Mean people suck in marketing and what to do about it with Michael Brenner - The B2B Roundtable | Lyssna här

About this episode

Why does so much marketing stink?

Michael Brenner has a direct answer: “Most of the marketing that we do that stinks and doesn’t work is because some executive with a big ego asked us to do it.”

That line gets to the heart of this conversation.

Bad marketing usually starts inside the company. It starts when teams make decisions around internal pressure, executive preference, sales requests, product priorities, or ego instead of asking what actually helps the customer.

In this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I talk with Michael Brenner, Former CEO of Marketing Insider Group and author of Mean People Suck, about why empathy matters in marketing, leadership, and business.

Michael argues that empathy is not soft. It is one of the most practical ways to improve marketing, build stronger cultures, help employees feel more engaged, and create better customer experiences.

We get into why marketers feel frustrated, why many companies still create marketing customers do not care about, how to put the customer back at the center of the business, and why the simple question “What’s in it for the customer?” can change the work.

If your team is tired of creating marketing that checks internal boxes but fails to help buyers, this conversation is worth your time.

About Michael Brenner

Michael Brenner is the Former CEO of Marketing Insider Group. After a 25-year career inside corporate marketing departments, Michael built his work around content marketing, employee activation, thought leadership, and helping companies create marketing that serves customers.

He is the author of Mean People Suck and The Content Formula.

Connect with Michael:

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Michael Brenner
01:20 Why Michael wrote Mean People Suck
03:35 Why so many marketers feel miserable
05:15 Why empathy matters in marketing
09:20 Why customers do not care about brands
13:30 Why the buying journey does not start with your product
16:00 Putting the customer at the center
23:00 Asking “what’s in it for the customer?”

A few things worth taking away

Most bad marketing is created to satisfy internal requests, not customer needs.
Marketers struggle to care for customers when they do not feel cared for inside their own companies.
Empathy is tied to employee engagement, customer loyalty, retention, and business performance.
Customers do not care about your brand as much as your company thinks they do.
The buying journey usually starts with the customer’s question, not your product name.
Marketing should help customers solve problems, not just promote the company.
A better org chart would put the customer at the center, with every department asking how to serve them.
The best marketing and selling feels like helping because it is helping.
The question “What’s in it for the customer?” can stop a lot of wasted marketing activity.
The three pushback questions are simple: Who is this for? Why is it important? How are we going to measure the impact?

A few lines that stuck with me

“Most of the marketing that we do that stinks, that doesn’t work, is because some executive with a big ego asked us to do it.” — Michael Brenner

“The math isn’t enough to get people over the challenges that we’re facing and how to do marketing that doesn’t suck.” — Michael Brenner

“The companies that have effective marketing are those that are empathetic.” — Michael Brenner

“We just aren’t that important. We’re not as interesting or important as we think we are.” — Michael Brenner

“The buying journey doesn’t start with a search for our product.” — Michael Brenner

“We wouldn’t do half of what we do if we asked what’s in it for the customer.” — Michael Brenner

Resources mentioned

You may also like

Listen and subscribe

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Full transcript

Brian Carroll:
Michael, welcome to our show. I’m so excited to have you here with us today. Can you tell our listeners just a little bit about yourself?

Michael Brenner:
Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me, Brian. It’s great to talk to you today. As you know, I’m Michael Brenner. I’m the CEO of Marketing Insider Group. After a 25-year career inside corporate marketing departments, I went out on my own and started squarely in the B2B marketing and content marketing space, now branched out into content development, employee activation, and thought leadership programs. I’m fortunate enough to get to run around the world sometimes and give speeches. It’s been a blast, and I feel really fortunate to be able to do what I do.

Brian Carroll:
So cool. For our listeners, you may not know this, Michael, but you’re one of the very first people I interviewed when I first launched this podcast. That was like three years ago.

Michael Brenner:
Yeah, exactly.

Brian Carroll:
It was funny because we were talking about this topic of empathy, and I just would love for our audience, can you tell us this story? You just wrote a new book, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. For those who are watching the video, can you hold it up? What’s the book title? Mean People Suck. Tell me why you wrote the book. Why now?

Michael Brenner:
Again, I have to give you credit. You were out in front of this empathy topic in marketing I think long before me. Kudos to you. It just took me a little bit longer, but essentially as a content marketer and as a former internal corporate marketer, I reached out to folks that I know that are still living and breathing corporate marketing struggles every day.

One of the things I found was that they were miserable. It’s almost like that scene from, I think it’s Poltergeist, where the obsessed woman has “help” written on her. Was it Poltergeist? No, I forget which horror movie it was. Maybe it was The Shining. I can’t remember.

