The Customer Magnet Show

Every experience doesn't have to be over the top to be remarkable.

Today we are talking about innovation, and specifically how to build a company culture where innovation thrives.

And to dive into this topic, I chatted with Vikram Khemka, Director of Technology at Cimpress, a multi-billion dollar mass customization business. You’ve probably heard of one of their core brands: Vistaprint.

We can learn a ton from Vikram, including the link between an innovative culture and your company’s talent.

• How to innovate in a way that makes your customers’ experience more seamless
• How to build a culture that is unsatisfied with the status quo
• Why company culture helps you attract and retain top talent
• How to leverage the combination of data and technology to develop solutions that give you a competitive advantage
• The 1 thing you must embrace to nurture an innovative company culture
• Why it is necessary to make personal connections with both your team and your customers
• A simple philosophy to maintain an entrepreneurial company culture as your business grows

Listen to the 32-minute episode here:

Watch the episode here:

Read a transcript of the episode here:

Sonia Thompson: Hello Vikram, thank you so much for joining me today. How are you?

Vikram Khemka:  I’m very good. Thank you for having me.

Sonia: Oh, it’s my pleasure. All right, well let’s go ahead and dive right in. Tell me about your company Cimpress.

Vikram: All right. So, Cimpress is the world leader in mass customization. We own many different brands and companies that all work in the mass customization space. Vistaprint is our biggest company that people might have heard of, but we have many, many others spread all over the world. In Europe, and in Japan, China, India, Brazil, really a very global company.

We are all about mass customization. So, what does mass customization mean? It’s really all around us, even if you don’t really recognize it. So, if you are a small business, and you are trying to promote your business, and you want business cards, that’s part of mass customization. If you are a small business and you are having an event and you want themed T-shirts, that’s mass customization. If you are say, a small hotel chain, or even a big hotel chain and you have these laser engraved pens, of any kind of customized pens with your logo on it, that’s mass customization also.

So, we essentially lead the mass customization industry, and we do that because of the investment that we have made in technology. And refusing to accept the status quo in terms of, this is the manual process, and this is how it’s done traditionally, so this is how we should do it as well.

Sonia: Got it. You said so many wonderful things there, and I really like how you kind of just sort of demystified mass customization, because we all use it so frequently as part of our day to day. So, let’s just kind of wrap this part up with a little bow. You said it, but I just want to clarify, what is the specific problem that you solve for the people that you serve with your mass customization brands?

Vikram: Mass customization … customization is expensive, and if you are trying to do that at scale, it gets even more expensive. And especially if you are a small business, which happens to be the target audience of many of our companies, not all of them. But even if you are a mid-sized company, getting customized goods produced for you is really expensive and time consuming.

And what Cimpress does is, it makes it through the many brands that we own, a lot easier for people who are in the market for customized goods. Starting from micro businesses, which is what Vistaprint focuses on, to more bigger businesses, that another company that we own called National Pen, is on. Across the spectrum, make the process and the experience of getting customized goods for your personal use or for your business, a lot easier.

Sonia: Okay. No, I like that, I like that.

Vikram: Or give you enterprise that you are going to be happy with.

Sonia: You mentioned that mass customization can be expensive, and you guys have invested a lot in being able to do it in a cost effective way. What would you say is a role of mass customization, or customization period, in delivering remarkable experiences to your customers?

Vikram: It’s all about brand identity, the way I look at it. So, if you are a small business and you want to … or even a medium sized business, you don’t want to just give away a pen or a T-shirt, you want to give away something, or have your team even, use something that has your brand identity on it. Or if you’re running an event and you want some flyers to advertise your services, or you want a business card, you obviously want that customized, right? You want it to be with your name on it, your company’s logo on it, your company’s color scheme on it. So, it’s really about something that people identify with. It’s about what businesses identify with. And it could also be about what a consumer, or our personal use customers identify with.

Sonia: Okay. Okay. Now, I know your company has a lot of fantastic capabilities in being able to do this on a really massive scale. Is customization something that a business is only really able to do if they invest these types of significant resources, or is that why they should come to you for that kind of help?

Vikram: If you’re a business, you’re obviously not going to … Say, you are an accountant, or you run a small tax consultancy firm. You need business cards, or you need to advertise, or you need a website, or you want team T-shirts or polos, or whatever.

You’re obviously not going to do that on your own, you’re going to outsource that or buy it from someone, whether it be your local neighborhood store, where you can go and physically spend time with them, explain to them what you are looking for, and then get something back in return. Or whenever you order it, with typically fairly long lead times.

Or you can do what many people around the world do, go to one of Cimpress’s brands, and are able to have that same transaction entirely online. If they need support, we are able to provide human support as well. But for the most part, the whole process is a lot easier. Our lead times are typically much shorter than what you would get on the open market. Our pricing is a lot more attractive. We offer quality in a very wide spectrum. You know, for the more quality conscious customers, we offer much higher quality products. For someone who’s looking more for a budget offering, we offer that as well. So, it’s really about making that experience a lot easier and smoother.

Sonia: Yeah. And I like … I mean, what business doesn’t need the processes to be easier, and smoother. And I like that that’s a service and value that you provide there. Now, as we’re thinking about other businesses who are considering doing customization, not necessarily in the realm of what you’re doing in terms of gifts and brand identity, but they’re just thinking of ways to customize for their customers. That is something that you guys have been able to see lots of great benefits from. Being able to give your customers something that’s exactly what they need, and it’s not necessarily just off the shelf.

Vikram: Yeah. Absolutely. I do believe that it’s not just about the ability to produce customized goods. It’s also a lot about the experience around that, which is, can you give them meaningful recommendations about what else they might be interested in? Can you give them meaningful help and recommendations about how to make their design look better?

So, obviously the turnaround time, the cost, the quality, those are all the base things that you would think of in purchasing anything. But I think the real value add comes from the overall experience. Like, did you make meaningful recommendations? Did you make the design process easier?

If you are not a professional designer, then were you still able to get a product that you are happy with, with some of the tooling that we might provide directly in the browser? On the other hand, what a lot of our … so, this is what Vistaprint does extremely well, they target the do-it-yourselfers who are not professional graphic artists.

Many of our other businesses actually go after their target customers are the graphic artists, who already have a design and artwork. But what they’re really looking for is ease of ordering, and ease of getting their design on to a physical product.

So, it’s not just about the fact that you bought a few presses or some equipment, and now you’re good at mass customization. I think it’s really about the overall customer experience.

Sonia: For sure. For sure. How does innovation help companies deliver remarkable experiences? ‘Cause I believe innovation is a big part of the customization process, but it’s been a big sort to lever to the success of your company. So, how does that play in?

Vikram: I guess it goes back to what I said at the very beginning, about refusing to accept the status quo, refusing to believe that just because some industry has been doing this, something in a certain way for decades, that’s how we will do it as well. So, we are always looking for better ways of solving our customer’s problems. Oftentimes, problems that our customers don’t even know that they have.

So, I’ll give you an example that we recently rolled out, and was built by my team. It’s a service called Crispify. And what that does is, if you have an image that’s not very high quality, like it’s a low resolution image, the details are blurry, it obviously will not print well. And one of the challenges is that even though it might look reasonable on screen, on a physical product, when it’s ink on paper, it’s not really going to look good. So, from our perspective it actually was a double whammy, because the customer thinks that they’ve got something fairly reasonable on screen. But when they get the physical product in hand, they’re really disappointed.

Typically the way people handle this is by just giving their customers a warning that, “Hey, your image is just low quality. Could you give us a better image?” And that’s what we did for a long time as well. But what we did recently is leveraged machine learning to create something that on the fly can double the resolution of your image, and still provide an output that will be appealing and acceptable to a human. Like, doubling the resolution just artificially, that’s not difficult. The trick is, or the challenge is, to do it in a way that appeals to the human eye.

Sonia: Right, right.

Vikram: We were able to do that after a lot of research and not accepting the status quo, that this is a problem that’s too difficult to solve. And that was core innovation that we did, core research that we did, that now leads to a much, much better customer experience.

So, when our customers come online and they have a low resolution image, we detect that automatically. And instead of telling them that, “Hey, your image is low resolution,” we automatically crispify it in the background. We now know that they’ve got a high enough quality image. And instead of giving them a warning, we actually now tell them, “Hey, your image looks great.”

And as you would expect, the results are astounding. We’ve seen about a two and a half, three percent increase in conversion rate. As a result of that, our customers are happier, and we are happier. So, this is obviously one of the areas where we innovated, and pushed the boundaries of what was considered too difficult to solve.

Sonia: I think that that is a fantastic innovation, and I think it’s an even better innovation that shows how you can improve the customer experience. But it only comes from really understanding the customer, and every aspect of their journey.

I’ve been on the receiving end of, “Oh, your image needs to be better,” or whatever, and it’s just frustrating ’cause I would have said, “Well, hey, if I had a better image, I would have uploaded it.” So, it’s one of those things where you’re anticipating a problem and fixing it. And I think that is brilliant.

Now, to get to a place to where you’re able to provide innovative solutions, like you said, you have to have a culture that isn’t willing to accept the status quo. How do you create that culture that is really unsatisfied with what the norm is, and that is relentless about finding new and innovative solutions to better serve your customers?

Vikram: I think it really starts at the top. And this is where I think Robert Keane, our CEO … when he started Vistaprint in the mid 90s, or late 90s, whenever that was, which then evolved into Cimpress, I think one of the things that he did really, really well and realized early on, was that technology and innovation has a really, really important role to play.

So, I remember when I first started at Vistaprint, Vistaprint was still very small but already a public company. This is probably back in 2006. And I remember thinking to myself at that point, “What am I going to be doing in a printing company?” I’ve got all my education in computer science, I have worked on Wall Street, what am I going to do at a printing company?

It took a lot of convincing at the time for the people who hired me. But I think that goes to show, the fact that from the top, the company always believed in innovation and in hiring really smart people to solve problems that were considered too complex. And I think it’s something that for the most part, even as we have grown many fold since 2006, we’ve been able to retain that culture of treating, or thinking of technology as one of the pillars of our business. It’s not something that is an after thought, or something that oh, you just need to run your business. It’s what our business actually runs on, or drives our business.

In our business I believe it’s technology, marketing, and manufacturing that all really need to play hand in hand and be effective partners for us to be successful. But I think the key is for a company like us, to be in what was, and continues to be … traditionally was and continues to be a really manual intensive process, to challenge that and say that it does not have to be that way. Technology has a role to play here. All the way from machine learning, to having extremely great UX on a website, to having sophisticated fraud a lot of times. It’s really about e-commerce in a space that has not really been there.

Sonia: Got it. So, it sounds like you all work to keep that sort of innovative mindset, it begins at your hiring process. With making sure that you’re able to bring people on who have this sort of point of view and innovative thinking. Are there other things that you guys do on a day to day basis, just to keep people … Just to make sure nobody gets complacent, and nobody gets complacent with … it’s just easier to do it the way that things have always been done. So, how do you make sure that people keep that fire going?

Vikram: I think we are very data driven, and that really helps. I think we strike the right balance between research for innovation and research for the long term, versus what’s driving somewhat immediate business value.

So, giving another example from my team. Cimpress has a fairly large embroidery business. And embroidery is extremely, extremely complex. Say you have the letter A that you want to embroider, the embroidery machine just understands … it’s really, really dumb, and all it knows is you tell it go from this point to that point, make a stitch at this angle, and then go from that point to this other point, and make a stitch at whatever other angle, and so forth. So, depending on how thick your letter is, and whatever, there is essentially infinite ways of filling it up with stitches. But there’s only going to be a few that actually appeal to the human eye, and that make sense.

So, when we started the embroidery business, much like everybody else, we were doing it fairly manually. As our business grew, we collected the data and we tried to make as many improvements in process as we could. We tried to add technology as much as we could, to bring the time that we were spending on getting an embroidery order ready for production, as little as possible while maintaining quality.

And so what we’ve done is, we’ve leveraged machine learning to now be able to predict when a new image comes in that we have not seen. Patterns for embroidery digitalization and stitches, that in the best case scenario, are exactly ready, or just going through automation, are ready for production. And the expected scenario is, it may not be fully ready for production just yet, but a human being just needs to tweak it a little bit. And maybe spend a few minutes, as opposed to the industry average, which is between 30 and 35, 40 minutes.

So, that is a huge, huge change in terms of the impact that it can have on the industry, and the competitive edge that it can give to Cimpress. Here is the industry spending 30 minutes on something, and we can do the same thing in five or ten, or even lesser than that. So, it’s really about data. It’s about keeping abreast of what’s going on in the technology world, and trying to figure out how that can apply to our space.

Sonia: Got it. And what would you say have been some of the biggest challenges, ’cause there’s definitely a lot of upside to this kind of innovation. But I think that sometimes companies get hung up on innovation as a culture, because of some of the challenges that it brings. So, what would you say have been some of those that you’ve experienced, and how do you guys work to overcome those challenges?

Vikram: I think that some of the biggest challenges are that investing in research and innovation, and it is expensive. And if it doesn’t yield results at the end of the day when you’re running a business, you’re going to have to sometimes make difficult decisions about how much can I continue to invest in this, versus just run the business and make money.

And I think that’s a challenge. I’m not saying that we’ve gotten it right all the time. I don’t think that that’s possible. But it’s, I think, about striking the right balance and not becoming too anxious because you had some failures. I think failures are part of the learning journey, and I don’t think that anything is … usually things are not a complete failure. Even if you didn’t meet your business goals, you learned something from that, and maybe you can apply that in some other aspect of the business. So, I think it’s about judicious risk taking, and continuing to believe and accept that some amount of failures will happen, and that’s just part of the deal when you have an innovative culture.

Sonia: For sure. For sure. All right, so one of the principles of your company is that it’s all about physical, more personal connections. Can you explain more about this philosophy, and how your team brings this mantra to life?

Vikram: In the context of what my team does, what we do is we provide software and services to many of the brands that Cimpress owns. My team does not directly talk to, for the most part, the end customers who are actually buying products from one of our brands.

But what I would like to talk about is, that mantra applies across the board, not just with end customers. If my customers are colleagues who happen to be working in one of the other companies that Cimpress owns, how do we make a personal connect with them? And I think the biggest challenge over there is to A, not make assumptions. And then, if you do make assumptions, challenge your assumptions, and understand the business.

For someone like me, who started with Cimpress when it was Vistaprint, and it was just Vistaprint, and Vistaprint has a very specific way of doing business. They target a specific kind of customer. And having seen the explosive growth from Vistaprint, it’s very easy for someone like me to just think of everything with the Vistaprint lens on. Now, the Cimpress of today is very different from the Vistaprint of 2006, when I started. Many of the other companies that we have are completely different from Vistaprint, even though they are in the mass customization space.

So, making the effort to go out to our colleagues, and those other businesses, actually visiting them, partnering with them, collaborating with them, and understanding what business problems they are trying to solve, versus trying to sell them a solution that we built for Vistaprint, which may or may not be the right thing for them. And having that constant flow of ideas back and forth, having that dialogue, and having it be two way. All right, I’m going to try and understand your business problem, and the specific kind of customer that you are trying to reach. But at the same time, let me try and explain to you what I’ve learned from working with another businesses. And I think that two way communication and that dialogue, that’s really key for that portion of connect. Building that relationship and building trust, I think is extremely, extremely important.

Sonia: For sure. For sure. Now, I know one of the the things that Cimpress prides itself on is maintaining an entrepreneurial culture. And that’s something that most start ups have in the very early stages, but as they start to grow bigger, it becomes more and more difficult to do. How have you all been able to maintain that type of entrepreneurial culture as you’ve grown bigger, even with multiple businesses?

Vikram: You’re right. I think the biggest thing that we’ve done is, we’ve decentralized. So, all of our brands run independently. There’s very few central teams within Cimpress. And even those teams, the central teams within Cimpress, one of which I am part of, run very small and lean teams. Even though as a group Cimpress technology, the central team that I am part of, is a whatever, 200, 300 people, we run in very, very small teams.

So, I lead a team who’s total size is maybe 25, 30. But even within those teams, each of our squad, as we call it, which is sort of the smallest building block, is usually no more than five or seven people. So, because we have small teams and we try to reduce our coupling and dependency on each other, small teams I believe, tend to be much more nimble and agile, because there isn’t that much process for them to change, and they don’t have that many dependencies. So, keeping the size of our teams small, and keeping our teams focused in a specific area of the business, I believe harbors innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit of being willing to try different things out really quickly.

And that, I think, becomes much harder as you have larger teams, because something that you try has a potential to impact many more people, in terms of bodes well and adversely, and to stop the process. Smaller teams tend to be much more nimble.

Sonia: For sure. For sure. This has been fantastic. Where can people find you, or find more about Cimpress and the work that you guys are doing, if they want to learn more?

Vikram: Obviously, we have our website. From the work that Cimpress technology is doing, a lot of our APIs are actually publicly available. We have a portal called developer.cimpress.io. So, a lot of the technology work that we are doing is available there for people to look at. We do believe very much in open source. So, we contribute to the open source community, but also whenever it makes sense, we heavily leverage code that has been open sourced by others.

Sonia: Cool. All right. Any parting words of wisdom for business leaders who want to build an innovative company culture, as a means to deliver remarkable experiences for their customers?

