In this episode of Marketing Insights, Marketing Maven, entrepreneur and Host Shanita B. Akintonde explores how brands can break away from blindly chasing algorithms to EARNING rather than assuming consumer attention.
Because showing up is only the first step. The rule of three is at play:
Show up. Level up. Glow up.
Full Podcast Transcript:
Shanita Baraka Akintonde:
I'm back with another special edition of Marketing Insights. Now, before I get into the content of this podcast, let me give you all a little preview. I call this the Professor's Podcast. Sometimes I playfully call it The Playlist of Podcasts. In other words, you want to add the Marketing Insights podcast to your personal playlist.
Today, I'm going to use that word play both literally and figuratively speaking. And that is because the idea of playing comes into play with this podcast, which I am entitling Bored Games, but that's bored spelled B-O-R-E-D versus B-O-A-R-D. I had to pause for a second there. Bored as in... I'm yawning.
So Bored Games, i.e., why consumers aren't playing along anymore, is what we're going to talk about in this special edition of my Marketing Insights podcast. So anybody want to play a game? That can be Monopoly, Scrabble, Uno, Candy Land.
Am I the only person that would get so close to the Candy Land spot? And if I got one of those cards that sent you back to the beginning, I don't know if it was like the Candy Cane card or whatever, I would get really emotional when I was a kid playing Candy Land. Really sad if I ever had to do that, but I digress.
We're happy today. And that is because we are going to play a little game of follow the leader, or maybe we can call it copy the competition. Oh, no, wait a minute wait a minute. I got it. I got it. Got it. Here's everyone's new favorite marketing game, let AI write it.
Well, welcome back again to another special edition of Marketing Insights Bored Games. That's B-O-R-E-D. And class is officially in session. On this episode, we're going to talk about some things, but before we do, let me introduce myself officially. I'm your host, Shanita Baraka Akintonde, professor, author, career coach, marketing shero, and president and chief love officer of ShanitaSpeaks, LLC, where I give soul to my client strategies to help them build their businesses and brands to show up, level up and glow up. And that is also included in telling better stories about themselves and others.
And today I'm going to put all that into a pot of gumbo, serve it on the side as we play these bored games today, because we're not just talking about board games or games or any kind of games. We're talking about bored games, B-O-R-E-D. So while some marketers are busy playing real games in real life because they're trying to capture consumers in ways that are not necessarily above board, I'm playing it up today, ain't I? Y'all get it?
Consumers may actually be getting bored with those tactics because they can see through them and they see what many marketers are trying to do. The same old, same old. No change, no variety, no differentiation, which I talked about in my last podcast.
In other words, marketers are putting out the same post, responding to the same trends, using the same language, which we never have to worry about here, do we marketing maestros, or using the same influencer formulas. They are "using the same authentic voices, same videos, same emails," you all get it. And so when everything is the same, what is it that's going to make people get bored faster? Sameness.
And so now we're going to throw artificial intelligence into the mix and that is even more sameness. Because whether people realize it or not, when things are being generated, written, populated with AI content, there's kind of a rhythm that is present that also speaks to sameness in that arena as well. So what happens when nobody takes a step back or maybe they're afraid or not adventurous enough to look at it, and say, "Okay, you know what? We don't want to be the same as everyone else. There's a real danger actually in us being the same. We need to be different."
What happens when someone is not able to do that or unwilling to do that? Well, uh-oh, that's when you have a moment in which really playing around is going to hit the wall. So today what I'm going to do is I'm going to share with you these creative marketing games, if you will, that I've come up with that is going to give us an opportunity to not play around with our consumers, but to play gainfully to get ahead of the competition. It's going to be an opportunity for brands to take a pause and to really stop playing altogether because unlike Monopoly, where you pass, go and get a free pass.
So what do you get? When you all play, do y'all get money, $200? Is that what you're supposed to get when you pass? Oh yes, you get $200. Forgive me. I'm acting like I don't know how to play Monopoly. You get the $200 when you pass, go.
Well, in this case, you may not get the $200 in real cash in real time as you're listening to this podcast, but you're definitely going to get the payoff at the end. And I also promise you that it's not going to take a long time to do so. Alrighty. So let's break it down.
And here's the first game that I'm going to talk to you all about, and that is called Follow the Leader. And we remember this game as kids. You let someone get out in front. I think one of my favorite cartoons, Frosty the Snowman, demonstrates this the best. Y'all remember this when he was out walking with the broom when they first made him into a snowman and all the little kids got behind him and he was marching around the city, I think, and everybody was following him?
Well, that idea of you being Frosty and following behind him is the idea that I want you to imagine. And if you've never seen that cartoon, shame on you, but also find it somewhere and watch it because it's really a great cartoon. I shouldn't even be talking about winter considering that summer is still in session, but that's what popped into my mind when I though about follow the leader.
