What Makes Marketing Actually Work?

David (00:02) people don't want your perfectly manicured and polished end results. Like that's not how the world works anyway. Ben Ard (00:32) Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by David. David, welcome to the show. David (00:37) Hi, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Ben Ard (00:39) Yeah, David, I'm really excited because you have one of my favorite subjects we're going to talk about. And you've done the research, the homework, we're going to reference an article you wrote. This is going to be a ton of fun. But before we dive into that, tell us about who you are and your career and all that kind of fun stuff. David (00:46) . Yeah, I was just telling Ben, ⁓ about my meandering career and story before, know, we started, basically, you know, I started in consulting and the agency space worked on brands like Coca-Cola, Atlanta Hawks, skin condoms. I was doing all sorts of different things. after a chapter of doing that, I actually became a founder, started my first, second, and then third company kind of in the, three years time. And then, you know, ⁓ moved on from that into. I guess a large B2B SaaS company. that's what I'm doing on the day to day as a director of product marketing. Actually work for a company that does church tech, which is, you know, kind of an interesting niche in and of itself. But, but yeah, aside from that, you know, I do, I do writing like what Ben is talking about. I do art, I do all sorts of things, kind of tinker on ideas, but I'm excited to be here. Ben Ard (01:45) I love that. And I honestly feel like people that have a bunch of different interests bring the most value to like everything they do. Like whenever I hear, I have this really cool hobby or this really cool passion that isn't just working on marketing or work all day. Those are the kinds of people I'm like, I bet they have really good ideas. I bet they look at things in a good way. So I'm excited. Yeah. So David, you wrote this cool article. David (02:01) Yeah. I appreciate that and I agree. Ben Ard (02:11) about the value of research for a company. Now we're not talking about the traditional term of research. What do we mean when we say research? What do we mean by that? David (02:17) Yeah. Yeah. So the distinction I make is basically, know, companies do all sorts of research, whether it's like qualitative or brand research, or, know, they'll do customer research and, know, do these large quantitative studies or, whatever it might be. But what I'm talking more about is how do you position research, the act and art of research as content and brand building in and of itself. And the article in the article, I referenced a company called story MFG. They're kind of like a more premium. clothing brand based in the UK. And you know, they have their main Instagram channel. Obviously they have their website, which they sell clothes and accessories and stuff, but they have kind of like a hidden Instagram that is not really well publicized. They don't really market it, but in there, it's all of this kind of BTS. It's all of this process related content about how they, you know, messed up on certain garments or how they had failed ideas or How they even got to certain ideas that became viral, right? It's like the story behind the good ideas. And, and I just thought, okay, that is a really interesting act of marketing. doesn't seem like marketing to kind of maybe followers of people that ⁓ are paying attention, but I think in fact, I would say it's like the best form of marketing, especially nowadays, or it's like people are, you know, consuming short form content, you know, a crazy pace. And there's a lot of quote unquote AI slop out there, but You can't really like, you can't make up failed accidents, right? Like you can't make up experiments or the documentation of it. So it's like really authentic. And I think people want that right now. I was like reading a stat about how luxury spending is kind of tanking right now, like companies like LVMH and whatever experiencing a loss and And I think it's because people are just buying dupes, like they're okay with dupes, right? And I think that idea kind of translates even into marketing. It's like, what, what stands out when everything is kind of like easy to consume? It's like, you know, like junk food for content. So that's where I went with the article. Ben Ard (04:21) I love that. That is so cool. So when you look at it and all the research you've done and everything in this article, how do businesses kind of get on board with this idea? I mean, we have a lot of marketers that listen to this podcast. If they're going back to the company and say, Hey, we need to show who we are in a very authentic way. We need to show up that way. And almost like what I love it you're talking about is in a vulnerable way. David (04:40) Yeah. Mm-hmm. Ben Ard (04:47) in a way that may not paint us always in the best light, but it paints us in the real light. How do you go about, first of all, convincing people in your company to do that? And then where would you recommend people get started? David (04:59) That's a great question. mean, like it's, it's true. I think people, and I think this is a huge miss that people want to do marketing, maybe like how marketing was done in 2010 to 2014, where there's these perfectly manicured feeds and really well done videos or whatever. don't think for the mass, the majority of B2B SaaS shilling marketers, I don't think they've left that paradigm. And I think. You know, it's, it's less about asking for permission and more about trying it and seeing if it works or not. So a great example of this and maybe like a case study that you can say, Hey, this is what gives us permission is anthropic. Everybody knows anthropic. love Claude. They had a recent, tweet thread that came out like June 27th, where they basically had this experiment called project then. And this experiment was crazy because they basically prompted Claude to set up an e-commerce shop and sell stuff for it. And, know, I don't know if you saw it, they, you know, it showcased how it like messed up, like what went well, what went wrong, everything surprising. Like one of the craziest parts