Vikram: It’s going to be sound like a broken record, but refuse to accept the status quo. Like, think about the problem that you have in front of you and don’t get bogged down by this is how it’s done. Just because this is how it’s done today, or most of the industry is doing it in a certain way, doesn’t mean that you have to do it the same way.

And I think to enable that, you really need to have a group of people who share that passion and that attitude of challenging that, and trying to come up with better solutions. It doesn’t have to be perfect. I think that’s one of the other things that we do very well.

In my space, we don’t try to automate everything. Well, we do try to automate everything, but we are not dogmatic about it. If we get to a point where we realize this is as far as automation can go, but it will not yield a result that our customer is going to be happy with, we are okay with having manual intervention to delight our customers. As long as we are being extremely selective and conscious about why we are doing the manual process, and how can we make the manual process itself the most efficient it can be?

So, it’s really about, I think, being customer focused, and refusing to accept the status quo.

Sonia: Love it. Love it. Again, thank you so much for stopping by. This has been super insightful, and I really enjoyed the discussion.

Vikram:  Thank you very much, likewise.

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Today we are talking about the health of your company, particularly your company culture and how it impacts your bottom line.

And to dive into this important topic, I chatted with Sam Murray, Managing Principal, and Senior Professional in Human Resources at OneDigital, an employee benefits company.

We can learn a ton from Sam, in particular how to build a company culture that is healthy enough to deliver experiences that win you more customers.

• How an inclusive work environment contributes to delivering remarkable customer experiences
• The main reason companies struggle to embody diverse and inclusive work environments
• What your company culture really is (Hint: it isn’t necessarily what you write on a piece of paper)
• How the beliefs of your team impat the way they treat your customers (and what to do about it)
• The root cause of employees behaving badly (and how to fix it)
• How to structure your organization in a way that prioritizes building a thriving company culture
• How to measure the effectiveness of your diversity and inclusion programs

Listen to the 22-minute episode here:

Watch the episode here:

Read a transcript of the episode here:

Sonia Thompson: Hello Sam, thank you so much for joining me today. How are you?

Sam Murray: I’m great, good morning to you.

Sonia: Let’s go ahead and get started and dive right in. Tell me about your business OneDigital.

Sam: Well, OneDigital is the largest national benefits insurance firm in the country, and they have an HR consulting segment as part of their model, and because HR and benefits sort of overlap, my background is I started an HR consulting firm over 20 years ago, it’s been a really good fit for us to be part of the OneDigital team.

Sonia: Sweet, alright and what would you say is a specific problem that you solve for the people you serve?

Sam: Well companies have all different types of initiatives, they have different mindsets on how they wanna run their company so our challenge is always to align with the company’s objectives.

Sonia: Okay and aligning with their objectives but is there a specific challenge that they often have that you guys are helping them with?

Sam: It ranges from compliance to culture to retention it really is across the board. I would say now we have a lot more inquiries about retaining employees, finding good employees, addressing more consistent culture within the company.

Sonia: Got it, got it. These are all hot topics. Now one of the things I know that you addressed often with your clients these days is an inclusive working environment and I’m sure that helps with the retention aspect of it. So just that we are all on the same page what is an inclusive environment and how does it help companies deliver remarkable experiences to their customers?

Sam: Well that’s a pretty loaded question. An inclusive environment touches on many areas, it includes various demographics, it includes communication, it includes people at all different levels that have some knowledge of how the company should or is being run and it allows voices from every level to be heard within the company. I think that creates a sort of ownership of your job and how you conduct yourself that the customer experience is enhanced by rather than well I don’t know this is how they do things. Those kinds of answers are not going to create a good customer experience obviously.

Sonia: Got it. Now just to about every company these days will say something like we’re all about diversity and inclusion, this is part of our values, but a lot of people actually struggle to live that in practice. It’s one thing to say it, it’s another to actually have a culture that embodies it. Why do you feel that so many companies struggle with this from your experience?

Sam: Well I think that having a thoughtful company is a challenge. Your primary objective on a day to day basis is profitability so a lot of companies are just driven by bottom line driven types of decision making. Let’s face it a company is a compilation of just people that have different life experiences, different values, so for people to be thoughtful is sometimes a challenge when you have a busy job that’s just demanding on a day to day basis. Companies don’t often take time out, set aside a day or two days to retreat and really discuss who are we? Where are we going? What do we want to achieve?

Sonia: Got it. Now you say a company is made up of individuals and I do think that sometimes people forget that, each employee is a human, is a person. Is it difficult to get the people that you’re hiring to adopt the values of the company when maybe they’ve never thought about this in particular when they’re coming to work for a company, but maybe they have different values, is that something that you feel can be changed with training or is it something that this is how you act when you’re here operating on behalf of our company and what you do in your own time is your own thing?

Sam: Well I think a lot of times companies, as you pointed out in your previous question, companies wanna say what they do and what they are, but the employee experience is what they actually do and that really is what culture is. It’s not what you say you’re culture is, it’s what the employee experience is to what your culture really is, but I think employees are hungry to be a part of something that they want to embrace so when a new employee, as you just asked in this question, comes on board how do you get them integrated into hopefully a healthy company culture?

It really falls on all of the other employees and to some extent the manager to help shepard that employee in the right direction by saying those aren’t the kind of things we say here, that isn’t the way we behave here. So you begin identifying who you are as a company by the voices of your employees and employees then want to participate in that.

Sonia: Got it. I love the way that you describe that. Getting people to adapt to the company culture that you say you wanna have, cause like you said there’s what you say and there’s actually what people do and a lot of getting people to do and live the values and the culture that you want to have within your company requires some training so what would you say from your experience over the years working with different companies is what a good training program might look like to get people to sort of nod their head and say yeah yeah yeah these are values that I can live on a regular basis while I’m here at work?

Sam: Well let me get a little bit into the history of training and the area originally started in harassment training, companies were required to that either because it was a defense if there was a harassment complaint the company could say hey we trained them it’s not our fault. That, especially in California, was expanded to discrimination, bullying, all of that is now part of that training requirement, but that has just been on the surface. If these are our policies you have to behave this way. Dealing with employee behavior is fine, but their underlying beliefs is what causes those blips, those Starbucks moments, those Roseanne moments. You can muscle your behavior requirements to a certain extent, but peoples underlying beliefs will pop out. And so I thing we are seeing a shift now in how or what corporate responsibility is really gonna look like in order to participate in the social change that’s needed.

Sonia: For sure, now there’s culture change at a social level and there’s culture change in a company and sometimes like you said those things can go hand in hand. Now a lot of times culture change is something that works well whenever it happens from the top down, but sometimes diversity, inclusion, belonging creating these types of environments, creating these real cultures that are embraced sometimes it’s not a company priority because they’re like we’ve got this number to make, we’ve got these initiatives, yada yada yada. So what do you do or what would your advice be for business leaders within a company who see that there needs to be a shift in the culture, but they don’t necessarily have the full buy in from their senior leaders? They’re not opposed to it, but they don’t have necessarily the full buy in?

Sam: Well let’s face it everybody has they’re own biases that they come to the table with. What I’m seeing is corporations are going to have to now start talking about that, there’s gonna have to be a discussion on it. But one of the things that my career has sort of evolved into is I often get consulting projects that are around executive level misbehavior so I do one on one trainings with executives.

Let’s give an example, a vice president of sales, a top sales producer, but he behaves badly in some way, let’s say he hits on the receptionists and creates a harassment situation. They don’t want to get rid of their top sales person, but they have to do something about it so I end up being the counselor to those kinds of situations and what I’ve discovered through doing a lot of these counseling sessions is that if you don’t deal with the core beliefs of the people at the top it’s just gonna trickle down. I mean I’m actually doing counseling for the business owner, the CEO of companies where maybe there attorney had recommended it because maybe they’ve had a claim and that’s gonna have great impact down

What’s happened even in Hollywood, they had policies, they trained people, but the people at the top are the ones that are the most guilty of that behavior and people see that. Employees recognize inauthentic behavior, and so then pretty soon nobody’s behaving correctly, even though the policy is written. Everybody signs their documents that they are trained, but once you allow it at the highest level it eventually becomes a virus in the company.

Sonia: For sure, For sure and I totally agree with you. So it sounds like what you’re saying is you definitely need your company leadership on board, but what leaders have to do within their sphere of influence is walk the walk and talk the talk, eventually everybody can get on board. But what they can control is their own team and how they lead them and they need to be able to live into what they’re asking them to do.

Sam: Yeah, that is correct.

Sonia: What are you’re suggestions on, first I’m curious if you think this is possible, but for how to gain support of employees who aren’t necessarily on board with diversity and inclusion and belonging especially if they feel threatened by them. Because I know this is a topic that a lot of people don’t necessarily don’t wanna talk about, but it’s popping up and it’s popping up a lot so how should leaders start to address this?

Sam: Well I think they have to make it more visible in the company for one thing. Training needs to change. It can’t just be espousing what the policy is and what the requirements is, you have to bring people to a level of awareness of what the impact is.

For example, everybody would agree that we need an even playing field, but until people really understand that we won’t have an even playing field and how they participate in perpetuating that so then there’s not gonna be real change or awareness. So your training needs to include real discussion about and real interaction about that playing field and how that looks in environments and how people respond to that when they’re on the low end of that playing field.

So those kinds of examples can even be done with simple games where imagine I’m sure you’ve played Monopoly before, imagine when you start the Monopoly game different players are given different amounts of money instead of everybody getting five ten dollar bills and three five dollar bills and all of that if people got different amounts the playing field is not even, they’re gonna have certain advantages.

So I think those kinds of examples can really start to bring a different level of awareness of employees to recognize what the know is right, there should be an even playing field.

Sonia: For sure. Are there any specific recommendations that you would give employees or leaders of these teams for what their specific role should be in rallying diversity, and creating a diverse and inclusive work environment, because everybody has a role to play right? What are your thoughts on getting people to replace theirs?

Sam: Yes. You know as you’ve already identified leadership has to be there and we’re seeing in the HR industry we’re seeing titles change to people in culture and other kinds of contemporary terms to recognize that someone needs to be in charge of continuing to put this in front of everybody so employees don’t fall back into their default of the biases that they learned growing up or whatever. But that it’s constantly in front of them.

And so when it’s somebody’s assignment, I think things can actually change when it’s in front of you all the time, when it’s a component of every staff meeting, when their are changing signs, when their are rewards and incentives and things that are all part of a program to help instill the right culture in the company, which will always translate. Health always translates to the bottom line. When a company is not healthy, the bottom line eventually starts to feel that pain.

Sonia: I like that analogy because this is all about the health of your company right? Once a company starts engaging in these efforts to transform their culture to be one that’s diverse and inclusive where everyone feels like they belong, how will they know that it’s working or that they’re making any progress, cause I imagine that these are gonna get difficult and uncomfortable and maybe they might feel like it’s not working at all so how do they know when they’re moving the needle in the right direction?

Sam: Well companies for a long time have done employee satisfaction surveys and I think that is still a very useful tool, but it’s the questions that are asked in the satisfaction surveys that need to change and need to be more raw, more open, more direct to these types of issues, but I also like random interviews.

I know that sounds a little awkward, but imagine in a company you have Chief Culture Officer okay and there job is to monitor that things are on track and continuing to be progressive and moving in a good direction, in a healthy direction to be tapped and to say I’d like to interview today as a rank and file employee and talk to them about what your experience is, what you think we can do differently, how could you be more included and one on one people are a lot more comfortable sharing things when they feel that it’s welcomed information. So I think surveys are helpful as a whole and it does give you data, especially in a large company. But just like they do random drug tests I really think random check in with employees could really be powerful.

Sonia: For sure I totally agree. This has been super insightful, if people want to learn more about you and the work that you’re doing where can people find you?

Sam: Well my email address, would you like that?

Sonia: Sure if you want people to connect on LinkedIn I can put…

Sam: Well my name Sam Murray, S a m M u u r a y, and I am on LinkedIn, but my email address is simply [email protected].

Sonia: Sweet, and I’ll put that info in the show notes in case people wanna reach out and they wanna find you easily.

Sam: Yeah I’d be happy to direct them to a solution that will help them with what they’re trying achieve.

Sonia: Well any parting words of wisdom for business leaders who wanna create a culture of inclusion in their business so they are able to be a healthy company to deliver those remarkable experiences to their customers?

Sam: Well I guess in summary I would say to business leaders recognize that things are changing and corporations are going to have and already starting to have a different kind of social responsibility than they have had in the past, it’s not just charitable they really are gonna be held because of their own reliability they’re gonna be held to creating environments where bias is minimized and healthy views of the world that we live in exist and that is gonna be a big responsibility and that is gonna require an ethical balance to how they use that responsibility, it’s sort of scary putting that in the hands of corporation in a way.

We’ve always relied on families to provide our values, but I think corporations, business in general are going to be playing a much bigger part in that role, but you have been delightful and than you so much for listening to my views and my experience that I’ve gained in my career, so thank you.

Sonia:  Thank you so much. It’s been great talking to you.

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Today we are talking about culture, and specifically how to build a brand that is relevant within today’s ever evolving culture.

To dive into this topic, I chatted with Paul Marobella, CEO and Chairman of Havas North America, one of the world’s largest digital, creative, media, and entertainment agencies.

We can learn a ton from Paul, I know I sure did, in particular how to be the disruptor in your industry, rather than the one that is being disrupted.

• Smart and fun ways to invest in your team’s professional development
• What the cultural zeitgeist is, and why you need to lean into it
• The 1 thing brands must do to effectively tap into what is relevant in the culture
• The biggest bad habit many brands engage in that prevents them from staying relevant
• The important reason why you need to rethink how you source top talent
• Why content is the cornerstone of your ability to consistently deliver remarkable experiences
• Why every industry is being disrupted and what to do about it

Listen to the 29-minute episode here:

Watch the episode here:

Read a transcript of the episode here:

Sonia Thompson: Hello Paul, thank you so much for joining me today. How are you?

Paul Marobella: Hi, I’m doing great, thank you for having me.

Sonia: Oh it’s my pleasure. Alright, well let’s go ahead and dive right in. This is a super cool topic that I’m excited to dig into more. First, tell me about your company, Havas North America, and how did you come to be at the helm of it?

Paul: Well, thank you. It’s a great company. Havas North America is one of the largest advertising and communication companies and part of the larger Havas Group, globally, based in Paris. And we’re part of Vivendi, and Vivendi is a French company that owns Universal Music Group, which as you might know, owns 50% of the world’s music, and Studiocanal which is a movie studio, and Gameloft which is one of the largest mobile gaming companies in the world.

In our organization, you have story telling and creativity, covered across the whole spectrum, so it isn’t just about advertising, it’s about how can culture and creativity be a part of helping brands connect with consumers in more emotional, personal ways. And we think that make us different, different from the other advertising holding companies that are out there.

North America is an important region for Havas, and Jason Peterson and I are co-chairs of the North American region for our company, and we have some great agencies, and we have some amazing people all around the country, and the countries here in Canada and the U.S., and couldn’t be happier to be here.

Sonia: Sweet. Alright, well what would you say is the specific problem that you solve for the people you serve?

Paul: Sure. I think there’s two people we serve. The first one is the people that work here, and the others are the people that we do business with every day, our clients. And what gets us out of bed in the morning, is to really be … The way we say it is the most meaningful partner to the modern CMO and brands, and meaningful to us takes shape in a lot of ways. But when you look at the challenges that brands and marketers have today, it’s a very different challenge than maybe we had 10, 15, 20 years ago, but a lot of things stay consistent.

So meaningfulness to us, from a brand perspective is how do we leverage creativity in new ways. How do we tap into culture in really truly authentic and meaningful ways which many brands get right and many brands don’t get right, and their brands are impacted because of that.

Of course, we need to drive commerce, and building community around brands are really important as well, like social qualities, and engagement communities, some brands do that really well. And the last one would be the really powerful experiences for us. Really powerful customer experiences. Those are the five things that we focus on. Those are the five things that we do for our customers.

And for our employees, we want to have a really amazing place to work. Advertising is not an easy industry to work in, that’s no secret. And I have a saying, I like to say that, You have to be a masochist and a speed-freak to work on the agency side of the business for any period of time. And so for us, how do you create an environment that people want to come to every day, that they want to be a part of, that helps them truly understand what’s happening in culture, by surrounding them in culture, and then so they can apply that to our client work every day.

Sonia: Have you found that as you invest more in your team, that they are able to in-turn able to do better work for you? Is it really just, you can’t focus on just delivering for your clients, without making sure that you invest that same type of energy in your team?

Paul: Yeah, that’s a great point. We have a variety of ways that we do that, and some of them take place on a daily and weekly basis, and some of them take place on a quarterly and annual basis. We have a couple.

One of the things that we do in all of our offices is have cultural events that allow and give our people the chance to experience parts of culture that may have nothing to do with advertising. Music, fashion, tattoo art, graffiti art, whatever it might be, that shows what’s happening in popular culture, what’s mattering to different segments of customers. And that helps really create, really interesting ideas for our clients.

And also, we have larger things, like a lot of our people … We nominate people to go on what we call learning expeditions globally. So we’re a global company, we have offices in 45 different countries, especially when you include Vivendi as a part of that. We have some people who go on what we call learning expeditions that visit different offices around the world, visit Universal Music Group, learn about how record labels work, how musicians get signed, learn about how scripts are written for TV shows or for movies, and that’s a different access into creativity that they can bring everyday to building brands.

