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About Ben Guttmann
(00:00-01:20)
AS: Welcome to the Experience Focused Leaders podcast. I am thrilled to host Ben Guttmann. He is a marketing communications expert and the author of “Simply Put: Why Clear Messages Win and How to Design Them” book.
He ran as a co-founder and managing partner of Digital Natives Group for 10 years, which is an award-winning agency, and worked with the likes of the NFL. I love New York Comcast, NBC, and the Nature Conservancy. And now he's also teaching marketing for undergrads at Baruch College in New York City. Welcome to the podcast!
BG: Thanks so much for having me, Alex! I'm excited to be here.
AS: Well, we love books here. Books about communications and marketing. They are probably the things that got us on the journey of building RELAYTO and getting the podcast out there, and helping people connect through messages that really resonate. And I think you obviously support great causes with your agencies. So let's talk about how we can help anyone deliver great messages. Let's dive into your book, the framework that you've developed. We would love to hear more.
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How to help anyone deliver great messages
(01:20-04:17)
BG: Thank you for having me. I ran a marketing agency for 10 years, and we worked with all sorts of clients. We worked with small businesses in the beginning and big brands as well. Everybody had these really wonderful things they were doing. They had great products, initiatives, and programs that they wanted to work on and tell the world. And the reason they hire somebody like us is because they want to get it out there.
AS: The pattern that we see is the more important the message, the more sophisticated the value proposition, the more valuable it is for social success in the world, the harder it is for those folks to get it across. Is that a pattern that you saw?
BG: That's right. I would sit with clients that have been working in their businesses for years. Entrepreneurs that have been burning the nut oil for a decade. People who have been in their industry for multiple decades. And sometimes they have the hardest time being able to tell me, let alone tell anybody else, what it is that they do, why it's important, and we would sit there and try to pick apart and figure out a little bit of what it is.
Eventually, we figure out something that works. I got curious about what to say, why is it that some things work and some things don't work? Why do some messages get through? Why are they effective? Why do people act, and why are some things the opposite? Why do we spend a ton of money on campaigns that don't work? Why do politicians and activists scream into the void? Why do we, in our personal lives, have a hard time sometimes getting things across to other people?
AS: And so all of the people that are most important to us, right?
BG: Right. Like all of us are in this business of informing and persuading. My background is in marketing, doesn't matter if you're a marketing entrepreneur executive or if you are just a human being, right? And so I began looking into it, and it turns out that the answer was simple. I put this in the forward of the book, I said, “Look, it's ironic. I wrote a 208-page book about simplicity. It sounds like I didn't really take my own advice here, right?”
What is the simple message
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We define “simple” as something that's easily perceived, understood, and acted upon. And so those are the three kinds of barriers, right? You have to notice this out in the universe, you have to be able to capture and process it. You have to be able to ask, “Where does this fit into my biography? Where does it fit into my life? What can I do with this information?”
(04:17-04:55)
AS: So simplify it for us. What is the simple message?
BG: We define “simple” as something that's easily perceived, understood, and acted upon. And so those are the three kinds of barriers, right? You have to notice this out in the universe, you have to be able to capture and process it. You have to be able to ask, “Where does this fit into my biography? Where does it fit into my life? What can I do with this information?”
I found that they all share five principles, and those are the kind that make up the different chapters for the second half of the book.
About RELAYTO
We care about our families, loved ones, neighborhoods, religion, and sports teams, all these things are important to us. But we don't care about your new shampoo, right? You have to connect that with us in some other way in terms of how this fits into our lives.We care about our families, loved ones, neighborhoods, religion, and sports teams, all these things are important to us. But we don't care about your new shampoo, right? You have to connect that with us in some other way in terms of how this fits into our lives.
(04:55-07:28)
AS: Let's dive into that. But I have to say, this is music to my ears. And so I think you are a brother from another mother in this instance.
