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Are you guilty of trying to get your customers to do things that, deep down, they don’t want to do? You’d be surprised at how many marketers are guilty of this, whether they do it intentionally or not.
Show Notes
Are you guilty of trying to get your customers to do things that, deep down, they don’t want to do? You’d be surprised at how many marketers are guilty of this, whether they do it intentionally or not.
Stéphane Hamel is a seasoned digital marketing and analytics consultant, innovator, keynote speaker, pre-seed investor, and start-up & agency advisor. He joins the very first episode of the Marketing Unf*cked podcast to discuss how marketers can unf*ck their marketing by focusing less on automated chatbots and more on building trust with customers.
Tune in to rediscover the true value of building a trust-based relationship with customers and why this may be the secret ingredient missing from your existing marketing recipe.
In this episode:
· 01:06 – The importance of developing trust with your customers
· 01:38 – Whether automation is effective at delivering personalized emails or not
· 03:43 – How to build trust with customers and retrieve essential data to help build powerful marketing campaigns
· 05:36 – Why brands need to focus on being transparent with their customers
· 07:00 – How to gain a customer’s trust
· 10:51 – The problem with GDPR cookie banners
· 12:54 – The hard truth about why so many marketers use ad and cookie blockers
· 14:20 – What marketers are doing ‘wrong’ with the data they collect
· 17:04 – How to avoid making the same mistakes as Cambridge Analytica
· 18:58 – Why marketers need to put themselves in the shoes of their users
If you enjoyed this episode and want more insider tips to help you unfuck your marketing and run a business that gives a shit, please subscribe to the Marketing Unf*cked podcast.
Resources:
· Brave
Creators & Guests
What is Marketing Unf*cked?
The only actionable podcast to help you unfuck your marketing and run a business that gives a shit. Listen in on raw conversations with experts about ethics, privacy, and sustainability in marketing.
Siobhan: Welcome to the only podcast that will get you to unfuck your marketing with Siobhan. It’s Marketing Unfucked. Today, we will speak all things data privacy cookie banners, and customer experience with Stéphane Hamel. Let's do this.
How can we unfuck our marketing?
Stéphane: There are so many things, but what I would say is maybe cutting back to the basics of understanding your customers and what they want, what they truly desire, and not pushing down their throats and trying all kinds of crazy tactics to force them to do things that they wouldn't want to do in the first place.
Siobhan: What are we pushing down there?
Stéphane: Well, I think the way digital marketing has evolved, the concept is interesting of automation and personalization, and so on. But it's not so much the fact that it's personalized, it's the fact that it should be at the right time, the right place, and the right tone. So, coming back to really a discussion, a trust relationship instead of thinking that automation will be the magic recipe that solves everything.
Siobhan: Okay, so there are some people out there who would say that automation, because it personalizes your experience online, is actually you are doing exactly that - you are building that trust and having that dialogue.
Stéphane: Are you really because we want to fuck marketing, when you get an email that says, hey, hello and it states your name (if they get it), is it really personalized? Is it really building trust? It's just an automation behind it that is spitting out the same message to everyone there is nothing personalized about that.
Siobhan: Of course. There’s nothing personalized about the email, I get you, I cannot stand those emails. But I do, for example, appreciate it if I go on a website and they know that it's useless to show me certain things because I never buy them.
Stéphane: Yeah, that makes sense. And again, if they get it right, because automation, regardless of goals or the amount of data you have, if the system, the machine learning, super smart AI, whatever we call it, ‘big data’ - if it gets it wrong, usually it's almost impossible to fix it.
If you go on Amazon and you purchase a kid’s book from your niece, Amazon thinks everything you want is kid’s books, nothing else. How do you fix that with Amazon? How do you tell Amazon that that was one exception? That was one time that I purchased that. I don't want to build a library of kids books, it's actually impossible to do it or at least very difficult. And it's typically the case with almost every website you go to is that you don't have that ability to say, if the trust is there - you would be willing to give more information about your tastes, your preference, and so on. But it's actually typically very hard to do.
Siobhan: So, since we clearly can't retrain some of these systems that are assuming, we are what they think we are, which is clearly frustrating to us as a user, then how can we approach it? If we're, let's say, new in the game - How do we build that trust with our customers so that we get that data and that information to be able to help them in a beneficial way?
Stéphane: I've been thinking a lot about the way the internet evolved over the years because like, I was lucky to have access to the internet very early on in 1987. The web didn't exist, it was just the internet. You had to find friends for news groups and chats and that was about it. Eventually, it turned into a commercial platform and the brands to control of the data about us. If we could go back and fix that, wouldn't it be amazing if instead of this approach, the consumer would always remain in control of their own data?