Sonia: You’ve mentioned culture a few times, and I wanna just … I don’t wanna take for granted that everyone knows what we mean whenever we’re saying culture, and so I think some of the terminology that a lot of people use now is the cultural zeitgeist. So what exactly is the cultural zeitgeist and how does it help companies deliver remarkable experiences to their customers?

Paul: I’ll use some examples to explain cultural zeitgeist because I think that on the most macro level, the cultural zeitgeist that we’re feeling now is a tension in our society. And we don’t have to debate why that tension exists, but if you just looked at what’s happening today, whether that’s Roseanne or whether that’s how Kanye’s talking to his customer base, or whether you look at what’s happening in the world, there’s an inherent tension that’s permeating music. It’s permeating fashion, and it’s permeating how brands are connecting with their buyers in more meaningful ways. And I think that when you look at that sort of overlay, you can think about how brands are engaging that.

Often times, people, I think, misinterpret culture as fashion. Like Yeezys for example, its like we need an idea that includes Yeezys, or we need an idea that includes Kendrick [Lamar] or whatever it might be. But actually, there’s a part of culture that is technology movements, for example.

So when you look at Blockchain, I would say probably the majority of people don’t really how Blockchain is or how it works. But we had just created an ad, the first ad in the Blockchain for TD Ameritrade which has TD Ameritrade planting a flag in the Blockchain. The ad will be there forever, and it’s a way for a brand like TD Ameritrade, which I think that you would look at as like a sneaker brand or a beverage brand, but they’re a financial services brand that wanted to capitalize on culture, but do it in a way that was relevant to their brand.

Sonia: So can any brand tap into is, because I know, like you just gave the great example of TD Ameritrade which is a financial services company, because I think a lot of companies will feel like, “uh that’s not really us,” like “this isn’t in our lane,” or “we’re out of our element.” Is this something that any brand can do?

Paul: I think that’s why I started with the definition of what the cultural zeitgeist is, and I … the truly thing that matters is what’s relevant, and what’s in the personality of that brand. I think when you look at a brand like Sprite, that we work with, it’s easy for them to tap into Lil Yachty, and have Lil Yachty be in their videos, and be in their commercials. Its easy for them, because it works for their brand, but Lil Yachty probably wouldn’t work for TD Ameritrade. Although there might be ways that we could work that out if you were trying to work with connect with a different customer base.

It has to be authentic and meaningful and matter to that brand. And what’s interesting is that we often find that the people that are making decisions, whether that’s the agencies or that’s the client side, aren’t typically tapped into what’s happening with their customer base. And it’s our job as their creative and cultural partner to help demonstrate to them how tapping into certain veins of culture will drive and grow their business.

Sonia: Do you see that as … I’ve heard this a couple of times, and that’s obviously your role as the agency, do you feel like more companies need to start developing more of a sense and a pulse of what’s going on so they don’t have to rely all the time on their third party. It probably makes your job easier as well if they are sort of tuned in as well.

Paul: Yeah, I mean I think it is the value that we bring as a creative partner to brands across all categories. For us, Jason and I realized awhile ago, that in order for us to truly be authentic about what’s happening in culture that for the both of us, we needed to bring talent into our company that are from those veins of culture.

They’re not traditional advertising people, and this is a body language shift that I think you have a lot of marketers and brands and agencies that talk about culture … Get on stage at the big events and talk about culture, will do a PowerPoint presentation, show some videos, but really at the end of the day, they’re not really tapped into what’s happening … in culture.

We recognized that, and we kinda leaned into that and said, “We’re getting a little gray and we’re not really that tapped into what’s happening.” So we built something that’s called The Annex, and The Annex is … the original positioning was ‘For Millennials by Millennials,’ and it was let’s bring in, let’s hire people from the different parts of culture that have no experience in advertising.

They are from fashion world, we’ve hired people from Virgil Abloh’s RSVP Gallery here in Chicago. We’ve hired people from music. We’ve hired people from other aspects of the world that aren’t traditional advertising creatives. And we’ve paired them with advertising creatives. So for us, that’s how we’ve stayed relevant, and how we brought that to brands. I think that’s the role of … I think it’s harder for brands to do that, because you can’t buy your way into culture.

Sonia: No.

Paul: And if you think of, they’ll remain nameless, but if you look at some brands that have tried to buy their way into culture recently, it goes horribly wrong, because often it’s very tone-deaf. And to do it the right way, can be really scary for brands because it’s not natural or native to them, whatever’s happening in culture, for the most part, the people making the decisions. That’s the tension, and that’s the tension where agencies can help resolve that tension because it’s easier for us to do that. Often in Fortune 100 companies it can be more difficult.

Sonia: Very good. What is the role of events and delivering these types of culturally relevant experiences, because I hear a lot of great examples of brands that are doing lots of cool things that are tapping into what’s happening right now. But are events the core of how it happens, or is it really like a cross-section?

Paul: I think it’s really hard to bring a brand a life in a 3-D way in advertising, and experiential and events are … We see it rising. We see it’s more important to a brand’s business. We see that the brands that are doing it the right way, aren’t just creating these events for a few hundred people. They’re using that content, and they’re using that experience to broadcast to a wider group. So we talk about return on that investment. How do we make that experience go beyond the few hundred people that engaged at that moment.

So we created something for Peet’s Coffee at Coachella called the ‘Ice Sauna’, which was a launch of their Iced Cold Brew, but it was at Coachella, but it wasn’t just for the thousand people, however many people engaged the event, they used that on a more mobile way to be a part of a wider point of view for the brand. And we see experiences growing. We’re investing in experiential. We’re investing in experiences, and we do see it as a growing part of the business.

Sonia: For sure, very good. Now what are your thoughts on the difference between experiential events that some might say, These are just PR stunts, and we don’t wanna be in the business of doing PR stunts, versus brands that want to deliver remarkable experiences and meaningful defining moments for their customers. Is there a distinction between the two?

Paul: I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head that would considered a PR stunt, although I think if done right, and within the context of the positioning of the brand can provide a new perspective on the brand, and if it’s true to the consumer. Our group in New York, the 88’s had done an event for Adidas in New York City where they sort of leveraged the guys that sell the counterfeit bags out of the black bags on Canal Street and had launched a sneaker that way for Adidas. And it was an event that happened all around the city, and it was a really interesting event, but it tapped into a truth in culture, which was counterfeit sneaker culture. It tapped you into truth in New York City, but when you look at the content that was created as a part of this PR stunt, it really tapped into a truth that existed in the world that would matter for that particular brand.

Sonia: How do you … because I’ve heard you say this a lot of times, it’s not just about creating the event or the experiential moment, its bringing it in content. So is content a critical component to being able to do this and make it more of a surround sound type of approach, where you’re able to reach as many people as possible?

Paul: I think content is at the heart of how our industry is changing, and creativity itself is coming to life in ways that isn’t just around the 30 second spot or isn’t just around having four months to create a TV commercial, and everybody goes to L.A., and has craft services, and we shoot a TV spot with a celebrity. And what’s shifting is that Jason, my partner, talks about this all the time is that ‘shot on an iPhone’, fundamentally changed our industry credibly. And the brands and the agencies that are tapping into the creator culture, are the ones that are succeeding.

So as we look at our creative mission is to move creatives to creators, that’s Jason’s creative mission. So in order to do that, you have to hire people that know how to create a TV spot with this, and that’s a different set of skills. And so how do you have an experience or an event, and then create content that’s relevant and meaningful and that can be used across platforms to exponentially drive awareness of what’s happening with the brand.

Sonia: So I guess with the addition of content, it sort of transforms what brands are producing away from moment-in-time events. It’s like okay we produce one event a quarter, to where it’s something that allows them to be engaged and connected all the time or all year.

Paul: Right, there’s a team that we created in Atlanta for Coke, and across 16 Coca-Cola brands that is a content creation team, and this team taps into three things. They tap into what’s planned on happening, so like the Super Bowl, or the Oscars, or the Grammys, and we’re gonna create content for the brand around those.

Whatever’s happening in real time. So we’re at the Super Bowl, something happens in the game, how can we create content in real-time that drives the brand’s purpose, drives the brand’s mission in real-time. And that type of content creation isn’t just about creating a TV commercial, it’s about providing your buyer with either entertainment, or whether utility, regarding your particular product or service. But to do it you have to change your mindset about what content actually is. It’s more disposable. It’s not, you can test and learn…

Some of the best brands today are developing an idea, and they’re testing and learning that idea with a $500 piece of content. And that content may catch fire, or it may not. And if it catches fire they’ll uplift it, and they’ll start to invest in it, start to invest in the production. And again, everybody’s creating content now. Everybody’s a photographer. Everybody’s a videographer. Everybody has a filter. Everybody thinks they’re an expert on portraits, and that’s cool, but it also … Brands have to tap into that.

Sonia: Now I love how you’re talking about the way the world of advertising and promoting your products is changing. The marketing, there’s the core principles of marketing, but the way in which we execute and we show up, is just, it’s evolving rapidly. I think that’s kind of difficult for a lot of brands when they’re thinking about trying to deliver the remarkable, they still get very stuck up, ‘but we’ve gotta talk about our product. We’ve gotta focus on our features and our benefits. We’ve gotta sell, sell, sell.’ Now what is the role of having these types of product, more salesy messaging, as you’re trying to have these types of communications and experiences and tap into the culture at the same time?

Paul: Yeah, I think that’s the tension. I think that brands, especially publicly traded brands, are under pressure to deliver sales overnight. The brand over time, which is a tension not only for us but for them. And when you look at a brand like Carl’s Jr. That we recently started working with … They balance it nicely. They wanna tap into what’s happening in culture, but they wanna do it in a way that promotes the product in a really interesting way, but it promotes the price point in a really interesting way and drives traffic.

And one brand that I’ll focus on in the same category which we don’t work on, but I have a lot of respect for is KFC. And you know, if you look at the KFC spots over the last few years, the last couple years maybe, they have done a really interesting job at creating what I’d call some of the most promotional advertising that’s in the market, but it entertains you. Its relevant. It taps into culture by changing out who the colonel is every week or two. And so they’ve found a way to be creatively relevant, be true to the brand, and be promotional at the same time.

Sonia: Very good. Now along the same lines, as you’re trying to find that tension, you hear a lot of marketers, a lot of companies focusing purely on ROI numbers. So how do you measure the ROI of these types of events, or should that be part of the conversation as you’re going through it?

Paul: I’ll start by saying that advertising isn’t the fix for everything. Which often times companies and brands think that advertising, and marketing, and events, will solve all of their problems. There is a little thing like having a good product to sell, or having a good retail environment for people to be a part of, or having a great website that actually works, or a good mobile app that actually works.

So ROI, for me, is a few things. It isn’t just for every dollar I spend I want three back. From where I sit, it’s did we change perception? Did we improve purchase intent? Which as a brand marketer, often can be the proxy for all we can do. We don’t necessarily control the quality of what’s in the can, or we don’t necessarily control the quality of what happens in the website always, we don’t control the retail environment, always. So if we can change a consumer’s perception of the brand, and we can measure that through purchase intent or brand perception, or the delta between here’s how I felt about the brand after I saw the advertisement or engaged the event or experience, heres how I felt after that. That’s to us is the ROI, and it’s very measurable.

Sonia: No, I hear you. I think that’s a good point, because I think sometimes they get so focused on we put this commercial up, what happened to the numbers? Or we made this Instagram spot, did we get a bunch of new likes as a result? That’s not always it.

Paul: That’s not always it. You gotta worry about the product and the experience too, which is part of that. And every category … Every single category is being disrupted. Everyone, and every client that we have in some way is under attack. Whether that’s through a start-up technology company, or whether … Every retailer that we work with, whether it’s Amazon, or a direct consumer brand, like from an apparel perspective whether that’s Bambas or Rhone, or like these direct stands, or these direct to consumer brands … They’re all being disrupted.

So what these smaller brands have the ability to do is be distinctive, memorable, more agile, more flexible. They don’t have a huge board they need to get approval from. They don’t have Wall Street they need to get approval from. They can move quick and they can actually build technology on the fly. They act more like a Silicon Valley company than an actual CPG brand.

Sonia: Do you see taking this type of approach as a combination of both a short term and a long term strategy? Because as I hear you talking about it, it seems like this is part of playing the long game, and the more you engage and you stay relevant with what’s happening right now, the better you do at earning the attention that keeps people coming back over time.

Paul: I think that it’s … if it’s trending it’s too late, which is something we talk a lot about. Brands will often try to jump on a trend train, and you can tell the ones that are a little late. You can tell the ones that are actually setting the trends, and I think for us and for our clients, driving innovation is one of the hardest things. Driving innovation and being responsible to the balance sheet on a day-to-day basis is a really hard thing to do, and you have to have a leadership team, and investors, and a board of whomever that might be actually believe in investing in a percentage of the revenue, or whatever it might be in innovation.

What’s interesting is when you look at … As someone said the other day, Negative cashflow is the new sexy. When you look at the big, sexy companies like Netflix … they’re cashflow negative. It’s crazy. But they’re cashflow negative because they’re playing the long game. They’re investing in their technology. They’re investing in their platform, like Netflix, they’re investing in their content. And they aren’t beholden to having a 25% return on a quarterly basis. They will at some point. They’ll get called at some point, but by that time, it’ll be too late for the category, because they’ll have owned the category.

Sonia: I think that those are great examples. And it just goes to show you … Putting that ROI conversation that we were just having back into context of when is the right time to measure, it might not be so cut and dry as you said, Oh, if I invest a dollar, I’ll get three back.”

Paul: I think it’s okay, to have your cash cow, whatever it is that is your core business fund your innovation. I think that the smartest companies do that. I think they know what their core is. They’ll continue to be excellent, execute flawlessly on that core. But they have an eye to the future, so they’re either investing in incubators or instead of ignoring the competitive set, or the little start-ups in their industry, they buy them. Or they incubate them. Or they find a way to have a stake in them, so that when the time comes, they can make them part of their business to fund their future.

Sonia: Well this has been super fun. Where can people find you if they wanna learn more about you, they wanna learn more about the work that you guys are doing and some of the cool things that you’ve done with some of the brands that you’ve been working with.

Paul: Yeah, thank you. On Havas.com you can find what we’re doing overall, and then all my social channels are @marobella.

Sonia: Alright, and I’ll put all that in the show notes so people can find it easily. Alright, well before we go, any parting words of wisdom for business leaders who want to be culture creators and sort of lead the way versus purely following the trends as they’re working to create remarkable experiences for their customers?

Paul: One of the things that I’ve heard recently that resonate with me is, Disruption is when it’s being done to you. Innovation is when you’re doing it to a category. And so I think that’s what we’re trying to live by, that’s what we help try to have our clients live by. You know I wake up every day and try to learn something new, and being in the business for almost 25 years, it’s how do I learn something new? How do I stay tapped in? How do I find a way to bring whatever it is that I learn every day to our people and to our customers, so that would be my advice.

Sonia: I love it. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you again. Super insightful.

Paul: Oh it’s my pleasure, thank you.

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• Paul Marobella on social media
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Today we are talking about communication, and specifically how to make sure the words you are using connect you to your customers on a deeper level, so they can move further along in their journey with you.

And to dive deeper into this topic, I spent some time chatting with Courtney Herring Bowden, a copywritier who helps businesses deliver magnetic marketing messages.

We can learn a ton from Courtney, in particular, how to develop a strong brand voice that draws your customers to you.

• The difference between copywriting and writing
• How copywriting helps you create a deeper emotional connection with your customers
• The types of communications copywriting should be used for to deliver remarkable experiences for your customers
• How to deliver a strong brand voice that helps you connect with your customers at a deeper level (no matter what kind of business you are in)
• The most common mistakes businesses make with their communications and how to fix them
• Why you need to think of your copy as a part of the product experience you deliver to your customers
• Where copy and communication should be considered in your creative process

Listen to the 24-minute episode here:

Watch the episode here:

Read a transcript of the episode below:

Sonia Thompson: Hello, Courtney. Thank you so much for joining me today. How are you?

Courtney Bowden: I’m doing great, Sonia. It’s great to be here. How are you?

Sonia: I’m doing well. All right. Well, let’s go ahead and dive right in. Tell me about your business Courtney Herring.

Courtney: So I am a copywriter and digital marketing strategist. And I partner with purpose driven business leaders to help them skyrocket their bottom line with money making marketing messages, so they can communicate authentically and clearly and attract more clients without compromising their own values or voice.

Sonia: Got it. And you kind of said it, but what is a specific problem that you saw for the people you serve?

Courtney: So really it’s four things. I mostly help my clients discover what their brand voice is and why their message is. I also help them connect authentically with their tribe of customers. And I help them communicate clearly the value of their offers whether it’s a product or a service. And finally, I help them figure out how to inspire more action. Whether it’s getting more subscribers, more followers, more downloads, more purchases, more clicks, what have you.

Sonia: Got it. And I like the last part of it. It says you’re helping them get more action which is of course what we’re trying to do as we work to create a transformation for our customers. We need them to do something.

Courtney: That’s right.

Sonia: So what exactly is copywriting and how does it help business move their customers to take a specific action?

