Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Uncensored Renegades. This is the 20-minute podcast where Kory Marchisotto and myself tackle one big question every week. I hope you enjoy this. Now, if you are enjoying it, I got one request to make. We're putting this out on the current Uncensored feed for a limited time only. So, if you're enjoying it, go over to Uncensored Renegades, hit subscribe, and never miss an episode. Anyway, without further ado, let's get into it.
So, K boss, we're back.
We're back, baby. All right. So, last time we were chatting about what is marketing and what is marketing anyway?
Well, I think we concluded it's everything. But the problem is no one else realizes it's everything. So, they're too busy doing the cutting, sticking, and coloring in. I think that's basically the issue. We concluded it's everything. But I just wondered, what's your word, right? If you had to pick a word, you were asking everyone else for their word. What was your word?
So my word is actually the only... Well, I was a lone soldier. Remember I told you we ticked off like connection and influence and storytelling. These had multiples. My word is poetry.
Wow. And probably a surprising word to most, especially those that know me because I'm a very data-driven, financial-driven marketer and I use a lot of data and insights in my storytelling. So, not many people would associate that with poetry. And for me it's an instant word association. I don't even have to think about it. You say marketing, I say poetry. And when I think about poetry, so I went to our friend ChatGPT just to say, okay, does my definition track. So I want to see what you think. So ChatGPT did a beautiful job of breaking it down into four parts. The first one is the philosophical definition of poetry. Poetry is truth in its most concentrated form.
I think that tracks with marketing. The creative definition is poetry is painting with words.
That's beautiful. That's beautiful, isn't it?
I think that's marketing. The spiritual definition is poetry is the soul speaking aloud.
And then the functional definition is poetry is language that breaks its own rules to make us feel something.
Also good. My word, like all four on fire. Right.
So my summation is that whether you look at it philosophically, creatively, spiritually or functionally, marketing is poetry.
That's amazing. I would never have got there though. Like that's... I'm not surprised that didn't come up for anyone else. Like, yeah. Where did your love of poetry start then? What's the...
I've been writing poetry since I'm a kid. I'm sure my mother has a collection somewhere that maybe someday I'll put in a Substack. The definition of your soul speaking aloud is probably how it started for me. So, you know, when you're young and growing up and being exposed to a million things that you don't understand or know how to deal with, some people don't express themselves at all. Some people express themselves through anger or some sort of visible aggression, if you will. My way was to write and especially to write in rhythm and rhyme. So I started doing that when I was really young and my mother always encouraged it and especially in difficult moments I would find it's the only way I could actually express what I was feeling in a way that can connect, going back to our word connection, with people on a more deeply visceral level. And when you think about marketing, it's the power of meaningful words. The metrics follow. If you use the power of meaningful words and translate that into also visual graphics, and all the colors, codes, cues, and beautiful things that go along with your narrative, the metrics will follow. So, I love writing. It's my soul care.
It's funny. So feedback I got in my career and it's a really odd thing to be kind of known for but a lot of people said to me you got an ability to take the complex and make it appear simple. And I was like I didn't even know I did that but I was like oh that's interesting but there's something about the world is complex isn't it but actually with poetry you somehow distill it and you kind of take the mist away and then suddenly you see something clearly that maybe you hadn't seen before. So, there's a line that you're going to love that's one of our affirmations. We have a brand called Keys Soulcare that we created with Alicia Keys. Talk about a poet. And the affirmation on one of our products is you are layered, complex, and divine. Complex often takes people to a negative. I think the more layered and the more complex, the more divine because now you're getting into deeper levels of meaning that start to unearth truths.
So the two probably biggest honors that I got in my career, the first one was a CEW Achiever Award. I wrote a poem for that and it was one of those moments of like really digging in deep on what is my ambition, what is my motivation and what can I give back to others and I got a lot of signals back from that which is how memorable it was because nobody else did an acceptance speech as a poem. It's a very vulnerable act. You are putting almost your art form and your soul out there for people to dissect, right? So it's a very vulnerable act and most people don't like to be vulnerable. And so I took those signals and more recently I would say my second most honorable moment in my career was being inducted into the Hall of Fame, the Marketing Hall of Fame from the American Marketing Association. And writing a traditional speech would have been way easier.
So I did what I often do, which is the hard road. Yeah.
Take the hard road. Take the path of most resistance and find a way to bring something memorable to the audience that would be a representation of what marketing means to me through these doors that we just shared. By any stretch of the definition, if you really take it down to its fundamental essence, that's how you make deep connections. That's also how you compel and captivate because you're disrupting the pattern. If everybody's getting up and doing a traditional speech, if you will, and then somebody else comes up and, you know, busts out in a poem, now that's a pattern disruption that gets people to stop and take notice.
