Behavioral Science, Marketing, and Print Strategies with Gee Ranasinha

In this episode of Printing's Alive, Gee Ranasinha from Kexino explores the intersection of behavioral science and marketing, highlighting the role of emotions and being remarkable in consumer behavior. The discussion covers print's impact in marketing, Super Bowl ad insights, recruitment challenges, and senior-level distrust in marketing. Gee and Warren discuss Hatteras' strategies, industry challenges, and the importance of customer experience, modern equipment, and educating digital-native buyers. They also touch on strategic marketing, sales systems, and proactive action in the print industry, concluding with reflections and advice for print business owners.

Episode Transcript

(00:08):
Hey, everybody.
Welcome back to another episode of PrintingsAlive.
Exciting podcast where we will talk abouteverything print.
Today, we have a special guest.
We have Gee Ranissina of Kexino.
Gee sounds like a fascinating guest.
He's the founder and CEO of Kexino, a marketingagency that helps small medium sized businesses

(00:31):
with creative effective branding strategies.
With over twenty five years experience workingwith brands like IKEA, Marvel, Time Magazine,
he's got a wealth of knowledge to share.
And, oh, on top of that, he's a visitingprofessor in France teaching MBA students about
marketing and behavioral economics.

(00:51):
Pretty cool stuff.
Right?
Right.
Hey, g.
How you doing?
I'm doing well, Warren.
Thanks for inviting me.
Delighted to be invited.
Well, I have to invite you.
You're a good guest.
There you go.
Yeah.
And, you know, you you you speak of a lot ofthings that are really interesting, and I wanna
just you know what?
Actually, tell us a little bit about you beforeI get into this.

(01:14):
Well, you've done a pretty good job.
And you are a small business marketing,branding, media production, and behavioral
science agency.
We're 17 years old.
In that time, we've worked with around 400start ups and small businesses to increase help
them increase their awareness, reputation,trust, but most importantly, sales, because

(01:37):
sales is the name of the game.
Right?
You know, if it doesn't move the needle, it'snot marketing.
It's fluff.
Right?
Well, without sales, there's no company, and itdoesn't matter what
you And the thing is there's too many peoplewithin marketing who get on their high horse
and think they're above sales.
Right?
But it's every single person's job within thecompany to position and be an advocate for the

(02:03):
organization from a sales perspective.
Right?
Marketing is selling.
And if you're in marketing and you have aproblem with that, you should get out of
marketing because that's the whole point of it.
Because it's sales is was what pays yoursalary.
It pays all our salary.
Right?
I agree.
And and I think I think in the on the marketingside, it really is the whole company because if

(02:26):
the whole company isn't doing what they'redoing, the marketing person doesn't have a job.
Well, not just that.
You know, marketing's the responsibility ofmarketing isn't just the marketing manager or
the marketing director.
The responsibility of marketing is across theentire organization.
Anybody who faces a customer, either face toface or virtually, is directly or indirectly

(02:54):
creating a perception in the mind of thatcustomer.
So they are marketing.
Love it.
K.
I wanna jump right into something that I don'treally hear a lot of people talking about in in
the world of print, and, you know, that is youstudy behavioral science.
Right?

(03:15):
What is behavioral science for people who haveonly heard the word but don't really know what
it is?
Okay.
Behavioral science or behavioral economics oryou know, it's it's just really a rebranded
word of psychology.
It's it's customer psychology.
In in the old days, marketers who were any goodwere were good because they understood their

(03:43):
customer.
They understood the buying drivers, the leversthat they needed to pull in order to influence
a buying decision, which is primarily emotionalrather than rational.
What's happened over the years is we've lostsight of that, and we've tried to make

(04:05):
marketing into some kind of engineering,financial economic model where one plus one
always equals two and we can predict the sameresult regardless of the context or the frame

(04:28):
of mind that the customer is in at the point ofbuying, which is clearly total and utter
rubbish because you think of your ownexperience when you're purchasing something,
there are a lot of influences which areanything but logical, anything but rational,

(04:49):
but they do influence the way that you buythings.
The problem is that many of these influencesare hard to measure.
Some of them are pretty much impossible tomeasure.
So since businesses are looking to create anefficiency driven model where we can run

(05:10):
everything by the numbers, variables whichcan't be easily quantified or exchanged between
people are dismissed.
So what happens is we have a logical driven,rational driven approach by numbers, which is

(05:33):
less effective, but is looked at by seniormembers of the organization as being valid
because it is logical and pragmatic and, youknow, engineering in its output, and Newtonian

(05:54):
physics in its output.
One plus one is always two.
The problem is we're dealing with human beings,and human beings are not logical, rational
entities.
Right?
So you you you you know, if if you were if youwere looking at a part of the business,
supposing you were looking at manufacturing oryou're looking at r and d, we're looking at

(06:15):
finance or whatever.
Okay?
Each part of that system is a known quantityand is, excuse me, and is using units of
measurement which are interchangeable.
We all know what those measurements are.
Like, if you're talking about a manufacturing,for instance, right, a kilogram is always a

(06:37):
kilogram.
Right?
Regardless of whether you're talking aboutprint or you're talking about engineering or
you're talking about physics or technologyweight is weight.
Right?
It's always.
Right?
Temperature, you know, a hundred degreesCelsius is always a hundred degrees Celsius.
Right?
All of these things are are known and e eeasily, communicable variables.

(07:04):
When we get into marketing, some of thevariables that we're talking about are not
easily communicable and are difficult tomeasure.
Right?
For example, buyers can be can be influenced,their purchase can be influenced by things like

(07:26):
fear, regret, anger.
Right?
I mean, the entire, insurance industry ispowered by fear.
Right?
Death.
Death and misery.
The these are very strong emotional driverswhich influence a buying decision.

(07:52):
So by relying totally upon rational pragmatismin our methodology for marketing, which follows
through into the customer facing communicationsof marketing, we get to the point where we have
today where we're spending more and more.

(08:13):
We've got all of this new technology.
Right?
We've got customer segmentations, retargetingtags, you know, cookies, AI, all of this stuff,
yet the effectiveness of marketing is fallingoff a cliff.
So why is that?
Because what we're producing is utter crap andis instantly forgettable.