Courtney: So I really define copywriting as both the art and the science of persuading a reader or a listener to take some sort of desirable action. So it’s really important because there’s a difference between copywriting and writing. I think a lot of people often miss it and copywriting has a distinct purpose. It’s to sell ideas or offers and to persuade or inspire an action. Whereas writing can be a lot of things. It can be poetic. It can be entertaining. It can be pleasurable. And I always say that copywriting is always writing but writing isn’t always copywriting.

Sonia: I like that distinction. Yeah, because I think a lot of times when it comes to businesses some of them will get caught up in, maybe this is more some of the smaller businesses that really don’t necessarily hire a copywriter to do their writing projects for them. Because they’re like oh I could just write this. Or we can get someone on our team who’s a good writer to write this. But that’s not the same when you’re trying to move somebody to action.

Courtney: That’s right. That’s exactly right.

Sonia: All right. So how does copywriting work to help businesses deliver remarkable experiences to their customers?

Courtney: Well it does a few things. So copywriting helps businesses create tribes. And it essentially magnetizes the right people to a business and it also repels the wrong people away from it. Next, I believe copywriting creates an emotional connection. So it creates and accelerates the like, know, and trust factors. So we know that people do business with people or brands that they know, like, and trust.

And copywriting helps a company or a business move people from being strangers to being buyers and then eventually being evangelists. And so speaking of which, great copywriting creates loyalty. So that allows customers to run and tell their friends and share what it is that you’re offering enthusiastically. And finally great copywriting helps communicate solutions. So it helps a business position itself as the very best choice to solve their customers problems.

Sonia: Got it. And the experience comes in that it’s not really something, sometimes like you said it’s clearly communicating an idea of a thought or what somebody should do. And other times hopefully it’s a little bit enjoyable to read because I think there are probably far too many business sites or business materials that I’ve read that have just sort of bored me immediately and I’m like I don’t want to read this at all.

Courtney: Right.

Sonia: So yeah, there’s a way to use copywriting to make anything sort of more palatable, digestible.

Courtney: For sure. Absolutely. It can be all of those things that writing is. It can be entertaining. It can be pleasurable. It can be funny. All of it.

Sonia: Okay. Now what types of communications should copywriting be used for within a business?

Courtney: Anything that requires words.

Sonia: Okay.

Courtney: But specifically, it could be websites, sales pages, other landing pages, product descriptions. I think a lot of people who are businesses that have physical products or even digital products sort of underestimate how important it is to have a persuasive product description. It could be the difference between something flying off the shelves or the virtual shelves, or something collecting dust. Also, it’s great for email marketing messages, social media updates, internal company communications. So if you’re trying to build a team or if you’re trying to build great team culture your internal company communications are going to be very important and copywriting helps to get people on board. And finally training programs or even mobile apps.

Sonia: I love how you called out internal communications. Because I know a lot of businesses are really working hard to cultivate the kind of culture that helps them deliver the remarkable or change their culture from one that’s not quite working so well for them. And the words that they use in communicating the transformation that they want to create or the new day that has arrived is very important in enrolling people. So it’s not just about what you’re saying to your customers it’s how you’re communicating with your employees as well. So I really like that you brought that up.

Courtney: Absolutely.

Sonia:  All right. So what do you recommend brands do? Because I know that there are a lot of brands who are sort of thought of as hip and cool and they have a very strong brand voice and they might feel like you can make their copywriting, their words, their content, the things that they’re communicating with very fun and have maybe even a bit of a ‘tude sometimes. But then there are other businesses who might say listen that’s not us. We’re more serious. Or the problems that we help people solve they’re not like that fun type of thing. How do you recommend that businesses who might not consider themselves having a strong brand voice work to create a brand voice that could help them deliver remarkable experiences?

Courtney: So that’s a very good question. And I encounter this all the time with my clients. And one thing that’s really important to do is get clear on your why. Get clear on your mission, your purpose, all of those things that make up sort of your brand equity. And also it’s important to figure out how your customers or your client base speak so that you can mirror that. Because if you mirror the way that your ideal client or customers speaks then you can connect with them very easily. And also you want to figure out what are the things that really frustrate them or what are the things that really desire and speak to those things. So that’s what I would recommend a company who is struggling to figure to really understand what that brand voice should be. That’s what I recommend that they do.

Sonia: I like how you brought up it’s just a matter of talking to your customers. And if you think about as you’re talking to your customers the way that you talk to your friends, most people whenever they talk to their friends no matter about what the situation is or whether they think it’s a boring topic or not, they still have a tone of voice that isn’t necessarily going to bore the person that is listening to you as they’re talking you to tears.

Courtney: That’s right. Absolutely. And another thing to add on to that, it’s important to talk about the benefits of your offers whether that’s a product or service instead of focusing so much on the features which is kind of like how it’s delivered and what it’s made of. You want to talk about the end result that a customer can expect to achieve or experience and that can sometimes ignite excitement or enthusiasm.

Sonia: For sure. Now what are some of the biggest mistakes that you’ve seen businesses making with or regards to communicating? And this is whether or not they’ve been using a copywriter.

Courtney: Well, I think one of the number one mistakes is not knowing who they’re talking to. Not understanding their audience beyond just a demographic understanding, age, gender, annual income. It goes deeper than that. You have to understand what is called the psychographics. So I mentioned it a little bit earlier. Their deepest desires and their most fearsome frustrations. What their struggles are. How they’re talking about their struggles. How they’re talking about their desires. That’s something you truly want to understand in order to really put to play those best practices. Or to avoid mistakes. Now the next thing is using a brand voice and communicating a message that doesn’t align with the needs and desires of their audiences. I see it all of the time. And that’s why some people log onto certain company’s websites and feel bored to tears. Or they don’t open up the emails. Or they’re not engaged on social media. It’s because that message, that brand voice doesn’t quite align with what the customer ultimately wants.

The next mistake I see businesses often make is not being painstakingly clear about what the customer can expect to experience or what they expect to get out of a product or a service. And even before they purchase the product or service, I say a lot of businesses drop the ball by not even telling what the customer, or telling the prospect what to do next. So not issuing enough calls to action. And then the next thing is not optimizing their messages. So once you hear from your customer base or your client base it’s important to constantly tweak that message, constantly optimize that message in a way where you’re keeping those customers and those clients engaged.

Sonia:  So if I hear you correctly, I feel like what you’re saying is if you want to deliver remarkable experiences with the words and the copy that you’re using, you have to treat your copy with the same level of care that you treat your product. Because your copy is a part of your product.

Courtney:  That’s absolutely right. I would say that is so accurate.

Sonia: Okay. Because I think sometimes it’s maybe considered an afterthought. But as we start to elevate customer experience and see it as as core part of your product that means that elevate every element of it which includes the words that you use. And that sometimes the words that you use are going to meet your customer before your product actually does.

Courtney: That’s so right.

Sonia: Yeah. So you got to make sure that you are putting the right kind of care with the two of them.

Courtney: Absolutely. And I don’t think enough businesses do that because a lot of the focus can be on branding, the sexy stuff, the color palette, the logo. But even before you get to that point you need to figure out what your message is.

Sonia: Got it. So what are some of the other best practices? It sounds like it’s some of the inverses of what you just said. But let’s make it crystal clear for people. What are the best practices and the core things they need to be thinking about when they’re working on their copy to deliver that great experience?

Courtney: So beyond just knowing your audience and who they are, you want to make sure you tailor your messages to reach them at the appropriate part of the customer journey. So you never want to ask for their hand in marriage or ask for the sale when you’re only at the dating phase or when they’re actually only just becoming aware of your business and what it does. The next thing is of course I’m just going to beat this into the ground, but being super clear. Whether that is helping your client or your customer understand the next steps to engage you or how to buy from you or what it is that they can expect. Being clear more than being clever is just so imperative.

The next thing I would say and probably the final thing is incorporating story telling so you can create an emotional connection. So studies show that humans really process information the best way using narratives. And if you use story telling you’ll be able to not only create an emotional connection but your customers and your clients will be able to retain the information that you share with them so much more easily.

Sonia: For sure. I like this. So I think you said this before, but I want to just kind of ask this to get people thinking about this in a different way. Where should copy be considered in the overall creative process for optimal results?

Courtney: That’s a wonderful question. So copy should be considered right after the initial strategy. So you want to make sure you have a goal or a north star that you’re reaching for. But it should definitely come before any design or aesthetics are considered. Because you need that messaging or that tone of voice or that guidance in order to make sure that your branding is on point.

Sonia: Okay. So sounds like you always need to have a copywriter as a part of your strategic team.

Courtney: Absolutely. It’s going to make a huge difference and it’s going to help you help companies save money in the long run because you’re not going to try to retrofit a message into something that you’ve pretty much already created.

Sonia: For sure. All right. Now you already said this, that you do consider a copywriting both art and science. But how do you know if it’s effective? How is it that you’re able to measure it or to know like oh we might need to refresh our words? We need to refresh on what’s happening on what we’re saying?

Courtney: So really three ways. Click through rates, engagement, however you gauge that to be, whether it’s the number of likes, shares, comments, and finally sales.

Sonia: Okay. All right. So if you’re meeting a certain threshold. So basically is it testing? Is it meeting a certain threshold or if you’re pleased with where you are? You can kind of keep what you’re doing. Or is it like if it’s just not meeting the mark then you say all right well let’s try something different? Is that how it goes?

Courtney: Yeah. And with a lot of marketing strategies and tactics, often it’s all about testing. So you want to make sure that you’re AB testing, testing one thing against another and making sure that you have sort of a starting point that you can go from. So you can say yes, we were able to get a 3% increase in our sales because of this messaging. Or because of this certain thing. So you want to make sure that you isolate the elements. Copy often interplays very closely with design. So sometimes it can be hard to know which is which because it’s like a marriage. But yeah, isolate the messaging and test it and make sure that you are actually making progress and if not you can always optimize it or tweak it.

Sonia: All right. Courtney, this has been super cool. If anybody wants more information about copywriting, the process, or just to learn more about you, where can people find you?

Courtney:  So I can be found at CourtneyHerring.com. And I also run a wonderful engaged Facebook community that’s dedicated to helping companies up level their marketing messages. It’s called the Copy Clinic. And it’s a group that can be found on Facebook. So all you have to do is search. And you can join and just get all of the insights and strategies that I have to offer there.

Sonia: Sweet. And if you’ll send me the link I will put it in the show notes that people can just click on it and go straight to it and find it. So that’ll be super cool. All right. Any parting words of wisdom for business leaders who want to use their words as a way to deliver remarkable experiences to their customers?

Courtney: So I would say to craft a brand message that really sticks and that really sells it’s important to leverage the best parts of either your personality if you’re a consultant or your company if you have an organization and lean into them to create emotional connections that eventually lead to transactions. So think about creating connections first and then transactions will ultimately, and almost inevitably follow.

Sonia: Got it. I know I said that was the end but I do want to just kind of follow up on this one thing about creating emotional connections. What is the balance in being able to do that versus because this is a thing that a lot of brands struggle with, and I know a lot of the bigger brands in particular they’re like you got to be talking about our product. But talking about your product all the time doesn’t necessarily lead to that emotional connection. So how do you recommend that brands strike that balance of of course having the right product discussions but with communicating with words that actual create that deeper bond and connection?

Courtney: Yeah, so I think that’s another great question. And it is a balance. But I think that businesses should always lead with adding value. So if talking about your product online whether it’s social media or what have you does not ultimately add value to the conversation. Then perhaps you need to rethink how you discuss your products. So because right now we’re in a very interesting space in marketing and customers are becoming very savvy and so they’re really concerned with aligning themselves or purchasing from companies that are invested in pleasing them. They’re invested in engaging them.

And so you need to, or companies should be very intentional about creating those connections and again when you create connections it really does open the door for you to talk about your products. And I believe that sales is a service. So when you’re talking about your products and services it’s important to position them as solutions to a specific problem. And so again once you create those connections you can then talk about the solutions that you have and then that’ll ultimately lead to more growth in sales.

Sonia: Love it. All right. Courtney, thank you again for sharing all your wisdom. This has been super insightful.

Courtney: My pleasure, Sonia.

• CourtneyHerring.com 
• Courtney’s Facebook group, The Copy Clinic

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Today we are talking about emotional intelligence, and why it is so essential to both building a high-performing team and delivering the kinds of experiences that help you win more customers.

And to dive into this topic, I chatted with Justin Bariso, author of the new book EQ Applied. Justin is also a consultant, and a columnist at Inc. where more than 1 million people a month read his column.

We can learn a ton from Justin, in particular how to make your emotions work for you rather than against you.

• Why emotional intelligence is essential to deliver a remarkable customer experience
• Practical ways to get better at managing your own emotions so you can better care for the emotions of others
• The downside of not focusing on how you make your customers feel
• How leaders can get started improving their degree of emotional intelligence
• How to build emotional intelligence as a competency within your organization
• How to show empathy for people who have experiences that are vastly different from your own
• The one thing you need to remember on your journey to increasing your emotional intelligence

Listen to the 38-minute episode here:

Watch the episode here:

Read a transcript of the episode here:

Sonia Thompson: Hello Justin, thank you so much for joining me today. How are you?

Justin Bariso: I’m good. Thank you, Sonia. Thanks for having me.

Sonia: My pleasure. Alright. Well I’m super excited about this discussion, so let’s go ahead and dive right in. Tell me about your company Insight.

Justin: Sure. So I started Insight, let’s see, I guess about seven, six or seven years ago when I moved to Germany. So long story short, I was not seeking entrepreneurship, it kinda found me out of desperation because I had moved, we moved here when we had children to be closer to my wife’s family. Due to change of events I didn’t have a job and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do so I started off helping foreign executives, mostly ones living here in Germany, with their communication skills so they, many of your listeners might know this, Germans generally have a very high level, they speak a high level of English, but where things get lost sometimes is in the subtle communication cues, they speak a very direct form of English, which can be good. I’m from New York so I know how that goes and I’m a big believer of being honest and direct, but sometimes, depending on the audience, it can misinterpreted as arrogant or just a lot of misunderstandings, so that’s how Insight started.

I was helping these executives with their communication style and everything from emails to presentations, any dealings they were having with English speaking companies and American companies, that kind of thing. But it’s grown since then because as I started writing about my experiences, and I got a column on Inc. Magazine, inc.com, so the digital version of Inc. Magazine, and the focus of my work really became emotional intelligence because what happened is I found that I was giving a lot of advice to these executives and to these teams on, not just the communication and the English language, but how they’re handling their emotions because they would get frustrated that they were getting, a lot of their communication was getting misinterpreted and then they would start telling me about the problems they were having internally and in their teams, you know, their own teams, their German teams, and so I had gotten a lot of training on this.

I spent 13 years with a major nonprofit in New York and that’s really where my education came from, my practical, every day management education. They taught us a lot about putting people first and treating people with empathy so this became my primary work, writing about it, sharing it with others, and so nowadays that’s what I advise companies on, is how they can reach customers, but also internally people at an emotional level, how they can motivate them, how they can better engage their employees, how they can solve conflict management problems, and a lot of this is individuals too, they’ll write in because of my column and I love engaging, or yeah, engaging with readers. I give a lot of free advice, believe it or not, but you know what? It comes around because they spread the word and clients will come in asking for help with whatever problems they have.

Sonia: That is fantastic, just, well it’s fantastic that people are more and more starting to recognize that developing in these softer skills is just as important as some of the hard core skills and the products and services that you offer because it’s all about how you make other people feel, right? So if you’re able to connect with them in a way, that’s not always the easiest thing to do, it really does pay dividends so I’m super glad that you’re doing it and people are seeking it out as well.

Sonia: Now you mentioned that this is the focus of your work. Now you just published a book, it’s hot off the presses, EQ Applied, which is all about emotional intelligence. Now, what is emotional intelligence, just so we’re all on the same page and why is such an important trait for businesses?

Justin: Sure, so many listeners may have heard of emotional intelligence the last couple of decades actually. It was about 20 years ago when it first became very popular through Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence, and basically, emotional intelligence is just how do you manage your own emotions and how do you manage others’ emotions. It comes down to how do you deal with conflict? How do you deal with internal conflict? So when you’re extremely emotional, all of us have made decisions when we’re in a very emotional state that we wish we could take things back or we wish we could have handled things differently, and that’s basically what emotional intelligence is.

The way I define it, I make it very simple, very practical, one sentence. Emotional intelligence is making your emotions work for you instead of making them work against you.

Sonia: Okay.

Justin: So, you could get into a lot more details of that but that’s basically what it is.

Sonia: Okay. And how does emotional intelligence, whenever people are making it work for them, how can they make it work for them to deliver remarkable experiences for their customers?

Justin: Yeah, well, I think you quoted, it’s actually a famous quote, a couple minutes ago, which is, “People will forget what you said. They’ll forget what you did. But they’ll never forget the way you make them feel.”

Sonia: Right, right.

Justin: And that’s so, so true because people do business with businesses because of that emotional experience they have and there’s many ways that manifest itself. It may be that they do business with someone because it’s very, very convenient, or with a company because it’s very convenient, it’s very quick, it could be because they have great customer service, it could be because they like the way they’re treated when they go into whatever the business is or whatever they have, experience with the company. So naturally, that’s really what it comes down to it, it’s in many, many different ways, but what kind of experience are you giving your customer?

