Hey everybody. Welcome back to experts talk. I am your host, Ben Thomas. If you watch this show, you know we love spotlighting different people with different subject matter expertise across a bunch of different use cases. Today's no different. But today, we're talking about the world of marketing. So to have that conversation, I brought on somebody today who knows a little bit about both the practical side. That's Westerowe West, associate professor of marketing at UT Dallas. Great to have you on. It's great to be here, Ben, and it's always such a delight to spend time in the market scale studio and having been a client for a number of years and now on the other side behind the mic, just what a gift. So thank you for inviting me to join you today. Well, absolutely. It's great to have you. You mentioned sort of getting to live on both sides of the fence a little bit. Now really investing in the next generation of marketers. Right? And and I think it's an understatement to say that the world looks a little bit different for those who are coming into the marketing world versus when it did when you came in when I came in, but, you know, you have the chance really to live on the front lines and and I want to ask really at a high level. Maybe we're diving in, I guess, right off the top. But what are some of the common skill sets that you think that people need to bring into modern marketing roles? There's a few that come top of mind because I get the question a lot. Gosh, AI is everywhere. Is AI going to take my job? How do I manage a career in the midst of AI? They're so digitally native. I joke all the time with my students, I grew up in the last century, so show me a little grace. There's certain topics I have to remember they don't know anything about. None of them have ever gotten the let out. They've never seen the Cowboys win a Super Bowl. There's so many things that they just have not experienced. That said, they're truly remarkable, and the best students that get the great internships, that go on and get the great jobs, have a few key capabilities that AI can't take away. They are great communicators. They really understand on their feet, whether it's written. They can communicate a point and do it very well. They are great teammates. They know when to lead and when to follow. Those are skills that don't go away. And I think more than anything, the very best students are curious. They don't just take what it says in the book or what I might say or somebody else might say. They just ask the next question. And those are skills that, particularly in marketing, when you're really trying to understand what's the problem you're solving, does it align with the strategy, Really helps stand out. And so those things are I think those attributes persevere. Well, look. One of the things that stood out to me whenever I had a chance to talk with some TCU students recently, aside from the fact that they made fun of me from being born in the nineteen hundreds Exactly. As they called it, which was wild to me. The creative side of marketing really was thriving. Right? A lot of these kids understand and know how to shoot and edit video and take the ideas that they have and turn it into music production or graphic design. So many different skill sets that for us coming in were you had to have a certification and a thousand dollar a year Photoshop license to even try. Now it's just stuff that they know how to do. Right? How have you seen sort of the those technological innovations drive some of those skill sets as people come in? Yeah. That's a great question. I mean, tools like Canva and everything you can do with Dali and all these different resources they have now, you know, create AI driven images and the analysis, data analysis and representation, it's off the charts. I think the challenge of all that is not to let too much creativity, halt the message. I think in our my generation, we were notorious for filling a slide with gazillion words. And fortunately somebody like Nancy Duarte came out and really talked about the art of telling a story in her book Slideology. Have almost so much access, when I pull back, it's like, okay, creativity is awesome. Lean into that. But less is more. Don't forget that. Less is more. Don't try to overdo it because it looks like a dog's breakfast if you go too far. I I'm guilty of the same thing. I I love to to information stuff and then send people the slides later. But Exactly. You know, I'm I'm curious when you think about those people who sort of come to the table from the creative side, do you find that there's sort of a natural disconnect between sort of the what I would call the business side of marketing. Right? Outcomes, ROI, sales. Do you see that there's there's maybe a little bit of a disconnect from from that side? I think historically, and I think, you know, I've always been of the mind that the best run organizations of any type have diversity of thought. They have people that think differently. If you're in a room that everybody thinks just like you, you probably need to switch rooms because you're never going get to the optimal answer. I think what's beautiful for somebody that's highly quantitative and can't really be creative or really articulate something, a really quantitative point, they now have the tools to do it in a visual manner or a different manner. And somebody that may be highly creative that can't always figure out how to how does that tie back to the purpose of an organization's success? The same tools exist to kind of help them. So what was once a span bridge has become a footbridge with access to some of the tools and resources they have together. So I think that challenge has been has certainly last five years. Yeah. And and and it's been interesting really to see that natural evolution. Right? And and one of the things I've loved is tools like Canva, and and you mentioned Dali, and and so many of these tools have come out is it's allowed people really