(08:38):
The most important part of marketing, marketingat the end of the day, if you distill it down,
what all we can do as marketers is form memorystructures in the brain of a potential buyer so
that when they are in market to buy whatever weare selling, we are one of the possible options

(09:04):
that they will consider.
That's all we can do.
Right?
But what we're producing is generic vanillaspam.
Right?
You know, you you you and you've seen it ahundred times before.
You you take you take two pieces of marketingoutput, whatever it means, brochures or ad or

(09:28):
whatever, okay, from two different companies,two different businesses in the same category.
And if you covered up the logos of thosecompanies, the communication is almost
interchangeable.
Right?
They're all saying the same thing, which is avery dangerous place to be.

(09:49):
Right?
Everybody wants to walk in the middle of theroad, but walking in the middle of the road is
where you get squished.
Right?
Walk on the left or you walk on the right.
And everybody's trying to be this generic,inoffensive, entity hoping that the prospect
will join the dots themselves, which they neverwill, right, because they don't care.

(10:15):
Right?
Or if the object of the exercise is to beremembered at the point of being considered to
purchase, then where we're going wrong is we'renot being remarkable.
And by remarkable, I don't mean remarkable, Imean remarked upon to the point where we are

(10:37):
standing out.
Let me give an example.
K?
Super Bowl every year.
Okay?
We have you usually the day after the SuperBowl, if you're in anything to do with media,
there will be a hundred and one blog articlesand YouTube videos about the best you about the

(11:00):
best Super Bowl ads.
Sorry.
Which, by the way, a few years ago, theystarted releasing them all before the Super
Bowl.
There was no wait.
Sure.
Because they needed to warm up the audience.
Right?
So the the one the the best Super Bowl ads ofwhatever year, okay, are the ones which are a

(11:25):
little bit out there.
Right?
There is some dimension which the customer seesas having merit, which is different compared to
the other ones in their category.
Okay?
It may be a gecko when you're talking aboutinsurance.

(11:46):
Okay?
Or, you know, they they the the whatever it maybe.
They may but they all, you know, frogs
I always like I always like the Doritocommercials.
Right.
There's there's something either funny,ludicrous, makes you makes you laugh, makes you

(12:07):
happy, makes you angry, or makes you but itinvokes an emotional reaction.
And that's the secret.
That's the secret sauce that we've missed.
It's the stuff we used to know.
Right?
Marketers, advertisers in in the day used toknow that to form strong memory structures
involves emotion.

(12:29):
You think about it.
How many times do you you're driving along inyour car and you're listening to the radio,
okay, and a song comes on the radio, and you'reinstantly transported back to a time and place,
and you're surrounded by a certain group ofpeople, and, you know, you you can almost touch

(12:50):
the environment, right?
It's a very strong memory, Okay?
Now that memory is not created by bulletpoints.
That memory is created by a strong emotion,usually a happy emotion in those sorts of
cases, which it comes is is comes thosememories come flooding back when you hear that

(13:13):
song, especially if you've been under the songfor ages.
Another one is smell.
You know?
You hit you hit the
smell and the same thing.
It just conjures up all of these memories foryou.
Right?
What what are we doing in marketing?
We're we're doing that we're nothing.
We're we're we're writing a bunch of bulletpoints and expecting the customer to do the

(13:34):
work.
Right.
So now perfect segue into print.
Okay.
Right?
Because print, we do all the stuff, printindustry.
We take care of all the marketing stuff,communications for all those other companies.
We're working with marketers.
I wanna know from a behavioral scienceperspective, and I did not study science in any

(13:57):
way, shape, or form.
I just learned how to spell the word science.
Why do why do printers do what they do or notdo what they do?
I think we know what we should do.
We hear every day what we should do.
There's a lot of companies doing what should bedone to be able to put your business out there
to be remembered.

(14:17):
I'm more interested in the ones that are doingnothing and that are wondering what's happening
and then, you know, complaining for lack ofbetter wording.
And then what happens is then they get intopanic mode and then they start lowering prices,
doing things, giving things away, and making awhole ton of other bad decisions as a chain
reaction.
Why
The thing is, in within the printing industry,in terms of printing companies, printing

(14:43):
businesses, there are a ton of printingbusinesses who know what they're doing, who are
getting it right.
That of that, there is no doubt.
Correct.
However, I would say at least 70%, maybe evenhigher, of printing companies haven't got a

(15:04):
clue what they're doing even though, as youjust man as you just mentioned, they are
exposed to some of the best marketing output interms of what their customers are producing,
you'd think that it would be an easier way toup their game.

(15:28):
Right?
The problem with printing companies is notspecific to printing companies.
It's a problem with many companies within manyindustries, and it's twofold.
From one side, we're recruiting people who callthemselves marketers, who are not marketers,

(15:57):
and we are recruiting them based upon what wethink we want them to do as marketers.
But we are not marketers ourselves.
Okay?
The thing is, if we're recruiting an accountantor a CFO, okay, we don't know about balance

(16:21):
sheets and p and l's and EBITDARs and, forecastprojections and this sort of thing.
We we don't know how that how to actually
do But we know they do.
But we're paying them for their experience andexpertise to do it.
Okay?
We think marketing is a certain is a salesupport role because what we actually see, the

(16:47):
one tenth that's above the waterline of thaticeberg, is tactical output.
You know, brochures and events and stress ballsand tote bags and other crap.
This is a tiny percentage of a tiny percentageof what marketing is actually about.
So we're recruiting the wrong type of person,number one, because we think marketing's

(17:13):
promotion.
When marketing is a hell of a lot, thenpromotion is part of marketing.
Sure.
Yes.
All promotion is marketing, but not allmarketing.
But, but promotion only is, used once you knowwho you are and what your brand is.
%.
Exactly.
You need there's a ton of work you need to dobefore you get to the tactical stuff, which the

(17:38):
people who call themselves marketers who arenot haven't got a clue about doing.
And the people who are recruiting them didn'teven know this sort of stuff existed.
Right?
So that's half the problem.
Half the problem is we're bringing the wrongtype of people in to help us with our
marketing.

(17:59):
The other problem
Hold your thought for one second if you can.
And because I just something happened the otherday, and it wasn't about marketing.
It had to do with HR.
And somebody reached out to me and said, wouldyou have a few minutes for a chat?
I'd like to get your take on some HR and maybewhere we should be looking and what we should

(18:20):
be doing to hire someone because our HRdepartment is using this, this, and this.
And my and my reaction was, are you kidding me?
You're wait a second.
You're calling me to ask me what I think youshould be doing because what you're doing
isn't, you know, right.

