Today on Stack and Growth, we're back with our call to action series, chatting with Liam Moroni of Storybook Marketing. Liam walks us through his journey as a marketer focused on brand and storytelling. He gives his history, philosophy, and advice on how to change your leadership's mindset. Hope you all enjoy.
Welcome to Stack and Growth, call to action, a show for the Trailblazers, change makers, and paradigm shifters. Each week, a different marketing hero who is called to make a change in their field will join us to walk through each step of their journey. They'll cover the highs, the lows, and what's coming next. Together, we'll help you find the changes needed for your own business to win.
I'm Steph Crenola here with Evan Hughes, and today we are so excited to welcome the CEO of Storybook Marketing, Liam Moroni. Liam is a leader in working with brands to help them tell their full story, aligned with Refine Labs' dedication to move away from a growth at all-cost mindset into an effective growth strategy. Liam, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me and for immediately making me feel uncomfortable with Far Too Nice and Intro, but I'm very happy to be here.
Big fan of the show, big fan of the team. That's right, I said I would change it. Hey, everyone, tell Liam he's mediocre at best in the comments. That'll make him feel right at home and comfortable.
I guess kind of scaling back to your beginnings, what got you started in marketing? And can you tell us a little bit about some of the experiences you've had, especially with companies who didn't necessarily embrace the power of brand marketing and storytelling? Sure. I've been very fortunate that I actually knew I wanted to do marketing.
Since I was about 16, I went into college, I had a very clear idea, and I was lucky to have been put on the right track. I actually used to work in a store when I was in school and I was doing sales, and I spent so much of my time rearranging the window display more than I was actually selling stuff, and I was overthinking how do I explain this, and one of these travelling sales reps who would come in all the time saw me doing it one day, and I was like, you should look into marketing. And I was like, okay, sure. And I went and looked it up and was like, that is 100% what I want to do for my career.
So I was very fortunate. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I picked my degree in marketing. It was as deep as I could possibly go.
I didn't know where I would end up with it, but I knew I loved advertising. I loved marketing the more I did at the more I just found a passion for. And I got very fortunate that I was, when I left college, I was on a placement program where I was meant to come to the US for, what was supposed to be six months, and that was 18 years ago. And I was so I actually got my career early on.
It's always been in B2B, but I was lucky that before I got into tech, I was in publishing, I was in the food industry, I worked with Guinness from their official merchandise section. So I got a decent spread and I got to see a lot of different types of marketing. And then I got into the tech industry. And I've been in this industry for, I guess, of the 18 years, about 15 of those, 16 of those years have been in it.
And I started in ad tech. I was in market tech, legal tech, fintech, travel tech. Like if there's a tech, I was in it to some degree. And yeah, it's been a right.
But I think, to answer your question, I think what was surprising to me was, when I got into tech first, when I got into ad tech, it was probably like 15 years ago. And I loved the industry. It was obviously Silicon Valley was up and coming. It was big.
Google was still not the kind of big player. It was the cool brand everybody wanted to come to. And when I came into tech, it was weird. And I didn't realize it at the time, but I was more or less told, Hey, all those things that you talk about, your four P's, your college degree in marketing, that doesn't play here.
This is a totally, totally different world. And I was introduced to all these things. Some of them you may not even heard of. Like when I started in ad tech, Google had released a thing called the zero moment of truth.
So I was told, Oh, forget, you're like four P's, Zmosh, that's what you need to focus on. And then there was another one and another one. And I kind of somewhere along the lines was like, I don't recognize any of the way that this marketing happened. But I was, I assumed somebody knew better than I did.
And I've come to realize that maybe they didn't. I think you might be the first person we've talked to that went into marketing on purpose. That's honestly fascinating in this. And it's like, I'm the only one in my college class who is still in marketing.
They all went into totally different professions. Amazing. I love that. I did not take that track to marketing, not for sure.
So I stumbled my way through the community college show. I applaud you and the fact that you went through everything and stuck it out is pretty impressive. So Liam, you talk a little bit about like working in a consumer brand world, you know, with Guinness. I think that there's a lot more attached to consumer about building a brand, creating the awareness around it, like kind of advertising differently than we think about it in the tech world today.
