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Demystifying the conversations we're already here at RRE and with our portfolio companies. In each episode, your hosts, Will Porteous, Raju Rishi, and Jason Black will dive deeply into topics that are shaping the future, from satellite technology to digital health, to venture investing, and much more.
Raju: Do you know what we should do tomorrow, William? We got to go to Burger King and say, “Have it your way? I’d like a Big Mac inside my Quarter Pounder.”
Will: [laugh]. Totally.
Raju: I—
Will: That’s how I want it.
Raju: Have it my way.
Will: Have it my way.
Raju: I’d like a Quarter Pounder. I want a Big Mac inside of it.
Will: [laugh].
Raju: I'm Raju Rishi.
Will: And I'm Will Porteous. Welcome to RRE POV the show in which we record the conversations we’re already having amongst ourselves, our entrepreneurs, and industry leaders for you to listen in on.
Will: Welcome back to RRE POV. Today, we’re going to be talking about enterprise marketing. Enterprise marketing sounds like a pretty broad topic, encompassing lots of different kinds of companies. Raju, can you give us a framework for thinking about what you consider enterprise marketing?
Raju: Oh, my God. That’s such a good question. William Porteous. I’ve had the luxury of participating in or running marketing at most of the companies that I was involved in as an entrepreneur, or even at AT&T and Lucent, and it’s actually much broader than people think. They’re like, “Okay, I’m going to bring in a VP of marketing or a head of marketing,” and what winds up happening is you’re actually looking for a particular type of marketer, and ultimately that role becomes pretty pervasive.
And so, when you kind of look at the totality of marketing in an enterprise, you have corporate branding at the highest level, you got corporate communications—people don’t usually hire for that initially because it’s a small company—but then you have product marketing. And that role, it’s sometimes a question mark of whether it should be run by the product organization or the marketing organization, but a bunch of stuff needs to get created. You know, product branding, product messaging, pricing, sales tools, and sometimes it falls under the purview of marketing, and sometimes it falls under the purview of product management.
Will: Makes sense. Do you want to talk about each of those three sub-disciplines, and what you think matters in them, and where they belong in the life of a startup?
Raju: I can. I’m going to finish the totality of what marketing constitutes, if you don’t mind, Will, and then I’ll—
Will: Oh, wait, there’s more.
Raju: Oh, wait, there’s a lot more. The traditional marketing, we consider outbound marketing, you know, with BDRs, email campaigns, webinars, social media, event marketing, and then we’ve got inbound marketing, which is responsibility for the website, the SEO, the SEM, then we’ve got nurture management, which is, I’ve got an existing prospect on the hook and I need to nurture them. And then we’ve got channel marketing, which is marketing through our channel partners. So, that’s really the totality of the marketing realm. It’s actually, like, seven or eight different disciplines, and I think the mistake that a lot of early entrepreneurs make is that they really want to fixate in on either digital marketing, or outbound marketing, or they want to focus on inbound marketing—like their website, SEO, SEM—and they hire for a marketing person that can, you know, kind of fill the niche.
My belief is that you should really be thoughtful around what type of marketing is necessary for your company at this stage, and hire directly for those skill sets—maybe it’s a marketing manager and not necessarily a chief marketing officer—and then eventually supplement other pieces of marketing before you constitute the totality of marketing in your organization. So.
Will: Got it. So, where do companies need to start? If they are just building products, starting to ship products, starting to work with early customers, what’s most important among those seven disciplines?
Raju: My recommendation to entrepreneurs is, you know, have a product organization, and either it sits in engineering, or it sits with a founder, or you actually have a dedicated product organization. Early on in the onset, I would leave product marketing to the product organization. Let them figure out the proper messaging, the proper pricing, generate the actual sales tools, which is, you know, PowerPoint, white papers, collateral, those kinds of things, and I would focus in on the marketing side of things that is more outbound and inbound marketing. I would leave channel marketing aside. I think channel marketing is kind of the last function that people should create because you have to learn to sell as a business on your own before you can get other people to sell on your behalf.