I would decide which brands I wanted to share my information with. I probably would be willing to share a lot more information with the brands that I trust. But what we hear these days, because of the ‘cookie Apocalypse’, and we work in marketing so we like to use terms that are, the apocalypse to third party cookies will be guaranteed, or it's the ability is I've been using Brave for several months and it's already blocking third party cookies. And guess what? The web still works, I'm still live, I can still do everything at once, even if third party cookies are blocked, by Brave.
Siobhan: Are you sure you’re not missing out on something?
Stéphane: Well, if I'm missing on something, I don't know what it is, I'm fine. But it's really that trust relationship that we need to go back to in terms of marketing is really something that is more transparent. So if we could go back and fix the problems we have today, the first thing to do would be transparency. Be honest about what you do with the data you collect for marketing, that transparency control, your customers are going to stay tuned for that. And I think in the near future, like, in a matter of months, maybe a year, maybe two years, we're gonna see more brands actually putting that as a strong brand value to be totally transparent and give user control about their data.
Siobhan: How can we do that? Because I do see the trend of brands wanting to do that. I I also am seeing a lot of confusion, meaning how do we do this? There are regulations as with GDPR, all over the world who are trying to force us to do this. We see two things, people implement it and don't know what they're implementing, or people trying to get around it and track you anyway.
The regulation isn't working, in my opinion, the rules might not be working, they could be working for some, but I don't think is really working in benefit of the customer. So, then what can we do? How can we gain a customer's trust? I'm going to a website. I don't know if I trust you or not? What makes me want to give you my data?
Stéphane: Yeah, exactly. You don't know at that point if you trust them. So, at first, you're not willing to give them your data. But if you go back to it, and if you appreciate their service, or their product or order maybe the next time you're going to be willing to do it. It's really like when you click on a website, did you want to subscribe to the newsletter? Because, okay, do you appreciate the brand and you want to get some offers. So you're telling them to market to you, but then you go to subscribe to the newsletter, and they ask all kinds of crazy questions like your gender, your age, your preferences. Can we just give me the freaking email and ask for other information later on, when I will trust you more.
The message we hear from agencies and so on is you need to go back. You need to build your first party data. But the problem with that is, what we're going to see is all of the brands are going to try to build their own first party data and end up with the wrong picture about the present. Everyone is gonna try to build a profile of what they think I am the guy and but what if I could instead be in control. So I’m referring to zero party data. So I was in control of my data. I would be willing to say, to brand A or B, or C, here's a certain degree, a certain amount of information about me that I'm willing to give in the data, they're not willing anymore, I will just pull the plug and you won't know about me anymore.
So, imagine the quality of the data, who would have these people were willingly giving it to you, because they trust you and they like your brand. And they want to receive your marketing offers and so on. The quality of the data would be so much better than trying to build your own first party data. Because, again, when you go to a website and there is that white paper or whatever it is, and then they ask for a bunch of information. Did you really get your real information?
Siobhan: No, I never do.
Stéphane: Yeah, exactly. So, what's the value of this data? It's crap. And then you build your marketing strategies built on Joel in Alabama somewhere where it just happens to be the first choice in the dropout, like it doesn't make any sense. We need to rethink the paradigm of how we do digital marketing and how we collect data.
Siobhan: I think a lot of it is that I know in the past year I've been in digital marketing, there's always been this push for a lot of data. I know that when I talk to clients, I tell them, it doesn't matter how many data points you have, if they're not useful, what can you do with it? Or if I can't create it, if I can't analyze anything to understand what action we need to take, what can I do with this?
So that conversation is already happening? So yes, then this moving to first party data, and everyone freaking out over what's happening, that's I think, part of the process. But then you're saying we're putting in the wrong information. So, it's better for us to get real data, valuable data, even at a later time, so that we can market to that specific person correctly. I agree with that concept. I'm just having a hard time understanding how we can make it happen. I just recently had a discussion on LinkedIn and it also became apparent that a lot of digital marketers, for example, are getting frustrated and just hitting Okay.
For example, we have GDPR cookie banners. I reject them, if I don't want the site to be there. But I was shocked to hear that a lot of my colleagues and my peers are saying, we just want to get on with it. It clearly didn't serve the purpose because no one's thinking about anymore. They're just clicking. So then how can we address that?
Stéphane: Yeah, that's really, that's we're really heading into some kind of a nightmare, where that's what happened when you when an industry is not able to regulate itself, then the lawyers get in in the midst everything. Because those cookie banners are the worst thing ever. Like I think the only other thing that was worse than that is the blink HTML that he could you have your text blink on the page. But cookie banners are just so bad in terms of user experience. Also in terms of also of the false trust that it brings because even if you say no, they will still most in most cases, they will still track you because they decided that the brand or the site owner decided that they are entitled to track him because all that spying is anonymous, we have the legal right to do it, and so on. But you essentially ask the user, do you want to be trapped? Do you accept my cookies? Who cares about cookies? That's not the point? Do you accept to be tracked? So what was the value proposition then just so that we can offer you a better experience so that we can market to you? So that we can do I don't know what. Those cookie banners is often worse than because they don't talk about the value propositon. What did you offer in return for my data?