And you having made the transition to multiple different aspects of marketing and what did you say was like the kind of the aha moment for you where you're like, wait, we're not doing this. We're not creating the brand awareness that we should in the tech world through our marketing initiatives. And I want to suddenly become the champion of that. I'm talking through that journey a little bit.
There was a couple of moments of study to me on there. I think one of them is that I remember distinctly, I was very much at Daid in the wool, like lead scoring mechanical revenue marketer. Like if there was a badge that you could wear saying like, I'm a demand gen guy, that was that person. I was, I was everything I try and preach against now because I'm trying to talk to you past me.
I'm atoning for my sins. And I think there was one part was that a lot of what I was doing, it just didn't intuitively make sense to me. I was like, I don't buy this way. And yet I'm claiming someone else does.
And like, oh, this person has received more emails than the other person. And they've opened 10 ebooks and downloaded two forms. That person is more ready than the other. And like, I can't think of not only one product in the world, I couldn't think of one SaaS product.
I had bought that way. And I was a buyer and I was acting very differently to how I was marketing to other buyers. And I think that was that there was a bit of dissonance in there where I was definitely kind of like going, I was trying to reconcile like this is really feel correct to me. But I think where I really, there's a couple of things that definitely broke me out with the Yahoo moments.
One of them, I would give 100% credit. It was Dale Harrison, who is, I know a friend of the refinance team, big friend of mine. He showed up in my comments going, everything you just said was entirely wrong and stupid. I was like, OK, fair enough.
And you know what it feels like. And I had that medium over like, this guy got blocked this. And then said, I don't have an argument against what he says. And that was kind of like I had that moment.
And I tell Dale all the time. I was like, I feel like you gave me the blunt truth. And I had nothing to defend myself against with. But I would say even before that, where I was really starting to feel like I wasn't in line with even my own thinking was, I remember being in a room with the CRO and we were selling two marketers.
Now, there were marketers who were at e-commerce company at the time. And I was talking about like, oh, here's what we're going to do. Here's our strategy. And the CRO said something to me that just stuck in my head for days afterwards.
It was like, oh, well, marketers at this company don't do that. They're interested in this term. And they're really into like, they love extensibility in a product. And I was like, I've never met a human being who cared about extensibility.
Or who knew the word extensibility? I don't know what that means. And I just remember leaving the room going, I'm a marketer. And the marketer that that CRO just described doesn't feel like a real person to me.
Like, are we completely off base on how we think about the world? And it just irattled me. And then Dale came and just nudged me off a cliff. He sent you overboard.
You did. I can feel that. I remember those messages very much pointed at me at the moment. I was like, am I even thinking of this correctly?
So I love that that challenges you. But also you, I think this is a common thing that we hear with everybody, right? It's like, I just knew this wasn't correct. But we're just doing it.
We're executing. We're creating these like false narratives about the buyers journey and how they're getting there. Because we're just chasing the growth. We're chasing the next like KPI that we can tell in our siloed marketing wins or whatever department we're kind of across from the departments.
There's no overlap there. And I think that's the scary part about when people get into those roles is like they're just champion the next win. They're kind of finding their next opportunity to brag a little bit subtly and which is great. It's like self reassurance that there's some job security in that.
But I don't think that people take the risks that you've taken. So I think that I applaud you there because I learned a ton from you just like listening to you kind of be a voice of reason for a lot of what we say out loud, but also just putting pen to paper. I think what you bring to and this isn't a compliment. But what you bring to like just kind of the even internally refined labs is talking about it is just a different way to like bring a perspective of how to communicate to other companies and think about brand a little bit differently.
So just one second to immediately take away that compliment because it makes me so uncomfortable. The truth is though, all jokes aside, like what I was just talking about what I continue to talk about is what comes out of all of the textbooks and marketing research. They're not these wildly new ideas that I've come up with in, you know, while I was having a shower like a thought occurred to me. This is just the way that everyone else is talking about it.