was like, it had hallucinated that it was a real person, which is really scary. Right. But they publicize all of that. I think on the surface, it looks like. They're releasing some experiment results, but in my opinion, they're releasing research as branding, right? They're saying Anthropic and Claude, are a company that, you know, does things that are on the edge, right? We do things that we don't even know what will happen, even though we're supposed to be the experts. And it kind of creates momentum. creates progress. And that's what we really care about, which I think is quite amazing. And so I think, you know, if you're thinking about, okay, how do I get permission? It's. Ben Ard (06:43) I love that. David (06:46) I think it is that people don't want your perfectly manicured and polished end results. Like that's not how the world works anyway. Right. So I don't know. thought that was a really cool example of it. Ben Ard (06:55) I love that. even today, I don't know if you saw this, chat GPT released GPT five and I just got access. literally like put in my first two prompts right before we hopped on. I was really excited to go do it. But what I love about chat GPT and open AI is they live stream and they do live demos and like stuff breaks. And like even once during this presentation, the guy was joking about the idea of David (07:01) Mm-hmm. nice. Yeah. Ben Ard (07:21) Okay, well I did this presentation and I had to hide this error and stuff like that, but they do this and it's kind of like, Hey, this is real time. We may not get the results we want. And it's kind of awkward sometimes when they're sitting there waiting for it to happen. And, and I think they like that and they always introduce people who they are, what they do, because I think they want that genuine, authentic connection with the business. And I think that's another great example of, being able to do that. David (07:24) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's like we're moving from the Apple product launch to kind of more of this like real time messy. Like there's something interesting about that inherently, which I think is true about like any kind of marketing right now. Like even if you're on Tik TOK as a brand or a business, like if you're selling HR software, how do you show up on Tik TOK? Right. And I think it's like the companies that do well aren't the ones that talk about their features and benefits. It's like. They take on some other playbook, you know, that maybe has nothing to do with their brand or their products or their features, but it shows some story, some human story that's messy and funny and, you know, awkward, like you were saying. And I think that's kind of the whole point of this essay. It's like in this era where everything you're not certain what something is, right? Is it AI? Is it not? Is it real? Is it fake? It's, I think you kind of win by showcasing the rough edges. Ben Ard (08:43) Yeah, I love that. Yeah, and you're right 100 % as AI gets better, you know, some of this video, you can't tell if it's real or not and all that kind of stuff. The differentiator will be the mistakes because humans will be more prone to mistakes than AI and that makes it authentic and that makes it real. I love that. So what's kind of cool is we're talking about this authenticity and it doesn't have to be over polished. So now like David (08:55) Absolutely. Ben Ard (09:10) You got a cell phone, you got whatever, like go make content. Any recommendations from what you've seen of like where to start? Like who knows if you're B2B or B2C or whatever. Is it just sitting down with the CEO and asking for their story or what any ideas about like how to start kind of showing this kind of content? David (09:25) Yeah. I was in the article, I had thought about that because that's probably what everyone was going to think. Like what's the next step here? And to me, it's like, you have to actually have some differentiated thing, whether it's a process or like a product or something that you do exceptionally well and break down how you even got there. Right? So for example, like in the article, I referenced StoryMFGs, they had a shoe release, like a drop, a collaboration with ASICS. They talk about, and I think the entire storyline was that they talked about how they partnered with certain vendors and, you know, Vietnam or Indonesia. don't remember where and how they made the shoelaces, how they dyed the things. Like it was all about what was, hard to replicate from anybody else. And I think that's really what it comes down to is you need to look, sit down, think about your products, your company and say, what could other people, what would take other people really long time to catch up? us on or what can other people not do easily that we can kind of easily do. mean, that's probably a really good start and, ⁓ and not just show that, but show how you got there is probably what I'm thinking. And, and I think I also mentioned that where you put that out was important. think maybe a lot of marketers would kind of default to saying, okay. That means we need to make a blog about this and put it up on our website. But I would think like, maybe, you know, resist that urge and just throw up something kind of almost like disheveled, like a kind of a V1 rough edit of something, right? Like I think that would actually do a little bit better than trying to get something really polished, like I was saying. Ben Ard (11:04) I love that. So something that comes to mind for me is this quote in Simon Sinek's, one of his books about people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And when you're looking at it, you just mentioned this, a cool example about passion. Like there's no way someone goes through all of this effort to dye shoelaces if they're not obsessed with having this beautiful product. David (11:13) Mm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Ben Ard (11:31) exactly how they want it. Do you feel like that is kind of the main reason for the research and behind the scenes is to kind of discover the passion and the why? Or does it go in a different direction or even deeper than that? David (11:44) I mean, I think that's a pretty good take. would say like, I've been