(18:41):
I said to him, and I basically said, I thinkyou need to fire your HR department.
And are you prepared to pay me?
Because why are you calling me?
You have a department.
And, you know, like marketing, there's so muchof left and right, doesn't know, doesn't agree,
and oh, what what it's like back to marketing.

(19:03):
So what do you do?
Because you gotta start fixing these things.
You have the wrong people with the wrongmindset leading the the troops.
I I think there is at the very heart of it, andI I sort of alluded to it earlier on, At at
board level, at senior management level, Ithink there is an inherent distrust in

(19:29):
marketing.
Okay?
There was a Harvard Business Review article afew years ago, and I can't remember the exact
percentages, so you forgive me if I'm a littlebit a little bit off here.
Age.
It was it yeah.
Well, you know what to do.
So age is you know, memory is the second thingto go.

(19:50):
Right?
What's the first?
I can't remember.
Better you don't.
Right.
No.
So, they did a survey with, CEOs of very ofcompanies of various sizes, and more than 70%

(20:11):
of them were unhappy with the performance oftheir CMO.
Interesting.
While when they asked the same question abouthow these CEOs felt of their CIO or their CFO,
the amount of CEOs who were unhappy with theperformance was less than 12%.

(20:33):
So there's a huge gap in between.
And the reasons are numerous, but one of thebiggest reasons, I think, is us as marketers.
Because when we're talking to seniormanagement, c suite level people, We try to

(21:02):
bamboozle.
We try to use all of these all of this jargonthat we use within of ourselves.
Right?
So we'll talk about salience and ESOV andmental availability and all of this stuff,
which
I have no idea what
you're talking about.
You know, econ economics engineering typepeople haven't got a clue.

(21:24):
And no no nor would they.
Right?
Why would unless they're marketers, there's noreason why they would do.
Okay?
Marketers need to speak the language ofbusiness, which is the language of finance, But
we don't speak board, which is why we'relaughed out of the boardroom half the time

(21:46):
because we're looked upon as some you know,we'll start talking about, oh, yeah.
Well, you know, we got some, you know, we gotloads of likes and tons of ebook downloads,
and, page views have have gone off off thescale.
And everybody says, well, great.
That's wonderful.
Congratulations.
But what does that mean?

(22:07):
Right?
What can I use to attribute this to sales?
What marketing effort or efforts or series ofefforts can be attributed to company revenue
compared to, and that's the important thing,doing nothing.

(22:29):
Would we have got that uptick anyway forwhatever other reason?
And markets don't do that.
They don't do that bit.
Right?
There needs to be a compared to element in allof this, which marketers conveniently forget
about.

(22:52):
So as a result and and the other thing ismarketers use terminology finance terminology
in marketing, which is not the way that financepeople they're ROI.
You you you talk about ROI to a finance personas a marketer, it'll laugh you out of the
boardroom.
It's ridiculous.
Right?
It's it's it's a it's a totally differentargument.

(23:13):
So it it debases our our professionalism andour reason to be sitting at that board room
table.
So perfect example that just came to mind iswhen I think about Shark Tank, that show in the
the show in The US where you have, fivedifferent entrepreneurs on there that are very

(23:36):
successful in business, all come from differentbusinesses, and then you have people coming on
to present what they do.
And the way in which they present, you know,it's a bit of marketing, but what the people
sitting on the couch wanna know is they wantthe real numbers.
They wanna know how you're getting there.
They wanna know what you're doing to get there.

(23:57):
Right?
And how you're gonna stay there as opposed tothe fluff and the excitement, because the fluff
and the excitement wears off quickly.
Right?
It's,
Like like I said right at the beginning, unlessthere is a straight line that we can draw
between what we're doing in marketing and theeffect on the bottom line of the business, then

(24:20):
we have no reason to be there because we don'tknow what we're doing.
We don't know what success looks like becausewe're measuring it in this little bubble, and
we're saying, okay.
Yeah.
We got we got 2,000 likes this week compared to1,500 likes last week.
That means we're growing.
Well, no.
What do the sales look like?

(24:41):
Well, I I was getting
other side on the other side, there is inertia.
Okay?
What we do in marketing today, we don't see theresults instantly.
Okay?
It may take months or even longer before we seeresults.
And equally, the reason why we're in the statethat we're in today is a result of marketing

(25:07):
that we've done accumulated over time.
Or lack of.
Or lack of.
Either, plus positive or negative.
Okay?
So the the the point is that marketers,especially if they're in a senior position, are
being tasked to to turn around the fortunes ofthe business generally within a quarter or two

(25:33):
because businesses are working on a quarterlybased reporting structure where they're coming
back to shareholders or the board or both.
And since there is this this latency betweencause and effect, it's no wonder that the

(25:54):
average tenure for a senior marketing executivein corporate America is fourteen months.
Interesting.
And why CEOs are so unhappy with their CMOs.
Interesting.
So let's let's look now.
Take a printing company, and not not a big onebecause there are like we said before, the good

(26:16):
the good companies, and I'll mention one namethat comes to mind because, really, I think
they do a smashing job, and I like I met allthe people.
They're great.
But, like, a company like Hatteras, Bill Doer,they've got little videos going out.
They've got different people within the companytalking, so it's giving you that team feeling.
But more importantly, they come out withsolutions that actually work.

(26:41):
They come out with, you know, processes andways to get things done for the client, and
that's why their clients keep coming back.
That's why their clients keep trying them whenthey bring in new services, because they've
they they market themselves, and the way theymarket themselves, they live up to it.
And I believe that they were living up to itbefore they started marketing themselves.

(27:03):
So it was really, a way to go.
But with other companies, what do you thinkother companies, if they're listening, what
should they be thinking about marketing, andwhat should they be thinking about in terms of
starting off, marketing their company?

