Gini Dietrich is the CEO of Arment Dietrich and the author of Spin Sucks. This is part of an interview that I conducted for the book that I am writing on my Bullseye Marketing Framework.

Louis: What is PR today and how is it different than in the past?

Gini: I believe in the PESO model which is Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned media. So you have your traditional earned media which is media relations, publicity, working with influencers, brand ambassadors, things like that. You’ve got shared which is social. Owned which is content, content marketing. And then paid, not from the perspective that we are going to go out and create these gorgeous ads and then put them on the Super Bowl. No, it’s more like take the content that we are creating and then amplify it through paid social or through email marketing. So it all works together from an integration standpoint and that’s what we do. So, we really look at communications as an integrated model.  A lot of people think of PR and they think of publicity. They think, you know, you’re getting on the front page of the New York Times. And that’s just one teeny-tiny part of it. We really look at it holistically.

Louis: So I think of traditionally PR as being kind of the earned media part of the peso model. You know the publicity, the media relations, influencers and so forth. How then is a PR agency today different from a marketing agency?

Gini: Well, it’s probably not in some cases. There are certainly some digital agencies that are trying to do everything that a PR agency would do as well. Typically what I find marketing agencies do better at is branding, product development, that kind of stuff versus communicating externally and internally.

Louis: Is there an area of the PESO model that you think is most important to your work as a PR professional?

Gini: I think content is where it starts because without content, you don’t have earned. Without content, you have nothing to share on social. Without content, you have nothing to share in email or amplify on paid. So, I think that’s where it all starts. I think you are right in that most PR professionals and most executives expect that you should start with earned but you can’t start with earned if you don’t have anything to share.

Louis: Yes. Well, content is kind of central to everything today, like you’ve said. So, what about influencer relations now? You know, that’s kind of at the heart of the earned part of it.

Gini: Yes.

Louis: So, do you do that for your clients and if you do, how do you go about doing it?

Gini: We do. And I actually we take a different approach because I’ve had the whole experience of working with celebrities. And I used to do food PR, which I really miss, and I’ve done everything with celebrity chefs. And I have gone that whole route but what we find is that that’s great for awareness but not for sales conversions. And because we do so much work with B2B organizations, awareness is great but clients aren’t happy if you are not helping them convert sales. So we find that micro-influencers are actually much more effective because they may have 100 followers but all 100 are avid fans of everything that influencer says and if that influencer believes in and is passionate about a product and they talk about it, all 100 of those people are going to actually buy. Whereas if you are Tiger Woods and you are touting a new watch, millions of people will see that but how many people will buy? I would rather have 100% of 100 people than 0.0001% of a million.

Louis: Yeah, that’s a great point and I have heard that from some other people who are involved in social media influencer outreach. They might be focused on influencers — more like a couple of thousand followers rather than a hundred. But you don’t need someone with Kim Kardashian levels of followers.

Gini: No. You do not.

Louis: So how much of that time when you are working with influencers are they doing it because they love what you’re doing and how much of the time is it because you’re paying them in some form?

Gini: With the micro-influencers, we try to find people who are already using the products or have a passion for the products or the industry or maybe have worked with the competitor. So we try to find those kinds of people. For someone like me who works on both sides because I’m also an influencer, I will not work with an organization unless I’ve used their product and believe in it. And I want to have used it on my own, paid for it, all of that before I even consider it.

When the late Lester Thurow was dean of M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management I produced an admission video for the school.

Thurow had three legs to the program he was implementing at the school. He believed that the business leaders that they were educating needed to:

• Be comfortable operating globally
• Understand technology (a perfect approach for a school at M.I.T.)
• Know how to work in teams (he would say, “In school working in a team is called cheating…”)

That all sounds good. But this was 30 years ago. He was ahead of his time in many ways.

I decided that the people considering Sloan didn’t need to see a bunch of students saying, “This school is great. And the professors really care…” like every other admission video. What would move them to prefer Sloan would be to hear from business leaders that Thurow’s approach was what their companies were looking for. So through Sloan I arranged to interview some of the top people of Citibank, Motorola, and other leading companies of the day.