So basically what happens is someone gets out in front and everyone else gets behind them. And whatever the leader does, the other people do. So that's something that we obviously as marketers would want to happen.
We want to get out in front, have everyone get behind us, including competition. And whatever the leader does, you do. Well, welcome to the marketing timeframe in an age of social media, which gives even more opportunity for emulation because once a company creates a funny video, then everybody starts creating funny videos.
Or once a company gets snarky on social media, then everybody thinks that their brand has to have an attitude as well. So there's a lot of copycatting going on, which is not exactly the same as follow the leader. To a certain extent it is, but it's a little different.
So listen up. You should study what works and you should try to take from that what you can and apply it where it works for you and your brand. I call it stealing shamelessly. And I believe I've talked about that in other podcasts. If I haven't, I know in my classrooms I've definitely talked to students about it.
So there's nothing wrong with that. You study what works, you emulate it if it makes sense to do, you tweak it as needed if that makes sense, whatever the case is. Even competitive research talks about the importance of that as part of a marketing strategy.
So when you are listening, which is a part of my company module and you're paying attention to what people are talking about, you pick those trends up, you take it and you package it again, if applicable to your brand or service. All of that is groovy, but there's a difference with studying your competition and then trying to become your competition. You can't become them. You have to stay true to you. So that is where it gets a little slippery.
And if someone can take your logo and swap it out with someone else's logo, and the message still works, then that's a problem, Houston. That's a problem. We don't want that. We don't want that.
Okay. So you have to stay true to you, your voice, your perspective, your personality, and most importantly, your promise because that is what differentiates a brand, my favorite word. So because marketing isn't about becoming the best version of someone else, it's about becoming the best version of you, then game number one, follow the leader, has different connotations. You have to understand what we're saying about following the leader versus trying to become the leader because if you do the latter, womp, womp, womp, womp. Game over.
Alrighty. Let's move on to game number two, Hide and Seek. Now we played this, most folks did as a kid. You never wanted to hide so well though that nobody could find you. I don't know if that ever happened to anybody. That never happened in my childhood. Hopefully, it didn't happen in yours. Well, obviously it wasn't you because you wouldn't be sitting here listening to this podcast or would you?
All right. So ready or not, here I come. Hide and Seek is a wonderful game when you're about five or six years old, maybe even seven, eight, nine. If you had a prolonged childhood like me, you might have played it up until you were 10. But regardless, it's not so much a wonderful game if you're a customer.
So stay with me. If you're a customer, you're not trying to seek nothing out. You don't want it hidden from you. You want it in plain sight, plain view, easily accessible when you need it, at what time you need it, as much as you need it.
So some brands don't get it and they think that by making customers work for them and actually having them work a little too hard sometimes is what's going to make them stand out or perhaps they think that it'll increase the anticipation that I've talked about in the past, but that's not the type of anticipation that we're talking about. That's not anticipation you're building, that's frustration, big difference. So what you want to do is make sure that when people decide that they want to utilize you, your service or your product, that you are there for them.
And so that means if you spend a lot of time on setting it up, whether that's through your copy that you have in your ads or your photos or imagery that you're using, if you have a great mission statement that you've created, someone clicks on your website and they're like, "Wow." They're scrolling and they're scrolling and they're scrolling and they're scrolling and they're scrolling and they're scrolling and they're scrolling and they're scrolling and they're scrolling. It's only so much that all that fancy stuff is going to keep them engaged.
Pretty soon they're going to look at you and say, "Okay, now what do I do? Where are you? Where do I click? What do I need to do to just close this transaction?" In marketing maestros, if you've learned nothing else from me, it is you have to make sure that that value proposition is upfront, in the middle, center stage and not hiding somewhere behind the couch. You have to make sure that your customers don't need a magnifying glass or decoder ring to find you or to figure out a puzzle after they watch like three episodes of Law and Order to figure out what it is you're trying to give them. You need to tell them who you are, what you do, who you do it for, and why they should care quickly.
In my company, ShanitaSpeaks, LLC, for example, I help individuals and organizations tell better stories. I give soul to my clients' strategies, and I help individuals and brands show up, level up and glow up. I'm clear, I'm specific and I'm memorable, both in what I say I'm going to do when I show up and how I give it to them. There's no hide and seek. Again, womp, womp, womp, womp, game over if you delve into that territory.
So we're talking about bored games, that's B-O-R-E-D, not B-O-A-R-D. And we're talking about how you as a marketer can avoid the former. We don't want people to be bored and we want them on board. We want people to look at our brands, look at our products and say, "This is solving the problem that I needed to solve, which is our number one mission and goal and ambition, but also we need that to happen quickly."