And you go back to your point, not many people are trained in marketing. Most people find their way into marketing. And I've learned this is not just a B2B promise is everybody's common in the B2C world. There's just a lack of formal training in fundamentals in marketing.
I think it's easy to point fingers and go, well, you're not a trained marketer. I think leadership has an obligation to train people correctly. And I think marketing should be a trained profession. It should have come along with these classes because as soon as you do it, you suddenly you're armed with just this knowledge that like, oh, that's not how any of this works.
And it starts getting you thinking like, is it more likely that people buy the same people by the same products in different ways and different environments? Is it more likely that there is a lot of commonality between how you buy in B2C and B2B or does it feel more likely that tech is a completely unique animal that resembles nothing to the rest of the world? Like I know the answer to that. We all know the answer to that.
But when we go up in tech, we are brought up to think that the industry is totally unique. And I think in some ways it actually is unique or at least it used to be unique. And I've been thinking of this for a long time and I'll give you my soapbox on this because it does stick in my head. Most of what happens in tech when there was deep funding, when there was huge sums of money that you were getting is that everything that's rational about how a market operates gets thrown out the window because there's some things businesses have to do.
You have to turn a profit. That was not a consideration. Nobody had to turn a profit for years at the time. And that allows you to do completely unnatural things.
It turns out if you can lose money to sell something, you'll sell a lot of us. There's nothing more effective than under-pricing your product. And if you have the luxury, it turns out you can grow extremely fast because, you know, like I remember there was a big thing about Casper Matris at one point, that it was costing them like $300 to sell a mattress. Like they were losing money on every single item because they were playing the growth at all cost game, acquire market share, and then somehow figure out how you turn a profit.
And so a lot of this on natural stuff was happening in tech. And so when all of the VC funding for at least non-native AI companies has gone away, suddenly everyone's going, oh, the playbook doesn't work. It's like, no, it's not the playbook. It's the completely unnatural subsidies that were happening in the market that allowed you to do wildly irresponsible things with other people's money.
And I think a lot of it is we grew up in these marketing silos or functions. So we were operating, I started my career and just search specific SEM, right? So you don't really think about how broad, what truly marketing is, and you have social media managers, you have email marketing managers, you have search marketing managers, and they're all operating in silos. And I think that's traditionally what kind of got a lot of us to where we're at in this marketing career.
So then it's almost like, how do you pivot back to understand the fundamentals as you continue to progress your career? And I think that's the inflection point right now for a lot of marketers is like, they're kind of like, I've done this. AI is blending everything together. Channels are coming together.
Brand is having such an important dominance in terms of gaining market share because you can no longer chase silo channels. So I think it's fascinating to be in the space right now. And I think you're absolutely right. There's a lot of pressure on companies that hasn't been there before.
And I came from AWS. So like budget was unlimited effectively. We were managing a $32 million budget. It's like, what's another zero?
I don't care. It's been really interesting to come in the startup world. You see under the hood of so many companies that they're runway is short. They don't have much and you can't just burn budget.
So it's interesting. And I think that it's fun to see that pendulum swing back to brand, I guess, as long winded way of saying that. But I'm curious to hear how you did it. What are some of the tools and stuff?
So let's have you take it from here. Yes, I want to pivot a little bit into that specific storytelling function because I did not come from marketing. I was a high school English teacher for 13 years and I know how hard it is to teach a room full of people how to tell a story or how to follow a story or how to graph a story. There is a science and a formula behind it.
That is something I'm intimately familiar with. So when you go to a room full of people who aren't being forced to be there, who aren't trying to get a good grade, they are trying to protect the finances and funds that they do have, how do you get that room full of people to buy into something that feels fake? We want to tell a story with our brand that feels so intangible to a lot of folks, especially when they're in tech, not to call out a specific group, but that's the group that you have the most experience with. So we're going to focus there.
How do you get those folks to buy in? Oh, that's a great question. First of all, shout out to teachers. My wife's family are teachers.
My family are teachers. I'm the only non-teacher in my entire family. So big-check teachers. I know.