I am the founder and CEO of RELAYTO. We take important documents, presentations, and videos and bring them to life. Why? Because the less they're discoverable, the less they are understood, and definitely, they're not acted upon, right? And, so the classical example is some 200-page PDF. Half the time, it's gated somewhere, the other half, it's non-discoverable because Google doesn't read PDFs, right? When you get to it, you can't even understand what's going on because you're on your phone or the table of contents is not navigable. So you can't get to the parts you may care about. And the concept of a call to action was that thing is almost nonexistent in the medium of sophisticated ideas. The best I've seen is people write a thank you at the end of a presentation without anything, right? No email, no number, nothing. Just thank you. “Look me up online”, because obviously we all have time to do that, or links to some videos that take you out, and you'll never come back to that message ever again because you have to watch the political podcast or whatnot.
BG: Everything else is more interesting, right? So, every ad that you have ever seen, every website you had gone to for a marketing, automation platform, whatever, every single time has been against your will, right? You've never been like, “What I'm gonna do today? I'm gonna wake up, I'm gonna watch some advertisements”, as nobody has ever done that. That's not how we think, that all our creativity is so good and people want to see the stuff that we're doing: they want to see my report, my activist slogan or my safety warning, or whatever people care about, right? We care about our families, loved ones, neighborhoods, religion, and sports teams, all these things are important to us. But we don't care about your new shampoo, right? You have to connect that with us in some other way in terms of how this fits into our lives.
The framework for the messages that move us forward
(07:28-12:12)
AS: Let's be a little bit geeky and dive into your framework because I think the people on this podcast probably are the few people that would look at commercials and lists of the most fun NFL or Super Bowl ads. So let's go through the framework and how we can apply it in particular, probably to the types of messages that move the world forward to a better place, right? Things that are a bit more hefty.
BG: Absolutely. The big kind of psychological cognitive science is the idea of perceptual fluency. There's a whole vast subsection of behavioral science research where you look at it, and you say it's about fluency which, put simply……
AS: In neuroscience, it’s called “cognitive fluency” probably.
BG: The things that are easier for us to see, hear, remember, pronounce, select, and buy, we have a whole host of positive associations with them. So, there's an example I have in the book, there's a study that came out about 15 years ago, where they looked at stock tier symbols. You know, near-stock exchanges, Nasdaq, whatever. Something like Google is GOOG, right? Something about Black Verizon is VZ. And so it's between two and five depending on where you are or one in five characters for your stock or symbol.
These researchers said, “Ok, does it matter what the ticker symbol is? And they took like 1000 companies. Excuse me if I get the numbers wrong, I don't have it in front of me. It took up like 1000 companies that had IPOS over the course of a certain period. And they looked at ones that had pronounceable ticker symbols, ones that you could say like GOOG, right?
The ones that were more fluent, the ones that were easier to understand, performed better in the initial IPO as a whole than the ones that didn't. And if you invested $1000 on that first day, you'd have 80 more dollars in the ones that were fluent versus the ones that weren't. And then, you know, that fades over time is more important. Things begin to affect the stock price, but it still lingers, even though your sales force skews it for you because they're tickers CRM.
AS: And they did pretty well in the world. But I think that's fascinating. Basically, because you have a lot of trading happening from retail investors that are not as sophisticated.
They're not doing a deep analysis of the financials or whatnot. They're just going by the first impression.
BG: Basically, it's mostly that there are things, it was easier to find a home in your head. It was easier for you to see, to read in your mind's eye than the ones that weren't. And for some reason, that begins to accumulate different kinds of positive associations. You'll see there are other studies about this and that are about the text that is written in a harder-to-read font, like a blurrier typeface or, one that grainy or blurrier, or ones that they have in a CRISPR, you know, cleanly black and white typeface.
The ones that are easier to read, people rated as more trustworthy and intelligent. When you look at law firms, lawyers that had more easily pronounced names are better in their careers than those that had more difficult-to-pronounce names. And so all these things start.