Because if I have a headache and I decide to take something for it, I need it to kick in relatively quickly. I don't need to come back a week later and still have that same headache, right? That's a bit extreme of an example, but you get what I'm saying.
So now let's go into game number three, which is also one of my favorites, and this one is Simon Says. For this podcast, we'll say Shanita Says, but regardless, it is the same premise. This one is good because Simon can say, "Make a podcast, call it Marketing Insights, get on TikTok, get on Instagram, use an influencer, put it in a carousel."
Now, all those things, I broke the rule because what didn't I say before I said all those things? Because if you don't say it first, you can't do it. I didn't say, "Simon says." So that's the trick of the game. If you're a kid and you played it, remember the person would get you because they would say, "Simon says, 'Raise your right hand.' Simon says, 'Kick out your left foot.' 'Kick out your right foot." And if you kicked out your right foot because it wasn't preceded by Simon says, you were out.
So the same thing applies here. You have to follow the routine, the rhythm. It's like the famous line in Copy where the woman who wrote it, and I believe she may have been new to the industry at the time, but don't quote me on that, who wrote the word repeat on the back of the shampoo or conditioner product. She wrote that one line, it said, "Wash your hair out, rinse and repeat." And by her adding that one word of repeat, it not only caused a ritualistic approach to using the product, it caused the product to quadruple in sales because by repeating, what are people doing? They're using more of the product.
So when you follow that kind of intuitively, instinctively idea of telling people something to do, but they have to follow it in a certain sequence or step process, you're giving them something to do, but it engages them and that keeps people from being bored as well. There's an algorithm, there's a rhythm to it and that's something that matters. So while your platform matters, the technology matters, the trends that we've talked about previously matters.
But somewhere in there, you've got to engage your consumers in different ways because at the core of everything that we do really, and I know I've used that term a little bit about other things, but at the core of the core, let me put it that way, are the people. The people, the customers, they are really what at the end of the day makes a difference. So what do they need is what you're going to answer and how you give it to them.
We like rhythm. We like rules of three. We like being told how to do something specifically. And even if we know it intuitively what to do, just following steps and being told how to follow those steps engages us, it's fun, it keeps our attention and people will correct you.
If you say, "Rinse and repeat," and then later on down the line you come up with say an extension of your product line and it doesn't have the word repeat, I promise you, customers will come back and say, "Wait, what happened? Why are you not telling me to repeat?"
So we can kind of train, if you will, our customers so we don't even have to tell them anymore. They'll tell us or correct us if we don't follow through on what we told them and specifically if it's a brand promise. But that's another conversation, another time.
Right now, I'm talking about bored games on this special edition of Marketing Insights. I'm Shanita Baraka Akintonde, your host, the professor with the playlist, and today we're playing around with board games. And we're talking about how marketers can use this idea of "playing games" or what we can learn from board games, actual board games, B-O-A-R-D, and apply it to what we do to make ourselves better in the marketing arena.
And with that, we're going to move on to our final, final bored game example. And that is actually Monopoly. This is a classic. And why I said earlier, what happens when you pass, go, forgive me, because my family, we play this game like, oh my gosh, it's like a battle zone.
I mean, they take it so seriously in my family that sometimes I have to get ready. When I sit down, I have to be locked because we don't play this particular game only for fun. There's a lot of competition.
But as far as you're concerned for this podcast, we know Monopoly is a classic game. You need to buy Boardwalk. You always want to get Boardwalk and Park Place, the two blues, you want those. But you know you collect the $200 when you pass go.
And it's something that is just a lot of fun because I think it teaches strategy, it teaches planning, it teaches you how to be visionary and plot and figure things out ahead of time. It's a lot of fun. But at the end of the day, just make sure you know if you play with the Akintonde family, you got to come win.
Okay. But there's a marketing lesson hiding on the board and that is some brands behave as though they have monopoly on their customer's attention spans. So in other words, they send you an email or we send our customers an email, and then we think, why didn't they open it? We post a video and then we ask, why didn't they watch it? Or we launched this really great campaign in our minds anyway, it's great. And we think when we look at the metrics later, why didn't they buy?
So that's what I mean by we think we have a monopoly on our consumers. Because check this out, we have to earn that feedback, that watched video, that buying into the campaign, if you will. They don't owe us their attention. We again have to earn it, and we have to earn it every single time.
It's like anything we do in life. Sometimes there gets to be some complacency. People think because they may have figured you out or they think because you may have responded favorably in the past that that is guaranteed, that because you are loyal, so to speak as a customer in this case, that that is going to be something that they can take for granted.