I interviewed John Reed, the chairman and CEO of Citicorp, in his office on the second floor of the old Citicorp building in Manhattan. (Not on the top floor of the new Citicorp building? The rumor was that he was afraid of fires and wanted his office on a low floor.) Of course there were endless requests from the media to meet with him so Reed set aside one hour every week to meet with a reporter. That was the slot that they gave me one week. I had to wait about three months for it.

While we were setting up in the camera and lights, etc., in the library of his office around 8 in the morning, Reed came in and introduced himself. He was wearing a white shirt, which would not look great on video. But he asked, “Would you like me to change into my blue shirt?” He knew his stuff. After all, this was the person who had essentially introduced ATMs into banking.

That idea of setting aside one hour a week for PR stuck with me. No matter how busy a senior executive is, it’s worth 2% of their time to represent the company to the world, comment on important issues, and take advantage of free media.

You may not have reporters lined up for an interview with you, but you can use HARO (Help a Reporter Out) to find out what stories reporters are looking for experts on and get visibility that way. It’s free.

PS: A friend of mine was working at that time in NYC as an investment banker. I told him I was coming to New York to interview John Reed for an hour and he said, “No you’re not.” I assured him I was. Again he said, “No you’re not. Do you know how much people would pay for an hour with John Reed?” Later my friend became Obama’s “Car Czar” and then Senior Counselor for Manufacturing Policy. But that’s another story.

How much of a business and marketing strategy do you need? And how much of success is based on tactical execution?

Certainly you need to understand who your customer is, why they buy, and how to reach them; your competitors; and your competitive differentiators. (If you don’t have any, you better create them.)

But these things are changing quicker than ever these days. The breakthrough iPhone was out less than a year before competitors started to appear despite Steve Jobs’ claim that “we filed for over 200 patents for all the inventions in iPhone, and we intend to protect them.” I can’t tell you the number of clients who have said to me, “Our competitors are always stealing our messaging.” (My clients never do that.)

Over 30 years ago Amar Bhide, now at the Tufts Fletcher School, wrote in his seminal Harvard Business Review article, “Hustle as Strategy”, “A surprisingly large number of very successful companies…don’t have long-term strategic plans with an obsessive preoccupation on rivalry. They concentrate on operating details and doing things well. Hustle is their style and their strategy. They move fast, and they get it right.”

I noticed over the weekend that management author and consultant Tom Peters, who engages with others very actively on Twitter (he doesn’t just post), was discussing similar thoughts:

This emphasis on being close to the customer and nimble is certainly applicable to modern marketing, which is far less tied to the Big Idea (the Marlboro Man or Jolly Green Giant) and instead puts out hundreds of small ideas (tweets, emails, blog posts, ads, etc.), sees which connect and scales those.

And it reflects the agile marketing approach. I recently interviewed agile marketing maven Jim Ewel for the book I’m writing on my Bullseye Marketing Framework (I’ll be releasing an excerpt of his interview soon). Jim has been a senior marketing executive at Microsoft, and a successful CEO, so he certainly knows the enterprise strategy approach. Today he advocates a series of quarterly plans, rather than an annual one.

I’ve written 15-20 page marketing strategies for companies, and run workshops to help them develop 12 month action plans. I think these are useful (if read and used) at companies that have traditionally under-invested in marketing and need a sense of the road ahead and not just “we’ll figure it out as we go”.

In Only the Paranoid Survive Intel CEO Andy Grove explained how they made the strategic decision to abandon the memory chip (RAM) market and focus on microprocessors. They had a good reason: they were being hammered in the market by Japanese memory chip manufacturers. One of my favorite business books is Jim Collins’ Good to Great. While he provides some great data and cases, you could summarize the entire book in three words: “Focus and execute.”

On the other hand in Zero to One Peter Thiel laid out a strategic approach to business that may be useful for, oh, maybe 1% of companies (my critique here).

With or without a strategy a strong emphasis on focus and execution is central to success.