How to name your company
(12:12-15:04)
AS: All right, let me make this a public service announcement. I'm gonna pronounce your name, Ben Guttmann. Very easy for me. I think I need some extra help. If you have a minor in the Ukrainian language, I'm gonna do it for you. Hopefully, I'm applying your lessons right away. So that's fascinating, and it probably comes with the naming of companies as well. So we worry about, for example, RELAYTO. I have to sometimes explain, it's like “rely information” to someone. But I have a bit of anxiety in my head that because people don't know exactly how to pronounce the name, it gives them a sense of self-consciousness when introducing it. Any thoughts on that?
BG: That's a good question. You want to avoid friction wherever you can, right? There are ways you can style it, with marketing, you can convey what the pronunciation is. I've seen a lot worse, so don't worry. Actually, a friend of mine, Alexandra Watkins, she's kind of the naming expert in the world. She wrote a book called “Hello, my name is Awesome”. And she runs a naming agency called “Eat My Words”. I would recommend checking her stuff out. She has a great model for deciding what makes a good name and what makes a bad name.
AS: So I think that this insight of fluency sounds like it's very broadly applied, right? I think one of my pet peeves is we do a lot of navigation generation from static content. And so sometimes people do too much text and caps, which is actually, as you know, another kind of friction: harder to read, similar to font styles, right? Everybody could apply almost in every email you write and every document or website you put together. This is a really applicable insight.
Five principles of an effective message
(15:04-17:55)
BG: Well, that's like the piece of science that drives everything else. You want things to be more fluid, there are a million different ways in which you can apply them. I have basically broken them down into five major principles. So number one is beneficial. Number two is focused. Number three is salient. Number four is empathetic, number five is minimal, and I can go into each one of them. Basically, “beneficial” is what's in it for me, right? As the receiver, when I hear, how does my life change? How am I better off receiving your message? And if this is an ad campaign, what are the benefits? Features and benefits are like marketing 101. As your product and brand mature, you end up a lot closer to the features and a lot further away from the benefits.
For example, there's an old advertisement for Microsoft Excel that I was able to dig up, and they're really good. Actually, they talk about the future of computing and, you know, magic style. I don't wanna butcher these words and get them wrong, but they really focus on benefits and what it does for you in your work.
AS: Yeah, so this a really common challenge to our audience. We sometimes work with complex organizations that love acronyms. They are acronyms that don't even spell nice things. They are tough acronyms. Then the second thing that we see is if you have a complex offering, right? And we've learned this, by the way, this is a good example. We learned something amazing from Salesforce, they have an incredibly complex broad offering. So to make it beneficial to your point, they've created an entry point that helps you select who you are really quickly, and in one or two clicks, you select exactly who you are, and then you drill into exactly what you care about, and it sounds so obvious. Yet so few people do this, and I don't know what's preventing people from taking a step back and wearing their customers’ shoes. What's the mental block that you see?
What prevents people from wearing their customers' shoes
And so it's really obvious when people are saying something that sounds like they wrote it. That's why we give Oscars away to people who are good at saying things that were written. Most people are pretty bad about saying something authentically that was written for them. If it sounds weird when you're talking to somebody, it's much better if you talk out your idea, grab that little fragment of a sentence that was really great.
(17:55-24:54)
BG: That hits upon a couple of different pieces, actually. The enlightened idiot in this conversation talking about RELAYTO would be me. You're the expert on RELAYTO. I have only learned about it recently. I've talked to the website we talked about. It's a great product, but I'm probably a lot closer to your audience.
AS: I think some people call it, in the beginner's mind, kind of a Zen concept. Do you recommend some techniques for stepping into that “enlightened idiot”?
BG: Absolutely. First of all, there's an entire branch of marketing called marketing research. I have friends that run agencies there, and they will do great work. If you have a lot of money and a lot of time, you can get a lot of valuable insight from that. I also lean into the idea that, you don't always need that much. For example, Gallup poll has been running surveys on political opinion in the US for about a century. They use about 330 million people in their survey to make an inference.
