting to hear your journey and how each step becomes a mutual reinforcement of the next step in what you’re doing. And you know, going back to those lessons come through when you talk about the people matter and understanding their, their stories. I mean, it was incredible just hearing you talk about what was happening in Pittsburgh at that time in that moment at

Sylvia 

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bennie 

Often I tell my marketing teams and we’re working on things that it’s not about you. And that little bit of information helps to open up that empathy window. Like it’s not, not about you and kind of getting us into those spaces to understand that change. You know, as, as we wrap up our conversation, I can’t believe we’re at the end of our hour. I’d love for this moment. What’s, what’s one bit of advice you may have for those who are, who are practicing marketing today.

Sylvia 

Yeah.

Bennie

Who are at maybe the inflection point of practice and research or the inflection point of career of finding what’s next for them, what encouragement would you have?

Sylvia 

I have two thoughts about that. The first one is the most powerful one. It’s what makes me a threat. It’s what excites me and it’s how I own the room. Because I do believe what’s been key to my success has been…

Bennie 

Right.

Sylvia 

Rejecting the status quo. You have to convince me while we’re doing the same thing again tomorrow. You have to convince me. If you have a growth mindset, if you have any thought or notion about technology and its various forms, it’s here to make the world better. The value of having access to large networks of subject matter experts and people around the globe is to leverage collective knowledge to make the world better, to grow in ways for profit, non -profit, socially, politically, reject the status quo. We live in a dynamic environment and it’s hard to convince people that they can sustain the same level of impact doing the same thing. more than six months. And you know, the cycle of strategic marketing has compressed a lot. It used to be the three to five year plan. Well, you can try that today and you’re going to be in trouble. So we’re talking about really an accelerated environment, which requires us to be constantly thinking about what’s next. And it doesn’t mean that everything can change. But when you see there’s an opportunity to tweak, Iterate you may be thinking about is this a business priority for us is now the time to do it and I think that is the value for the Gen Z years and the next the a gen alpha is that it think of it as a clean canvas, you don’t have to change things for just the sake of change but you will see things that can work better and you should feel emboldened and empowered to think about how to make it better because.

Bennie 

Hmm.

Sylvia

Here’s the second thing I’d like to say, because it lives in my spirit. It is my essence. And it’s a quote. Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and then go do it. Because what the world needs is more people who come alive like Sylvia.

Bennie

All right. And my friend, Dr. Sylvia, that is the most perfect way to end our conversation today. Innovator, I love having you here. Innovator, researcher, troublemaker, someone who’s coming alive. I just welcome having you here on our show and sharing your story and insights with all of our listeners. It’s been a pleasure having you here.

Sylvia 

I appreciate it. Thank you for having me.

Bennie 

And thank you all for joining us for this episode of Marketing And. I’m your host, Bennie F. Johnson. We encourage you to find out more about the AMA and marketing in your community and marketing shaping better outcomes, better responses in a better world. Thank you for joining us.