to start their career a little bit more ahead of where a lot of people initially came out. Right? If I'm a a business major, I understand a lot of the core concepts. I may not have the creativity, but it's much easier to start somewhere. And if I'm the creative, it's much easier for me to start with some level of business acumen because I could research things much easier on chat GPT and watch things like shark tank that we didn't all have growing up. But, you know, what would you say maybe a first step out of college or some of the hard skills that you would recommend people focus on whenever they're looking to go in a career in in marketing? Well, I think I think there are hard skills in in any profession. Those, the hard skills now, because they most have grown up digitally, having a straight talk, tough conversations, clarity of purpose. We live in a world where a new idea comes out every minute. We have access to new information every minute. And you go back to what's the purpose of the organization I'm working for? What are we trying to do? What are we trying to accomplish? It feels like you can go from chasing rabbits one day to squirrels the next day, and you don't even know what happened. And then all of a sudden, you're off track. And so I think one of the really tough things is in this world with information overload is being really clear on purpose. How do you have a discussion with your peers, stakeholders, with your boss, your boss's boss? Are you on track? Have been confident in having those conversations. Marketing, you'll hear me say it all the time, I say it all the time to my students, is an extension of the strategy. If If the strategy is not clear, you're going to struggle in marketing. And if you're struggling in marketing, it's probably because you're not attached to the strategy. So it comes back to just that. I mean, core abilities to stay aligned, be comfortable having an uncomfortable conversation at a time, checking to see where you are. If you're asked to do three things and then a fourth thing comes up, going back to your boss, your manager, hey, which one drops off? There's only so many days, hours, weeks, and a year to keep going. So that that's still an age old challenge. Right? It is. Well, you mentioned strategy. Obviously, some people might substitute that word for marketing. It is an extension of sales. Depending on who you might ask, it it varies in there. But, you know, you talk about strategy, and I and and obviously, that varies from, you know, am am I focusing heavy on advertising and creative and and high churn and high volume sales, or am I in a more blue collar environment with a longer extended sales cycle selling multimillion dollar equipment? Right? I think at least in my perspective, sometimes there's there could be a disconnect between what people might define as the B2B side and the B2C side, but you have some different thoughts on on that. Explain that a little bit to me as a marketer. One of the things that that I learned early on from I was really fortunate to be a research assistant to a guy named Don Schultz who wrote seminal books on marketing. And I was his research assistant because I was poor and I needed money. He really talked about the notion of high involvement versus low involvement purchases versus B2B and B2C. If you go out and buy a car tomorrow, that's a high involvement purchase. If you had to go out and buy new furniture for all of market scale tomorrow, that's high involvement purchases. You make the right decision, you feel really good. You make the wrong decision, your wife is going to tell you. You make the wrong decision, the furniture, your peers are going to tell you. It feels pretty much the same way. When it comes to a low involvement decision, if you buy copy paper for the office and you go home and you buy paper towels for the house, it's a low involvement decision. You don't like it, you can switch it around next time. No harm, no foul. So I think that's one of the big things. I, as a marketer over the years, particularly as I moved into kind of high-tech deployments for all sorts of environments, I would borrow best practices from the auto industry because it was all about segmentation. It was about account based marketing. It was about how do you cultivate a sale over a period of time. Segmentation, segment to win. Then if I was going to do something, if I went back to, you know, when I worked on Pace Picante Sauce or Dial Soap or those environments, I'd want to make sure I had some lasting brand perception for that that fleeting moment that they could stick to. For Pace, it was about the you know, it was made in San Antonio by people that know what salsa should make taste like. It was all authenticity. So anyhow. Well, we grew up with pace in our home. So whatever you were doing was working. You know, I I saw a stat the other day, and and I'll use kind of your terminology here, but the the high involvement sales cycle happens eighty percent at least digitally. The lower involvement is closer to ninety five percent. Right? Because you've got, hey. Buy it now. You talk about BOPIS, things like that. Earlier buy online, pick up in store in traditional retail environments. But, traditionally, those high involvement sales cycles, at least what I might call B2B, about forty to fifty percent of that was digital before us. Sales rep was released in theory pre COVID, but eighty percent is wild. How do we manage that? Yeah. I mean, you know, we it's tough. Obviously, we live in a world where people have to opt in, and a lot of those things are good for us as as consumers and customers, but it makes it tough for marketers. And so you really have to think about the journey and how you create an environment of where you go. And then you layer into that the transition that's taking place from Google search to search GPT. One of the people I trust most, she's talked openly about the notion that does a corporate website exist in ten years? It