And so, the inbound and outbound marketing side of things is, I think, where I would start as an enterprise organization. And the thing to really think about, whether you want to skew heavily toward outbound versus inbound, is if you have a product that is more lightweight, you don’t want a heavy-touch sales organization. A lot of that is going to be done through marketing itself, and so you want to really kind of optimize around your website, your SEO, your SEM. If you have a high-volume sales organization or you have a high-touch sales product, then you want to focus more on those email campaigns, those webinars, those event marketing, and so the outbound takes on more of a focus. But I would start either with outbound or inbound, and if you’re lucky, you can get one person that can kind of run both pieces in the show.
Will: So, that’s a really helpful distinction. When you’re looking at prospective investments, how much is leadership and strong instincts in marketing part of what you look for in a founding team? Do you need this in your entrepreneurs? Is this sort of part of the DNA of a good entrepreneur, or is it something that you can kind of hire for from the outside?
Raju: At the onset, you know, the entrepreneur’s responsibility—and you know this, Will—like, is to kind of figure out product-market fit, and that’s figuring out the product and the market [laugh]. And so, there’s market: it’s marketing. You know, how do you sell to them? What kind of pieces of functionality do they really need? What gets them over the threshold to buy?
So, you know, some of the early pieces you kind of have to have, like, a marketing gene in your body—a little bit—as an entrepreneur. That shifts as you want to scale. Like, if you want to scale the business, and you’re a little bit downstream, you kind of figured out product-market fit, and now you want to create repeatability in your business, that’s the moment in time where I think you bring in an outside resource that has a lot of knowledge around, you know, how to manage social media campaigns, how to manage events, how to do proper email campaigns, and on your website, how to create a call-to-action, how to manage, you know, your SEO and SEM strategy. Which can—you know, SEO is not cheap. It’s not free.
People think it is, you know? They think it’s organic, but the reality is, a lot of your SEM work—which is your, you know, sort of Google AdWords and things like that—play into your, you know, search engine optimization. And how you create that is kind of a flow. So, I would say I’m looking for the entrepreneurs to have some level of acumen about their customers and how to pitch their customers, and get them over the goal line, but it’s really when you’re trying to scale the organization that marketing becomes sort of an outside resource that you bring in, and you look for someone that can sort of package and, you know, sort of institutionalize a lot of that in campaigns.
Will: That makes a lot of sense. Are there, kind of, consistent things that you look for as a board member in the evolution of the marketing organization—and particularly the relationship between marketing and sales—in the early days? I mean, how are those two connected or not connected in the early days of a company?
Raju: That’s a wonderful question. It’s a dance. It’s a dance [laugh] is really what it comes down to. Actually, you know, the best performing organizations that I have ever had, had a yin and yang relationship between sales and marketing. Marketing would push the envelope and say, “Hey, I gave you leads, but you haven’t followed up.” And sales might push back and say, “Hey, you gave me leads, but they’re not the highest quality leads, and leads that I generate are the best.”
And the ones that win are the ones that now work together and say, “Okay, what exactly do you need in a lead that makes it so that your sales reps will prioritize that even over deals that they’re creating?” Right? They’re dialing for dollars, they’re basically reaching out to potential clients, and they tend to want to follow up on their own created leads as opposed to ones that are created by marketing. But I think the two leaders need to get together in a room and say, like, “What isn’t working? I’m giving you leads; you’re not following up. Like, what about that isn’t working? What do you need?”
And the same thing’s got to be true from the sales side thing. Like, the marketing person should push and say, “I’ve given you leads. Like, why aren’t you following up with them? And I need you to follow up because we’re spending money on those, and it’s a waste of money if those leads go cold.” So, that’s one piece of the equation on it, Will, that I think it’s an interesting concept.
But I also think the name of the game for marketing qualified leads should be changing in today’s world. Marketing managers and marketing leaders were typically measured on the number of leads that they created. And then they would say, “Hey, listen, I created a thousand leads.” You know? Or, “I created ten-thousand leads. And so, you know, it’s your problem now.”
And I think the reality is, it should shift from quantity to quality. Because if you think about the unit economics associated with this, if you spend a lot of money capturing a lot of leads that are kind of poor, and now the more expensive part of your organization, your sales people, need to actually follow up on all of those, and 90% of them are bad, you have a very unproductive go-to-market motion. If the quality of your leads are better, then what winds up happening is you’re spending less money marketing because you’re not broadcasting to the entire world and getting every single person; you’re really focused on your ICP—your Ideal Customer Profile—and then when that lands as a marketing-qualified lead, your sales organization can now take it and run with it. So, I think it becomes a more efficient way of running a go-to-market organization, if you do it that way. But it is the single hardest thing to get right in a business because sales tends to want to measure their own created leads in a different way than marketing is trying to provide. But they really got to dance together. It’s a tango. It’s a tango.