Well, now you're teaching all of us across the world. I'm finding the thing I should have done all the time. I think what I've come around to when it comes to brand and marketing and just like that storytelling aspect is I think where marketing often loses the room and where it comes into the disadvantage is that people don't know what you're trying to achieve with storytelling. Like a lot of the time, and this is where I think the revenue marketing thing won really big because, and again, I remember saying this multiple times, like, oh, listen, you go chase brand awareness and vanity metrics.
I'm going to go generate pipeline. You feel like you're on the right side of the argument. And the problem is that when you think about storytelling, storytelling is a means to an end. We don't tell stories in marketing because we like telling stories.
Sure we do. It is fun. The reason that you're doing it is because it's much easier to get someone to remember you through a story. It's much easier to build a brand through visual elements than it is through numbers and facts.
You're taking advantage of what we know about how memory works and we're using that to try and be remembered. So there's a very logical reason to it. The problem is if you don't give people the grounding of we're not doing this because we want like, I think we've lost a lot of credibility by saying things that we like to believe are true. Like, we want people to love our brand.
We're creating relationships with people. People don't have relationships with brands. They use brands to reflect themselves. People wear items of clothes because it reflects the personality they want to feel about themselves.
They don't have a relationship. I don't have a relationship with Apple. I will buy Apple because it reflects a kind of person I would like to see myself as. And there's so much that goes deep in marketing where I think we try and make marketing feel magical because we want it to feel magical.
But at the end of the day, we're trying to sell more stuff. And marketing is a way of standing out from the crowd, of being thought of more than the other guy and of being thought of when people have those problems. And all of the stuff that we do is to accomplish that goal. It just so happens that memory is hard to build and attention is very hard to get.
So you have to be loud. You have to be silly. People on the sales side and finance people and engineers, they don't get that. And they just think marketing is blowing a whole bunch of budget on an event so they can all go out drinking.
Like I get it. To some degree they're not wrong. But that's the cost of attention. And I think the point I'm making is that I think it's on us to explain why this is the path we are taking to do this.
Like you know, like why do brand for example? Well, the reason you do brand is not because it's like the cherry on top. Well, we've built a great business through performance marketing. Now let's build a brand.
No, brand is what gets you into the big leagues. It's the only way that gets you into the big leagues. So like from a CFO perspective, the question isn't what's the ROI of brand. The question is what's the cost of not doing brand?
How limiting will our company be by not allowing ourselves to be in the consideration stash? And I think a lot of it is just we have to know how to have that conversation. And a lot of it is to come in and say like, we are an authority. This is a trained profession.
I think we've done far too much of let's show everyone that we know what we're talking about. Let's earn our seats at the table. It's like, no, this is a really hard job. If it wasn't a hard job, there would be no professional marketers.
Anybody could do it. And not everybody can do it. I'm kind of a bit of a rant on that one. No, I love that.
Just going to clip that whole section there. I think it's true because we just had an event with Dale Harrison talking about how to justify brand to your CFO and all of that is echoed. You have to prove out your ROI, but you flipping the script on that. And instead of proving it, what's the opposite?
What do we lose if we don't have it? And I think that's a really important perspective to hold onto. What are some tools that you use to help brands focus on the important pieces or to find their story? There's a few.
And I think even before the tool, I think it's always the mindset. And Dale would echo this, I know. Like mindset comes before measurement because at the end of the day, what you're really trying to do is you're trying to construct using measurement the way that you believe the world works. And there's that very famous quote from the statistician George Box, which is that all models are wrong, but some of them are useful.
And all we're trying to do is we're trying to construct a model that is close enough to the way we think the world works. And so, you know, when you think about classic measurement, like lead scoring, lead scoring is a model. And the model assumes that the more touch points someone has with marketing, the closer and closer they're going to be to actually blame. And the problem is you start to actually track this, and then you see it doesn't work.
And then marketing is handing over a bunch of stored MQLs to the sales team, and they're saying this is trash. And instead of going, is the model wrong, we're just saying, well, maybe I haven't figured out how to make the model more accurate. No, maybe the model is just underlining false. And I think the brand model for me is at the end of the day, you know, one of the biggest limiting factors in how a brand grows is how many people know you exist.