seeing a lot of this idea around, I think it's a meme. It's like, I'm not talented or I'm not intelligent, I'm obsessed. I think Virgil said that maybe, or maybe Kanye, I don't know. Somebody said that. And I think that's kind of what you're getting to is like, and I think that's kind of the point is you can't fake obsession. And I think obsession leads to... actual innovation, actually interesting stories or products. And I think that's what I was saying earlier about. Find the thing that, is hard to replicate because often that comes out of an obsession or even in B2B SaaS. It's like, you know, we can joke about ERPs or HR tech, but somebody was obsessed with this kind of single problem and said, how do I figure this out? And I think that. storyline is worth telling, even if the product is boring and what he really cares about it, people will care about, somebody actually cared this much about that. And it turned out to be some successful business or outcome. I think that's kind of the point. Yeah. Ben Ard (12:47) I love that. And if you don't have someone in the business that you could put on camera and show that passion, you might need to find a couple of people that you need to bring into the org that, ⁓ bring that passion to the table. I love it. This is amazing. So I love all of these tips. I love the concept of the Y. I mean, rather than getting into more tactics, which maybe we can do on a different episode, we're almost out of time. David (12:55) Yeah, I mean you have a bigger problem. Yeah, exactly. Ben Ard (13:10) Any other examples that come to mind of like examples of things you've seen go really, really well to like share with the audience, just to get the wheels turning on this idea. David (13:14) Yeah. Absolutely. I would point folks to a brand called Craig Hill. They make kind of like small accessories, but if you go on their TikTok or the Instagram reels, you will see some of these videos that basically showcase the process. for example, one of their pinned videos is how they re-imagined the corkscrew to get wine, corks out of wine bottles. And they said, it's basically this formula. What doesn't work about the current corkscrew that we've all accepted? Right. It's uncomfortable. does. It's hard to use whatever, whatever, and all of the iterations, the process by which they got to this actually incredible updated corkscrew. And, know, that video has like 3.4 million views or something like that. And I think it's that very idea. They're not shilling the corkscrew that they made necessarily. Right. But they're, they are in a different way. And I think, ⁓ it's it, they use it as actually they're paid ads and they're organic content, which I think is like. really cool and interesting. And yeah, I think there's a lot to learn from something like a Craig Hill, even if you're not a consumer product. Ben Ard (14:20) Yeah, I love that. Now it's interesting. I just an example that I remember and I haven't thought about this in a while. I'm not really a hardcore like I don't play video games because I run a startup and I have no time for that. But and have kids and what was interesting though is back in the day back when I was a young kid, I played these old games like old computer games and loaded up on a DOS computer and one of the original makers of one of my favorite games. David (14:32) Thank you. Ben Ard (14:48) Years later ran this Kickstarter campaign to make a game in that kind of style, you know, and this was like five, six years ago. And as a part of it, they shot a full documentary of the behind the scenes. Now I bought the game. I played like two minutes of it. I actually don't care for the game in any way, or form. I love the behind the scenes because they would show how it was being made. They would show the struggles they went through. Like that was. David (14:58) Wow. Yes. Ben Ard (15:13) pure, like I would have paid money to see that on Netflix over the actual game itself. was such a cool experience that, you know, again, like sometimes the behind the scenes is way more valuable than, you know, what's in front of the, you know, on the website and that kind of stuff. David (15:16) Mmm. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. I'll leave you guys with one more maybe. There's a YouTube channel. it's by Huckberry, which is like another clothing brand, but they have a series called dirt, which is basically, you know, they, they work with this, I think his name is Josh the coast. And they go to all these different countries or places and discover, but wearing their clothes, you know, or whatever. And it's like, it is kind of like, like an Anthony Bourdain parts unknown type of vibe, but for the brand and you know, it's fully document. Ben Ard (15:37) Mm-hmm. Yeah. David (16:00) It's a, there's a whole like production team around this brand, is like kind of an insane investment. But to your point, think that's, I wouldn't have cared about Huckberry if it wasn't for this documentary. Cause I just love that content and storytelling. So I think I'm right there with you. I think a lot of people probably feel the same way. Ben Ard (16:16) And I love that it can scale because I think a lot of times in business, okay, let's test it, see if it resonates. And honestly, as it works, it doesn't have to say like crazy raw invest in it, put some money in time before, you know, and in front of it. And it can really turn into the whole story itself. I love that. This is such a cool concept. All right, David, I have loved this. We are going to link to the article that you wrote in the show notes. So everyone go check it out. I believe it's on your sub stack. David (16:25) No. Yeah. Love it. Uh-huh, yep. Thank you. Ben Ard (16:43) So go subscribe as well. But David, for anyone besides the article in your sub stack, if they want to reach out and connect, how can they find you? David (16:50) You can find me on LinkedIn or I'm on X Instagram all by David Kyle Cho. I am not the millionaire artist David Cho, unfortunately. Ben Ard (16:56) Okay, perfect. Well, we will link to everything so that everyone can find you. David, thank you so much for the time and insights. This has been awesome. David (17:05) Yeah, thank you Ben, appreciate it. It was fun.