AS: I think it's a panel of 500.
BG: If you remember from statistics class, you don't need that big of a sample size to be able to extrapolate. Getting five people together is better than getting zero people. I even suggest you take a little Post-it note, draw a stick figure on it, stick that on your monitor and explain to them what your message is. Because the real thing is we say a lot of things in our own little language when we're writing stuff especially, but we talk a lot more than we write, and we're really good at talking.
I think Seth Goden had a piece about this once that nobody ever gets talker's block, right?
And so it's really obvious when people are saying something that sounds like they wrote it. That's why we give Oscars away to people who are good at saying things that were written. Most people are pretty bad about saying something authentically that was written for them. If it sounds weird when you're talking to somebody, it's much better if you talk out your idea, grab that little fragment of a sentence that was really great.
AS: I think the joys of Zoom are that you could just record yourself, listen to how you talk, and how you come across. And sometimes that's great for research. In the same way, you can get a little bit of a feedback loop, whether it's from yourself or from somebody else.
BG: You should always look at feedback as kind of a thermometer, not a guide. It shouldn't be to give you insights, but we're using it more as a check.
AS: I think this is the big gap that we all have in our communications. I feel like there's pressure to express ourselves, right? And there are a lot of tools that help you express yourselves. Is it about expressing myself because of my ego and narcissistic needs, or is it to connect with another human being? Is the expression going to lead to behavioral change? And one of my personal pet peeves is that we are a culture of outputs but not of outcomes.
Do you have any statistics on that as well? What's preventing people from thinking? Especially creative people actually rarely, sometimes get zeroed in on the outcomes, and it's maybe the business and creative people like yourself that have to bring them back, right? Like, guide us a little bit on that.
Why some creative messages don't work
The message is the way I frame it. It's not words. It's often represented by words, but it is the idea that's behind the words. It could also be images, sounds, or feelings. Anything that hits the frame.
(24:54-28:36)
BG: I mean, that is part of the reason I put that right in the introduction, why I wrote the book is that communication is important, right? it's easy to think that marketing is just marketing or you don't need any more commercials or sloganeering. We are here to connect with other people, make a change in the world and to make all these things better. So that is the important stuff, and so many people struggle when they're trying to actually do that. Communication problems are cited as the number one factor in divorce. About $400 billion a year is an economic loss for miscommunication.
AS: It's the number one, and when you say miscommunication, it's sort of a combination of “I communicated, but nobody read it or saw it”. Or, “I thought I communicated one thing, but actually, the few people that did get to it, completely didn't get to that part that I thought was really important”. And then there is no outcome. The few that did listen, got distracted midway through it and didn't do the one thing I really desperately needed them to do is the loss of communication that you're describing. Is it other components there or is it just people talking at each other is another one?
BG: In the book, I simplify everything appropriately, and I say, “There're senders, there're receivers, and then there's the message in the middle. We're all both of them, right? In this conversation, I'm sending right now, you're receiving. And a minute ago is the other way around. For people who are listening to us, we're both sending and they're receiving. So we have to understand where our responsibilities are in each of those when we have each of those roles.
The message is the way I frame it. It's not words. It's often represented by words, but it is the idea that's behind the words. It could also be images, sounds, or feelings. Anything that hits the frame.
So this book is not a style guide, right? I'm not an English professor, I'm not here writing, you know, this is the word to use or not. It's about how do you frame that thing. That's the message, and make it so that it is an effective communicator that goes from the center to the receiver. I also want to make sure that I always lean on the idea that it's the responsibility of the sender.
Just like when you send a letter, you're responsible for the postage, it's the responsibility of the sender to make sure that the message is something that can be easily perceived, understood, and acted upon.