probably doesn't exist in the same form. And so I do think you're exactly right. We see it almost every category like the what we teach at the university even in retail, you know, for many, if it's a meaningful purchase, if you're looking for a new pair of boots or something, a new winter coat, you've done your work online before you even go to the store, if you decide to pick it up in store. So that takes place. I think what it requires is again, very clear of value proposition in your offer. What's the problem you solve for the customer? And if it's something that's an apparel product, how do you relate to it? You have to almost create a notion of a movement. We have a new Kith store that has opened up here in Dallas and it's out of New York and it's an amazing store. They've got a great Kith treats there and they're about culture. Know, if you buy Kith, you know, we're creating culture together. That's an emotion. If you're going to buy a new refrigerator for your house, you've done all your work online before you go into a store. So it's, yeah, it's just part of the journey, and you gotta you've gotta be smart both ways to figure it out. Yeah. Well, look. You you talked about compliance and opt in things like GDPR, CCPA continue to drive sort of a lot of that user experience. You see providers like Apple closing off some of their data privacy and things like that, which kinda brings me to my next question. And a lot of people will debate this and have different schools of thought about it is advertising. What sort of is that mix, and what do you see in in sort of the next generation of advertising for marketers? Is it gonna be, you know, traditional Google PPC? Is it gonna be is is OpenAI gonna roll out, sponsored, you know, above the fold? Adverti I mean, what what do you see from a the future of advertising standpoint as we continue to to put those vice grips on privacy? I think a lot about this because what brought me to Dallas for we're way back when straight out of graduate school was to work in the American Airlines account. And I thought, man, if you could do advertising for American Airlines, which is a commodity environment, you could do anything. And we'd have Ridley Scott shoot our TV commercials, which is crazy. Right? We'd have James Earl Jones and Patrick Stewart and Matthew Modine as voiceovers. It a different period. And you still see those big ads today during the Super Bowl, our media structure is so fractured. Is PPC still going to be a thing? Yes. I think ultimately Google and chat will both coexist for a period of time. You'll use each for different purposes. I think retargeting is still super strategic. I think that within that, the role of account based marketing for different purposes is still important. There's still a role for certain types of trade shows. But advertising for some brands in a very fractured environment has got to articulate the company's strategy. What's our purpose? If it's Disney, it's keeping the magic of childhood alive. I grew up in the Midwest. We had Hy Vee food stores. It was all about a helpful smile on every aisle. Even today, digitally, if you order there and you pick up in store, you pick up curbside, it's part of their whole DNA. If we talked about Target today that used to be Tarjay and expect more, pay less, Nobody knows what they stand for. They do these cool collaborations. So I do think advertising can go help be a pillar in a storm of messaging to to stand out and be really clear on what a brand stands for from a strategy standpoint. Well, I think that solidification of advertising actually plays well to to our next generation of marketers because they have that channel, but they also have what I would call the fandom channel. Yeah. Sure. Grew up, a, understanding that being being a YouTube influencer was a legitimate career path. But, also, they're used to taking their phones out and creating content for their favorite artists and brands, and you grew up around influencers. You wanna talk about marketing strategies. There is no better marketing marketing strategy than engaging your fans in same store sales and ABM and and actual retargeting. I mean, there is no better strategy, and and I feel like the next generation is is prime for that. Yeah. I absolutely. And I think, you know, why is social taken off? Because they trust people on social more than they trust an ad, more than they trust what they might see on TV or other places. And we talked about this before, the notion that trust at every level has been fundamentally broken. Edelman, which is the global PR firm, has done a study on trust for the last twenty five years. And they do it across about thirty countries across the globe. And when you look at it, people's trust, it doesn't matter whether it's business organizations, whether it's government institutions, education institutions, religious institutions, it's at an all time low. And the US, of the thirty countries that are so ranked, is in the bottom one third. We're not the bottom, but sixty one percent across those thirty countries have a mid to high level grievance of what's going on. So trust is, you know, authenticity and trust is important. Social marketing is huge and a key way to bring people back. And if you can find a way to engage your users, our students, they have to do real projects. And a big part of that is, Okay, QR code here, review here, come back. It's huge. And so that authenticity, it's one of the beautiful things that social media for all the other things that we may talk about aren't so great. That's great to help build that level of fabric through a brand, if you will. Well, betting on those communities, I hate to even say influencers, but betting on those people of authentic, you know, communities whether you know, one example for me is is the rodeo community. I love the rodeo community. I'm a big fan. I go to the NFR in in Vegas every year. So for me, when Wrangler, when Pendleton whiskey, when, you