Anyway, there was a woman possessed and the words “help” showed up on her stomach because I feel like a lot of internal corporate marketers feel that way. They’re miserable.

When you get down to it, what I’ve found is that it’s largely because they hate their boss. They don’t love the corporate culture. They’re not happy with what they’re being asked to do. They feel they don’t have an impact.

When I looked at why content marketing programs aren’t successful, the answer superficially was content ROI. What’s the ROI of content? And if you don’t mind me, I’m not being promotional, but I actually wrote a book called The Content Formula, all about content marketing ROI.

And when I went back to folks I sent the book to, what I found was that it wasn’t enough. The math isn’t enough to get people over the challenges that we’re facing and how to do marketing that doesn’t suck.

The reason I wrote the book is that most of the marketing that we do that stinks, that doesn’t work, is because some executive with a big ego asked us to do it.

Brian Carroll:
Right.

Michael Brenner:
Executives love seeing logos on stadiums, and they love seeing Super Bowl ads, and all the things that we make fun of marketing about largely come from a request from sales or marketing or product people.

The companies where content marketing is successful or marketers are happy are making an impact because there’s a culture of empathy. Their cultures don’t suck. The companies don’t suck. The leaders don’t suck. That’s why I wrote the book. Maybe a long-winded explanation, but that’s why.

Brian Carroll:
Well, and I think you’re also just talking about the state of affairs for marketers. It’s hard for marketers to actually care about the customer when they themselves aren’t necessarily cared for. They don’t feel safe. They’re anxious, or they’re frustrated, or they’re challenged.

You also talked about empathy. It seemed like this book was written for two people: for those who are experiencing this, but also for leaders. Why does empathy matter especially to marketers, and does it lead to better results?

Michael Brenner:
Yeah. One of the stories that I tell in the book, the very first corporate book that I read, and I have to give credit to the former CEO at Nielsen, my first company who made most of us in the company read the book. And I was like, “Oh, here we go.” And I read the book. I was like, “Wow, this is actually really pretty cool.” It’s called The Service Profit Chain. I write a lot about it.

It’s a book that isn’t talked about much, but the premise is simple. Three or four Harvard Business Review professors got together and said, wait a second, we’ve seen this correlation between engaged employees, happy employees, happy customers, and higher stock prices, happier stock investors.

Brian Carroll:
Right.

Michael Brenner:
They did some actual research and found that where there’s employee engagement, there is customer loyalty. Where there’s customer loyalty, there’s higher spend rates and retention and higher stock prices.

The key to those environments, those cultures, those companies where there were happy employees was empathy. The company’s purpose was to make their employees happy because they knew happy employees created happy customers.

It’s totally intuitive and yet it’s counterintuitive. That’s one of the reasons we reconnected was my LinkedIn post, “Empathy is the counterintuitive secret to success.”

The thing is, I think life has beaten us down and gotten us to believe that we should take what we want and put our elbows out and get to the front of the line. It’s actually the opposite. It’s counterintuitive that if we help people, we can actually get what we want.

It’s definitely true for marketing, which really has a bad reputation. Most people think marketing is propaganda and promotion, but the companies that have effective marketing are those that are empathetic. It’s those that are empathetic to their customers and don’t just create promotion and propaganda.

Empathy really is the key in marketing and business and in life. I wrote the book trying to straddle all three of those perspectives. I hope your listeners out there take a look, and hopefully they can get back to me and tell me how well I did to try to straddle those three.

Brian Carroll:
Well, I just want to say I’m excited for you. I’m excited for this book because big-picture empathy, or caring for customers, or wanting to help people, is pretty easy to talk about. Right? I think if you were asking your own executives, do you care about your customers? Do you have empathy for your employees? I don’t think anyone would argue with that, but it’s easier to talk about than it is to do.

One of the things you talked about was the customer journey and what the experience is for customers, why they don’t care about brands anymore, and how brand doesn’t matter. So why is that?

Michael Brenner:
Well, the first thing is I think it’s important for marketers and especially brand marketers, corporate marketers, but also I think those who are in the trenches need to understand how to explain this to executives. And that is that we just aren’t that important. We’re not as interesting or important as we think we are.

My former company, Nielsen, did a survey of brands and found that 77% of consumers said they wouldn’t care if the brands they use disappeared completely. We’re seen as replaceable in many aspects.

While we think we’re super important and we think we’re super interesting in the companies we work in, our customers are just trying to get through every day and trying to meet the challenges they face. They’re trying to stay awake. The bar is low.