The importance of the sense of ownership
It's about users, right? That's what design is about. Art is about you. Design is about saying how you accomplish something in the world by arranging something.
(28:36-33:22)
AS: I think this is genius, and we even share this with our team internally. It's the sense of ownership, right? You're accountable. If you're doing sales enablement, you're accountable for getting the right sales content to the team. This is marketing's number one responsibility, to get the sales team fired up using the message. Instead of thinking all those customers aren't reading your brilliant 20-page ebook white paper, it is your responsibility to use buzzwords. A buyer experience, right? Remove the barriers and make it fluent. I think this is really important, and it's funny, I would say even people who are in the business of communications sometimes lose that sense of ownership, right? You just gotta remind yourself.
BG: I have done a lot of design. My career is as creative director, as a designer. And when I talk to designers, I can always tell you the ones that are gonna make it or not. It's the ones that think a client/user is stupid, especially if they think that in a derogatory way.
It's about users, right? That's what design is about. Art is about you. Design is about saying how you accomplish something in the world by arranging something.
So when a designer is not focused on that, when a designer is saying, “But it looks really good in my portfolio”, I'm like, “Well, how did it work?”
AS: Well, I think this is fundamental, actually, and I think there's a change in the mediums. There's some design, particularly graphic design, that still comes from a world that was very far apart from the outcomes, right? There were multiple steps between the designer and the recipient. We live in a very different world right now, for example, at RELAYTO, where we promote interaction design. If you think of interaction, and that's where you take the graphic designer with Adobe skill, maybe now, with the help of AI, designs would be even more beautiful, faster, and competent. They are probably very capable of using those tools because they've been trained. But their superpower is data-driven design, right?
It's basically observing what's the interaction, tweaking, testing, and so on or at least moving in that direction because that's what really creates a connection. I think one of your points is empathy, right? By definition, if there is an interaction, it implies some kind of empathy. So I think this ties into this broader change in the mediums of communications.
And what do you think that's doing? Marsh McLennan obviously crafted the medium as the message. When you talk about the message, how does it adjust for us? We obviously are Experience-Focused Leaders. So for us, we believe experience is the message, and experience combines the new medium, but it's even broader. Guide us a little bit on what you've observed. The name of the company you founded was Digital Natives Group. So guide us a little bit on that and how that differs across mediums.
How to properly adjust your message
If I hit you over the head with an advertisement 1000 times, then you're probably gonna go out and buy pair of hiking boots. But that tool doesn't work anymore. It's in the process of dying, and kind of a cheat code for everybody's business and marketing for the past , won't work in the next generation.
(33:22-35:32)
BG: We're living in this little moment where if you look at every major platform, all the browser companies, like Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft, they are all pushing in the same direction, which is basically the death of the cookie. The cookie is this little file that lives in your computer, that tells the website you've been there before, and that's how you get all sorts of retargeted advertisements. For instance, you look at hiking boots one day, and then hiking boots follow you around the internet forever.
AS: That's the joys of our existence.
BG: Last year, Facebook stock dropped 20% because of fears over the death of the cookie, because Facebook is an advertising company. They don't own the platforms, nor do they know the browsers or operating systems there. We think things are gonna be less effective because of these changes, that's the company that's gonna be hit the hardest.” This only shows that blunt-force stuff does work.
If I hit you over the head with an advertisement 1000 times, then you're probably gonna go out and buy pair of hiking boots. But that tool doesn't work anymore. It's in the process of dying, and kind of a cheat code for everybody's business and marketing for the past , won't work in the next generation.
You have to go back to, like, “What worked before? What works with humans in general?” That is how I put together something that is an effective message that communicates and persuades.
Art vs business
(35:32-38:00)
AS: So you're back to the art and versus as an entrepreneur giving money to Facebook and Google Ads.
