by scott.gillum | Feb 2, 2021 | 2021, Business Trends, ebooks
by Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
If you are a business marketer and your organization has more than 4 personas, keep reading. Making things even worse, the personas you have are most likely sales personas or, more accurately, “selling scenarios.” I’ll explain.
Most B2B personas are built around a title or role and are constructed to identify the needs of the buyer in their role, which is helpful. They may align solutions with those needs, suggest the content that aligns with the buyer journey, and perhaps even identify the preferred sources of information they use.
All good things to have except that there is no “person” in the persona, which is what marketing needs in order to do its job right.
That job is to create awareness and drive interest in the brand, products and services of the organization. It’s not to sell. And this is where we run into problems. Most personas are built using the titles of buyers (budget holder, decision maker, user, etc) which may, or may not, be present at the beginning of the journey.
Marketing’s success is about finding audiences who are seeking information and getting them to do something with it. Share it, demand more of it, request to speak to someone about it. It may be too soon to know if that “someone” is a buyer, but what we do know is that it is a type of person. Two types actually, and it’s their personality type that determines it, and not their title or role.
Until recently, it was very difficult to understand the difference. In the past, we’ve collected engagement and/or intent information about buyers and guessed about their motivations and behaviors. With AI enabled personality profiling tools, we now have the chance to better understand our specific audiences, and when I mean specific, I mean down to the individual.
Personality based marketing (PBM) can help us understand how to write copy to attract these personality types. It can help us understand their content preferences for lead nurturing, and it can improve the overall performance of campaigns because we know which personality types will not engage or respond.
Why does that matter? Because according to Gartner, personally relevant content drives engagement, and that relevancy isn’t just about your job or role, it’s about you.
It’s about your personal preference for consuming content. Some people like “big picture,” quick to consume visualized assets such as animated videos. Others prefer long form white papers with details on how to use or implement a product. The difference is how those personality types intend to use the material and that speaks to their motivations.
For the big picture folks, the motivation is that they like to share new ideas with others. It makes them feel good about themselves. Others need information for their own purposes. To help understand how to improve the performance of their team, their platform, or their advertising efforts.
It’s why we created Carbon Quadrants. Our proprietary process for determining which personalities are most likely to match the behavior we need to improve response rates, consume or share content, and most importantly, play a critical role in the buying group.
Through our analysis we can also determine which audience segments are most likely to respond or not. Engage in the early stage of the buying process or skip it altogether. Through the use of AI tools we can know how to address audiences on a deeper, more meaningful level and as a result, improve the performance of marketing.
If you’re interested in improving the performance of your organization contact us to learn how Personality Based Marketing can help.
by scott.gillum | Jan 26, 2021 | 2021, Business Trends
As previously published on 1/22/21 in Mediapost
by Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
With the rollout of the Covid vaccine, companies are predicting that employees will begin returning to offices in mass during late spring or early summer; but will they?
Due to office modifications required for greater distance between desks, along with other adaptations for protection, workers expect that their office schedule will alternate to allow for capacity constraints. The expectation is that they will be in the office every other day, with many hoping for 3 days at home and 2 days in the office, according to a recent survey in the Wall Street Journal.
This schedule may appeal to convenient wisdom but it seems to ignore what we learned about how employees really want to work.
Covid flipped the script on the work environment. Once, remote working was the exception and it has now become the rule, with the added challenge for many of online schooling for children. Houses were, and continue to be packed with family and for many, chaos rules the day.
At the end of 2020, we set out to figure out how Covid had impacted the lives of our talent network, in particular, how they are balancing work with the new demands of being remote, especially, those who are working parents.
Our Workday Study, completed in December, provided unique insights into how people got work done in “new normal.” Our model uses independent talent (contractors, freelancers, etc.), which gives our talent the autonomy to make their own hours.
As a result, they could openly share how they work, in a large part because they don’t have to worry about “business norms” regarding a “standard” work week or meeting a manager’s expectations on productivity.