So the first and biggest thing you have to do is get as many people as possible to know you exist. And then you're going to try and maintain those memories with those people until those people become ready. So when you think about the value of that, like you have to be in front of as many people as possible, which is where reach comes into play. But you also have to try and at least be in their heads.
And there's only two ways of tracking brand in broad buckets. You can either ask them and you can say, have you heard of these brands? Of these brands, which one is your favorite? Why do you like this brand more than you're like, you can only ever find out what's in people's heads by asking them questions, or you can also watch what they do.
And the problem with, like, I'm a big fan of survey research. I think it's important. I think if you can get it, you always always should. But there's another great quote, which is from David Ogleby, which is the problem with market research is that people don't think what they feel.
They don't say what they think and they don't do what they say. So when you ask people, hey, would you buy this brand? If it only costs X amount, they'll all go, yeah, I would totally buy that brand. And then you come and release it, nobody buys it.
So like, you can only get so much for asking people questions. You can also track whether or not they do anything. And one of the ways you can track whether they do anything is with stuff like branded search. Do people actually seek out your brand?
Do they look for you and try and find out what you do and find out more about you? Those are observations. And when you start to stitch together the model, what we're trying to understand is, do people know who we are? Do people remember what we do?
And do people seek us out when they have problems? There's a million ways of measuring that. But at the end of the day, as long as you understand that's what the concept is, everyone agrees. That's the goal.
And then a lot of it is semantics. Everything's a vanity metric until you can put it into context. Do you feel like, so you talk about measuring it and you're thinking about like, market share brand, so like a specific tool that people could use is effectively going to looking at like Google search data, right? Or Google search console and understanding the general market share.
What do you think? Like, what's the pushback you've heard in this scenario though? Like where people are just like, eh, or is there not one because people haven't really like applied the numbers to really see the growth prediction? I think that's a good question.
Not as much pushback as I think I expected. I think the current pushback is there's the AI obsession, where, oh, well, everything was happening in the other limbs now. And we can talk about that. It's not really true.
It may be true someday, but it's definitely not true right now. But I think the main thing is it feels too simple. I think there's this kind of expectation that this has to be complex and algorithmically driven. And I think sometimes we just overcomplicate things because I think, you know, we've all been this marketer where sometimes you present something and say, like, that doesn't look complicated enough.
I'm going to add like three more layers onto this because complicated means good, right? Like it's how it works. Sometimes it doesn't have to be overcomplicated. And especially if it's accessible, that's a good thing.
Like measurement is often, it's all about what you do with this. And I think the deliteracy of how to use data is more important than the amount of data that you actually have. Like, you know, the thing that I think is really interesting about search data is you can put it into comparisons. Like if you just track your branded search or let's say, actually, let's do a different version.
Let's say you decided that I am going to track branded traffic to my website as a proxy for brand interest. Now, there's two problems with that. One of them is you don't know how many people searched for your brand and didn't need to click through. So they may have gotten the answer they wanted.
That's increasingly true these days. So just getting a click doesn't actually mean it was better. They may have gotten a sufficient answer from the search. So firstly, you may have just got the wrong metric and you may have been better off just finding out how people looked for your brand in the first place, positive or negative.
And the other is you don't have anything to compare it to. So let's say it went up 10% since last month. Well, I mean, was that the market? Like is it just a better month?
Did it happen for everybody else? Was it like something I did or was it something that we just were on the receiving end of and we wrote a wave? And so a lot of data is effective as long as you can give something else to compare it to that says, is this up because something happened or is this up because I did something or is this up because everybody is up. And when you can track you and your competitors, you get that context, which is at least allows you to tell a story that it's more than correlation.
It's at least something going on that is like, if I'm up and nobody else is up, something has happened. Now, the question is what caused us? But all of it comes from comparison. Yeah.
Yeah. No, I think it's a powerful reminder that sometimes less is more especially when it comes to crafting your narrative. And I think a lot of us get with the pressure, get in positions where we feel like we need to create something grand or some sort of visual that distracts from the actual story that we're trying to tell. And it's a challenge I've run into before in my career.