BG: I have a ton of respect for art, but this is business. It’s about solving problems and the thing about this is, it's the harder part. There's like a message in the vessel. Like what's the slogan? What's the tagline? All that stuff? And that's all the different ways that you get that to somebody, right? You get that through Facebook ads, you get it for the commercial or direct mail pieces. And the vessel stuff is where most people will spend their time. In the marketing department and agency, most is spent on the vessel.
There's no disrespect to any of that., it's empowering. You can go out and get some certificates, learn that stuff, and you could be a real expert in that thing. But a lot of that vessel, there's not enough attention paid to the contents of it. The question is how do we build models? Look at that because it’s harder to figure out that other stuff. The vessel is dealing in black and white, right? If an ad worked or didn't, it still got displayed.
AS: This really resonates with me. I think about what one of the customers, a CMO, said that really struck me. We're spending gazillions on getting customers to our ebook, white paper, case study. We master the channels, and then when they land there, the message is not obvious or clear. For instance, the wrapper makes a package beautiful, then you open it, then there is this beautiful tagline or whatever it is. What's in it for me was emotional resonance that's focused and so on. So it makes a lot of sense.
What are Ben's favorite brands
(38:00-43:30)
On that note, let's do a little bit of a fun exercise. What are some of your favorite brands? And what do you think they're doing? And maybe, you know, some of the brands that you really don't like, but you wish they were doing something different about how they communicate it?
BG: That's hard. I teach marketing at college. I have a bunch of undergrads that come in every year, and I have them pick a brand, and then develop the brand essence and positioning statement. And I give them this one caveat on the assignment. I said, “Don't choose Apple, Apple's too easy.” Apple is the biggest company on the planet. They make all the profit from smartphones. They have the most successful product of all time. It's a different animal.
I tell them to go into conversations. Do not just have Apple as an example. I think that there's a handful of brands that are very good at almost everything they do. And I think Apple is one of them, right? That's right now some of the most interesting brands, and I feel like I don't know enough about all of these that I have a super deep conversation on. But I think YETI and Liquid are some of the most interesting brands that I've seen in the last five years.
AS: Let's assume the audience is new to YETI.
BG: Ok. So have you ever bought a cooler in your life? I don't remember when it clearly was not an emotional decision that if you bought the cooler you bought it at Walmart or something like that. And it lives in the back of your garage or if you live in the city you probably have some tire from one. You bought it at Bodega, right? You haven't spent that much time thinking about your cooler. And if you bought it at Walmart, you spend 30 bucks on it, right?
It's the Coleman out there. Yeah, I think Coleman makes coolers. They've made coolers forever, and they're pretty good. But yet he comes out and says, “Hey, we're gonna make a cooler that's gonna cost $300, and the cooler is gonna become a status symbol. We're gonna invent a new category.” That's the luxury cooler market. And it's a good cooler, right? They're like, “Oh, you put ice in it, and you go backcountry, off-roading for a week, and you still have ice in it at the end of the week.” And so it's like they are high-performing products.
But there are other high-performing products out there that are not as expensive, but they basically said, “Ok, we're gonna be in the market of people that wanna show that they are serious about their outdoors and willing to throw money after things.” They invented this whole new category, and then they owned it for themselves. I mean, it's like a little bit of the blue ocean strategy type stuff. There was no luxury cooler. They invented it.
I have a YETI tumbler. It is great. They also have chairs and, you know, the things that make sense. But then they have dog dishes. They have a $50 dog dish. They have a $50 bottle opener. And they're making money, hand over foot, because they're talking to a market that didn't really have this stuff, and they're positioning themselves as a status symbol, people just want to get a souvenir from that company. They might not be able to afford the $300 cooler, but they want the $20-30 little tumbler and it makes them feel like they have part of that.
It's more of how they're doing their brand experience than anything else. It's like Harley-Davidson. There are people that have Harley-Davidson tattoos but don't own a Harley-Davidson.
AS: I didn't know that. That is actually hilarious. I knew about this tattoo story, but I didn't know that it's a non-owner tattoo.