(27:24):
I I could tell you that when, I started withmine, I didn't really know what I was doing in
the beginning.
I I just happened to fall into it and get luckybecause we started off with a a a video that
everybody saw that went crazy and, you know, myhead grew a little big at the beginning, and
then it got deflated, because there was nomoney coming from it, but there was a lot of

(27:45):
fame coming from it.
And then after I learned to take that video andtie it into what we were doing, the excitement,
the fun, good company, company you know, bringall the people around.
Then we were, then I thought about, you know,having certifications, sustainability started.
So I went out and had a certified for all thecertifications and then Pantone.

(28:09):
Part of my thinking was this, I'm I I you know,I learned branding or what the brand should be,
but I started thinking, again, no education.
It just came to me on my own.
Oh my god.
I wanna do all these certifications for tworeasons.
One, I wanna put it out there that we'resustainable or that we believe in it.
And then the other thing I did with it was I itwas internal marketing.

(28:30):
Instead of asking your people to work harder,instead of always setting KPIs with numbers
that make people nervous about their jobs, Italked about, folks, what we're doing here is
seen on the outside.
How we're seen on the inside is how we'll be,you know, received on the outside.
So we're doing these certifications.
We gotta step it up.

(28:51):
We should have high marks.
We should have everyone talking about us.
So I kinda gave, or tried to give everybody onthe inside, a purpose to take ownership, to be
proud of what we were doing.
Right?
And then when you go outside with it and youmatch it together, you've got everybody rolling
down the same page.
And that came about though by practice and alittle bit of luck.

(29:13):
And then I did find out that after years ofbeing continuous, you start to hear things
about your company, that we were authentic,that we were fun, that people would come and,
they enjoyed their visits because we tried tomake the visits enjoyable.
And I know a bunch of companies like I'vementioned, Hatteras and others that do that,

(29:33):
but for the most part, I don't see that.
I see a lot of frustration in companies, andand I see a lot of people selling marketing to
companies, but I don't always necessarily agreewith the right way to go about it.
What do you recommend people do to start thatdon't know?
There there there's there's a number ofproblems here.

(29:54):
First firstly, the mediocre vanilla genericmarketing that's being produced by the vast
majority of printing companies is as a resultof not inaction, not knowing not not knowing
what to do, it's because of fear, fear of doingthe wrong thing.

(30:21):
But if you are truly authentic as anorganization within and without, like you were
in your organization I mean, you're okay.
Right?
Now that video, it's nearly twenty years oldnow.
Right?
Shit.
It was
Just shy
of 15 of time.
Fifteen years, maybe more, ahead of its time.

(30:44):
Right?
Why haven't we seen that kind of virality videoin the print industry ever since?
There hasn't been anything.
Okay?
Because you can't re you can't recreate me.
No.
I'm just saying.
There's a there's a You don't wanna recreateme.
Yeah.
There's only one, Warren, and thank goodnessthere is.
Only one that is.

(31:04):
The the point is that most printers are stillliving in the days when all they had to do was
put an open sign on the door and people wouldwalk in.
So marketing has never been a systemic integralpart of the value creation change for their

(31:27):
chain for their company.
So this is all alien to them.
Not all.
Not all of them.
Of course not.
But what the what the issue is, I think, isthat they know they need to be differentiated,
but what they're doing is they're coming upwith this generic communication that while the

(31:51):
successful printing companies no.
Again, I have to make sweeping generalizations.
Are focusing around problems, end userproblems, their customer problems, and how
those how their company or maybe not even theircompany addresses those problems.

(32:12):
They're not talking about I mean, I still havetoday large printing companies whose Salesforce
want a kit list to be able to wave under thenose of their prospects.
They want to say, here.
Look.
Well, look.
We've got the the latest Okeydokey twothousand, machine, and it does this and it does

(32:36):
that, and it's got this many units, and it'sgot this all these finishing, and we've got
this kind of all of this all this nonsense, andthey're still talking.
You know, it's it's like if you talk to an rand d person about a product and you ask them
what the product does, they'll give you all ofthese mathematical formulas and everything else
about how the thing works.

(32:57):
But nobody, with the, you know, greatestrespect, nobody apart from these guys gives us
stuff.
I don't care about how it works.
I care about what it does for me, and that'snot what we're talking about.
We're not talking about that.
We're talking about number of colors, finishingoptions, binding options, all very chapter and

(33:21):
verse, very, pragmatic, very logical, veryrational.
But we're not talking about what motivates thecustomers of our customers to buy, and that is
here.
This is emotion.
So I I'm because I'm trying to contain myself.
So this there's there's something that makes methat makes me crazier than crazy in the world

(33:46):
of print.
And, for every print owner out there, pleaselisten.
For every salesperson, who works for a companyfor what I'm about to say, you need to listen
because you need to go to management.
Stop with your equipment on your websites.
I've been scanning websites lately, and and I'mangry.

(34:07):
I'm actually I'm really angry and I'mfrustrated because I'm scanning websites, and
I'm seeing equipment.
Never mind seeing brand new state of the artequipment.
I'm seeing equipment with powder, oldequipment, old presses.
I'm looking what the companies are writing andall they're talking about is me, me, me, me,
me, and not one person, well, on some of thesites talks about the solution for the

(34:33):
customer, right?
Salespeople, I I just gotta go off on thisbecause I I'm freaking out.
I go on all kinds of people's LinkedIn webpages, salespeople.
First of all, why is your contact informationnot in there?
If I'm looking for you and I'm hawk to trot andthere's no email or phone number, guess what?

(34:53):
You are done and I am not coming back because Idon't have the attention span for that.
And if you're gonna have an email, put yourcompany email, not your Gmail because then I
think you're looking for a job and I don'twanna work with you either.
Like, really makes me nuts.
Nuts nuts nuts.
And then I'm looking for a salesman person, andI I go to the about, and the about is oh my

(35:18):
god.
It's it's just not even about anything.
I don't know where they come up with that.
So folks, go back.
Look at those little things.
Change it up.
Make me wanna talk to you.
Give me some tidbit about you.
Give me a little bit about how you operate, andI don't care about your degree, and I don't
care about where you work.
Talk to me one on one.

(35:38):
Sorry.
We used to have to the company LinkedIn pages,but that's a big bad start for everybody.
We used to have a we used to have a guy in ourteam years ago at the agency who had a had a
perfect aphorism that we used to use throughoutthe company and used to use it too many times.
It became a joke, actually.
And what he used to say is, nobody cares howgood you used to be.