Well, we marketing maestros know not so fast because think about the amount of information consumers encounter in one day, not just from us, but from so many other places. They get emails, texts, videos, ads, podcasts like this one, and every podcast isn't as great as marketing insights, but they still get them. Notifications, boop, boop, boop, breaking news, streams, group chats, etc., etc., etc.
So there's a lot of information. And so we're not only competing with other brands, we're competing with just life. And so as marketers, we have to stop acting as though we're going to show up and automatically that means that we're going to be seen no matter how fabulous we are. And if you listen to the beauty brands podcast that I just dropped prior to this one, I know you look fabulous because you're using all those products that we talk about in that podcast.
However, there's still something that we need to do and not just show up and behaving as though once we do show up, that that automatically means that we're going to be seen. This is where I want to make an important distinction with you. Showing up does matter and how we show up is important, being authentic, being real, and even being beautiful and how you define that is in multiple ways, in spirit and energy and look, packaging, all of that, that matters.
I tell my clients, I tell my ShanitaSpeaks clients to show up and level up and glow up. You heard me say that. And that glow up, I really... Double clicked that, but that is only step one. Showing up gets you into the room. Leveling up gives people permission or a reason to notice you. And glowing up gives them a reason to remember you, but that's how you earn attention.
Monopoly or monopolizing someone's time, monopolizing them you think over competition. Womp, womp, womp, womp, game over. So we've talked about the four things. I've given you the sound effects as to what can happen if you don't play these games successfully.
So now you're asking me, well, Professor Shanita, what games should we be playing? Well, honestly, I don't think you should be playing any games. I think you should be strategizing and thinking in terms of how you can achieve your goals without playing games because marketing isn't supposed to be a game at all.
It's supposed to be a relationship that you're building. Let me say that again. It's not a game that you're playing at all. It's a relationship that you're building or have built with your consumers because if you think about it, the brands that you love, that I love, that we love, don't merely sell to us.
And I talk about this in the previous podcast as well. They understand something deep about us. They know how to either entertain us, teach us something, help us, surprise us. And don't we love to be surprised, especially when it's a good surprise? Sometimes they can make us laugh, they can make us think.
And every time they do those things, how do we feel afterwards? Because even every once in a while they make us say, "Ah, they get me. That brand understands me." And that's when you have a connection, a real connection with the brand, the product, the good, or the service, and you can't manufacture that. In some cases you might be able to, but that's really difficult.
That brings me back to AI and that is something that is on everyone's radar and you can definitely use it to help yourselves out in the marketing arena. In terms of brainstorming, you can use it to help you research some things, organize it, etc. So you shouldn't run away from it, but what you shouldn't do is use it so that now everything sounds cookie cutter or everything sounds exactly alike.
Everything when you turn on the radio or you listen to a podcast like this, or you're reading something in a magazine or in a book or on a billboard or wherever you get your information from, it's all redundant and repetitive. That's not what you want. You want it to have some originality, some passion, some nuance, some things that are going to be specifically coming from a person that understands how to go between the lines, twist it around a little bit, turn it upside down and bring it back. And that's where the human touch comes into play. You can't get that necessarily from AI, but it can help you in the framing perhaps in some cases.
So here's a little homework for you. And this is before our next episode and before you tune into the next edition of Marketing Insights, as this one is about to wrap up, I don't want you to be bored, so I want to keep you entertained and educated and all of the above.
So here's what I'm going to ask you to do. Take a look at your own marketing wherever you do it, whether you're a student in class and you're looking at your homework assignments, whether you're a professional out in the world like I am, whether you own your own company or you work for someone else, whether you're someone in the middle of all of that. And I want you to ask yourself, are you following or leading? Are you communicating your value or are you hiding it? Are you listening to your customers or just to the trends or the algorithms that are out in the world?
And the last one, are you earning attention or are you assuming that you're entitled to it? Because as I said before, if your customers already know exactly what you're going to say before you're saying it and exactly how you're going to say it, what you're going to do next, then they may not be engaged with you. They may be bored.
And marketing maestros' bored customers don't play the game for very long or they don't play anything for very long. So stop playing the same old games and make a move. Tell a better story, make yourself useful, make sure you know how to do it to keep people remembering you because you're someone worth remembering.
And that's how brands show up. That's how we level up. And that marketing maestros is how brands glow up. So until next time, which will be our very best time, this is Shanita Baraka Akintonde, professor, author, storyteller, marketing shero, and president and chief love officer of ShanitaSpeaks, LLC, signing off from another special edition of the Marketing Insights podcast, this one entitled Bored Brands. That's B-O-R-E-D.
Connect with me on LinkedIn at Professor Shanita Akintonde, on Twitter at Shanita_Barakamama or on Twitter at underscore _ShanitaSpeaks. Bye-bye.