Will: That’s a really enlightened perspective. I can tell you’ve seen this narrative a lot, and I think we’re both very familiar with that tension between the growing sales organization and whatever they’re getting and think they’re not getting from their marketing organization. I would just add to that, I think the same tension exists when you start to talk about the product management function, features that aren’t there yet that sales needs in order to sell the product, or so they think. Same thing with the communications organization. “Nobody’s ever heard of us.”
How many times have I heard sales people say, “Well, it would be great if”—but [unintelligible 00:11:34]—“We’d be more successful, except that people haven’t heard of us because of the marketing communications function.” So, there’s always going to be that set of tension points in the growing enterprise marketing effort.
Raju: I completely agree [laugh]. So, yeah, you know, I have a bunch of tips if you want me to throw them out there, and maybe I’ll ask you some questions as well?
Will: Sure. Yeah, that’d be great. You’ve done it, you’ve scaled it, you’ve coached it. It would be great to hear some of your tips.
Raju: Yeah, I’m happy to do it. You know, I think at the end of the day, like, every product and solution that we’re, you know, when we work with entrepreneurs, is new and different, and there’s a different, sort of, hook that gets people interested, there’s a different value proposition. But, you know, at the highest level, all the tips are the same, right? Like, understand the overall market opportunity. I think one of the mistakes people make is—entrepreneurs make—is they say, “This is the totality of my market opportunity. This is the size of it.”
But they haven’t really looked at what’s truly addressable with the current product and solution. And that’s really the ICP. What is your Ideal Customer Profile, which changes as your product changes, it changes as the market changes, it changes as competition comes in, and so you have to reevaluate what that ICP is continuously. But that’s something that people ignore. They think that the breadth of the market—you know, they’re just trying to, like, go after everybody and, you know, writes a check, as opposed to, like, this product is a financial product that’s designed around large check writers to make it easier to process or get the banks to approve. I think the reality is, you got to understand what your addressable market is, and what is that ICP? And when you’re struggling, you know, stake out the smallest market you can imagine. And this goes against everything you learned in capitalism.
Will: I was going to say, this is fascinating to hear from a venture guy—one to another—because so many of our colleagues really focus on large addressable markets with rapid growth rates.
Raju: Yeah. Well, I mean, the totality of that addressable marketplace long-term is super important to us, but you want to create repeatability, especially in marketing land and sales land. And so, you kind of have to go to the smallest market that works and kind of broaden from there. What is adjacent to that that will also work? Or how do I change the pitch a little bit to this other adjacent market to get them interested in buying?
So, I think that’s the route, but ultimately, you do need to understand what’s addressable within that product, and I think that’s a mistake that some entrepreneurs make. And when you get the ICP, really kind of understand them. Who are they and where do they buy? Where do they sit? What communities are they in? And importantly, how do they like to buy, right?
I think people try to force-fit SaaS models on pay-by-the-drink kind of buyers, and I think that can be a mistake. I’m not saying you can’t shift away from that if you create a strong enough value proposition and a logic around why something needs to be sort of a recurring revenue solution, as opposed to pay-by-the-drink solution, but I think you need to understand your buyers.
Will: I know you’re going through some of your tips right now, but I have to ask you, when you talk about understanding how that initial customer profile likes to buy, what’s the role of channels in the early-stage company in influencing that decision? When I started 25 years ago in this business, you didn’t think about channel partners until you had a company that was in the $20 to $50 million run range because partners didn’t really care before that. How do you think about it today, and how do you think it influences—it can come into play in the growth of the company in its earlier stages?
Raju: I think channel strategy and channel partnerships are vital to a company that’s going to reach its ultimate potential. I just think that in the first few innings of a company’s life, you want to be as close to the customer as you can. And being close to the customer means, like, your sales people and your marketing people are interacting directly with that potential buyer, and you’re getting feedback. Is something misaligned around the product? Is there a UX/UI issue? Is there something of interoperability that they want with a different product? Is there a pricing mismatch?