This past weekend “Black Panther” opened nationally with over $200 million in ticket sales, and another $169 million from overseas markets. This makes it the most successful February movie opening ever, and one of the top five for any time of year. (It’s a really terrific movie in many ways; I highly recommend it.)

A month ago the prediction was that it would have a $100 million opening weekend. To make those bigger numbers the appeal for Black Panther expanded well beyond U.S. Blacks. It’s not just “a terrific Black film”; it’s a terrific film. Nonetheless they do form a core audience that may help sustain it at the box office longer than it might otherwise.

Last summer’s “Wonder Woman”, also from Marvel Studios, had a similar cultural impact and commercial success, grossing over $800 million worldwide with its female lead.

Super heroes have traditionally been white males. (Black Widow, part of the Marvel Avengers team, has still not had her own movie despite being played in those ensemble films by Scarlett Johansson; for years Marvel has said, “we’re working on it.”) Literally a majority of the audience did not have a super hero that looked like them and had had their experiences. But Marvel is now showing the great commercial success possible from catering to under-served parts of a market.

Sales and marketing have many reasons why they might not work together well, but one is that they start with a fundamentally different view of the business universe.

Sales people sell to individuals and small buying teams. They are always trying to understand their customer, their particular needs, and how that person can be motivated to buy from them.

Marketers, on the other hand, typically start with personas: a fictional composite of the customer based on research. Sometimes these have names like Marketing Mary and Finance Frank. These personas and market segments drive marketing messaging and targeting.

As more sophisticated companies add more and more data to their customer records, they will create deeper profiles of individual customers. Like the recommendations on Amazon, they will become increasingly personalized. But no matter how much data they use, the customer record will never have the nuanced personal knowledge that a salesperson can.

On the other hand the salesperson will never the breadth of knowledge that is in the customer record. They certainly won’t remember every piece of content that the customer looked at, and every interaction that they’ve had with the company.

Both sales and marketing have great, but incomplete knowledge. The magic happens when they respect one another and begin true collaboration.

Usually the support of an influencer helps the marketing and sales of a company.

In the gun industry it seems to be the exact opposite.

Remington has announced that it intends to declare bankruptcy. The problem is that the president is too friendly to the gun industry.

When Obama was president even the slightest hint of a new gun regulation triggered massive sales of guns and every related item. The best way to sell more assault rifles is to suggest reinstating the assault rifle ban that expired in 2004.

But now with Trump and a gun-friendly Congress in office, gun sales have slumped and 202-year-old Remington is having trouble paying the $1B in private equity debt it took on in 2007.

Be careful what you ask for.

Valentine’s Day rituals have evolved over centuries but a major commercial disruption happened in 1849 in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Expensive, hand-made Valentine’s Day cards had been around for decades, but Esther Howland wondered if they couldn’t be mass produced and sold for less. In 1849 she produced a dozen samples and asked her brother, who was handling sales for her father’s stationary company, to see if there was any interest in them. She hoped to get $200 in orders but he came back from a sales trip with $5,000 in orders!

Her cards were hand-made but she did it at scale and could sell them for far less than other companies. She used high quality paper and introduced many new designs. Eventually she targeted every part of the market with cards selling for 5 cents to $50. Within a few years her business was selling over $100,000 in cards a year – the equivalent of a several million dollar business today.

She sold her company 30 years later and Worcester remained the “Valentine Capital of America” for several more decades.

A year ago the head of brand for P&G, the largest advertiser in the world, told the digital advertising platforms that they had until the end of 2017 to clean up their act. He wanted much better accountability and transparency about their ad spend – a better system for knowing that the ads they were paying for were actually running, and were fully visible to people for a set amount of time.

This week Marc Pritchard gave the industry a passing grade. While not all issues have been resolved, he said that so much progress had been made by the major players (Facebook and Google), and they were demonstrating so much effort, that he was satisfied (with more work to be done). He did say, though, that some smaller ad platforms had not shown as good a results and P&G had cut their advertising from them.

P&G is still off of YouTube because of brand safety issues: they aren’t assured that the videos that their ads are showing on are on brand.

That was a big sigh of relief from the ad industry that you heard.