If they feel good emotionally with what you’re offering them then they’re going to keep coming back. As opposed to, something could be a good deal, and that’s great and that may keep some customers coming back, but only if they still connect emotionally with that company, if that’s very important to them, the fact that they’re getting something a good deal, they’re getting something very inexpensive, the minute they have a bad experience with that company it’s easily going to turn them away, you know?

Sonia: For sure.

Justin: We can see that right now with the airline industry. Actually, it’s interesting because the data is showing that people continue to come back for the cheapest airline tickets but the companies are still so concerned with the bad PR that they’re getting because they know, potentially, how quickly it can change and how quickly people can go. This is why companies like Southwest, like JetBlue are doing so well because not only are they offering a less expensive plane ticket, but they’re also working on the customer experience.

Sonia: Right.

Justin: And you see that becoming more and more important to the larger airlines when in the past they just didn’t care because they said, “Well look, they’re still buying from us, they’re still flying with us,” but now they’re seeing that these smaller airlines that are concentrating on both, the success that they’re having and it’s influencing how they move forward as well.

Sonia: For sure, for sure. I imagine there are plenty of stories and you just kind of gave that anecdote there with the airline industry, but what would you say is one, and you’ve done a lot of research over the years, do you have a favorite story of when emotional intelligence really worked in favor of a business and how they were dealing with their customers?

Justin: I have a bunch. Starbucks is one I tend to write about and talk about a lot, for both good and bad. Starbucks, for many people they’ll know, well they’ve been in the news for some bad reasons lately, but I might reference that again in the future. But years ago they were really doing bad because they lost touch with their target customer and the business, this is when Howard Schulz first stepped away from the company and they really started going downhill over the next several years, and when he came back he realized, “Look, we’ve gotten away from what we’re trying to do, which is create an experience for our customers.” When he came back he was able to conduct this turnaround and he started connecting and, again, offering a valuable experience. People don’t pay four or five dollars because it’s a great cup of coffee, you know? Regardless of how you feel about Starbucks, it’s because Starbucks began offering experience that many people valued and so he was able to turn them around.

Apple is another example of Steve Jobs coming in and saying, “Look, we’re trying to do way too much stuff. Let’s narrow it down a few things. Let’s do them very well and let’s connect with our customers emotionally.” And then we know what happened with that.

And then the last one, you asked for one, let me give you three. The last one that’s one of my favorites lately is Tesla.

Sonia: Okay.

Justin: Now, Tesla, you know, I personally think Elon Musk is a genius. He’s not perfect. He makes mistakes and he’s made mistakes recently, but he’s a genius in that he’s been able to build this entire company based on an emotional connection with his customers and he does that through social media. This guy has, I don’t know how many millions of followers because it’s growing every day, and he’ll sit down and he’ll, you know, he’ll go, it’s not really a tweet storm, he’s sharing his thoughts, randomly, on Twitter and he’ll respond to the first few or ten or whoever that respond to him. So many people love Elon Musk and he’s built that company up. We’re talking about a company that has not made a profit traditionally that is barely selling anything and they, last year, became the most valuable car company in America.

Sonia: Oh my goodness.

Justin: Now that’s changed slightly since then but that’s built solely on him connecting emotionally with customers and also with his employees, you know? I write a lot about his employee emails and how great his communication style is. I don’t work in Tesla, I’ve never worked directly with them, so this is all that we see from the outside because I know that, you know, they’re like any company, Tesla has issues and some have come to me with those too, but generally speaking, I think Tesla’s a perfect example of how to build your company based on emotion and that’s where it becomes important and that’s what I write about a lot in the book. It can’t be purely on emotion, okay?

Sonia: Right, right.

Justin: Because, like anything, you have to balance emotion with other things and emotional intelligence is the exact same thing. It’s a great thing to have and it’s very helpful but it has to be balanced with other qualities as well.

Sonia: For sure, for sure. Now I really enjoyed going through your book and I could see practical applications for both my business life and my personal life, which is always a great thing. I feel like they’re always sort of connected. One of the things that sort of intrigued me were your four abilities of emotional intelligence. Can you walk us through those?

Justin: Sure. So I didn’t invent these by any means. The first one that I saw them in very similar terms was Daniel Goleman and he did that in connection with at least one other coauthor in his book Prime Leadership, he’s written a lot about it since then and others have different takes. But basically it comes down to those four, he calls them four domains, I call them four abilities.

Justin: So we start with self-awareness, so your awareness of self from your own emotions, how your emotions affect your thinking, how your emotions affect your decision making, and that’s both in the moment and also long-term, so how does it affect the mood I’m in right now, how does it affect how I will feel about something over the long term, the short term.

Justin: The next step after self-awareness is self-management. So based on this knowledge that I have of myself, am I able to manage my emotions? Now some people come to me and they say, “Do you really want to manage your emotions?” Well, here is an example of why you do want to at times.

Sonia: Okay, okay.

Justin: So let’s say I’m extremely upset about something, I read something, or I’m having a conversation with my partner and it just takes a turn for the worse and now, if I continue to let my emotions run wild, I’m probably going to say or do something that I later regret.

Justin: Whereas, one practice, which we call the pause, which the pause is basically just taking a few moments to slow down, to see the big picture, to say wait, you know? It seems like such a basic practice, and it is, but it’s, I say it’s easy in theory and difficult in practice, okay. Because we’ve all been there where it’s like we know we should stop the conversation or take a break and don’t and we keep going and we yell or we say something that we wish we could take back later, so this is self-management.

If I’m able to take a pause and say, just shut my mouth and be quiet because I know if I keep going I’m going to say something that I regret. Whereas if I just let my partner speak, or if I say, “You know what, you know, I need ten minutes,” and I go take a walk or I take ten seconds and I calm myself down and I count to ten and I take a few deep breaths, then often times I can bring myself to a place where the conversation becomes more manageable and it can be more rational and sometimes it takes stopping the conversation right then and coming back to it 20 minutes later, or an hour later, or a couple days later. But those type of techniques are where you can manage your emotions and you’ll be happy for it. You’ll handle the situation in a much better way.

Sonia: For sure.

Justin: The same thing with email, right? We’ve all written an angry email and you come back an hour later and you’re like, “Why did I write, why did I send this out?” as opposed to, if you have to write the email, write the email but don’t send it, right? So, take a break, go for a walk, come back to it, and then usually even 20 minutes later you’re like, “Oh, no, no, no I don’t want to send this,” and you rephrase it and you can write it in a much more emotionally intelligent manner. So that’s self-management, okay. That’s number two.

Number three is social awareness, so your awareness of how other peoples’ emotions affect them and their decision making. So going back to that conversation, let’s say I’m having a conversation with my wife and she starts to get heated. Okay, so I start to realize, okay, I may be very emotionally balanced in this conversation but I notice through her tone, or remarks she makes, okay wait a second, she’s starting to take this personally, she’s starting to get sensitive about this, and that now, will affect how I continue to go on in the conversation.

We can have that with our workmates, our colleagues, our friends, so being able to recognize other peoples’ emotions and how it’s affecting them and it really has to tie in with empathy-

Sonia: Yes.

Justin: … which is a quality, I think we might talk about more later, but it’s a quality that a lot of people want and think that they have but it’s a lot harder than people think.

Sonia: Right.

Justin: But anyway, empathy is really tied into social awareness. And one other thing I’ll say about social awareness, a lot of critics of emotional intelligence, of empathy, will say, “You know, you can’t really read another person’s feelings,” and that’s kind of true to an extent, and knowing that can really help because a person may be smiling and you think you know why they’re smiling, or they may be in a certain mood and you think, number one, you know what their mood is and you’re wrong, or number two, you think you know why they’re in the mood they’re in and you’re wrong.

Justin: Acknowledging that too, that these are all educated guesses and so, it’s like anything, just because we can’t read other peoples’ minds or emotions, doesn’t mean that we don’t try because trying to show empathy to someone is going to get you in a lot better place than you would be otherwise.

Sonia: Right.

Justin: So, it’s just making those educated guesses and trying to understand people, realizing, hey, you might be getting this wrong and adjusting to that. If you realize, okay, oh no, I don’t think I’ve got this, I don’t think I’m reading this person right, then you can adjust to that as well.

Justin: And now we’re getting into relationship management and that’s the fourth ability is using all this knowledge about yourself, your own self-management, your ability to manage your own emotions, you’re awareness of other peoples’ emotions and thinking, and using that to manage your relationships. So it doesn’t mean trying to manipulate people, which that is an element of emotional intelligence, I call that the dark side of emotional intelligence. You’ll see people that try to manipulate others with the knowledge they have about their emotions.

I’m highly against that and that’s one reason I teach people about this quality, so they can protect themselves from that. What I try to advocate is using it in a way to manage situations so that you can help people make decisions they’re proud of.

Sonia: Right.

Justin: So, in other words, you realize, again, going back to that same example, you realize they’re starting to make an irrational decision, a decision they may regret later because they’re in a very emotional state, so recognizing that and being able to handle that type of conflict or, just long term, how to build trust in your relationship over time. Things like that. That’s all relationship management.

Sonia: Very good. There’s so much there and it’s all needed, all necessary. What would you tell a leader, and I’m sure you do this all the time, who wants to grow in emotional intelligence, whether they feel like, “Oh, this is not my strong suit at all, I really need to get better,” or they’re even decent at it and then they just want to get even better at it so that they connect at a deeper level with others. What would you say is the place that they should start in terms of working this scale?

Justin: Well, as you know I talk a lot about those techniques in the book, but I could really narrow it down, at least as a start, to two things. One is perspective taking.

Sonia: Okay.

Justin: So, getting the perspective of others and understanding how others view you.

Sonia: Okay.

Justin: Now, that’s again, to be done with balance, okay. Because you don’t want to try to become a different person to please other people, but it’s more about we, you know, it’s like an illustration I use is the sound of your own voice. When we hear our voice, when I hear this podcast I’ll be like, “Aw man, that’s how I really sound?” Because the way we sound to ourselves is completely different from the way others hear us.

Sonia: Right.

Justin: And so it’s the same thing with the way we’re perceived, the way we perceive ourselves is so much different from the way others perceive us. So getting that perspective, asking people that we trust, whether it’s colleagues that we trust, friends that we trust, the people that are close to us in our lives, asking them for perspective.

Justin: And I have a list of questions in the book like, “How would you describe the way I make my decisions?” “How would you describe my genuine mood?” or “How would you describe the way my mood affects the way I make decisions?” This is just a small sample of the type of questions that getting perspective from others can help round out the way you see yourself because in reality you’re going to have a set of data that you see that you know internally that they won’t have but they’re going to have data to give back to you and that feedback can help you to have a more well-rounded view of the real, you know, the real person, who you really are. So that’s step one is getting that perspective taking.

Sonia: Okay.

Justin: And then two, taking time to reflect. That’s something that’s become harder and harder to do nowadays because, why? We’re tied to our phones. We’re constantly communicating. We’re constantly checking. We’re constantly learning, which is good, but we don’t take as much time to sit back and think, I think, as we have in the past.

So scheduling time to just block out time in your schedule to just sit down and think. And you know, you can think when you’re on your commute. You can think when you’re walking or when you’re taking the train or when you’re driving or these other times, and that’s great, but there’s, you can’t underestimate the time of sitting at your desk with nothing in front of you and taking 20 minutes to half an hour to longer to just sit back and reflect, you know.

A lot of people talk about meditation nowadays and there’s different forms of meditation, and the type of meditation I really preach is deep concentrated thinking, not emptying your mind, but thinking focused on your own emotions, on your own actions. Why do I do the things I do? In an instance where I acted in a way that I regret, why did I act that way? What things led up to that? This is a lot of things we get into in the book is how your experiences and how your habits affect your reactions and how you can actually change those if you’re reacting in a way that you don’t like or in a way that you wish you could change, how to do that, but it begins with that self, making time for self reflection.

Sonia: Got it, and it’s a great starting point and something that definitely takes a lot of commitment to be able to make sure that you’re going to be able to improve. What about for those leaders who they’re performing well on, they got a high level of emotional intelligence, but they know it’s not just about them because they’re not the only ones who are working to serve their customers. It’s about the team. It’s about the organization and the culture that exists. What advice do you have for how they can get others, or they can cultivate a culture within their team or within their organization that has emotional intelligence as a competency?

Justin: Sure, sure. As with anything, you know the best way to encourage others to do something is to set the right example, right.

Sonia: Yeah.

Justin: So one example I used recently that I think has mainly been a good example, and I wrote his pronunciation of his last name down because I’m still learning it, so Dara Khosrowshahi, he’s the relatively new CEO of Uber, and he’s made a lot of very concentrated efforts to turn Uber around, to turn around their culture, which is not an easy thing to do because a culture is really baked into a company, so I think it’s going to take years if he’s successful at being able to do this. He’s not a perfect example, you know, as none of us are. A lot of people will ask me, who’s a good example of emotional intelligence? It’s hard to say because emotional intelligence is tied in a lot to motive too and it’s difficult to tell why people are making the decisions they are. So I try to identify, instead of identify people that are emotional intelligent, I try to identify actions that are emotional intelligent.

Sonia: Okay.

Justin: So one example is an email he wrote some months ago, soon after he took over the reins at Uber. It was after what happened in London where they actually banned the Uber app and there’s been a lot of conflict there. He wrote an email to employees saying basically, “Look, we should not be surprised that this happened because there are consequences to decisions we’ve made and actions we’ve taken as a company and this is basically the consequences that we’re suffering.”

Justin: And instead of, like, painting out the city of London to be the enemy, or like, oh, they’re anti-innovation, or you know, instead of responding that way he said, “What can we learn from this example about the actions we’ve taken in the past, about the consequences we’re facing now, about how we can change things in the future?” And I thought that’s a perfect example of a company leader showing how to learn from experience, how to self reflect, so I would advocate that company leaders do that. When they mess up, when a company messes up, take responsibility and spell it out for your employees, “Look, this is what we did wrong, this is what I’ve learned from it, let’s take some time to reflect on how we can do better.”

Justin: On the smaller scale you could do that together as you’re meeting with company executives or your team members, whatever, you could actually do that in a meeting together. Amazon does a great thing that’s been getting a lot of press lately. They’ll actually start their meetings with silence. This is a trick I’ve adopted in a lot of my meetings. You take the first 20 to 30 minutes of a meeting, which seems like a waste of time, like you start it with silence with a long well-thought out memo and everyone in the meeting reads that memo. Okay?

And it gives them a chance to really pour over it and that’s how you can do it together in a meeting is you give them a memo where you talk about lessons learned, that kind of thing, but you know, to make sure, because people come into meetings unprepared so give them 20 minutes or 15 or whatever, adjust it to your own company culture, but give them some time to pour over it, to think about it, and then discuss it together. Okay? And that’s one way you can really inspire self reflection and learning from those type of experiences, but that’s how you can set the example and inspire your people to do the same.

Sonia: Cool. So all this is rich information here. I love it. Now, as more and more businesses are starting to have customers who are diverse, whether they’re in the US and they see the changing makeup of all the different populations of people, there’s about to soon be a minority-majority, or whether it’s you’re a global business and you’ve got companies, customers from all over the world, what is the intersection, or is there one, between cultural intelligence and emotional intelligence? How do they work together, if at all?

Justin: Definitely. So, I’m a big believer in cultural intelligence. One of the reasons is I grew up in a part of the United States, and due to my family background too, that was very multicultural. My father’s from the Philippines. My mother is American but with Portuguese and Irish roots. The part of the US I grew up in, Norfolk, Virginia is predominately African American.

So most of my friends growing up in school were black Americans, and so we would watch a news report … I can still remember, for example, when OJ Simpson went on the run, okay? And I remember it clear as day. We were watching this on the news. We were all riveted on the television and then afterwards I talked to my parents about, I talked to my friends about it, and everybody has different emotional reactions to that experience. Why? It’s based on their personal experience. It’s based on their culture. It’s based on their background and what they’ve experienced.

So that goes to show how important cultural intelligence is because we’re limited by the experiences we’ve had, by the background we’ve had, so getting to know, and that’s why diversity in companies is so important and I’m glad to see companies reaching out to get more diversity on their boards, to get more diversity in their employees because then they’re able to relate to more perspectives and different types of customers.

But at the end, so even though there are different emotional reactions, the emotions themselves are the same.

Sonia: Right.

Justin: Okay? We all get angry, we call get happy, we all get sad, okay? The reasons why are different across cultures, but the more you learn about different cultures … You know, in the beginning it’s all differences and it’s like, “Oh man, this is different and this is how…” but what I like to concentrate is how are we alike? Okay? Knowing the difference is important and that will help you navigate those relationships, but for your relationships focus on how are you alike because we have much more in common than we have different, and focusing on that.

Justin: And that’s one way, for example, empathy, if you’re talking to someone and they talk about something that makes them angry and you think, well that’s not a big deal … We’ll go to race just because it’s so easy to talk about. Many white Americans find it difficult to identify with a black American’s experience because why? Because they’ve never experienced that before. They’ve never been pulled over for no reason. They’ve never been treated unfairly because of the color of their skin. So instead of trying to relate to the experience that they’ve never had, try to relate to the feeling because we’ve all been treated unfairly, somehow, some way, whether it’s because of your sex if you’re a woman, or if it’s because of something else in your background or you’re just in a situation where you’re different from the others in that situation, you can relate to the feeling of being treated unfairly.