Survey participants were asked to record their time using a color coded system. Green indicated time dedicated to their personal time, red to their professional, and yellow a blending of the two. All time was captured in a shared document enabling us to view how their days compared with others.
The first finding was that there is no such thing as a typical workday. No two people worked identical days. The second insight was that our days are long (17.5 hrs), with 6.4 hours dedicated to work, 6 hours to “life” and the remaining 5 hours to blending the two. 
What may be most interesting is what we termed the “Power Hours.” The time blocks that fully focus on work. Two segments of the day were consistent across the group — 9:30 am to 12 pm and 1pm to 3:30 pm. What was interesting is how it varied by working parent based on the age of their children.
Parents with children under 10 started their work days later in the morning. Parents of children over 10, tended to wrap up their days earlier. Drilling down, we found parents of elementary school children needed time to get them ready for the day (off to daycare, set up for online classes, etc.). Parents with older children were often transporting their children to lessons (music, dance, etc) or practices (soccer, lacrosse, etc.).
This insight presents an opportunity to create different “office hours.” Instead of alternating days, organizations could alternate “power hour” shifts during the day. This could provide efficiency benefits of allowing workers to shorten commute times by avoiding rush hour, with the additional benefit of a schedule that meets the personal needs as parents.
By offering mornings shifts for parents of older children, and afternoons for parents of young children can not only control for capacity issues. but also, provide better work-life balance for employees.
If we’ve learned anything from the last year it’s that we need to be adaptable. Flexibility, adaptability and perseverance were, and are, critical to getting through this difficult time. The pandemic gave us a glimpse into work from a different perspective. We gained insight into how people balance life and work, instead of the other way around.
We’ve also learned that a person’s work schedule is as unique as they are. It’s now time to use these insights to advance how we think about productivity, the environment that enables it and how it aligns to the needs of the employee. This is an opportunity to evolve the workplace, and our traditional view of a workday, and workweek.
by scott.gillum | Dec 1, 2020 | 2020, Business Trends
Face to face meetings are dead, at least for the foreseeable future. Companies have invested in sales enablement platforms without seeing a measurable improvement in productivity. Email response rates are at a record low, and webinar performance is declining. Scott interviews Dr. Howard Dover, Director of Professional Sales and Sales Coach, University of Texas at Dallas on these challenges and how they are impacting how we sell now and in the future .
To hear Scott’s entire conversation with Dr. Howard Dover, Director, Center of Professional Sales, and professional sales coach to discuss the Future Of Selling”, listen or download here:
by scott.gillum | Sep 15, 2020 | 2020, Business Trends
Pixel506 is a tech company based out of New York and Costa Rica. Antonio Ramirez, CEO of Pixel506, sat down with Scott to discuss remote work and working in Costa Rica during COVID19. Antonio Ramirez gives tips on creating award-winning websites and how to set up your digital efforts for success.
To hear Scott’s entire conversation with Antonio Ramirez, CEO and Founder of Pixel506 about “Remote Work And Working In Costa Rica”, listen or download here:
by scott.gillum | Aug 12, 2020 | 2020, Marketing
By Jackson and Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 minutes
Editor’s Note: A father and son project often results in something being built. A treehouse, a restored car or a piece of furniture. With very little mechanical skills but a knack for storytelling and a son who is an English major, our project resulted in a white paper on Personality Based Marketing to be published in the fall. The blog post below is an excerpt from that piece, Jackson researched and wrote it, I just helped to frame it, without any tools…of course.
John B Watson is a crucial character in the use of personality in advertising, used extensively today, yet for many his name is unknown. He lived during a time (1878-1958) that saw the rise and boom of both psychology and personality studies.
As a professor at Johns Hopkins he did extensive research in psychology until a scandalous affair with a student would cost him his job. After being forced to leave the university, he entered the world of marketing work as a door-to-door salesman for advertising agency J. Walter.