BG: Yeah, there are people that buy dog leashes, belt buckles, and folders for elementary school students that don't have Harley-Davidson. People want to get a souvenir of the brand because the brand says something, it means something. That's almost an example of that wordless message. The whole thing of Harley-Davidson is about a new generation of cowboys, like that type of attitude, this kind of Americana piece. And so, how do they want to get a piece of that, then?
AS: What are great brands that are failing?
Takes on X and Twitter rebranding
(43:30-47:37)
BG: We can talk about Twitter and X.
AS: We could, that's topical. I think Tesla is an interesting example, obviously. At least how it came up as a great brand. At some point, I was like, “Yeah, we're the Tesla, we're building the Tesla of documents and presentations, right?” Now there are some mixed feelings about the brand, but that's relatively new. What's your take on X and Twitter rebrand from a marketing science perspective?
BG: Yeah. It's funny. At some point, I have also used the Tesla branding guidelines. Here's the thing Twitter had. 15 years of brand equity that everybody knew. It was one of three or four companies that everybody else put that logo on their own stuff. So everybody's website and I don't know, off the top of my head is your website, my old DC website, we all had the Twitter icon on it for years. For the last decade. Plus, every website for every company had a little Twitter icon on it. People put business cards, they printed their own business cards with a Twitter icon on them. It was a little square that was on everybody's phone. It was something that people put up billboards for their movie or whatever and had a little Twitter icon on it.
You couldn't buy that. That is not a piece of brand recognition that you could buy for if you spent all the money in the world, and go ahead, and kind of have immediately wiped that away by changing the name, changing the logo, changing the colors. I think it’s a very foolish move. Pretty interesting.
AS: I think it's a fresh perspective for me, and I think it's a great perspective. I hope they come up with a clever mechanism for at least modifying the Twitter icon and embeds, you know, automatically. I think I'm not an Elon Musk hater, I would say in general because I've seen what I really admire is just kind of the approach taken to Tesla, I think building a brand without any marketing. I think he has some inherent understanding of how to create an experience and a conversation out of nothing or now, increasingly less so. X is obviously like a lifelong dream for somebody, right?
BG: He's been trying to use that name forever, right?
AS: I think you have to give people credit for just going, like, “Hey, I just don't give a shit, you know. I'm just gonna go big or go home and pursue this.” I think this is his mindset, and it's part of what the recipe of success is. But it's definitely brand equity-wise. This is not a normal calculus.
I would agree with you, and I wonder if there was a smoother way of doing that. Some transition period that could be done. It was done in the dark of night. I think some things are too precious to be done sloppily. I think people understand that.
Thoughts on Metaverse
(47:37-51:57)
I think Teslas do have the quality standard they maintain, but that was not built overnight. And it took a lot of work. I think there's a perception that it's a digital brand, so you could just do whatever the hell you want, right? Meta was almost the same level of frustration. And the way the Metaverse is looking right now, “We have a browser, you could play our content in Metaverse”, but unfortunately, not too many people are doing it. So that was also an example of probably a mistake in retrospect. What's your thought on that?
BG: I think so too. I think that, first of all, Twitter was not a well-run company to begin with. I was open-minded in terms of saying, “Ok, then maybe there's something interesting to do here.” But I think that this was a confusing decision for sure.
But going back to the other pieces in terms of naming, talk of fluency and things being easier. Everybody understood what Facebook was, right? That was very straightforward. It's a physical object that existed in some colleges, and it described what was Meta as a name change for that company. Felt a little bit meaningless, and it felt that was always a fuzzy idea.
Talk about the difficulty in communicating when you look at any of the companies or individuals that were really pushing stuff from the Metaverse over the past year. It was not simple communication. It was something that was, often just like, “I'm gonna grab a bunch of the buzzwords that are around, and I'm gonna shoehorn them into one thing and something's gonna fit”, right? And there's in the chapter on the focus, that's called like “The fighting the Frankenstein idea”.