(36:04):
I Tell me about it.
Nobody cares.
Nobody cares.
So, you know, we've, we've been in business fortwenty five years.
Okay.
Great.
So does does that mean that you're half as goodas somebody who's been in business for fifty
years?
What does it mean?
What's it what's what's that actually mean?
Right?
We've got this amount of employees.

(36:25):
We've got five offices.
What what what does that mean?
How does that help me?
I don't care.
Right?
Can you deliver my job to spec by this timenext Friday?
Yes or no?
That's all I care about.
And if on top of that, you can give me youropinion, advice, recommendations about how to

(36:46):
improve the the effectiveness of what I'mtrying to do, then that's that's your value
add.
I'm gonna come back to you as opposed to goingto somebody else down the road.
But we don't start with that.
We start with a position of looking trying tolook like everybody else.

(37:07):
Yes.
We have the same equipment as the person downthe road.
You know, Feature based differentiation isgone.
You can't you can't win anymore by selling onfeatures, any features, because you have such a
small window of opportunity before everybodyelse catches up and they do the same thing.
Well well well, by the way, today in in if yougo back years ago, yes, different equipment had

(37:34):
different more benefits than others.
But today, I will say this.
Okay?
All the digital presses out there, they're allgood.
They all do great CMYK or they would not be onthe show floor to begin with.
Then you have some that are quicker then youhave some that are quicker, some that add a
little bit more color gamut, and there's acustomer base for that, really, but but the

(37:58):
equipment is good, and most customers todaydon't really give a rat's ass what you're
printing on, don't understand what you'reprinting on, and don't even care what you're
printing on.
The same way when it comes to paper, themajority of customers today don't even spec you
a brand.
In the old days, it was always I want sappy, Iwant flow.

(38:19):
Right?
I want something high end.
I can go back to to Plainfield days of offset.
Today it's I wanna coat it, I want an uncoated,I wanna bond, right?
Unless you're dealing with an agency, adesigner, unless there's a real reason for a
particular look because they're trying toappeal to different people in different markets
that they know, we're not get the averageprinter doesn't get requests by name.

(38:43):
And I I think you're absolutely right.
You know, on so many fronts, the wall's beenwon.
Okay?
We don't have huge variations in color outputanymore.
Right?
Even in offset, it doesn't happen anymore.
Okay?
Technology, engineering tolerances, software,all of these things have minimized that that

(39:09):
variation tolerance.
Plus, we've got print buyers who areexperienced around a different set of values,
let's say.
They're coming at it from an RGB mentalitybecause their first point of marketing output

(39:30):
is digital.
Now that doesn't mean print doesn't have apoint because that's the reason why they're in
your print shop.
But we're not talking the language of thesedigital natives.
Right?
We're throwing up blocks, obstacles, creatingfriction by saying, oh, no.
If you want to do that kind of mailer in print,then I'm going to need to have the Excel sheet

(39:56):
three days in advance so that I can put it inmy software and do the parsing and do no.
I'm sorry.
Those sorts of things that that that's aninternal problem of your systems or lack of.
Right?
Because as as far as these digital first, printbuyers are concerned, they're expecting the

(40:18):
ease of interaction with your organization asthey do with anything that they deal with in
the digital world.
And we're not doing that.
We're throwing up these blocks for no reason.
Oh, but you don't understand because, you know,the the finishing is gonna add at least another

(40:38):
day and a half.
Why?
Hang on.
Why why should it?
I don't understand.
To talk they they don't they don't wannaunderstand.
They don't need to understand.
So we we we we need we need to stop stoptalking about the restrictions of a

(41:00):
mechanically driven system as being an inidiosyncratic part of that process where the
digital natives need to adapt to because we'rethe ones who need to adapt, not them.
Listen.
Remember remember when when when all the dig inthe old days, it was you would get a file and

(41:23):
you were doing Ruby lists and you were cuttingout stuff and color keys and chromolyns and all
of that, and then the PDF started and peoplejust thought it was anything.
And then you were getting publisher files toprint out that you couldn't print out.
Today, it's really easy and easier, and there'sall this software.
You can't even you can't talk to your customerthe same way that we used to.

(41:47):
You can't beat them up, so to speak, the sameway.
Right?
It's more you have to take it in and, you know,massage it and do some of the stuff yourself
that you know to correct it and make it right.
Because some people I see, they stand there,well, if you don't give it to us, we can't do
it.
Well, if you okay, I'll go to the other guy.
We're not so adaptable.

(42:08):
We might think we are, but we're not soadaptable in dealing with them and
understanding where they are.
I still hear a lot of bitching.
There's always gonna be bitching aboutcustomers because I don't think in any industry
anybody likes their customers.
I mean, when they're getting good orders, theyare.
But in the in the process, there's a lot ofwork to do.
From from what you've said, I think many peoplewho'll be listening to this will say, well,

(42:29):
hang on.
This is all eating into my margin.
Right?
If I'm gonna if I'm gonna fix stuff which I'mtheoretically not getting paid for, right,
that's on me.
And certainly, if it goes wrong, that's doublyon me.
And I totally understand that.
But that's where this customer education stuffcomes in.
Right?

(42:49):
Our job is to make our customers look good.
Right?
And if we can do that with opinion, advice, andrecommendations and say, look.
You've set this up like this.
Right?
Firstly, stop sending us damn Canva files.
Right?
You know?
It used, you know, it used to be Publisherfiles.
It used to be PowerPoint files.
Okay?
Today it's Canva files or

(43:10):
Oh, but hang on.
If you're if if you're gonna use Canva, Canvaactually has a tie in with Markzware for
preflighting to properly, you know, review andset your files up before you send them on
because even Canvas acknowledged that there's aproblem No.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
But how
No.

(43:30):
But I I'm happy to hear that.
I'm happy to hear that.
But the average Canva user
Doesn't wanna spend
be aware of that.
Right.
Wouldn't be aware of that.
So I I our like I said, our job is to make themlook better than they are.
Okay?
And if we do that, if they see that we've gottheir back, and they'll keep they'll keep

(43:53):
coming back to us.
Right?
Because as far as they're concerned, you know,any b to b relationship, what you're selling,
number one, is trust.
But secondly, what you're selling is a way foryour customer to move up the corporate ladder.
Right?
If you can help them get a promotion, they'regonna love you forever.