Yet so many brands don’t create any kind of messaging or stories that resonate. And so that’s really the trick: if you truly care about your customers, you don’t talk about yourself as much.

When I meet somebody new, I don’t say, “Hi, my name is Michael Brenner, and I’m awesome.” That’s the last thing I would ever say. If I want somebody to actually listen to me, I say, “Hi, how are you?” My first thing is outreach. It’s empathy. It’s not promotion and propaganda and ego.

I think we just forget that sometimes when we’re sitting inside the corporate marketing department.

Brian Carroll:
Well, you’re illustrating the point that empathy is easier to talk about than it is to do. Part of what I’m hearing you say is we’ve got to overcome our own bias thinking that we have the answer.

Really often I think marketers come from the perspective, “If I were the customer, how would this appeal to me?” Or as you talked about the leader who wants to see the logo, well, that’s not a customer-focused decision in their calculus.

How might marketers use empathy in their approach to customers? What are some of your thoughts on that from your work and research?

Michael Brenner:
In my first book, The Content Formula, I talk about my year-long struggle to get my colleagues inside SAP to see and to have empathy for our customers. I started with data. The data often leads to the conclusion that, for example, at SAP we were selling a cloud computing solution called SAP HANA, which now has a little bit of brand awareness but then didn’t have any.

What I tried to show my colleagues in marketing was that people weren’t searching for our product name. They weren’t searching even for SAP cloud computing solutions. They were searching for things like “what is cloud computing?”

In every industry, no matter what thing you sell, if you sell cybersecurity solutions and you sell the world’s greatest cybersecurity solution named Alpha, I’m just making this up, people aren’t searching for Alpha as much as they’re searching for cybersecurity solutions.

When I found the data didn’t work, I moved to fear, FOMO in a way, but really fear. I went to the sales team and actually showed them that I use this term, “the buying journey doesn’t start with a search for our product.” And the sales team understood that actually better than my peers in marketing.

I used search. I said, “Hey look, when I type cloud computing into Google, IBM and Oracle and Salesforce show up, but SAP didn’t show up at all.” They got angry. That anger then translated to direct mandates over to my peers in marketing, who finally created the atmosphere and environment for me to create customer-focused content.

It was kind of like a mafia move, if you will. I kind of strong-armed them to see that it was the right thing to do.

Brian Carroll:
It’s interesting though because I think, here’s the thing. You and I talked about this offline before. When marketers are in our buildings, who is talking to customers more, marketers or salespeople?

Michael Brenner:
Yeah.

Brian Carroll:
I think the point you made is you went to the people who were talking to the customer.

Michael Brenner:
Yeah, exactly.

Brian Carroll:
They had that insight. And ironically, we’re in marketing. We’re supposed to influence messages of customers, but we actually are not in the building.

I want to ask you a question. You have a lot of great stories in your book. Do you have a favorite story? And if so, which one?

Michael Brenner:
Yeah. One of the things I talk about in how to create empathy inside the organization is to rethink the org chart. I talk about how org charts are boxes and lines, and they show who’s above and below us. Basically, they show who directs orders down to the minions who do the work.

I talk about how org charts miss the most important person, and that’s the customer. I’m not suggesting every company should recreate the org chart, but if we rethink the org chart, it would look more like a bullseye.

You have the customer at the center, and all the departments branching out from there would be thinking, how should I best serve this customer? There are a couple of stories in the book of people, and they’re not all necessarily marketers, but certainly a few who’ve done that.

One is Amanda Todorovich from Cleveland Clinic. She has a very famous empathy video. If you Google Cleveland Clinic empathy video, you’ll see an internal video. It was originally created to help executives inside Cleveland Clinic see that Cleveland Clinic is more than just a business. It’s more than a hospital operation.

It’s an organization that serves patients. The concerns that patients have are matters of life and death and giving birth and dying. Amanda’s team’s video was extremely impactful. I get chills just talking about it. I use it in every presentation, and it has 4 million views online.

They released it publicly at the request of their executive team because they really understood the impact of, hey, what makes us different isn’t because we have great surgeons and we have utilized some certain technique or equipment. What makes us unique is that we really care for our patients.

It’s empathy tied to a corporate mission, all the way down to the content that Amanda and her team create every day, which serves patient needs. That’s one of my favorite stories from an empathy perspective.

There are probably 15 stories. I could keep going. I’ll stop myself because I love talking about the people I call champions, the champion leaders, the people that celebrated others and achieved success because of that.