Siobhan: Do you think that's the first step into the into a right direction to me because we don't have on a cookie banner?
Stéphane: Yeah, and that's only that would be a good step. Because right now we don't have a choice, we have to ask permission. And it should be more transparent than it is right now. But your point about your colleagues and people like knowing my network, when I speak at conferences, sometimes one of the conference, there was maybe 1000 people in the room. And I asked who's using an ad blocker? About 7% of the people raised their in and it's shocking, because why is it that we're in marketing, and we use ad blockers, and I use Brave and you reject cookies? And really shouldn't be the ones embracing that. Oh, take it all here's my data have fun with it. And then you look at the general population. And in we escalate depending on source that there is about 30% of the people who are using ad blockers and stuff. So seven percent of us are blocking ads and cookies and stuff. There's something wrong. And why is that? I think that the first reason for that is we understand how it works. We don't want to be the victims of what we try to do to others, which is weird.
Siobhan: Of course. But what did we do that so bad with the data? I think that's something important to understand.
Stéphane: Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point. And people rarely ask what is it that I'm not doing right with the data that I'm collecting? And again, I think it's really a matter of duty if the user wants to receive your marketing and so on. That's great. There's absolutely no problem if they want to give you their information but for example, Facebook. First Facebook is going to tell you we care about privacy. We care about privacy. We give you control. Try to go find where you can leave the all the information and you're going to end up going 20 different pages and clear a bunch of information. And as soon as you turn that, as soon as you visit like two or three pages of content, and then get on Facebook for just a few minutes and go back to it. You will see that it's rebuilding, already rebuilding the profile that's not really control.
So, the problem is that as marketers, what we do with the data sometimes is, of course, we don't wake up in the morning and they say, Okay, I'm going to conform and do evil. That's not how it works, right? Oftentimes, we think it's perfectly fine. And the issue comes later on.
For example, Cambridge Analytical is a pretty good example of that. Well, they weren't pretty clever. At the time, it was an ego. They played with the system, they'd had smart data scientists creating great models to target the right people and hit that. It's marketing perfection. Yeah. So what is the real crowd in that case? I think the real problem of that case is that it turned into propaganda. And everything is fine, until people realise that they are the target of that propaganda. Otherwise, you don't know you don't suspect that what is biased is manipulating you. So, we're in a loop between doing super smart marketing campaign, pushing your message and targeting the right people versus manipulation for beginning to end consequences that now had effect on democracy and things like that.
Siobhan: It's just I think it's like a hard line to draw, right? Because like you said, no one has the intention, or most people don't have the intention to do anything bad. And Cambridge Analytica I'm sure that everyone working there thought this was a really cool idea they had, and they were being very smart about it. And then it did turn bad. So how can you control that? Is it about security control? What? How do you hold back from that going out?
Stéphane: That’s why I'm interested in more into effects, then privacy, per se, or the legal aspect of it. And the thing with when you take an invalid approach to it, there are differences depending on the culture, depending on the values depending on your personal values, and the values of whichever company you work for. So that it's a different approach. And the other thing also is when you take a legal approach to it, basically, what you're trying to do is mitigate risks for the business. You don't really care about the user, what you care about is, how can I mitigate my risk as a business? While if you take an ethical approach to it, you always ask - what do my users note? If I was in their shoes, would they care about it? Would they like it? Would they want it and so on.
So in the case of Cambridge, playing a nice game, and to see that all the time, when Facebook was still little games and stuff like that. I think people don't really understandable the consequences of what is your pet name and which school did you go when you were 10 years old? And the first few letters that you will see in this picture means whatever. The only goal behind is to use this data in ways that we don't even suspect, maybe you need to suspect now in the overt find out in the future, the consequences those days.
Siobhan: So ultimately, I would consider that a bad example of using data, but intentionally, I would say that's the wrong side of it. So if I had a marketing intern coming to me and saying what is like one big thing that I should be paying attention to? Would you agree that this is all about thinking about what your user wants? And what's best for your user instead of what's you?
Stéphane: Yeah, absolutely. It's really put yourself in the shoes of your users and that's such a basic concept of marketing is empathy and caring about the users instead of trying to find what can I do to push the envelope a little bit further and influence the users so much that they will make decisions that are not in their best interest.
We saw the thing about instant radical impact on kids TikTok. TikTok is the craze right now – oh we need to do some marketing on TikTok. I think it's pretty frustrating because there can be so many good things that we can do with the data we have and with marketing in general. But a large proportion of that - too much of it is ending doing things that are in the long run that aren't home fold.
Siobhan: Thank you, Stefan. And thank you for the thing to marketing and fact. Check out the show notes. For more on our guests and resources mentioned in today's episode, see you in two weeks.