(44:14):
So that's what we're doing in b two b.
Well, I I also think that more people have toreflect upon their own lives on what they do,
what they like, you know, what makes themhappy.
You always go to the same restaurant.
Right?
The restaurant owner welcomes you.
He remembers your name because you've seen it.
He's seen it on the reservation some so manytimes he's talked to you.

(44:37):
You go there regularly.
Every now and again, you sit down.
He will bring you a drink that you didn't orderbecause he knows.
Right?
What does that do?
Makes you feel good.
Makes you feel like this is your restaurant.
Right?
You get you do the deals.
I think
the rest restaurant industry, there there isparallels between the restaurant and the
consumer industry because there's there's twoextremes of restaurant industry.
Right?
No.

(44:57):
No.
No.
If you pass McDonald's as a restaurant.
No.
No.
I forgot I'm not talking McDonald's becausethey
don't serve great.
But you can.
Because the, you know, the thing about whatMcDonald's is not selling you a superly highly
nutritious meal.
What a Mc McDonald's is selling you ispredictability.

(45:17):
You know that what you're getting, even in areally dodgy part of town, right, your burger
and fries and whatever you've ordered is goingto be
Consistently awful.
Pretty pretty much what you can experiencewherever you wherever you've eaten McDonald's.

(45:37):
Right?
And there are some print groups who operate onthat model.
Okay?
They're looking for stolid consistency, the theuser experience being very rational, logical,
and pragmatic.
Okay?
And that works.

(45:58):
If if if but you're you're playing the numbersgame now.
Right?
You need to have an an enough going into thatfunnel to be able to maintain the operational
costs and profit margins that you're working onon the on that business.
The other end of the restaurant argument isfine dining Michelin star type thing, right,

(46:21):
where, yes, of course, the food has to be good.
Yeah.
Okay.
No brainer.
But the majority, I would contend, of theexperience you have at the restaurant isn't the
food.
It's everything else that accompanies it.
It's the starched white napkins.

(46:43):
It's the it's the glasses and silverware, whichhave been polished within an inch of their
lives.
It's, you know, how everything is rearrangedjust so, how the whole theater
The experience, the chef coming out
of the dining halloween.
Experience.
All of that sort of stuff.
All of that stuff helps helps you tell thatnarrative in your mind when the bill comes that

(47:07):
actually, you know what?
This was worth every penny.
It's not just what you've eaten.
It's all of these other things which contributeto the expectation level you've set before
you've even walked into the place.
You know what I used to like to do at theoffice?
I used to like to get customers to come inbecause I wanted to give them a tour of the

(47:31):
facility.
Number one, I was so proud of the facility thatwe created and how it was set up and and and
and the look and the feels, but I wanted themas much as I wanted them to meet the operators,
I wanted the operators to meet them.
I wanted our customers to know who was makingtheir stuff, how it was being made, and I
wanted the makers and all the people working tomeet the customers Because when you meet when

(47:57):
you introduce them all and there's a goodfeeling, there's a feeling of pride on both
sides.
And then there's a thank you to each other, youknow, and then you go into that whole
behavioral thing and then they're there I don'thave to do anything.
I sit back now and now that pressman's met theowner and the owner's met the pressman, there's
a kind of an understanding between them.
And why is that?

(48:18):
Because now emotions got in into the game.
It's no it's no longer a transactionrelationship.
It's personal.
Exactly.
It's not hard.
No.
You know, we just we we just need to look atthe way that we ourselves experience, buying

(48:38):
decisions.
And we, you know, we we are our own customersin that in that in that respect, but we don't
listen to ourselves.
We would we'd rather just sort of throwobstacles in a way and start talking about kit
lists and you know?
Yeah.
I I I always I always say, try to remember howyou wanna be treated.

(49:01):
Try to remember what you like when you'retreated well, and then try to give it back in
the same the same experience.
And then the people you're with, give them achance to hear and to learn.
I mean, I was at a at a with a client at aprint company.
We're doing packaging, and the owner offered totake the client into the back and see the

(49:22):
place.
And the first reaction of the client was, well,I don't really have time.
And, well, there was a big kick under the tableand a stare that said, like, let's fucking go.
And, he went and it was all good.
And I said to him after, I said, like, youknow, you were disrespectful.
He wanted to show you his house.

(49:42):
He wanted to show you where he's making yourstuff.
He wanted you to know where it was.
At the same time, he wanted to know how manysteps there were that were involved in the in
the process so that the customer could have anidea.
And the customer says to me after, he goes,because, yeah, you're right.
I apologize.
I said, you always make the five minutes whenyou're asked something.

(50:04):
You never say no.
There's no reason to say no.
You know?
And I just sit there.
And to me, personally, that stuff is secondnature.
Anytime I can get someone to walk in Yeah.
But it is it is it is to you, and it is to manypeople, but it is not to a lot of others.
And I I think also what what people who arelistening need to understand is that there's no

(50:26):
one size fits all recipe that we can segueinto, you know, what works what works for your
competitor would probably not work for you, andnor should it.
Because the problem with aping what yourcompetitor does, who's obviously been doing it

(50:46):
longer than you have, is that the customers seewhat you're doing, and and they think of them
instead of thinking of you.
Right?
So you need to find your own way.
You need to be diff you need to be distinctivein the eyes of your buyers.
You need to have some kind of differentiationacross a particular measurable metric that the

(51:13):
customer sees as having value and focusing juston that.
And that's where you need to have someone whounderstands what marketing is about to help you
do that even if it's just to get you startedand for you then to hand the keys of the car
over for you to carry on.
But you either, you know, you either onboardsomebody who actually has experience,

(51:39):
expertise, education in marketing at the verystrategic level to put all of those pieces in
place, or you get help from outside for thosepeople to train whomever you've got handling
your tactical marketing on an ongoing basis andthen sort of revisit them, you know, put your
head above the parapet every three, six months,whatever else, and sort of nudge the direction

(52:05):
as as as you go.
But you have to follow one of of those paths.
The the the you're not gonna find the result onyour own because if you would if you could, you
would have done it by now.
Listen.
I'm amazed at how many print companies havebeen in business for as long as they have and,
might be doing well, making some money,family's grown, but haven't done anything to

(52:30):
brand their business or to make it stand out.
It just kind of falls into the strip mallsystem.
Had to.
They never had to.
All this time, they never had to.
They've they've got on in spite of themselves,not because of themselves.
So if I if I I will what would you say then areone, two, three, four, five things, six things?