know, resist all folks like that associate with that community and people that I trust. Sure. And that community are wearing that. Right? That matters to me. That's a level of authenticity, But you take that to welding. You take that to entrepreneurship. You take that to AI developers and SaaS tools. That same idea exists within those communities. You don't trust anybody more than you trust your friends in your own community. No. And I think, you know, one of the brands that's been really hot the last few years is Viori, you know, which had it really take on Lululemon. You think, how are they going to do this? They kind of want a little men's angle. And they did an exceptional job curating Social media influencers, and they didn't give them like product for free. They gave them a deep discount, but they found people that represented their brand and did a great job. So it's really knowing again clarity of who you are, what you stand for. You can't reach out to everybody, but you try to reach out to those that represent your brand. By the way, it doesn't always work perfectly. Sometimes the person that you have as an ombudsperson for your brand screws up and you got to figure out what your off ramp is too. It's got to be authentic. It's got to be clear and Transparent. Well, look. Nobody does that better right now than the folks at the Savannah bananas, ironically enough. And and that's an example that a lot of people point to, especially as case studies right now where you talk about the idea of trusting community and trusting the people. There is no organization that I know of that's more fans first than the bananas from their social strategy, from their distribution strategy, from their merchandising strategy. That really is the playbook for the next generation of marketing. Yeah. It's interesting you say that. You probably don't know. My my son played baseball. So he was a professional baseball player. Mine know that he got cut. And he actually had an offer to play for the bananas. And when he went through it, they go through and actually curate the players, not just can you play, but what type of person are you, what your own social media following is like. And, you know, do you understand that this is for fan engagement? If you're just there to throw the ball a hundred miles an hour, probably not a good fit for us. So it's remarkable what they've done and how they've reimagined the game with the different rules and the time bound and the music going. And it's it's just fun. And you're right. I mean, they've reimagined it in a completely different way. When I was a kid, was the Harlem Globetrotters. But I love it. And I think it's fantastic. My son, by the way, decided he needed to go back to graduate school and move on from baseball life, but he was pretty excited about the opportunity when he considered it. As do ninety seven percent, I think, of minor leaguers. Yeah. Whatever this that was. It's, baseball, the disruption that they've brought to baseball has actually been really unbelievable. It's great. But it's also brought so many people back to the game, and it's allowed people to reengage with their dads who love the traditional aspect of baseball. Dude Perfect has done a lot of the same. Absolutely. You see people like that really finding a way to bridge it. Women's sports is is on fire for the same thing. Why? Because they see a lot of NIL and, man, do I really wanna pay a million and half dollars to a quarterback who may not pan out? I'm I would rather go watch women's college basketball, women's college volleyball, you know, the emergence of the WNBA, the pro women's volleyball, women's soccer. So that's been great to see. But, again, it goes back to authenticity, and people there's a craving for authenticity and engagement today. Yeah. There absolutely is. Wes, I I feel like I can talk to you about this for another ten hours, but I'm gonna ask you this to land the plane. If there's one skill set you would recommend to people, whether they're in college, whether they're in trade school, whether they're in hobbyist territory that wanna go into marketing. What What is that one skill that you think is most important to bring into the workplace in twenty twenty five? You talked about the importance of sales and marketing, and it's it can't be like this. It's gotta be like this. And the only way that that really works and where the marketers succeed best, it doesn't matter whether it's high involvement, low involvement. If they actually understand the customer and they understand the buyer's journey because most people you hear me talk, they'll have a great CRM deployment or they'll have a great marketing MRM, marketing resource management or great ERP or great customer success deployment. And they'll do those all in a really vertical fashion, but they'll forget that the journey is a horizontal journey. So I talk all the time, you can get an A on the test and you can get an F in the class. And so if you really understand that customer journey from start to finish, and you can talk about that with a degree of authority and give pointed examples of what that means. And you can't just talk about one customer that may be an outlier. Have to talk about segmentation. It's got to be representative. But if you can go in as a marketer and you don't have to. You can be there Two months, two years, twenty years, if you have that ability, the CFO will listen to you, the COO will listen to you, the CEO will listen to you, the CHRO will listen to you, and the CRO will find you as an ally. And so if you don't really understand that and what matters to your customers, you're going to struggle. If you do, you're on a fast path. Wes, look. There's no better advice than that, man. It's always great to have you on the show. Appreciate you coming on. Hey. Thank you so much, Ben. It's it's a privilege to be here today. Absolutely. And thank you all for tuning in as well. Be sure to check us out next time on experts talk.