Justin: So that’s the key in working across cultures, and really, in empathy in general. Try to relate to the feeling another person has, not their experience because even if we had the same experience, we’re going to feel somewhat differently than they did, we’re going to handle things differently than they did. But if someone’s angry, okay, try to understand why are they angry, or try to understand, when have I been angry? Why was I angry? And relate to that feeling. “Okay, so you feel angry. Yeah, I know what it’s like to feel angry.” And that can help you to understand them better and to hear them out because you want to be heard out when you’re angry and the fact that you give them that time and attention and effort will inspire them to listen to what you have to say and that builds trust in the relationship.

Sonia: Yeah, I love that because it’s the building the trust is there’s so many layers to it. There’s empathy, there’s time, you know, basically acknowledging someone else’s feelings and at the same time being able to communicate your own. So I think trust is an integral component of being able to earn the loyalty of your customers, so if I think if businesses thinking about I have to earn the trust of my customers and that will reap the dividends that will get them thinking about how they interact with them in a different way.

Justin: Definitely.

Sonia: Justin, this has been fantastic. Where can people find you if they want to read more of your work, they want to get your book, how can they get more from you?

Justin: Yeah, so when this podcast airs, I believe the book will be officially launched-

Sonia: Yep.

Justin: … So you can find it on all major platforms, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, anywhere where you typically buy books it should be available there. You can also check out my website directly, so EQapplied.com, and it should have links to the book. Also, if you don’t want to buy the book, you just want to read my take on emotional intelligence and see how it manifests itself in the real world, that website will also take you to a list of my most popular articles and just real life examples, both in business and also from my personal life and from others’ lives where you can see, “Oh, this is what emotional intelligence looks like in every day life.”

Sonia: Got it. And they should definitely buy the book because it’s great and it’s super helpful, but I’ll have all that information in the show notes so people can find it. Any parting words of wisdom for business leaders who want to apply emotional intelligence as a means to consistently deliver remarkable experiences for their customers?

Justin: Sure, I would just say don’t get complacent because emotional intelligence, it’s like any skill, really. You have to continually practice it and renew it. For those of you that play musical instruments, you know as good as you play that instrument, if you stop practicing then you’re going to get rusty and eventually you would lose the ability altogether to play, so emotional intelligence is the same way.

Justin: Just when you think you’ve got it, you know, and you’re making good decisions, balanced, rational decisions is the moment where you get caught off guard in a situation and really, that’s going to happen anyway. We’re all going to be a victim of our emotions at some point, but continuing that self reflection regularly, continuing that perspective taking can help us to do as good as possible and can help us to remain in practice so that those situations will be fewer and further between and most the time you’ll find that even when a situation, you’re confronted with a situation that you become very emotional that you can use that as a power for good, that you can use it as a catalyst too, because there’s nothing wrong with getting emotional, it’s just a matter of learning to harness those emotions and make them, again, make them work for you instead of against you.

Sonia: For sure. Again, thank you Justin, this has been super cool.

Justin: Thank you very much, Sonia.

• Justin’s new book EQ Applied
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Today we are talking about email marketing, and specifically how to use it to deliver remarkable experiences to your customers that ultimately grow your business.

And to dive into this topic, I chatted with Lauren Powell, founder of Bixa Media, where she is an email marketer extraordinaire.

We can learn a ton from Lauren, in particular how to get your audience excited about seeing a message from you in their inbox.

• Ways to use email marketing to connect with your customer throughout every touchpoint of their buying process
• How to get your customers excited about receiving an email from you
• Simple ways to create an emotional connection with your customers through email
• Why every email shouldn’t be a “sales” email
• Smart ways to find engaging content for your emails
• A common myth about email marketing that you need to ditch once and for all
• Key metrics to measure the success of your email marketing efforts

Listen to the 22-minute episode here:

Watch the episode here:

Read a transcript of the episode here:

Sonia Thompson: Hello Lauren, thank you so much for joining me today. How are you?

Lauren Pawell: I am good. I am so excited to be here.

Sonia: It’s always fun chatting with you. Alright, let’s go ahead and dive right in because we’re talking about a super cool topic, but first tell me about your business Bixa Media.

Lauren:  Yeah, so Bixa Media is a marketing agency where we help customers generate, nurture and convert. more leads online and a big part of that is what we’re going to be talking about today, which is email marketing.

Sonia: For sure. Alright, tell me … you talked a little bit about it, but what is the specific problem that you solve for the people that you serve?

Lauren:  Yeah, so my clients want more business and they want to get that business online. So, they may have great offline revenue streams or ways of acquiring customers or they may not and they’re just looking to generate more customers and revenue online.

Sonia: Sweet and why do your customers choose you to help them solve this problem?

Lauren: Yeah, this is a great question and someone was just asking me about this the other day and I was walking through what my client’s store might look like and most of them have already worked with a marketing agency of some sort typically to build the website. And lo and behold they build a website and they launch it, they realize that alone does not bring you customers.

Sonia: Nope.

Lauren: So they’ve gone through that whole show and then we have a conversation about the bigger picture of the marketing strategy, how we’re going to drive traffic, how we’re going to drive qualified leads to the website and how we’re going to nurture and qualify them. That’s typically why they choose me because we have more of a partnership and in many ways it’s an education for the client rather than the client just saying “I want a website, go.”

Sonia: Well that’s an interesting insight in terms of how people find you because you hear this all the time where people they want a website and generally people understand websites and they understand the need for it. They understand why it’s beneficial but like you said they don’t necessarily connect the dots on oh, well what do I do with the website once I get it? How is it going to actually function to be able to drive business results for me?

That’s when all these other components get into it. So, it’s interesting to see how many clients get sort of … or customers, companies, businesses get stuck in that world of having tools, but not really knowing how to get the full benefit of the tools that will actually help them serve their customers better.

Lauren: Yeah and the tool is often the shiny object.

Sonia:  Yeah.

Lauren: But it’s about how you use and employ that tool and I think even a website could be a great lead generator. But if you’re just thinking about it and working with someone as, “Hey I’m really focused on the colors and the appearance of my website,” but you’re not thinking about who am I speaking to and how am I moving them through that, then it’s not a very great tool, right?

Sonia: Yeah, yeah. A tool is only as good as how you use it, right?

Lauren: Yup.

Sonia: Alright so how are businesses able to use email marketing to deliver remarkable experiences for their customers?

Lauren: So I love the piece of this question that is “deliver remarkable experiences” because you can use email marketing to create a lot of different touch points for your customer, but to deliver that remarkable experience is a lot harder to do. I think the beauty of email marketing is that you can be in touch with people throughout the whole process from before they’re even a customer and then all the way through to after they’re a customer and how do you follow up with them and how do you make sure they’re happy on an ongoing basis. How do you get referrals?

So, really understanding where someone’s at and what they need at that point in time will allow you to deliver a remarkable experience through the email content that you’re providing. So, being able to segment where someone’s at in the buying process and what they need I think is really important.

Sonia: Got it. So it sounds like you’ve got to really have a deep degree of customer intimacy as well to know what it is that they’re going to want and need and that segmentation you said as well.

Lauren: Yeah, yeah so think about like if you’re going to buy a car and you’re thinking about buying a car you might be very early on and you have no idea what kind of car you want to buy. Or you might be at the point where hey I know I want a Toyota Tacoma. I’m just trying to figure out which … who I’m buying it from.

Sonia: Right.

Lauren:  So what kind of content you’re going to deliver to those two people over email is going to be very different.

Sonia: Absolutely.

Lauren: But if you’re telling me about Toyota Tacoma’s and I don’t even know that I want a Toyota Tacoma, that’s not very remarkable.

Sonia: Right.

Lauren: In fact, it’s just annoying.

Sonia: Yeah. Yeah, so speaking of annoying, most people aren’t really fans of email and I’m one of these people that I just like oh my gosh, there’s so many emails in my box. That’s kind of like how I feel a lot of times. So you rarely hear people being excited about receiving email from a person that isn’t a personal friend or family member or something else. What can businesses do to make receiving an email from them something that their customers are really excited about?

Lauren: Yeah so you almost answered the question in your explanation. But you said I’m really only excited about receiving emails from friends and family members, right? So those are personal. They’re talking about something interesting to you. And a lot of businesses don’t take that approach when they’re sending emails. They put some pretty banner in the header and then they send you an email about an offer or one sentence. And it’s really not that engaging or something you really want to receive.

And so I think if you take a more personal approach and also you’re understanding where someone is in that buying process, then of course the emails are going to be relevant and of course it’s going to be something that someone looks forward to especially if you have some of component that’s engaging and inspiring, entertaining or connecting in some sort of way.

Sonia: Okay, now a lot of businesses that aren’t necessarily one-person businesses or five-person businesses … sometimes even though smaller businesses struggle to do that as well. They struggle with that personal aspect of it and of course the emails end up feeling very transactional. So how can people use email? What are your recommendations for how to use it to deliver a more deeper emotional connection so it actually does feel like it’s coming from a friend or a loved one and it doesn’t feel weird or creepy or like you’re trying too hard to be cool?

Lauren: Yeah. Two things. One, you can experiment with sending the email from an individual at the company which I know big brands tend to feel a little weird about but often times that works really well. HubSpot does this really well. They’ll assign you someone-

Sonia: Matt from HubSpot, yeah, HubSpot.

Lauren:  Exactly. That’s something you’re more likely to open because it looks more like a friend’s email than something like HubSpot. Then in terms of how to keep the content engaging I think you can always get great inspiration from design-oriented brands or e-commerce stores like I’m thinking right now about Glossier or Soko Glam. But they do a really great job of sending an email from the brand but there’s some sort of something exciting in it or they’re just talking to you like, “Hey, it’s Friyay,” or something like that and obviously their customer is very millennial oriented so I wouldn’t suggest that for everyone.

But if you’re speaking to someone’s pain points, struggles or something they’re interested in, then at the end of the day it’s going to be something you want to read. And you want people to think when they receive your email, “Oh, I’ve been waiting for this. Oh, I’ve so been looking forward to this.”

Sonia: Right. Should storytelling be a component of it? Is that a way to transition from the transaction to something that connects more deeply?

Lauren:  Yeah, definitely storytelling’s a great tool. I think anytime you can incorporate story in anything it becomes more engaging even if it’s to share some of educational lesson or even to lead into a promotion or something that’s more transactional. But if you can relate it to some sort of story that connects with people, that’s just another way to get an emotional connection from that email. So if you read the email and you’re like, “I’m bored to tears,” then probably your subscriber’s going to be bored to tears as well.

Sonia: Right. If you don’t have any emotion associated with the email then you can’t expect anybody else will either, right?

Lauren: No. No, exactly.

Sonia: All right, so what are the best practices that you recommend your clients engage in with their email marketing efforts?

Lauren:

Yeah so from the content side if you can do some content research ahead of time, there’s so many pieces of content out there that have been proven to drive traffic, get shares, things like that. So you can do this on answerthepublic.com or just looking at YouTube or Amazon books and finding content that resonates with people already and you can already see sales are being generated maybe it’s from someone else. And then you put your own spin on it. That’s a great way to make sure that your content’s engaging and if you do that research ahead of time perhaps every quarter and then you can map out your calendar, you’re far more likely to create a cohesive story rather than what a lot of people do is, “Shoot I have to send an email today. What am I going to write?” That’s just not a great way to create any sort of engaging content. Plus it’s a sure fire way to have broken links, typos. I think we’ve all been guilty of that.

Sonia: Right.

Lauren: But you’re not leading someone down a path which is ultimately what you want to do because you’re not going to be sending promotional emails all the time. Some of it’s going to be more educational or entertaining with the goal of eventually getting that sale.

Sonia: Is there a ratio of educational to promotional or promotional to other types of emails that you recommend that people follow?

Lauren: Yeah, I like 80/20 but you could do 70/30 or 60/40 as long as more of it is educational and the rest is promotional. Now, I use the term educational loosely. It could be entertaining or it could be something else but people often are like, “Well if I’m not selling all the time then what’s going to happen?” At the end of the day you are still selling. You’re just selling your brand in a different way without having that concrete CTA at the end that says, “Buy this now for 10%.” But you’re still selling ’cause you’re building someone up and you’re moving them through that buying cycle.

Sonia: Right. Another key component in what you mentioned is that it sounds like planning is a big aspect of this. In planning is there a certain time frame that you should be planning in advance like is it a month? Is it three months?

Lauren:  I like three months because I find especially if you’re doing maybe like a cart open to close or you have a heavy promotional period like Black Friday and then Christmas. Then you can do that 80/20 rule a little better because you will then see, okay we’re going to have some heavy promotion for this month and a half. What are we going to lead up? What are we going to do that’s more educational that’s going to lead up to that?

Where if you just have a month and you’re really … people frequently are only sending emails once a week. That’s only four emails and that’s often not enough time to look at what’s the bigger picture and how am I leading people through these campaigns?

Sonia: Right. Got it. All right, so what are the biggest myths that you hear about email marketing that you would like to dispel once and for all?

Lauren: Yeah. I don’t know if this is a myth but, I guess it is, but people feel like if they send emails they’re going to be seen as spamming. A spamming salesperson. And at the end of the day if you’re creating engaging, compelling content and you’re attracting the right people, then it’s not going to be spammy. And people who leave aren’t your right audience so that’s okay if they leave because you don’t want to be spamming people who don’t want to hear from you.

So I think that myth that I’m a spammy salesperson if I send emails is far from true it’s just a question of what are you sending? Maybe you’re not sending the right stuff.

Sonia: Are there certain metrics that you should be tracking that let you know how your emails are working for you of if there are things that need to be tweaked?

Lauren: Yeah. On a basic level open rate and click-through rate and open rate is a measure of are people receiving your email in the Inbox and is it compelling enough to open? So those are two different things. Click through rate, is your content compelling enough to take the next action?

Sonia: Right.

Lauren: A couple of other things you want to be monitoring, subscriber growth. Its’ not just about the emails you send but is the list growing? Deliverability? Are you landing in the Inbox? Sometimes this gets overlooked and you wonder why your open rates are declining and maybe you’re not making it in the Inbox. Maybe you’re in the Google promotions tab or in the spam folder or perhaps you’ve even been blacklisted so you’re not really being delivered at all which has happened and is unfortunate and it’s hard to come back from. So you want to make sure you’re never in that position where that’s an issue. So by monitoring your open rates and making sure things aren’t drastically dropping you can stay clear of any issues along those lines.

Then you don’t want to put too much weight in this but you do want to keep an eye on subscriber rate. If all of a sudden you’re getting a ton of unsubscribes, maybe it was the wrong audience. But maybe it’s also the content you’re sending. So you want to just keep an eye on that. But you also don’t want to say, “Every time I lose a subscriber it’s a problem.” That’s not always the case.

Sonia: Got it. Okay. Now, who within an organization should be the one writing and managing an email marketing campaign?

Lauren: Yeah, so the word should is almost like a trap. If you have a copywriter on hand, I think that’s a great person to write the copy because frequently who’s sending and monitoring may not have the same skillset. I don’t find this is often the case. I find typically even in bigger companies you have one person in charge of a lot of marketing tasks and are probably doing a little bit of everything.

If that’s the case maybe having someone outsource who’s just keeping an eye on things for you or providing some guidance I think can be really helpful. But frequently it’ll be some sort of marketing coordinator. Ideally it’s someone who’s connected to all the other promotional events that are going on in the company because your emails should be in line with that.

Sonia: Absolutely. Yeah, ’cause I think sometimes people will just, “Oh just send an email. Just write it.” But when it comes to delivering something that’s remarkable and connecting on a deeper more emotional level, there is a degree of skill that’s associated with creating content that people want to read and that also point you in the direction of taking your customer on the journey that you both want them to go on.

Lauren: Yeah, it’s a subtle both art and science and so if it’s just handed off to a VA or someone who maybe doesn’t understand some of the intricacies, then there could be a challenge like getting blacklisted which is not something you really want to ever face especially if your list is a primary driver of revenue which it often is.

Sonia: For sure. How much time do you need to engage in an email marketing before you start to see meaningful results?

Lauren: It depends. It depends a little bit on your list size. It depends on the quality of your list where people are at. But a really great way to start is just by emailing your existing customers or past customers. You can often see additional sales just from that pretty quickly ’cause that audience is already warm and already knows, likes and trusts you.

So that shouldn’t take that long. A month maybe two. In terms of ongoing campaigns and how that interacts with the rest of your list that maybe is cold or new leads, that a little bit depends on your sales cycle. If you’re buying a new home, big ticket purchase, that might take 12 months to warm you up and then you’re ready to do it. But if it’s just a software demo for 19 bucks a month then that’s a whole different scenario, right?

Sonia: Yeah. Yeah. There are so many different nuances to email marketing but it’s such a powerful thing. I think the latest stat that I heard is for every dollar you invest in email marketing returns back 44. So it’s definitely something that should be a part of everyone’s marketing mix.  Most businesses, it should be a part of their marketing mix. So if people want to learn more about this because you know all the ins and outs and all the details, where can people find you?

