Too many marketers aren't students of marketing - Talk Marketing 034 - Grant Leboff

Too many marketers aren’t students of marketing – Talk Marketing 034 – Grant Leboff

Episode number 34 of the Talk Marketing series with the brilliant Grant Leboff. Grant is one of the UK’s leading marketing thinkers and authors and this conversation was a wide ranging conversation about marketing, why marketing is such a mess, how marketing goes wrong and you might give yourself a better chance of getting your marketing right. 00:00 Introductions 3:04 Why did you decide to become a marketing type person? 7:20 Is marketing just performative? 11:52 How you are qualified to talk to us about marketing? 13:18 What was the motivation for writing the books was that a marketing exercise or is that a calling? 24:02 How is it that people don’t know what marketing is? 29:53 How is it that marketing is in such a mess? 35:19 What was the thinking behind your books Sales Therapy and Myths of Marketing? 44:04 Should marketing be regulated? 58:12 Who do you provide marketing services to and how do you add value to their lives? 1:05:51 How is it that brands manage to get it wrong? 1:16:11 What are your reading recommendations? 1:16:27 Who can you introduce me too that might agree to speak to me as part of the Talk Marketing Series? How you are qualified to talk to us about marketing? Grant Leboff That’s a great question. So how am I qualified? I suppose I’d say I’m qualified in a few areas. The first one is that my background behavioural psychology because actually, marketing is all about people. It’s amazing to me, how few marketers actually understand how people work. Actually effective communication with people is everything. How do you influence people? How do you persuade people? How do you communicate with people? How do you move people? So I think that that is a qualification in and of itself. The other thing I’ve been in marketing, now for 20 something years. So just experience of the doing. I ran a direct marketing agency, which I built up and sold, I now run a reasonably successful consultancy and I’ve written five books, which I don’t think necessarily makes me a great marketer but it does mean that I’ve done a certain amount of study, and thought, and analysis about what I’m doing, because you can’t write a book without thinking things through. Certainly not getting the publisher to publish it at the end. So I think so I think my qualifications, I would say, are experience, understanding of psychology and the fact that I’ve done you know, an awful lot of analysis and thinking about marketing, in order to be able write five books about it, which means, hopefully, there’s a depth to some of the things that I talk about. Martin Henley Okay. What was the motivation for writing the books was that a marketing exercise or is that a calling? Grant Leboff Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I would say it’s a calling, if that doesn’t sound too pretentious. I was running a direct marketing agency when I wrote my first books. My first book was called Sales Therapy, it came out in 2007. In the marketing agency we had some IP that we were using and it was very successful. I knew that I couldn’t, you can’t own intellectual property in as much as you have employees that come and they learn your system, and they learn what you’re doing and then you know, they leave because they’re progressing their own careers. They can’t unlearn what you’ve taught them and nor should they. I had no interest in trying to protect my intellectual property, in as much as that was unrealistic and silly but I did want to be able to kind of prove that some of that original thinking was mine. I thought it was interesting for people to read so that was the motivation for writing book one. Book one was really a line in the sand to say, we’re doing some things differently here and this is what we’re doing differently and I thought that it had a double use, which was one personally, it enabled me to kind of prove that it was my thinking and sort of cement my thinking in a format we could say, like I had these ideas. Second of all, hopefully, by sharing those ideas, it was going to be useful for other people. So that really was the motivation for writing the book. To be honest with you, my motivation for writing all the others has not been about IP. The others is, it’s all been about thinking, I have something to say, that’s useful for other people. I mean, I’ll let other people judge whether I do have anything to say useful. I wouldn’t write a book if I, if I didn’t feel I had something to share. You know what, it wasn’t a marketing exercise in that sense. Martin Henley Okay. So that’s interesting, I’ve got an idea I’ve never shared with anyone. When you’re training, or you’re speaking, and I’ve spoken to a number of trainers and speakers about this, it’s like, when you feel like you might be losing the room, what you have to do is you have to up the theatre to get people more involved. So there is like, coming back to this theatre thing. My theory is kind of it doesn’t, it’s all, it’s all just stories for me.
Martin Henley

Martin Henley

Martin has built a reputation for having a no nonsense approach to sales and marketing and for motivating audiences with his wit, energy, enthusiasm and his own brand of audience participation. Martin’s original content is based on his very current experience of running effective marketing initiatives for his customers and the feedback from Effective Marketing’s successful and popular marketing workshops.

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