(52:55):
What do you think, companies that haven't donethis before are maybe nervous about doing it?
What should they do, or how should they start,or what should they think of?
And what should they not be afraid of?
I I think if if they don't have the level ofmarketing expertise, strategic marketing

(53:17):
expertise within their organization, right, Ithink they should either they should either
look to a external provider from a from a smallfrom a for a short term project to get things

(53:37):
off the ground, or if they're adamant aboutdoing these things themselves, it's all of
these things start with the same at the samepoint.
You know?
For for us, a customer, onboarding processstarts the same way as pretty much any
reputable marketing agency out there.
It starts with diagnosis.

(53:58):
It starts with what what the hell is actuallygoing on.
And to find that out, it means speaking withcustomers, actually understanding what fires up
what are the triggers and what are the driversthat get buyers to buy when they buy.

(54:22):
If we can get in this in in the head of ourcustomers, we should be speaking to customers
every single week to actually understand theproblems that they're having.
What's stopping them going home at 05:30 everynight?
There's a ton of things that are in theirinbox, which is preventing them doing that.

(54:43):
Some of those things are directly attributableto the services that we can offer as printers.
Some of them are only, tangible.
Okay?
But either way, being able to actuallyunderstand what what's going on in the mind of
our customer helps us not only address theproblems that they have today, but we can best

(55:08):
position our offering for what's gonna bebothering them tomorrow.
Because a you ask a customer and say, whatshould we do?
The only thing a customer is gonna say iswhatever is blocking them today.
They don't care about tomorrow.
They just want whatever's holding them up todayto go away.

(55:30):
And tomorrow, it'll be something else.
But if we can under actually understand theroot cause of why they are where they are, we
can anticipate what tomorrow, next week, nextmonth, next year looks like and introduce
products, services, or just reframe some thingsthat we're already offering in ways which the

(55:54):
customer can better understand and sell withintheir organization or to their customers where
whereupon when they do get buy in, we're inthat consideration space when they are in
market to buy.
Yeah.
I remember it makes me I not only do I feelmaybe a little old, but or or cutting edge at

(56:17):
the same time.
We went through a whole, a whole programretransitioning who we were, and I, at the
time, went out to the NAPL, and I paid them todo a client survey and spent a lot of money,
like, in a few thousand dollars to do it andpeople would laugh, or tell me, you know,
you're a little crazy or it's a lot of money.

(56:37):
But I I always thought that spending that moneywas really good because it's not me doing the
survey.
It's not me asking a customer.
It's an outside group doing it.
And when the customer gets a call, yeah,there's a few who don't care to give the time
because they're just assholes and never doanything to better anybody.

(56:58):
But it's amazing the amount of people that dorespond to the call, and more amazing than that
is the ones that comment to you after, like,what was that?
And then when you really tell them that you'retrying to better yourself and have a better
understanding and build the right culture,they're just like smile comes to the face and
they almost wanna hug you because they'rehearing you say what they wanna say, you know,

(57:21):
that you should do or could do, but maybe don'tknow how, and that you're taking the
initiative.
I hear a very few, very few companies thatactually go out to get real feedback from
customers.
I I think and I think in the past, it you know,pricing was a barrier for for for the smaller
organizations without a doubt.

(57:42):
Pricing was a barrier to do these calls andsurveys.
Today, that that's no longer an excuse.
But, also, I think it's very something youmentioned in there, which I think is very
important, is that having a third party askingthose questions and getting that feedback
allows the customer to be more honest with themthan they would with you Because the the the

(58:07):
problem with customer surveys, the cost theanything like that where you're asking feedback
is that many customers will tell you what theywant what they think you want to hear rather
than want to insult
you in a paper.
Right.
Whereas if there's one if there's anintermediary, they're generally more open and

(58:34):
honest.
And I also think that you should you know,anything like these these feedback type
exercises shouldn't be used in isolation.
They should be used as a guide with othercustomer insights of data that you can get from
from analog means, from digital means, whateverelse, and use that to either confirm or

(58:57):
question the veracity of the data that you'regetting from other places.
You it's not you're not putting all your eggsin one basket and and expecting results because
I don't think you can do that.
And, also, I think it depends on the channelbecause customers are often more receptive or
more inclined to be more open on certainchannels than on others.

(59:23):
And since there's no one size fits all, you theonly way to get a a healthy aggregation of data
is to use the number of different channels.
And I think the best the best place or the bestthe feedback you get, the place where it's used
best is with your staff.
In sit down conversations, in nonemotionalconversations and saying, we just spent $8,000

(59:49):
to hire a firm to go out.
These are the questions.
You don't necessarily have to name the name ofthe customers to keep the everybody, you know,
no finger pointing if there's good stuff or badstuff.
And then anyone in the room who doesn't wannahear what the customer has to say shouldn't be
part of your company.
There's so many exercises that if they can't bechanged, I'm saying, but there's so many

(01:00:13):
benefits that come from so many differentexercises that help you actually clean up along
the way.
Because you can't I mean, that's a whole otherconversation, but you can't have the wrong
people on your staff either because it's likerowing up the river after.
Are you all that?
It sort of brings back the subject of that ofthat customer relationship stuff that we talked

(01:00:34):
about earlier on.
You know?
Mhmm.
If if you think if, you know, if you're a printif you're a print, print, equipment vendor, k,
why is it, more often than not that when anexisting customer is looking to buy a piece of
equipment or upgrade their existing equipment,they're more inclined to speak to the engineer

(01:01:01):
or their customer services rep than they arespeaking to a salesman.
Right?
Because they feel they're gonna get an honest,unbiased answer from a CSR, from an engineer.
Right?
Because they know if they ask a salesman,salesperson, they're just gonna say, well, yes,

(01:01:22):
of course you need to buy it.
Right?
So in which case, why is the engineer, CSR,whomever contact that is, why aren't they
incentivized and or rewarded at the point ofsecuring that sale, not necessarily at the same

(01:01:49):
level, but having some kind of objectives and,remuneration package that that reflects the
level of connection and authority and influencethey have had in in securing that sale.
That's easy.
The system's broken, and nobody sat down toreally look at actually how it works.