Lauren: Yeah. I created something special for you guys on this podcast. If you just text to the number 44222 and then you do C as in the letter C and magnet so customer magnet, I’ll send you some free resources and some other great stuff. And if not you can just head to my website which is bixamedia.com. I got a lot of great stuff there as well.

Sonia: Cool and I’ll have that info in the show notes as well so people can access it easily if they don’t text you right away. Maybe they’re driving. We don’t want them to be texting and driving.

Lauren: No.

Sonia: All right, so any parting words of wisdom for businesses who want to us email, email marketing in particular, as a way to deliver remarkable experiences to their customers?

Lauren: Yeah, don’t wait ’til it perfect to get started because a lot of this is a bit of a learning curve and you’ll get better the more you do it. So I would say if you haven’t implemented email marketing now you should have been started yesterday. So go get started. Plan out your next four emails based on some content research and then just get them scheduled and sent out. And the nice thing about that is when you’re doing that advanced planning you really have to think about it once a quarter and then just be monitoring metrics. So it’s a lot easier than a lot of other marketing tactics that you’re going to employ. And it adds a lot of value to other stuff that you’re doing.

Sonia: Yeah, and I don’t think it costs as much as a lot of the other marketing tactics either.

Lauren: No. No, you’re not investing. It’s not like Facebook Ads or going to conferences. And it just layered on top of going to conferences and layered on top of running Facebook Ads, you’re going to get far more results out of those two efforts.

Sonia: Yeah. Lauren, this has been fantastic. Thank you again for stopping by and sharing your insights.

Lauren: Thank you. I so appreciate you having me.

• Bixa Media
• Get Lauren’s email marketing resources: Text ‘CMagnet” to 44222

• Framework based upon in the trenches experiences from 150+ business and thought leaders
• Science-based explanations to support why the elements of the blueprint work
• Action items to help you get some quick wins

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The post 144: How to use email marketing to deliver remarkable customer experiences appeared first on Sonia Thompson.

Today we are talking about events, and specifically how to use them to build your brand and of course to deliver remarkable experiences that draw your ideal customers closer to you.

And to dive into this topic, I spoke with Erika Speed, founder of The Cre8tive Artisan, an event planning company that helps businesses deliver memorable events.

We can learn a ton from Erika, in particular the core things you need to remember to plan an event that draw you closer to your customers.

• How events make your customers feel like they belong with you
• How to deliver experiences your customers want to be a part of
• Simple ways to get your customers to unmask, so you can get to know them at a deeper level
• Essential elements needed to deliver a remarkable event (rather than a stale one)
• The number 1 rule for using an event to elevate your brand with your customers
• Common mistakes to avoid when planning a customer event
• How to measure the success of your events

Listen to the 21-minute episode here:

Watch the episode here:

Read a transcript of the episode here:

Sonia Thompson: Hello, Erika. Thank you so much for joining me today. How are you?

Erika Speed: I’m doing well, how are you?

 Sonia: I am fantastic. All right, well let’s go ahead and dive right in. Tell me about your business, The Cre8tive Artisan.

Erika: So The Cre8tive Artisan is a company that I founded, it’s a boutique event planning agency where I curate unique and engaging lifestyle experiences for people to connect in meaningful and authentic ways. And so I wanted to create something that was purpose driven because I feel like the state of the world that we’re living in right now, the people really have a need to connect in deeper ways than beyond the surface.

Sonia:  Got it. Now what is the specific problem that you solve for the people that you serve?

Erika: I think a lot of times people just are so used to the same run-of-the-mill type of events. For instance, like a networking event that you go to, there’s like your typical happy hour. People come in, they don’t know anybody and the first question is “Oh, what do you do?” And people want to put people in this little box, in this category, without having these deeper conversations that could be had, like a more meaningful connection. And so I am really passionate about creating spaces where people can engage beyond what they do from their 9-5, like in who they are and really who they are beyond the surface. And so I really wanted to create environments that are conducive to that.

Sonia: I like that, I like that. Especially, I say this a lot, business is about belonging and if you are able to create environments that help facilitate people feeling like they’re in a place where they belong versus one that’s more uncomfortable, they’re nervous, they’re anxious, that’s no good. So you spoke a little bit about experiences, and lifestyle experiences, what exactly are those? That’s a phrase that you’re starting to hear pop-up more and more these days. So how would you describe them?

Erika: For me, I would define lifestyle experiences as events that kind of enhance peoples lifestyle. It’s like not your typical run-of-the-mill type of event. So it’s things like people might learn more about themselves, through different engaging activities or through experiential activations or just connecting with people in ways that are not traditional.

I pretty much fell in love with the lifestyle environment from the previous job that I was in where I was a lifestyle director and I was charged each month with curating 3-4 events where people could build community. So these people lived in this residential building and New York is just like a crazy place to live, people are always constantly walking around with these masks on. And you have to give off this persona and so I really was excited about having the opportunity to create a space where all these people come from all these different walks of life and from different things and trying to figure out a way to kind tie them all together to bring them in a unified way so to speak through something they may have never done before or something that could show them a little bit more about themselves.

So whether it was a paint and wine night with a little twist, or it was learning how to cook different things, you know they’re not really familiar with cooking and recipes. Or whether it was bringing in a salon discussion where I would have somebody talk about essential oils and different ways and doing different things. So I just kinda use it as space and opportunity to kind of bring in new elements of life. So it’s not like things that you’re constantly kinda doing and just like in this routine of monotony.

Sonia: Got it. Now you said a couple of different things there and I wanna dig into. The one is more so about how companies can use experiences ’cause these experiences sounds like a lot of fun from the consumer standpoint or anybody who’s going to be attending them. But from a company point of view and you said your last job and this is of course what you do now with your own business, you were tasked with doing this on behalf of companies as a way to engage. How do experiences help connect customers to the companies that are serving them?

Erika: I think it helps connect them more with the name and the brand ’cause I think a lot of times people are so not in tune with what their consumers want and they are so focused, like marketing truly is important but you also have to find a way to connect with who you want to connect with. So you have to find out what’s important for these people and you have to learn to speak their language and connect with them in different ways that are meaningful to them.

So it helps with retention, it helps with brand loyalty, it helps with like a lot of things in terms of like if you need that differentiator between a consumer picking your company versus another one, if they feel more connected to what you’re doing and they feel like you’re listening to them and creating things that are for them, that’s gonna create more brand loyalty to the product or to the service that you provide.

Sonia: Got it. Now how do these experiences help customers discover more about themselves, and I like how you said that, as you’re thinking about a company and a brand, trying to get to know their customers at a deeper level and create more of an emotional connection with them, sometimes you’re gonna have to dig beyond a superficial level. So how do these experiences help the customer and the company learn and discover more about the customer?

Erika:  I think that it’s a way to dig deeper, for instance, I’m trying to think if I can even think of a good idea right now. But I think it’s a way for people to just really kinda learn more beyond what they think that the customer wants. So you kinda learn what they really want and I think that’s ultimately what any business is trying to do. When you put a product out there, you put a service out there, you may have it in your mind, what you think people want but you really need to be in tune to what the audience really wants. And it’s a way to engage with them on a different level and something that’s more authentic and I think authenticity is another buzzword that you’re hearing a lot today and I think that’s really important for people to connect authentically to the consumer or to the business. It’s a way to create that next level of elevated engagement with them.

Sonia: For sure, for sure. Now you mentioned, whenever you were first talking about the types of experiences you like to create for your customers, that you don’t want to create the standard, ho-hum events that are boring, that people are used to. From your point of view, what separates a remarkable event from a ho-hum, boring, standard run-of-the-mill one?

Erika: To me, I think it’s something where you walk away with like “Wow, I really enjoyed that.” I think a lot of times, as you get older and you kinda go to different events, especially depending upon what you do in your day-to-day work, you may find yourself going to the same event over and over and you’re kinda living in an episode of Groundhog Day.

And it’s like an event like “Uh, I have to go to this other happy hour, I have to go to this networking thing and this meeting.” And it just kinda gets old and stale. So when you go to an event or an experience that kinda takes you out of that, and you walk in thinking that you’re expecting one thing but like when you get in there and it’s like wow, you’re taken out of your comfort zone or you’re doing something that’s totally different, out of your norm. I think when you walk away with having that type of a feeling, that’s something that kinda creates a remarkable event.

So like with the standard happy hours and things, I always have an element of surprise and if people may not necessarily know what they’re walking into, you’re not gonna find yourself going and asking the person “Oh, so what is it that you do?” You may have to create a question such as “What inspired you today? What made you excited?” So it creates a whole other level of conversation and it makes people take off their masks that they have to constantly wear and kinda of see themself in another humanistic kind of way. And so that’s what’s really important to me in the events that I create and that’s, when I go to events that kinda of allow me to create those type of things for other people or when I go to events like that, that really makes me leave away with a remarkable feeling.

Sonia: And I like what you just described, there are times where the events can be larger productions and then there are other times where the thing that makes it distinctive doesn’t have to cost money at all. It’s just as simple as creating a space for different types of conversations to be able to happen, which I think is a beautiful thing.

Erika: Yeah, I agree.

Sonia: So what should businesses be thinking about when looking to create an event as an experience, ’cause I feel like those are two separate things. They can be one, whenever you combine them together but what are the baseline considerations that they need to be thinking through to elevate their event to something that’s worth talking about?

Erika: I think they really need to truly consider who these events are for and I think it’s something that’s so simply said but a lot of people don’t really pay attention to it. And so like, I think people get in their mind these grandiose ideas that they want to do but it may never even be relevant or targeted to the people that they’re creating these events for. So it’s really important to either have a focus group of the people that you’re wanting to create this event for, so you’re really tapping into what’s important to them and kinda meeting those details of like the things that they’ll want to experience in the event or what is gonna be important to them in terms of meeting your goals.

And I think it’s really important to know the audience and to really be aware of like what it is that they are wanting to connect to. ‘Cause if you go in wanting to create something that’s not in line with what the people want, then you’re not really getting the results that you’re hoping to get to, and that’s not helping with your retention and that’s also not really helping out with the brand recognition that you’re trying to do, if that’s the people that you’re wanting to connect with.

Sonia: For sure. Now those sound like great best practices, whenever you’re setting out to create an event as an experience. Are there other ones that you would recommend?

Erika: Trying to think. I’m typically like a really big people person, so I always love different types of people and I never put people in a box of who they are. So I encourage other people to have that same outlook when they’re approaching the event or the experience that they want to create, just to really be open to connecting with the different people, people who may be different from you or people who may think different from you. ‘Cause I think when you connect the dots that way, it allows for more creative opportunity and freedom to develop as you’re wanting to create a remarkable experience or an event for somebody.

Sonia: For sure. Now what would you say are the most common mistakes that you see businesses falling into, getting caught up in, when it comes to creating events as experiences?

Erika: I’d say that the biggest event, again, kinda goes back to that simple thing of now knowing and pay attention to who they’re creating these events for. I think when you lose track of who you’re creating the events for, even, and it’s not really an event, but even if you look at like the Shea Moisture like thing that took place, an idea in theory and they thought they were creating this experience and this marketing piece, for this consumer but they really weren’t in alignment with who they were creating this ad for.

So I think you always have to go back to the basics. So I think going back to the basics of who you’re creating these events for and what will be important to these people and kinda using that as your grounder in terms of creating anything. I think think that that’s really important to really pay attention to and to really keep on top of mind as every decision and every detail, everything that you’re putting forth, that’s what you should be really keeping top of mind. I think a lot of people lose track of that sometimes.

Sonia: For sure. Now a lot of businesses will look at experiences with dollar signs in their eyes, wondering what is the return on investment? So if I spend $1,000 on this event, will I make back $1,500 or whatever their numbers are. Is it okay to do with experiential events? Should you be thinking about it from an ROI standpoint or is it really not that cut and dry, if you do X, you’ll get Y, or Z or whatever?

Erika: Yeah. I don’t think it’s necessarily always so black and white. I think there’ll be times where you may need to really focus on that and it also depends on what your end goal is that you wanted to accomplish. It may not always be the exact same thing that you’re doing every time. You have to look at what the objective is and what will be the best way to meet that. So if your brand is suffering or you’re noticing that you need to grow and stretch your brand in a certain area, you may need to bring in more money and focus in on the dollars in that way. Or if it’s something that’s more simple in nature, they may not have to be as focused in on that. But it goes back to what the objective of the company is in terms of what that is. So it’s not always so black and white, I don’t think.

Sonia: Are there specific metrics that you recommend that you think people should be tracking or thinking through as it relates to these types of events?

Erika: I think it depends on the company. So I work with a lot of different companies and different things so I may have an organization that’s wanting to put together a conference for educational professionals. So what their metric is would be a little bit different than like say a non-profit that I’m working with that’s wanting to put together a festival to help bring the community together. So it kinda depends on the organization and what their priorities are. It’s a little hard for me I guess to kinda think in that-

Sonia: It depends. It’s one of those, it depends. It’s no problem. And most things are, they’re very relevant to what your business is.

So is delivering these types of experiences something that needs to be done on a consistent basis or somewhat consistent basis or can you get the same impact from doing a one-off here and there?

Erika: I think that, and I hate to sound redundant, but again I think it depends on what your main objective is. I feel like new companies or like new brands, you definitely want to have a level of consistency to what you do because you’re trying to expand your brand and trying to get that recognition and trying to build a loyalty, whereas someone who’s more rooted in like a brand that has an existing audience is always coming to things, you can kind of spread it out a little bit farther and do like larger and grandiose things to continue to build on that brand experience. So I think it just really kind of depends on what the objective is and that.

But I think you have to be doing something. I think thats, you can’t just sit there and not exist. You have to, that’s the only way that you’re gonna grow and that’s the only way you’re gonna connect with your consumer and to create these experiences where people are constantly reminded of what it is that you do and how it is that you can help them. Whether it’s like a service or like a product, you need to stay on top of mind awareness, so you need to constantly be thinking of things that you can do that help elevate your brand experience and experiences are a great way to do that.

Sonia: Love it, love it. Whenever you, let’s say you decide you’re gonna do events on a somewhat regular basis or you’re gonna make this a part of your marketing mix, do you need to vary them? Can they be like the same events that you’re kinda running over and over again or do you need to have different types of events that you do over time?

Erika: I think you should do different events because the only thing that’s constant is change. So your audience is maybe gonna change in some of the ways that they think about things so you need to be kind of growing and open to changing with them as they change as well. There’s some standards that you can do, whether it’s like a conference is taking place and you’re gonna always have those basic formulaic things that you’re gonna do but you also need to kind of also be … to me as a creative artisan, you need to be kind of thinking of ways to elevate that experience a little bit more and to have something different so it’s not so routine and run-of-the-mill, that people are coming and like “I know what this is gonna be about this time.” You wanna have that element of surprise to kinda keep the relationship going, growing and keep it exciting and fresh.

Sonia: For sure, for sure. Erica, this has been super cool. Where can people find you if they wanna learn more about The Cre8tive Artisan and creating events as experiences that your customers deem remarkable?

Erika: They can find me on my website which is TheCre8tiveArtisan.com. And creative is spelled a little bit different because I’m creative, it’s The C-R-E-8-T-I-V-E Artisan.com and you can also find me on all the social channels under that as well, so Instagram, you can find me on LinkedIn under Erika Speed, or you can also find me on Facebook, which I am working on but it’s there.

Sonia: All right, and I will have all the information in the show notes so people can access you easily. All right, Erika, any parting words of wisdom for business leaders who want to use events as a way to deliver remarkable customer experiences in the people that they’re serving?

Erika: Again, just make sure that you know the audience that you’re wanting to create these remarkable experiences for. Don’t assume that you know everything about them. Make sure that you have people that are good reflectors for you to bounce things off on to make sure that what you are looking to create is gonna be relevant and touching for them. And just to be creative in all that you do and then to just always be thinking about creating that elevated experience that will help people really love you.

Sonia: Sweet. Thank you Erika, this has been a lot of fun.

Erika: Yes, I enjoyed it. Thank you.

• The Cre8tive Artisan
• Erika Speed on LinkedIn

• Framework based upon in the trenches experiences from 150+ business and thought leaders
• Science-based explanations to support why the elements of the blueprint work
• Action items to help you get some quick wins

Get the playbook

The post 143: How to use events to deliver remarkable customer experiences appeared first on Sonia Thompson.

Today we are talking about how to build a high-performing team. Now I am a firm believer that a high-performing team is a diverse team. But just assemblinga bunch of people with varying backgrounds, ways of thinking, and experiences doesn’t automatically produce people who work well together.

To dive into how to make sure you can build a diverse team that is able to sovle your customers’ problems like none other, I chatted with Dr. Aviva Legatt, an instructor, consultant, and Forbes columnist. She teaches a course on this topic at The University of Pennsylvania.

We can learn a ton from Aviva, in particular how to create an environment on your team that enables everyone to bring their full selves to work, which of course helps them perform better.

• The only way to effectively teach others about diversity and inclusion
• Why everyone has some implicit bias (and practical ways to overcome it)
• The third stage of diversity and inclusion that brings optimal results
• Why sometimes diverse teams don’t perform at a high-level (and what to do about it)
• How to create a safe space within your team, where everyone feels like they belong
• The surprisingly simple way many leaders resist creating a work environment where everyone feels like they belong
• The 1 skill you need to start creating a more inclusive work environment today

Listen to the 27-minute episode here:

Read a transcript of the episode here:

Sonia Thompson: Why hello Aviva. Thank you so much for joining me today. How are you?