If you go to channel partners, you can learn a bunch, but I wouldn’t give them the ability to sell the solution until you’ve kind of cracked the code. What you can learn from the channel is, if the market loves to buy from the channel, diagnosing why they love buying from the channel, how they buy from the channel, the sales motions and marketing motions that happen in that funnel. That can be good education because if, ultimately, the massive amount of the buying or the majority of the buying is going to be through channel partners, you can’t ignore it. But I would not start there until you’ve got a handful of sales closed on your own to get the direct feedback. Because, you know, the channels, if it’s not selling, they stop selling it—
Will: Right.
Raju: And they don’t tell you why it’s not selling. You know, they’ll tell you, I had, like, ten meetings, but they’re not going to detail, oh, you have a pricing mismatch, or you’ve got—the product looks ugly, or, you know, whatever it might be. That feedback doesn’t get to you unless, you know, your people are actually getting it.
Will: Well, and the channel’s got to care not just about the fact that the product solves a problem for the customers, but that they are going to make enough money selling your new thing. Because they’re selling somebody else’s thing today, and for them to start selling your thing instead, it’s really got to be worth their while.
Raju: Yeah, a hundred percent.
Will: Yeah.
Raju: A hundred percent.
Will: Other tips?
Raju: Yeah, this isn’t a surprise, but I like to be just overt about it, like, the world has shifted, right? Back when you and I were carrying a bag, Will, who was 30% marketing, 70% sales effort.
Will: Yes, that’s true.
Raju: And the buyers, it’s now 70/30 the other way. People research before they buy. They create a relationship with your company whether you know it or not, and they have an expectation. They’ve kind of done their homework. I mean, think about car dealerships, right? Like, you used to go in, like, “What do you got?” And then, we’d be like, “This feature and that feature.”
And now it’s like, you’ve done all your homework online. You’ve kind of even picked out the color sometimes, and you’re just ready to buy the car, and so now it’s a negotiation of price. So, I think that’s an important thing for people to recognize is how much pre-work is being done by the prospective customer. And so, you have to have a good website, and people are going to research your stuff before they buy. And the other thing that’s flipped—besides that 70/30 sales-marketing split going to a 70/30 marketing-sales split—is the marketing funnel itself is flipped.
It used to be that leads were generated and then trust was built. So, your whole process in marketing was to build trust. I have this lead, I’m going to do everything I can to build the trust. Now, trust is vital before you even generate that lead. People aren’t going to share information with a company they haven’t built some trust around, and that can be done in some very interesting ways. They’re looking for things like testimonials. Is there something on your website about this CIO, or this CEO, or this head of sales, or this customer buying, and I identify with them.
Will: Mm-hm.
Raju: It can’t be somebody that’s so out of my league that I don’t identify with them. They got to be a look-alike to me. And that testimonial’s got to come out. You have to have a professional website. You know, I think skimping on a website is just a non-starter. Like, it’s got to be really, you know, sort of obvious what your value proposition is, and it’s got to be, you know, pleasant to be around. It’s got to be professional because it looks like you’re a big company if you’ve got a professional website. You have to spend time inside of those communities. So, if there’s a Reddit community, if there’s a Slashdot community, if there’s a Hacker News community, like, you got to be in there.
Will: So, that’s interesting. You actually see the importance of engaging in online communities just to talk about the product and talk about its capabilities.
Raju: I don’t know about talking about the product, but talking about the problem.
Will: Ah, interesting. Yeah.
Raju: Yeah. I wouldn’t really talk about the product because that’s a sales pitch and communities don’t like being sold to, but engaging with the prospects on the problem and what’s working, what’s not working has a subtle effect. And they’ll know who you are. I mean, they’re going to look at you and know that, you know, are part of this community or part of this product. So, I think it’s important.
I think another thing you can do is free versions, right? Free versions build trust before people buy, before they have to, like, give you their name and stuff like that. And then there’s traditional stuff, like, you know, Forrester, G2, Gartner, that tends to be expensive, you know? If you’ve got the budget for it, I think getting on their radar as one of the cool companies is kind of a good thing. Creating white papers, right, content that is not about your product but is about the problem.
That’s why you sit in the communities, right? You get the problem really deciphered, and then you write a white paper about it. And people download it. Like, “I have this problem too. Let me download this white paper.” And all of a sudden you’ve created trust with that prospective buyer without knowing who they are. And so, that part of the marketing funnel has flipped. You got to build that trust before people are even willing to give you their name.