That’s the counterintuitive nature of empathy. It’s help others, live your life in service of others, and you actually get what you want. That’s really at the heart of the book.

Brian Carroll:
Well, in my experience, I 100% agree. Personally, for our listeners, at some point in time, my Jerry Maguire moment was by actually not focusing on convincing people.

I’ve always had the best marketing and selling feels like helping because it is. The reality is I realized my Jerry Maguire moment is I wasn’t living that. I was trying to convert people instead of connect and help.

The irony is, when you actually focus on, “Hey, what do they care about? How can I help them?” What I love with Cleveland Clinic is it’s not just a marketing thing. It’s what they do.

In my own experience, by not trying to get leads, I got 303% more just by helping people. It’s crazy.

Do you have tips for developing deeper empathy that you could share with our listeners? I know you wrote a book that has exercises that go deeper, but anything someone listening can come away with to begin saying, okay, I don’t disagree, but how?

Michael Brenner:
Yeah. There are a couple of tools I wanted to develop for your listeners. For the people who were like me, sitting and getting asked to do stuff that we know won’t work, the highest-level insight is ask what’s in it for the customer.

For example, your sales leader comes over and says, “I’d like a brochure for this niche industry event we’re going to.” It’s going to cost you $4,000, and it’s a couple of designers and a printer to get created. Just ask, “What’s in it for the customer?”

Do people really read our brochures? Are they going to throw it right in the trash? You might think it’s important to stuff that inside the conference bag, but I’ve never read a brochure myself from a conference.

If we ask what’s in it for the customer, as opposed to thinking of our jobs as just doing what the sales team or the product team or our boss tells us to do, the answer I think is sometimes surprising. We wouldn’t do half of what we do if we asked what’s in it for the customer. And so that’s the highest-level tip.

I offer three deeper level questions. I call it the pushback. It just goes a little bit deeper.

Who is this for?
Why is it important?
How are we going to measure the impact?

If you ask those three, those are three deeper-level questions from the “what’s in it for the customer?” overview.

Again, you wouldn’t put your logo on a stadium. You wouldn’t create a brochure that costs a lot of money to print and kills trees. You wouldn’t do a lot of the things that we do that we roll our eyes about when we think about marketing and all the propaganda that comes outside of companies.

Brian Carroll:
It’s so funny as I listen to you. As I talk with marketers, often VPs will lament, and we forget what it’s like to be a customer even though we’re all customers ourselves. That’s kind of the crazy thing.

Some of the things that we think suck, are we doing those same things when we reach out to our customers? We’re the recipients of marketing. We’re the recipients of sales messages.

Any other thoughts? Because I wanted to highlight you just because your message is so important. It’s so timely, and it’s so needed. But any other things you wish I would’ve asked about before we close?

Michael Brenner:
No, I think we’ve covered the main tips. I appreciate you bringing me on and letting me share these tips with the readers. I’d love for your audience to read the book.

Again, everything I do, I’ve done in support of this desire to try to help people. I started blogging before I had a business just because I wanted to share what I know. The keynotes I give, the books that I write, and even the client work that I do get paid for is really to try to help people, and it’s worked for me.

I don’t think I’m smarter than other people. If it works for me, I think it’s the secret for many of us to live a life that’s maybe a little more meaningful, a little more impactful.

I just talk to so many people. I talk about this crisis of engagement and empathy. The world feels like a meaner place these days.

The three takeaways from the book are: be kind, be cool, be you.

Be kind is just because it’s the right thing to do.

Be cool is don’t take things personally. A lot of the mean people we meet aren’t psychopaths and narcissists. They’re just having a bad day.

Be you is because the people who are living their fullest life know what their purpose is, and they’re working in support of that. It’s often in service of others. So that’s how I’ll leave it.

Brian Carroll:
Well, and as I listen to you, I’ve always felt and believed marketing can and should be a force for good. Often people view it as being about manipulating and coercing. It’s like, no, it’s actually about making a difference, helping people achieve results, and helping people transform in positive ways.

What’s the best way to connect with you and find out more about your book?

Michael Brenner:
Well, you can check it out at meanpeoplesuck.com. You can find more about me at marketinginsidergroup.com. I’d love to connect with your folks personally on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter at BrennerMichael.

Brian Carroll:
And for our listeners, Michael has offered to share some resources. You’ll find them in the show notes. I’ll provide those links along with the story. I’ve made some notes of things that we’ll share as well. Really excited for you. Thank you again for being with us today, Michael.

Michael Brenner:
Yeah, thanks again, Brian.

Rss Apple Podcaster