The Frankenstein idea is something you've probably seen in your life 1000 times. I've seen it in a professional setting, I've seen it with my students a lot. You know, there're five people in a group. Person one has an idea, person two has an idea, person three has an idea. And so on. And there is no clear leadership. They're just like, “Well, you know what I don't want.” This is ok. So what are we gonna do? We gonna take them all together, we're gonna wrap some tape around them, and we'll put it out there. We're gonna do the metaphors, and we're gonna do drones, and we're gonna do web3 royalty card. Yeah, like whatever it is. And there're going to be all these different things.
That's kind of what the metaverse really felt like. I didn't hear anybody communicate, articulate a very strong vision. That wasn't a version of that. There's a little tool I put in the book which is if you want to test if your idea makes sense, replace the ands with period. And so you say, “Yeah, I'm doing this.” Or like, “We have this goal.” So we do this thing because when you use the word, and it doesn't trigger anything in your brain, it's a proper grammatically correct English sentence to say X and Y, right? We wanna increase return customers to our coffee shop. And we're going to launch a metaverse concept. Sounds like something that is grammatically correct. There's no warning signs. But if you say, “We wanna increase return customers in our coffee shop. So we're launching a meds concept.” Wait a second. How does that relate to the previous one? How does that tactic relate to that call?
AS: Let me put myself on the spot. So I'm gonna try to do it for myself. I don't know if the audience knows what we're doing in RELAYTO, but, so, RELAYTO turns conventional documents into awesome websites so that anybody would be able to succeed with their ideas.
BG: That's a lot closer to home than anything else.
How to contact Ben
(51:57-53:12)
AS: Probably, the Mumbo Jumbo I put together on our website one day. Yes, it's really helpful. So this works. Everybody, check out Ben's book, and the newsletter right there has tips. Just one quick promo for you. Where can people find you? Where can they sign up to get the book? Tell us a bit more.
BG: Got it. So, everything for me is gonna be at BenGuttmann.com. And I do send a newsletter out every Tuesday. People seem to like it a lot. That's something they call three simple things. One thing for me, one thing for somebody else, and then one idea. And I've had a lot of fun doing that. I started that about a year ago, and the book comes out October 10th. It's by Berrett Koehler Publishers. It'll be where her books are sold. And you'll see that if you go to BenGuttmann.com or simply put book.com, it'll be right there, on the home page.
I'm excited to get it out there. I'm excited to share this with more people. If anybody has any questions or wants to read out my emails on my website, I'd love to hear from you.
Parting words of wisdom
You mentioned the word “help” in there. So another little tidbit that was in the book that I like a lot is you can generally remove the word “help” from your marketing vocabulary. People don't want things that help them do stuff, they want things that do the stuff. So toothpaste doesn't help make your teeth whiter. The toothpaste makes your teeth whiter is a lot stronger way to communicate that.
(53:12-54:37)
AS: Super. This is amazing. Before we go, what are your parting words of wisdom? The simple takeaway for our audience about what they could start doing tomorrow or even today. It's different. That's gonna help them succeed with their ideas.
BG: You mentioned the word “help” in there. So another little tidbit that was in the book that I like a lot is you can generally remove the word “help” from your marketing vocabulary. People don't want things that help them do stuff, they want things that do the stuff. So toothpaste doesn't help make your teeth whiter. The toothpaste makes your teeth whiter is a lot stronger way to communicate that.
Yeah, the lawyers might not like that. People might not like that. But you know, try to simplify that part as much as you can.
AS: That's really helpful. I use that without being completely aware of the drawbacks of using that word. That is actually fascinating. Ben, really fun conversation.
Thanks for sharing your insights with our audience and everybody. I hope you go to BenGuttmann.com and get your goodies there. Thank you, Ben.
BG: Appreciate it. Thanks so much, Alex!
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