Will: It’s a really powerful observation, and you’ve just taken us through a really amazing assortment of tactics that, clearly, you’re seeing work for your companies. As you’re talking, I’m sort of struck by the number of super technical founders that we know who believe, or want to believe, that if they build the perfect product, it’ll just sell itself [laugh].
Raju: Yeah.
Will: And without the range of activities that we’ve talked about today, no one knows [laugh].
Raju: Yeah.
Will: No one knows about it. No one will understand.
Raju: There’s nuances here, right? Like, one of the things I tell all of my entrepreneurs is that there are pieces of your marketing that you need to consider, you need to actually think of it like a product. And a webinar is a perfect example. So, you spend all this money and you get these people saying like, “Call-to-action is, come to the webinar,” right? So, that’s—you have to have call-to-actions, right? Everybody knows that. I’m not going to go through the basics of marketing.
Your call-to-action is, come to the webinar. Now, you got to say, like, what are you trying to do with the webinar, right? What’s the goal of the webinar? The webinar’s goal is not to sell the product. The webinar’s goal is to get a meeting with a salesperson.
Will: Ah [laugh].
Raju: That’s the goal of the webinar. And I think people spend so much time trying to sell the product on the webinar right, that they realize that’s not actually the objective. You’re trying to basically—like, you win if that person says, “I raised my hand, I’d like to have a salesperson call me,” or, “I’d like to set up a meeting.” And so, when you think about that, like, how you drive people through that, it should be like a product, right? It should be, like, a finished product.
And so, I think that people make the mistake of thinking about the discrete functions of marketing as—I mean, absolutely everything’s driving toward selling the product—
Will: Sure.
Raju: —but if you think about it as individual products and their goals being discretely different, but it’s driving people through the funnel, then I think it’s a much more, sort of, manageable goal.
Will: Well, and it implies a total confidence in your sales process and a deep understanding that no one’s going to buy anything without taking that meeting and without developing a real relationship with a salesperson. So.
Raju: I think one of the other things people fail to do is that everybody thinks, like, I need to go target. Like, broad-based branding is, you know, valueless. It turns out there’s a bunch of research that had been done, and the mix, the ideal mix between broad and targeted campaigns, is 50/50, you should actually do broad campaigns because you don’t know—like, there might be an ICP that’s missing in your mix. You just don’t know it. Now, you do the broad one, you’re like, “Oh, my God. Like, this person just kind of reached out to me.”
It also creates enough air cover so that people don’t feel like they’re being marketed and sold to. So, they see you. Because, you know, seven touchpoints before people, kind of, consummate a deal, you know, that can be one of them: they can just see it in passing. Like, one of my favorite billboard ads was done by—oh, jeez, I can’t even remember it… [laugh] it’s been a long time. I can’t remember the name of the company, which is, like, a fallacy in itself because I should remember the name of the company.
Will: [laugh]. Clearly, we’re very good marketers.
Raju: It was Twilio. It was Twilio. And the ad said, “Twilio. Ask your developer.”
Will: Yeah, yeah.
Raju: And I kind of loved it because it’s like, it was broad-based marketing, it was targeted at C-levels, and it’s like, “Yeah, you won’t get it. Ask your developer. They’ll know exactly what you’re talking about.” [laugh].
Will: Well, and I love the implications of that because I feel like the best products, particularly enterprise products, sneak in through the side door, through the back door, they’re download-and-try, developers start using them, junior technical people start using them because they solve a real problem, and you see this product begin to spread inside of the enterprise. And the best sales strategies take advantage of product that’s already installed.
Raju: Exactly.
Will: This is true—actually, this is how the open-source community penetrated the enterprise. You know, people woke up one day and said, “Wait a minute, we have all these Linux licenses and we have no one to service and support them.” Thus, a bunch of great companies were born, like Red Hat and others.
Raju: Absolutely. I got a few more tips, and then we’ll move to Gatling gun.
Will: Great. Let’s hear them.
Raju: You know, people always ask me, like, [sigh] my market’s crowded, and you don’t want to be in it. And everybody feels like they’re differentiated, but sometimes product differentiation can be very small. And when that happens, you need to hang your hat on other execution elements and market those. You know, things like, we guarantee you’ll be up and running in X months, or we guarantee X percent sales lift, or we guarantee X percent more customer interaction. And a guarantee goes a long way, but it can be on orthogonal pieces of your business that you know you have, sort of, differentiation and value beyond the competition around.