It didn’t take Watson long to start making observations about his customers. He concluded that rather than consumers being rational, they acted emotionally. Watson claimed: “tell him something that will tie him up with fear, something that will stir up a mild rage, that will call out an affectionate or love response, or strike at a deep psychological or habit need.” The Authenticity Bomb.
Using this, Watson would lead several advertising campaigns, utilizing strategies that are still in use today. During his advertising for Ponds Cold Cream and Pebeco toothpaste, he revolutionized the way that testimonials were used.
These testimonials were based on evoking the emotional response of desire for the customers. The ads featured seductive women, and were not directed to men but instead to women with the promise that they would become more desirable. The same approach used today in the advertising of skin and beauty products.
Attractive men and women drinking beers together sent a message greater than “this is a good beer” but instead “drink this beer and you can be like them.” Watson’s style of ads pitched a new reality attainable through the acquisition of their product.
There is now a new phenomenon in advertising. A new alliance few expected between social movements and corporations. Historically, adhering to social movements could be bad for business, and we have seen many examples of this.
Two recent examples are Budweiser’s “Born the Hard Way” Ad and Pepsi’s famous “Live for Now” ad. Both of these ads came out in 2017 and they were massive failures, each in their own way.
The story behind the Pepsi ad is more complex than that of the Budweiser ad, and the fact that Pepsi advertisers never foresaw any negative response is astonishing, yet you can tell their heads were naively in the right place.
They picked up on the popular movements at the time, specifically the #resistance movement aimed at the Trump administration and the foundations of the BLM movement. This can be seen everywhere in the ad, where the focal point is an enormous protest with young people marching, directly aimed at their millennial audience.
Then, the ad makes a massive turn for the worst, the idea that a Pepsi can bring everyone together. The moment that Kendall Jenner hands a police officer a pepsi is the moment that Pepsi created what could be considered one of the worst ads in history.
The message is patronizing, calling on both the absurdity of the message along with popular anti- Kardashian-Jenner sentiments that they are relatable people. This “bomb” exploded because Pepsi appeared to be disingenuously producing an ad that attempted to take advantage of social movements, but perhaps they were at the right place at the wrong time.
And that brings us to today, following the death of George Floyd and the monumental growth of BLM protests that have grown across the entire nation in 2020, companies are scrambling to produce as many ads as possible to address this audience.
The interesting phenomenon is, just like where Pepsi produced an ad using social movements as a marketing ploy without any relevance to their company, so are an extensive amount of corporations with seemingly no backlash…so far.
On July 13, 2020 Old Navy, released its “#WeAreWe” ad. It is colorful, upbeat, and poetic, praising the social movements of 2020. It is also accompanied by a new store manifesto committed to activism within their own company, and it has been successful.
Below the surface lurks the fact that their clothing is produced in Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Philippines, Sri Lanka, etc., countries renowned for their cheap labor and lack of environmental protection laws.
While Gap, Old Navy’s parent company, has addressed its garment production in the past giving it some praise, it still has glaring issues when it comes to worker pay and empowerment. Good on You, a website dedicated to rating the ethical behavior of companies, scored Old Navy a “2 out of 5” when it came to labor, and a “3 out of 5” when it came to environmental friendliness.
What Old Navy, and companies like them are pursuing is potentially dangerous to the brand. In addressing one issue they are exposing themselves to others. And potentially, setting themselves up to be unable to fulfill their promise to consumers, making them seem hypocritical.
What companies must realize is that while they may have the best intention, in order to be authentic they must be able to live it. Especially when the “trolls” come knocking. In the emotional and polarized environment we live in today, “covering the bases” is a tightrope that keeps shrinking.
Watson’s ads were successful because companies pitched you a new better version of yourself, one you can attain only through them. Now, companies pitch you a new version of them, one that they hope you accept at surface value but don’t look at too closely.