Dr. Aviva Legatt: I’m doing great, Sonia. How are you?

Sonia: I’m doing well. All right, let’s go ahead and dive right in. I’m super excited to dig into this topic with you, ’cause you’re coming from a completely different angle than I’ve explored before. You teach a course at Penn, Diversity and Inclusion: Strategies to Confront Bias and Enhance Collaboration in 21st Century Organizations.

Aviva: That’s right.

Sonia: Tell me about that course.

Aviva: Well, first of all, all of our course names have to be a mouthful because we’re in academia. If it’s not a long title, it’s not worth taking. That’s the motto. But all kidding aside, I came up with an education background, and when you study education, you learn all about diversity and inclusion, because really, it’s critical to teaching our youth how to interact in the world by helping them to all have access to the same knowledge base, ideally, or different sets of knowledge, and to learn from one another.

I started teaching in the organizational dynamics department, and felt like this element of diversity and inclusion was really missing from the work, because as a lot of studies have shown, diversity and inclusion and belonging are all key to performance and success. I felt like we had to rectify that, and the first thing we did to rectify that was we put together a Coursera course specialization with different modules about how to build high performing teams.

One of those mini courses within the module was a course on diversity. From that course, we ended up expanding it into a in person option, or maybe shrinking into an in person option, depending on your perspective, but we had to alter it, because for the audience members that might not know, Coursera is a platform that many universities use to take courses for free online to get exposed to different knowledge base from universities. And then the course I teach that you were referring to with the very long title, that’s a course I teach in person to graduate master’s level students.

A lot of them are mid level managers, in HR, people who are emerging organizational leaders and so forth. Really the impetus was my noticing there was an absence, and then saying, “This is all about diverse teams, so I, myself, am not the only one sufficiently equipped to deliver this knowledge. I need to myself assemble a diverse team.” So first we got a number of different speakers for the Coursera course, and then for the in person course, I brought on my co-teacher, Harvey Floyd II, who’s a cross sector leader, consultant, African American man, really incredible background and an amazing force to be reckoned with.

We seem to be the ideal team. We met through my Coursera course, and I did the initial draft, and then he came on and he shaped it, and made it even better. This year we’re going into our second iteration of the course and we have amazing speakers coming, like yourself.

Sonia: Oh, thank you.

Aviva: To share wisdom with our students, but really what we’ve found is best for teaching diversity and inclusion, and I say this as someone who has taught, and also someone who’s been a student for a very long time, is people really need to get uncomfortable in order to talk about and learn about diversity. Because I think it’s very easy to read a bunch of articles and say, “Oh, of course we need diverse and inclusive teams, because that’s what the research says” but the reality is we can’t really put ourselves in a place to confront what might be hindering diversity and inclusion and belonging until we look at our own biases.

Sonia: That’s true.

Aviva: We have all of the students take the Harvard Implicit Bias Test. I don’t know if you’ve taken one of those before. Have you?

Sonia: I have not.

Aviva: Oh, I’m going to send it to you afterwards, but it’s called the IAT test, and anyone can go on and do it. It’s free and it’s public, and basically just asks you about your different preferences for things, and you have to knee jerk react or respond to the questions, really, really fast, like, “What’s your first association when you hear ‘bad’? Do you associate ice cream with bad? Do you associate presidencies with bad?” You just have to gut check, like go.

That’s a very uncomfortable exercise to find out the results from, because a lot of times, you do find out you have a bias in one or more areas. Whether it’s racial, general, religious, they have all kinds of tests like that, and it’s pretty stunning when you learn about yourself. In that class, we do share a little bit of our biases when we feel comfortable doing that, but a lot of getting to this work is so hard, because we have to admit to ourselves that maybe we’re not as perfect as we want to believe we are.

Even if we’re working towards the greater good of diversity and inclusion and belonging, we know these things are good, but what within ourselves is preventing that from happening, and how do we reflect on that and move forward from that to create better collaborations and better results?

Sonia: For sure. Now you said so many wonderful things. I’m going to put a link to that assessment in the show notes, so people can access it and take it, ’cause I want to take it for sure. Now, before I ask you more about the course and the problem that you solve, I want to make sure that everybody’s grounded on these terms. Because we hear diversity and inclusion a lot, and belonging is something that’s starting to come up even more so, and I know, and I say this all the time, business is about belonging.

Can you just give a quick definition, maybe the academic definition, of what is diversity, what is inclusion, what is belonging, and why do we need all three?

Aviva: Oh, that’s such a good question, and I’d be curious to hear your thoughts, maybe you have a different definition than I do. But to me, it’s like stages of diversity, inclusion, and belonging, and belonging is like the best phase to be in, right?

Sonia: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Aviva: Because diversity just means that you’re bringing in different perspectives, so whether it’s backgrounds based on geography, race, gender, you can bring in different people of different backgrounds, but if you’re not leveraging them, then it may not lead to any good results at all. In fact, there have been studies that show that sometimes homogenous teams perform better than diverse teams when the diversity isn’t leveraged. Because there’s not psychological safety, so inclusion is really the next level of saying we all have a place in this company, in this organization, and we feel included.

But I think belonging is the deeper version of inclusion, where it’s not just that we feel like we have a voice, but we really feel like we’re going to bring our whole selves to work, all of our perspectives, our work is aligned with our identity, with our values, and we’re leveraging those every day. That’s the deep level of inclusion, and I think inclusion on paper could just be like, “Oh, we have some affinity groups. You can join those if you feel so inclined,” but belonging is a true genuine environment for speaking up, for bringing our whole selves to work.

Sonia: Yeah. I like those definitions, and I really like the one that you have about belonging in particular. Yeah, I see diversity as like the, like you said, just the basic differences that we had, and putting them all together and assembling them. Inclusion is whenever you’re actually not trying to build a melting pot, right? You want to be able to leverage the differences and the strengths that each person brings to the table in a way to where they feel like their voice can be heard, and it’s valued, and that they are able to help make the end product better, and that belonging piece is like, “Yeah, these are my people. They know me, they get me, they want me to be here, and we are all part of this crew, or family.”

I feel like if you don’t have a team where everyone feels like they belong, you’re not going to be able to create an environment for your customers where everyone feels like they belong, and your customers, of course, if you have a diversity customer group, increasingly, especially as you’re thinking about the way things are changing in the US, if you’re serving customers from around the world. That’s why I feel like that’s especially important.

Aviva: Right. I think you and I share that, because I work with customers who come from Asia, come from Europe, come from US, all different parts of US. A lot of first generation Americans, a lot of longtime American families, so everyone is coming at this world with their own perspective and so helping folks understand themselves and the value that they bring to the table, and we haven’t talked about this yet, but one of my businesses is college application coaching. So, a lot of what I do with that is very similar to my diversity work, in that I help people really identify what are their strengths and values, and how would those best match with the universities that they’re targeting?

Sonia: Got it.

Aviva: I mean, what universities would be relevant and helpful to target? What universities would enable them to achieve that sense of belonging and which ones would just be good names to have?

Sonia: Got it, got it.

Aviva: A lot of that is my helping other people to understand what diversity, if you will, they’re bringing to the table, because we are all different, but on paper, we can really look the same if we don’t really understand ourselves and the value that we have.

Sonia:  For sure. Now, you mentioned that the students who take this course that you lead at Penn, a lot of them are managers or working on their master’s degree. What is the specific problem that you solve for them? Are they taking this course as like, “Okay, this is part of the curriculum, I’ve got to check the box,” or is it more of, “We know we need this to become better managers and better leaders within our organization?”

Aviva: That’s so interesting. I’m really glad you asked that, and I think for every person it’s probably different. I remember some of the people saying, who came to our course, “I want to get into this work and that’s why I’m taking this course” and other people said, “I’ve been involved in this work” or, “I’m a people of color, so I’m always called on to be part of this work, and I’m feeling burnt out, and I don’t like that this problem is just a problem and I can’t do anything to solve it, so I’m looking for inspiration and a community.”

It really has depended on the participant, what they’re looking for, but our class isn’t required, so if you are taking it, you have a specific interest in diversity. Actually, I was very happily surprised that it wasn’t just organizational dynamics students who were taking our course last year. It was students from the school of social work, from the school of education, from Wharton, who were interested in this topic.

I know that it’s compelling and it affects all of us, and it affects our ability to do things well, and to feel that sense of belonging. I think that’s what we all want to feel in whatever we do. We want to feel like we’re in the right place at the right time. We want to feel like our skills are being used well. No matter our background, that’s what we hope that everyone could achieve wherever they are.

Sonia: For sure. Now, you mentioned that a big part of diversity training, and actually creating a transformation in the people who are going through this, so that they actually can create that environment where people feel like they belong, is getting uncomfortable. That requires tearing down probably some unconscious biases that exist. Can you just talk a little bit about unconscious bias, what that is, how it plays out, and how you even start to overcome it?

Aviva: Yeah. That’s such a good question. I think the first step is awareness of any problem. You have to know there’s a problem in order to fix it. That’s where I’d say the first step is the Implicit Bias Test. I feel like any team that’s very serious about doing this work should have their teams take the test. Now, you shouldn’t make it mandatory for people to share the results, because they are very, very uncomfortable sometimes. You’re like, “Wait, what? That’s what I said? That’s the way I feel?” Then you start feeling like, “Well, what would that really mean in reality?”

I know that for me, I’ll share one of mine, and it’s uncomfortable for me to share, but I’m going to share. I’m Jewish, so I realized through taking this test that I’m very biased towards people of my own group, and I think that’s a very evolutionary, because we had to stick together to avoid conflict and problems through all these places. I’m like, “No, on paper, I wanted to say that I have no preference for any one group,” but the reality was like, “Okay, yes, I got that result.” And it makes sense to me in context, so for me on a practical level, what that means, is that I just need to make sure I’m taking into account other perspectives that may not jive with necessarily my cultural context, and perspective that I have, some different values like values around education and values around hard work, and maybe other people have different values or different perspective on those values.

It doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be unheard or understood, but maybe I just have to listen a little bit more and be curious, and interested in what they’re saying. I’d say number one is know what you have to work on, and then number two, be curious, and listen to other people. Because you can learn so much and really shape your own perspective, and expand your perspective by listening to other people. Some of the best companies incorporate active solicitation of input in making decisions. Like, Google always has a lot of great innovations going on, but they have their own system for people to submit their input on things, and then their leaders take that into account and implement it.

I would say number one, reflection. Number two would be listening and collecting input, and then number three would be actually listening and acting on the input that would be relevant to the situation, whatever that is.

Sonia: Right. Yeah, I think like you said, the important part of addressing that implicit bias is first acknowledging that it’s possible that you can even have it. What that means, ’cause I think like you said, most people probably think, “No. I don’t have any of these types of biases,” but yeah, I think like you said, we’d all be surprised. Then, once we have that information, we can move forward to try and make sure that we do better.

Aviva: Exactly. But I think the big challenge to actually implementing this is that a lot of workplaces are not psychologically safe spaces, and that’s where the problems come in to even get to this place where we feel this inclusion and then even deeper, this sense of belonging. A lot of workplaces aren’t hospitable to people bringing their whole selves at work. A lot of workplaces are going to just work their workers really hard, according to their gender, and they don’t really care about what you’re bringing to the table on a deeper level.

That’s the challenge I think to doing good work in this space is how do you overcome that psychological safety barrier, and a lot of that I think starts at the top. I know one of your questions to me is like, “Has any organization gotten it right?” I think that some organizations are working towards that, but I think it’s a continuous learning process. You’re never going to be done with this work because there’s always going to be new people and new problems to deal with, and they’re going to bring up some of these biases. The biases that we have aren’t going to go away, but we have to reflect on them and address them in a situationally appropriate manner.

Sonia: What can leaders do? They might not necessarily be able to impact their entire organization on one fell swoop, but what they can do within their sphere of influence on their team to create that sense of belonging to try to expose those biases where necessary, so the team can have that psychological safe space? How do leaders create that psychological safe space, so that their team can function at a higher level?

Aviva: Well, one process that we have used with my work at Wharton, where I do some high performance teams facilitation, is we act as observers of the team. We will ask questions that reflect dynamics that we saw during the team, and ask them to comment on that, did they see that? That can help to alert people to blind spots, but even if you don’t have a facilitator on your team, I think … Well, what our goal at Wharton has been is to help people become their own observers. What people need to do is to become their own observers, and realize that having a good team, part of the job is seeing how people interact and what the meaning of that is.

You might not have the right meaning when you first see it, but being curious, listening, trying to understand what’s going on, that can help to create a safe space. I think just on a practical level, just asking people, “How are you doing? How are you feeling?” And actually caring about the answer is just a small common sense way I think to create that psychological safety.

Sonia: Got it. Now, what strategies do you recommend leaders employ to actually extract the value that having a diverse team brings to make it a high performing diverse team? Like you said, you want to be able to have your team perform better, and diversity will do that if you leverage it. How should people go about making sure that they do that?

Aviva: I think it really depends on what kind of diversity exists within the organization. Some organizations, it depends on what country you’re in, right, too? You might have a completely racially homogenous organization, but it might be very diverse in terms of cognitive diversity. You might have some introverts and some extroverts, or you might have some tech folks or some HR folks, or something like that.

What I would say, though, is that leaders should recognize that everyone has their own style of giving input and soliciting input. One practice that Twitter does, that other organizations may find helpful is that they don’t have a formal presentation meeting, so there’s not going to be a meeting where someone’s in there, clicking the slidedeck, while everybody sits and listens. It’s an active space for input, and there are multiple ways to give input.

You can give input in writing, you can give input out loud, but sending people the presentation, the agendas in advance, gives people a chance to reflect on what they actually want to bring to the meeting instead of just calling everyone to a space and talking at them.

Sonia: Got it.

Aviva: I think the key to leveraging diversity is recognizing people’s humanity and setting up the conditions for people to fail, people to come to work with their personality, with their values, and then obviously whatever the cultural context is, that’s going to inform how that’s rolled out.

Sonia: Got it. What type of resistance have you encountered as it relates to diversity and inclusion and belonging for organizations? Because as much as we would like to believe that everybody’s onboard, I know they’re not. What’s the type of resistance that you get, and what do you get when you encounter it?

Aviva: Well, I think that unless you’re talking about it, you’re inadvertently resistant to it, right? But it’s hard to address because it’s kind of a quiet resistance. Like, “We’re a Fortune 500 company or we’re a Fortune 50 company, so we’re named the best workplace by XYZ,” whatever, “And so we don’t have those problems,” right? I think it’s how do you get people out of that stage of denial. I think that’s such a great question, and I wish I had the answer. I’m sure if somebody did, it would happen, right?

I think the key that some great organizations have measured, a lot of organizations have taken, is having diversity as part of the C-Suite, that there’s like a Chief Diversity Officer, and it’s reporting directly up to the CEO, as opposed to an HR function or making it one person’s charge to do this. It really has to be a top-down and a ground-up kind of effort.

Sonia: For sure, for sure. All right. Well, what else have you been working on? You’ve done so much great work. What can we expect to see from you in the future? Do you have any other cool things that people should know about if they want to check you out further?

Aviva: Oh thanks. Yes, well we haven’t talked about … I have a column in Forbes, so as I mentioned, I have a business helping students apply to college, and I write about, related to that, I write about issues affecting millennials in higher education. If people are interested in that, they can check out my Forbes column. And I’m writing a book on, it’s kind of like a memoir of many people on their college acceptance, and their college experience, and how that impacted them, and what leadership lessons they gained, that were rooted in that college process.

Because I think this, as in the college application process, the college experience, is such a transformative and critical time for so many people. Whether it’s when they went through the experience, or a reflection they have afterwards, it’s really a critical piece of a lot of people’s life, and I know it was a critical piece of my life. So, I think I’m just really excited to explore this issue, because this was such a transformative experience for me. I don’t want to say who they are yet, because the interviews aren’t yet done, but we’re going to have some amazing interviewees lined up.

I can share those with you offline just to tell you, and I have a major publisher who would like to work with me. So, look out for that book. It should be out next year, and right now, just in the process of interviewing, so if you know people who have gone to top colleges and who are doing great things in the world and making a public impact, I’d love to hear from you.

Sonia: For sure, and I’ll have all of your information in the show notes so people can find you easily. Excited for your book to come out and-

Aviva: Thank you.

Sonia: … definitely want to read more of your work over on Forbes. This has been a lot of fun. Any parting words on wisdom for business leaders who want to build high performing diverse teams, that are able to deliver remarkable experiences for their customers?

Aviva: Thank you. I think the number one thing I could say is the skills of listening cannot be underestimated, and if you just pause and listen to employees, you’ll get the answer. I don’t think it has to be on any one person to drive this, but it has to be a collective effort in order to succeed. Listening is an easy thing to do and it’s also a difficult thing to do. That would be my number one piece of advice.

Sonia: Got it. It’s such an important one, as well. You’ve got two ears, right?

Aviva:  Yes, exactly.

Sonia: Aviva, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences and your wisdom with us. It’s been very insightful.

Aviva: Yes, great. Thank you so much, Sonia. It’s been a lot of fun.

• Harvard IAT Implicit Bias Test
• Coursera Course – Culture-Driven Team Building Specialization
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