So, I think marketing is not just the product. It can also be some of the surround functions that you provide within the business, which is, getting up and running and support, and you can always call us, you know, and things like that. There’s always somebody there to pick up your phone. And so, I think that’s an important element that people forget. Hopefully you’re not running into that challenge in your first day on the job because if you’ve got a really polluted and crowded marketplace in day one, you’re probably going after the wrong idea.
If competition eventually catches up and all the features catch up, or you’ve got two or three big competitors that have kind of caught up with you, that’s when you start differentiating around other elements. And the last tip I’ll give is just when you’re really, truly designed around marketing as a function, be metrics-driven. This is really, really important. Understand the number of touches it takes to get a lead; understand the number of leads it requires to close one deal. Every single activity you have, whether it’s a marketing campaign or your website, should have a goal, and you should measure against it.
And even if you don’t hit the goal, it’s okay. Just have one, right? Say, “Hey, listen, I’m spending this much money on this campaign. I’m expecting to get this many leads.” But then be hypercritical, like, why didn’t I get those leads? Why didn’t I get those touchpoints, or something like that. What went wrong in the funnel? Because if you don’t set the goal, then you’re just like, maybe that’s what it was supposed to be? Like, you should really kind of think about everything being goal-driven. That’s the tips that I have, at least for the moment.
Will: That’s very clear, and I think probably really insightful for our audience.
Raju: Yeah. I’m going to move to the Gatling gun side of things. I don’t have a lot here—
Will: All right.
Raju: But I’ll just ask—this is our typical, like, one-shot answers, you know, and I’ll ask you, and I’ll maybe answer myself. But in your mind, what’s the best logo that was ever created?
Will: Boy, just off the top of my head, probably Coca-Cola red—
Raju: Oof.
Will: Because, you know, you can’t actually—like, it took me years before I could actually tell that the letters said Coca-Cola, but if you think about the dating of that, right, that red and that white, its signature, that scrawl, I don’t even know what it says, but I can go, I know that 140 years ago, whenever Coke really hit the scene, that was a logo. And it stood out at a time when so few companies even really had logos.
Raju: That’s actually an amazing one because I think they own the color.
Will: [laugh]. I think they do.
Raju: [laugh]. Like, I mean, how powerful of a logo is that? Like, you own a color.
Will: Yeah.
Raju: Like, that’s amazing, yeah. I—mine was much more selfish. It’s the big M from McDonald’s—
Will: Yeah, well—
Raju: —because I kind of have to stop, [laugh] to pull over and get that—get something.
Will: The golden arches, was like, there was something almost heavenly about it [laugh].
Raju: I know. You sat there, and you’re like, “Wow.” Like, it was, like, alluring. Like, oof, it’s the golden arches.
Will: Yeah. Of course. You want to go to the golden arch.
Raju: I’m closer to God [laugh].
Will: Very subtle [laugh]. Very subtle.
Raju: Yeah. Yeah. All right, this one may be a little tough. I have an answer if you don’t have one. Worst logo ever?
Will: All I can think of is not a logo, but the Chevy Nova and the efforts to sell it in Spanish-speaking countries where—
Raju: Excellent [laugh].
Will: Nova means no go [laugh].
Raju: I remember that.
Will: So, not a logo, but a bad product name choice, for sure.
Raju: That’s hilarious, actually. But it was a bad product choice. And the fact that nobody actually thought about that before they started marketing it is kind of nuts. My worst logo is actually a company I worked at [laugh].
Will: [laugh]. Oh no.
Raju: Yeah [laugh]. It was a—and no disparagement to the Lucent folks, but we spent a lot of money on the logo for Lucent, and—I mean, a lot of money—and it turned out it was, like, a brush circle. Like, it was like an artist that didn’t have enough paint on their brush, and they’re making a circle.
Will: Yeah.
Raju: And I sat there in the [unintelligible 00:29:58], and I was like, I don’t know if it’s the worst logo ever, but it may be the worst use of funds because they spent so much money on it. And it was like, “Wow, we got an unfinished circle, with, like, not enough paint.” And, you know, like, there’s a lot of meaning behind everything. You know, the company did fine, right? But I just thought to myself, “Man, that’s a lot of money to be spending around, like, an unfinished circle.” So [laugh].