But then Monday the CMO of Unilever, the fourth largest largest advertiser in the world, said that they would pull their advertising from digital platforms that “breed division in society or fail to protect children.”

“As a brand-led business, Unilever needs its consumers to have trust in our brands. We can’t do anything to damage that trust—including the choice of channels and platforms we use. So, 2018 is the year when social media must win that trust back,” said CMO Keith Weed.

He didn’t name names but the assumption is that he is especially talking about Facebook, Twitter and Google.

This is a little curious to me. I know that there are issues with fake news and bots, but the vast majority of content on Facebook is posts from friends and family. A few weeks ago Facebook said they would reduce content from brands and publishers even further — even if that meant a cut in usage time by people.

Ads on the Google Display Network appear primarily on third-party sites. They claim they can reach 90% of Internet users worldwide on over two million sites. On the AdWords Display Network Placements tab you can see exactly where your ads are running – and you can blacklist sites. Surely an advertiser the size of Unilever can automate the monitoring of those sites.

Twitter, on the other hand, is still the wild west.

A recent study found that the customer acquisition cost (CAC) for B2B and B2C subscription companies has risen almost 50% over the past five years.  This isn’t entirely surprising to me since I wrote in September that the CAC for HubSpot has risen over 100% in that period. (Remember: CAC is the average cost to acquire a new customer: all sales and marketing expenses divided by the number of new customers.)

Subscription companies differ from those with traditional pay-per-product business models. They are typically cloud services and include Carbonite backups, security software, and thousands of sales and marketing software companies.

CAC can vary by channel. For years proponents of content and inbound marketing have said that it was more cost-effective than other channels like search and display ads. What the study also found, though, was that the CAC of content marketing is rising even faster and is now approaching that of other channels.

The authors of the study only looked at one industry or business mode: the subscription economy. This reinforces my idea that marketing channels can become saturated and, eventually, inefficient. Subscription companies are especially adept at digital marketing so this is a particularly acute problem for them. In other industries, though, where many companies under-invest in marketing the opportunities are still especially great for the ones that do.

And even if the CAC is rising, companies can continue to use these channels so long as they provide a positive ROI. For now, they do.

Marketing Tips reader Ian Gilbert recently sent me this article about Doritos creating a “lady-friendly” chip. CEO Indra Nooyi, a woman herself, describes how many men lick their fingers after eating the chips, and pour the final crumbs into their mouths, but women would never dream of doing that. They don’t like to crunch too loudly in public, etc. (Clearly we run in different circles…)

So they haven’t released a product yet but Nooyi said, “It’s not a male and female as much as, ‘Are there snacks for women that can be designed and packaged differently?’ And yes, we are looking at it, and we’re getting ready to launch a bunch of them soon. For women, low-crunch, the full taste profile, not have so much of the flavor stick on the fingers, and how can you put it in a purse? Because women love to carry a snack in their purse.”

The Internet was not kind. And within a few days PepsiCo, which owns Frito-Lay, said that they would not be releasing a Doritos for Ladies.

This reminds me of the BIC Cristal for Her pen which has received thousands of mostly-humorous mock reviews on Amazon, like “Someone has answered my gentle prayers and FINALLY designed a pen that I can use all month long! I use it when I’m swimming, riding a horse, walking on the beach and doing yoga. It’s comfortable, leak-proof, non-slip and it makes me feel so feminine and pretty! Since I’ve begun using these pens, men have found me more attractive and approchable. It has given me soft skin and manageable hair and it has really given me the self-esteem I needed to start a book club and flirt with the bag-boy at my local market. “

Brands need to be extra-careful when getting anywhere near issues related to gender, race, sexual identity, and so on. I know a woman who worked on the development of the Venus razor for women at Gillette. Now that was a situation that required a special razor for women. Women who shave shave differently than men: men shave a small part of their face, women shave large parts of their bodies; men tend to shave at the sink, many women shave in the shower; the attitudes of men and women toward shaving are very different; etc. Having a razor that was tailored to those needs was a big success.

And it was nice of the Internet to save Doritos the bother of creating a new Doritos for Ladies.

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