It's like over complicating slides over complicating the narrative. And then you walk away and people are like, what the fuck did you just say? Like, I have no idea. I think that it's important for us to just reset and kind of get back to the so what?
What is our objective here? Why are we doing it? And how are we going to show it? And then you can just take the analogy further.
Like the structure for almost all of the best stories follow the exact same structure. You don't need to reinvent it for the sake of being different. You don't have to go all like Game of Thrones are going to subvert the audience. I'm going to go all M.
like Shyamalan on this. No, sometimes classic structures work because they work because we watch them. People gravitate. And then you can just go back to a lot of good storytelling is understanding people and how they like resolution in a story.
And occasionally you can bend the rules on that, but you can't bend the rules unless you understand the fundamental rules. We need to do more of these stuff. We have a lot of time. I love it.
We didn't hit the abyss. I was on it. We're there. We're there.
Okay. We're at the bottom of the circle. You know, I think it's always good to hear like the positives of everybody's journey of their story, how they got there, the wins that they can kind of talk. But I want to know also, you know, one of the lowest points of this journey, kind of whether it's in marketing or the conversations you've had, but what kind of kept you pushing forward even with the pushback or even with kind of the blockers that you ran into without you just kind of talk us all through any sort of missteps, failures that you encountered that you're open to share, of course.
I'm not even sure they're missteps, but I think one thing that does stick out for me is that right now, Brandon is having a moment, which is great. It's nice to be on the right side of that. That wasn't true two years ago. It definitely wasn't true.
And there was an amount where I felt like I was firstly, like one of the only ones like you had that feeling like, I'm I the idiot here? Because everyone else seems to feel the other way. And it's one thing to feel that. And it's another thing to be putting your ideas out there and having very prominent people with large followers go, no, you're an idiot.
That's completely wrong. And that there was definitely moments from like, is this worth it? And you really have to just kind of decide on like, what's my conviction? Like you really, you don't figure out who you are until you have to make a decision that could be unpopular and you have to risk not going with the crowd.
It's not an easy thing to do. And I don't think I was doing anything wildly controversial, but I was definitely going against the tide in a way. And maybe I was making a strategic bet, but at the time I definitely at moments going like, like, is this industry ever going to come around to this thinking? Like, is the fact that I'm not feeling the same way as the rest of my peers, a sign that I should just leave the industry and try my hand somewhere else?
And I decided not to. I decided, no, I came up in this industry. I've got enough right to be saying this. But I was definitely, there was a long while, where I was like, maybe the fact that there's 10,000 people who think I'm an idiot and there's three that think I'm not, might be a risky thing.
That's not an easy place to be. I'm fortunate that I kept powering through it and eventually I won't win the argument. But I brought people closer to my side of the argument and then the argument itself moved on. I don't think I pushed it that hard.
I think I was just part of it. But for a long time I definitely wasn't. And I definitely felt at odds with the industry that I had spent 15 years in. First of all, I mean, education, so.
Well, and it takes a lot to, you know, push back on when you've got a comment from Dale that says no, everything you're saying is wrong, to take that and internalize it and not just got react, block, unfollow, ban, kick, you know. So like being able to push through that, what did this whole journey teach you about yourself and what do you appreciate? You know, we've heard a little bit about your ability to kind of stand up for where you think the industry should be, even if it's not yet, but what do you, let's make you say something nice about yourself here. We're not gonna say anything, we'll let you do it.
He's never coming back. Oh God, this is taking a turning point. I think I'm, it's a nice feeling to feel like you're being true to how you feel. And it's very, very easy to go with the crowd.
And especially, you know, like one of my big arguments that I still have and I still get in, you know, mini disputes online about this is that a lot of how we're training people in this industry is to not get fired. And I think that's a really low bar. I just don't think that's acceptable. I acknowledge that we have to not get fired, but I don't think we should be proud of the fact that that's the minimum threshold we meet and we call that training.
I think that's sad. And I think I'm trying to, you know, I'm happy with the fact that I am sticking to my values and I'm not compromised on them. And I took a risk and the risk paid off. I think I, you know, I held strong and I'm happy that I did.