Yeah. I'm slightly obsessed with this actually because I think like surprise is like the key to loads of success. We didn't really deconstruct it as a surprise, but doing like breaking the pattern recognition is what captures attention because your mind suddenly goes, 'Ah, something else going on here that I wasn't expecting.'
Pattern disruption. We could do a whole episode on. Yeah. It's such a brilliant tool, especially if you're in an environment where things are getting heated. So, imagine you're in a conference room and you're doing a strategy session and people don't agree and things get heated. Pattern disruption can change the entire mood and energy of the room. And it's one of your most powerful assets.
Yeah, I forget how many people have said this to so you have to forgive me if I've already said this right, but there was this really old study from 1972, this guy Marc Davis that analyzed what made something interesting and the conclusion of it is it denies a key assumption of the audience. The key assumption...
Wait, hold on, hold on, say that one more time.
So the secret to something being interesting is it denies a firmly held assumption of the audience. The assumption of the audience is you're going to get up and give a speech. So, everyone is, you know, looking for the same thing. They're kind of on autopilot. The moment you play some music, you know, break out the poetry, you're denying their assumption. And that in this study was what made some art interesting and others are not. And you boil that down to it's basically surprise. It's why you've put so much effort into doing something that's above and beyond what people expect or different to what they expect is that's what then got people's attention.
That is a brilliant quote. I love how just randomly you pulled these quotes out. It's like you have a file cabinet in your brain of quotes that you can go to. The beauty of this is that's the part that people don't understand. And you know, said another way, it's breaking with the status quo.
It is exactly that. And when you are looking to break out as a brand, if you do the same thing as everybody else, either you have to do it a thousand times better than they do or you need to take another path.
Totally. And back to your poetry as well, the other powerful thing about poetry is you put into words what people are feeling that they can't articulate. And that's the other thing that a brand does, isn't it? Is you stand for something and then people go, 'Yeah, I've been feeling that.' Or, 'Yeah, that I'm with them on that sort of thing.' And I think that's what poetry does as well is you go, 'Yeah, that's what I was thinking.' Because it's sometimes hard, isn't it? Because, you know, we're complex. Emotions are complex. And then, you know, poetry just go, 'Yeah, that's described perfectly what I was feeling at that time.'
Mhm. Yeah. It's not easy to write poetry. It's a... you have to find the place inside of you. And very often times, if you're digging too hard, you're not going to find it. So, you almost have to start the process and that at some point it's going to hit you when you don't expect it. And I know this is going to sound crazy. This poem in particular that I was talking about for the Marketing Hall of Fame hit me like a ton of bricks at the AC/DC concert in Las Vegas.
I love that. Now we're talking. Which song? Which song? Was it just...
This song in particular? It was clearly a moment where I had my guard down. I was so stressed out about this not-so-speech speech and the writing of this poem that I hadn't done and time was passing and I knew it was coming. So it was just weighing on me every day that this thing wasn't done. So clearly I, you know, let everything down at this AC/DC concert and you're having a great time and there's just so much incredible eye candy and the spirit and the energy and all the... I mean we could talk about AC/DC as a brand. What an extraordinary brand with unbelievable codes and cues and ethos that people live and breathe and walk. Talk about story living. And in that moment, my guard came down and the words just started flowing. And now I'm like, I'm at a concert, you know, standing up jamming with my two nephews and my husband. And I took out my phone and I start and my nephews are looking at me. They're like, 'Are you texting? Are you working?' I'm like, 'No, I'm writing a poem.'
So, obviously that was a lot of mental just outpouring. Yeah. And then you need to frame it and take the words and put them in something that's going to be digestible and that's going to tell a story. That's part of the arc of writing a narrative. But in that moment, I just felt this rush of words that needed to come out of me. So, thank you, AC/DC.
I've got to say, well done. But I mean that does make sense because I think any creative act it doesn't come when you press a button and go right I've got half an hour write something inspiring right does it? It's always when your brain is switched off in a different mode you know it's a bit like pattern recognition. You need to break the pattern of your work to then give room for the inspiration and your mind somehow kind of then joins all the dots together when you're in a different state.
Which is why people have aha moments in the shower.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a moment where you're actually vulnerable with yourself. Yeah. And you're not thinking about anything else. And it is a truism. I actually had the aha moment of e.l.f. and Chipotle needed to do a collaboration in the shower.
So, talking about this poem, are we going to hear it?
I would love to hear it. Yeah.
So, put your seat belt on, buckle, relax, get comfortable because it's going to be a few minutes.
Marketing is poetry, a craft of fluidity. So, John, are you ready to flow with me?