Will: Well, they ran out of paint [laugh].
Raju: Yeah. All right. So, best marketing campaign? Like an expression, like a slogan.
Will: So, my favorite—we’re kind of coming back to a theme here—is, got to be, ‘Have It Your Way.’ So, Burger King’s ‘Have It Your Way,’ it’s the ultimate customer message because ‘Have It Your Way’ actually works—and it even works in an enterprise marketing context. We can customize this thing to be exactly what you want it to be [laugh].
Raju: Wow, I’m going to change mine. I’m going to tell you what mine was, but I’m going to change it to be that one because I have to agree with you, Will. Like, ‘Have It Your Way’ says it all. I get everything I want.
Will: It says it all. And it says that the other guys are just stomping out standard burgers and that they actually don’t care about you, right?
Raju: Yeah. Do you know what we should do tomorrow, William? We got to go to Burger King and say, “Have it your way? I’d like a Big Mac inside my Quarter Pounder.”
Will: [laugh]. Totally.
Raju: I—
Will: That’s how I want it.
Raju: Have it my way.
Will: Have it my way.
Raju: I’d like a Quarter Pounder. I want a Big Mac inside of it.
Will: [laugh].
Raju: I mean, okay, fine. You know what, they should be like, “We’ll get that done.” Mine was BMW: ‘The Ultimate Driving Machine.’
Will: Totally, yeah.
Raju: Yeah. When they created that logo—not the logo, but the slogan, it construed to every driver, like this is the ultimate. This is—and it’s a driving—it’s not even a car; it’s a driving machine.
Will: And it speaks to the person and says, “You’re a driver. You’re someone who loves to drive.” Or, “You want to be in the ultimate driving machine.” It turns it into a status symbol immediately.
Raju: Yeah. Oh, man, I don’t have an answer for this one, so if you don’t, we can just move on, but, like, what’s the worst marketing slogan ever?
Will: Oh, I don’t know that I have an answer.
Raju: Okay. I don’t have one either. I was thinking about it for a second, but I just couldn’t come up with one, so I was like, okay. All right, best Super Bowl ad commercial?
Will: You must have one in mind.
Raju: I have two in mind.
Will: [laugh]. What are they?
Raju: One’s dating myself—like, extremely—but there was an ad—and this goes back to your best logo ever, which is Coca-Cola—so through the tunnel is a kid—
Will: Oh yeah.
Raju: —and Mean Joe Greene is coming—
Will: Oh yeah.
Raju: Through the tunnel, and the kid gives him a Coke, and Mean Joe Greene tosses him—“Hey kid,” and he tosses him a jersey.
Will: Yeah.
Raju: I freaking love that ad.
Will: Everybody loved that ad. And everybody wanted to be that kid. And everybody loved Mean Joe Greene for it.
Raju: Yeah. And my second favorite was the Budweiser, [screeching], “What’s up?” [laugh].
Will: [laugh]. I forgot about that.
Raju: [screaming].
Will: You’ve dated both of us. Yes, that was great. That was really good. Yeah.
Raju: [loudly], “What’s up?” Anyway, do you have one?
Will: I don’t have one.
Raju: Oh, okay. Okay.
Will: No, not that I can remember.
Raju: I thought you might say the E-Trade kids or something like that because, you know.
Will: [laugh]. Maybe the sock puppet, maybe the pets.com sock puppet.
Raju: Okay fine, sock puppet. Okay, best marketing movie slash show. There’s only one.
Will: [laugh]. Yeah, I was going to say…
Raju: It’s Mad Men.
Will: Well, sure [laugh].
Raju: Yeah [laugh]. That’s it. I don’t think there’s another one. I mean, I kind of racked myself a little bit, thinking, like, eh marketing movies? I mean, there’s some good ones, but, like, Mad Men? Classic.
Will: [laugh]. Yeah, totally.
Raju: Classic.
Will: Classic.
Raju: All right.
Will: All right. Well, Raju, thank you for talking us through enterprise marketing today. I’m sure this has been meaningful to everyone in our audience. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in to another episode of RRE POV.
Raju: Thank you, all. Thank you for listening to RRE POV. You can keep up with the latest on the podcast at @RRE on X or rre.com, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts — or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. We’ll see you next time.