Perfect. You did it. Uh, this is, this is fantastic conversation. I think it gets us all kind of just the reminder that sometimes you just have to take a step back and trust your gut, trust your instinct and kind of hold true to what you believe.
Despite kind of the ups and downs, but it's just a natural reminder for myself that the other's hard months or hard quarters. There's times that you just want to say, screw this all like this isn't for me. But when you kind of first of your come to the other side of it, there's going to be people that support you as long as you believe in yourself. And I think like your reflection of what you're doing and you're consistently of showing up and telling the same story.
But also adjusting how the story is told to the audience and how they're receiving it. I think it's just sometimes it doesn't land the first time and you just got to keep going. So yeah, and I've definitely refined my own story over the last couple of years. A lot of writing on LinkedIn is selfishly really helpful to shape my own thinking.
Like I definitely do think through my keyboard and I think a lot of the ways that I can articulate myself, I would not have been able to had I not found myself in more and more situations where I had to go, what do I believe? I'm going to put it down in paper and I'm going to put it out there and people might say that I'm wrong. And that's fine. And maybe I am wrong, but at least I'll have farmed my thought completely and then I'll put it out into the world.
And if it comes back with adjustments, I'm better farce. If it comes back telling me I'm wrong, I'll reflect on it. And if I'm right and other people come along with me, then I'm better for that too. Like I think a lot of it is just you have to figure out what do you genuinely believe and then hold that relatively loosely.
Yeah, don't try to write to please anybody I think is the lesson that I kind of take from that. It's you will get feedback and feedbacks good because it shows your challenge in the way of thinking and you're not just thinking like everybody else. And I think that is just a wildly powerful skill set that a lot of us could benefit from. Yeah, but also don't forget that some people are just mean and their feedback is worthless.
And the of the feedback matters. There are trolls every keyboard, warriors that just have so much to say in the moment. And it's, you know, we all get those, but they're reading it and they have an opinion. So that means you got their eyeballs on it whether good or bad.
So they clearly don't have anything better to do, but I love it. So kind of thinking, you know, we like to wrap up these conversations. There has been, you know, you've been what I think is at 16 years on this journey of marketing and have seen a lot of the changes and pendulum swings, but what do you see if the listeners, whether they're young marketers or people transition into the career, what do you see shift you see coming next? That's really like impactful.
And how do you think people should prepare for it? Or what do you think they should do to make sure they're on the right side of the conversations? I think I find myself on that side that it can be very easy to believe the world is totally different with all the new technologies, new channels, AI, and to some degree, it is. From a tactical point of view, the job is totally different and in a lot of ways much, much harder than I'd ever used to be.
But on another lens, the world is not different. And the world will still continue to operate the same way it always has. The brains that we use to make the decisions to buy things have not changed in millions of years and will not change any time soon just because AI is combustion. And I think a lot of what I continue to feel stronger and stronger about is that there is no B to B to C.
There are people and there are different kinds of purchases. I think that there's more people having common with buying a car and buying into braised software than buying a car and buying a pair of jeans. Like they're not the same. B to C is sometimes completely unlike itself.
The amount of marketing you have to do to get someone to buy a bottle of milk in a supermarket is not the same as you have to market to get them to buy insurance for their family. They're not the same. Sometimes they're more similar to B to B. What is always valuable is to understand how people work, why people do the things that they do, how markets operate, and all of it fits into the same core and standing.
People will make decisions based on fear, on desire, on risk mitigation, why are you making that decision, who else is involved with that decision? How often do you make a decision like this? How risky is this decision? It doesn't really matter what the category is.
B to B's ask, it's of no consequence. What matters is you understand how people react to different kinds of decisions, and consumers will always be consumers, no matter how they play. Incredible. Liam, this has been honestly a masterclass in reframing thinking.
It's just so nice to hear it clearly laid out, and we're really grateful for you taking the time to share your insights. We hope everyone listening will start to refine your own story, stop over complicating things, and say something nice about Liam in our comments. If you like hearing these journeys, make sure to subscribe and share this episode out to your network. And if you want to nominate a marketing hero to come on and chat with us, feel free to get in touch.
Thank you all so much for listening. We'll see you next time.