(01:02:10):
If I look at a restaurant, in the old days, therestaurants the the servers kept all the tips.
If I look at restaurants today, that is not thecase.
In most restaurants, especially the good oneswhere there's big everything gets pooled,
everything's broken down into a point system.
The dishwasher walks away with a good chunk atthe end of the night feeling good.

(01:02:30):
Why?
Because if you don't treat him right, he's notwashing your dishes and you're not getting big
tips as a server.
We are everything everything today is a team.
Even if you work if you're a doctor, if you'rea fire person, if you're a graphic artist, you
don't do it alone.
Everything's teamwork, but not everybody thinksin terms of team and one helping the other.

(01:02:52):
Right?
It's, I think about some of the OEMs in print,you know, from what I hear on the road is they
wanted to push all this extra color and toner,and, the salespeople don't get commissions on
the toner they sell.
So they're not really motivated to sell toner.
I would have tied the toner and the sale of theequipment into one so that they would be
motivated and have to keep going.

(01:03:12):
But it's crazy that I, in my position, hearthose stories.
Right?
I think it's it's it's it's also to do with theway that the the package is is is structured.
Right?
Because from a from a from a sales perspective,you're often working on a, like, a thirty,

(01:03:33):
sixty, 90 forecast rate.
And and anything longer than ninety days is notsomething that you can quantify, but still
potentially needs nurturing.
Yeah.
You don't want to lose that, perhaps today,lukewarm lead to a competitor simply because
they haven't had anybody from yourorganization.

(01:03:56):
Contact them for, you know
Yeah.
Anyways, you know what?
Oh, yeah.
That's a whole other world.
We don't have to go.
This is
back to behavior.
No.
So so we've been going on here for a littlebit.
So, really, if you have to give a few quickthings to the nervous, print owner, the owner
who hasn't done anything in a long time orever.

(01:04:17):
What would you say to him to entice him to,investigate, to look?
And what are the short term things maybe thathe should, you know, take it, you know, perk
his ears up to and maybe, you know, go into aska question more or two?
I don't think this is something that many printbusiness owners can handle internally.

(01:04:44):
I really think they need to have external help.
Great.
It just does doesn't mean it it has to be crazyexpensive, and it doesn't have to be something
that's long term.
But I think the first step is well, first stepis to admit that, you know, if we keep doing
what we're doing, we're gonna keep getting whatwe're getting, as Stephen Covey said.

(01:05:04):
Right?
So something needs to change.
So if there is an acknowledgment that changeneeds to happen, it's it starts with reaching
out and and and speaking to trusted externalproviders, perhaps ones that can be recommended
within your network.

(01:05:24):
We know LinkedIn's a good place to start.
If you're in if you're in The US, the AmericanMarketing Association is a good place to start.
You know, there there are, if if you're lookingpurely online, there are various verified
websites such as clutch.co, which, gives you agood starting point.

(01:05:51):
And have those have those initialconversations.
Outline exactly the business outcome thatyou're looking the marketing to achieve.
And if you're worried about going down the roadof the wrong type of provider, If you're asking
business questions and the response you'regetting is tactical, they're talking about ads

(01:06:14):
and blogs and videos and
Get out.
All that sort of stuff, they are not the rightpeople that you should be talking with because
all of that stuff comes way down the road.
Okay?
You have to do your homework first.
It all starts much further upstream.
Once you get all of that stuff in place, thenyou can do all the tactical stuff.

(01:06:34):
And once once you have a clear briefing,document, the whole thing can sort of run
almost almost autonomously.
But the strategic stuff, which is gonna beunique to your business and your business
alone, can't be automated.
You can't do this stuff with AI.
You can't do this stuff with a recipe that'sbeen used a hundred times before for a hundred

(01:06:59):
different companies.
It's unique to you as a business.
It's a reason why customers choose to dobusiness with you as opposed to doing something
else, and that's what we need to dig out andand nurture and water and and and and bring to
the fore and flourish.
Wow.
Yeah.
I couldn't agree more with you.

(01:07:21):
We're gonna end it on that one because I thinkpeople are all sitting there thinking in their
heads they gotta do something.
So first of all, for anybody's listening to theshow, and I hope you have, and there'll be
clips put out that hopefully you'll grab on to.
You could reach out to me anytime you want fora conversation.
I've been down the road.

(01:07:43):
I'm out there trying to help people.
I'm trying to peep bring people like Gion tothe show, so that you could hear from people
that are out there that aren't connected orpitching you or trying to do anything like
that.
Although I'm sure if you call g, he'd be happyto do the work for you.
But all kidding aside, like, do reach out to mefor a conversation.
I'm trying to promote, printers doing more tohelp themselves.

(01:08:06):
It's it doesn't have to be expensive, and itdoesn't have to be that hard.
And I'm even willing to put a couple printersin different areas together, and maybe we could
work it together and everyone could kind ofeven maybe participate in the cost that we make
it, you know, individual for each person.
Again, I'm just trying to think of ways out ofthe box to help people start somewhere.
I don't know what the end will be.

(01:08:28):
Wow, gee, behavioral science, we're gonna havemore conversations because I had written down a
few more questions that, I couldn't ask becausetime would go on and on and on.
But Let's
do two.
I'd love to.
Oh, two and three because I think I thinkprinters, you need to understand that your
business is not printing.
It's doing business.

(01:08:48):
And when you do business, one of the servicesyou offer is printing.
So you just have to learn to change it up alittle.
I wanna help people change their websites.
I wanna help you with talk about what yoursolutions are for your customers.
Your website shouldn't talk about you.
Anybody on LinkedIn, just my final thing isagain, you're about to talk about what you can

(01:09:09):
do for someone.
No one cares where you went to school, how muchexperience you have, and that you call yourself
a leadership person.
People in leadership don't say that.
They just lead.
Right?
Absolutely.
Sure.
G, any final words to the audience before wego?
I I just hope it sort of motivated somebody to,to take some action because, you know, we can't

(01:09:33):
carry on doing what we're doing.
We need to change things.
You know, I think the industry is depending onthat.
And it's a great industry.
Alright.
We're ending on that note.
Warren Werbit.
Printing's alive.
I love print, and we will see you again.
Cheers.