The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 190: Everything You Definitely Don’t Know About Marketing (But Should), From 4 World Leading Experts!
Episode Date: December 6, 2024Why is marketing so important for businesses? In this episode, we've picked the highlights from our conversations with Josh Kaufman, Scott Galloway, Rory Sutherland, Whitney Wolf Herd to bring you the... TL;DR on how to succeed at marketing your business. Head to https://www.linkedin.com/doac24 to claim your credit. Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Josh: https://joshkaufman.net/ Scott: https://www.profgalloway.com/ Rory: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/rorysutherland Whitney: https://www.instagram.com/accounts/login/?next=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.instagram.com%2Fwhitney%2F%3Fhl%3Den&is_from_rle Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Marketing is just who might be interested in this thing.
And a lot of it is the fundamental thing is
if no one knows you exist,
no one's going to be able to buy your thing. And so marketing is the process
of attracting the attention of people who might be interested in the value that you're creating.
And in an ideal world, making them curious, wanting to learn more, asking for additional
information, engaging with what it is that you have.
A lot of people conflate marketing and sales.
To me, they're distinct processes.
So marketing is the attracting attention and generating interest, and then sales is the
process of convincing someone to buy and then getting them set up as a customer. And a lot of marketing comes down to what is it exactly that
you're trying to gather attention for and where do those people generally hang out?
What are they curious about? What are they already paying attention to? What can you take
advantage of or dovetail into in order to attract someone's attention
at the right moment, at the right time, and make them aware that you have something that
could benefit their life.
Here's what it is.
Here's how you can benefit from it.
Because people, many companies see it as like an annoyance.
Like I've sold you the fucking thing.
Why are you emailing me?
Sure, that's not bothering me.
And they treat you like you're a nuisance.
Yeah.
Yeah. And that's a shame.
Because really like those happy repeat customers are not just like your high lifetime value
customers, the customers that will stick with you, keep spending money with you.
They're also a primary source of marketing.
Like word of mouth marketing is all happy customers telling other people who might benefit from
your product that, Hey, here's this wonderful thing,
you should probably check it out.
And so, yeah, like things like post-sale support,
sometimes customer reactivation.
So like to your point earlier,
it's a very straightforward marketing technique
called reactivation.
If you can contact Jack and say,
hey, you bought candles from us last year,
would you like to buy candles from us this year?
And get him to pick up just a couple more candles.
Like the cost of that promotion is potentially very small.
You already know he exists.
You already know that he's purchased.
Can you just get him to do that again? Those
are some of the most effective marketing sales campaigns that you can possibly run, but it
also requires that they had a good experience with whatever it is that you're offering in
the first place.
How has the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,
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the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the of advertising and a brand building a reputation changed in your lifetime.
And what is the most important thing for brands
to understand now, or some of the important things
for brands to understand now, if they are to be successful?
Yeah, so my first job in business school,
I started a company called Profit Brand Strategy.
That's now about 500 people.
Now it's just called Profit.
And the basic notion was it was based
on the principles of my professor
my second year, David Ocker,
who's considered the father of modern branding.
And it was that the intangible associations
with a brand or a set of products or services
are the only sustainable advantage.
That if you can wrap a set of products and services
with these brand codes of masculinity,
European elegance, youth,
and then pound away at those associations
using this incredibly cheap, efficient medium
called broadcast advertising.
You can take a marginal shoe, salty snack, marginal car,
and get amazing margins on it.
So that's been from the underworld war two
to the introduction of Google in the nineties,
the algorithm for creating
massive shareholder wealth was find a mediocre product,
wrap it in amazing brand codes
and make people feel more patriotic or younger,
stuff the channel with it and print money.
The PNGs, the Pepsi codes of the world,
the Coca-Cola's, these were the economic titans
of yesteryear.
The sun has passed midday on that
because our weapons of diligence,
whether it's Google or TripAdvisor, Amazon reviews,
now gets us to the best product
without the benefit of this weapon of diligence
called brand.
When I came to London,
I used to stay at the Four Seasons
from the Mandarin Oriental.
Why?
Because someone else was paying
and there always an eight.
And then I went on TripAdvisor
and I went on my social graph
and I found out the love the Connaught Hotel
or people love the Ferndale hotels.
I started staying at the Haymarket.
Why?
I like a place from the nice gym
and I wanna hang out with people
who are younger and cooler than me.
So I started staying in boutique hotels.
So all of a sudden product became the bomb again
and then your ability to embrace these new mediums
around social became more important
than broadcast advertising.
So the traditional metrics of branding,
the traditional vehicles for branding,
a brand identity and broadcast advertising
that I've been preaching in brand strategy,
the sun has passed midday.
If you look at my curriculum
and the majority of curriculums and marketing departments,
you could argue that we're just training people
to go to work at Unilever or General Mills
and be laid off 24 months later.
Branding has become much more about innovation
and actual product quality.
Now that extends into how you discover the product,
how you absorb the product, the community around it.
But Tesla is a better product.
Apple used to be an underpowered product
with a great brand.
Now it's a great brand with a superior product.
So these, Airbnb is a much better product. a great brand, now it's a great brand with a superior product. So these Airbnb is a much better product.
These things are,
Google is 10X better than what was there before it.
So supply chain, design, the way you absorb the product,
it's ease of use, you know, it's just,
it's moved from kind of what you call a brand economy
to lack
of a better term, an innovation economy.
So rather than taking classes on advertising, I say take classes on supply chain or analytics
or really understand industrial design.
You know, there was a general feeling that all product quality had maxed out and then
the internet came along and unlocked all this product innovation.
So cars, they felt it hit kind of a peak
in terms of product quality.
And then all of a sudden with the internet and GPS,
you could tune a car up wirelessly.
You can unlock the doors.
There was all kinds of crazy things you could do with it
in addition to EV.
I mean, there's just been so much actual innovation
around the product and what are the most valuable companies
in the world have in common?
They either spend no money on advertising
and they're spending less.
Apple's the strongest brand in the world,
at least a consumer brand, I would argue,
the strongest brands in the world in universities,
but it's reallocated six or $7 billion out of broadcast advertising into its channel, into stores. It built 550 templates of the universities, but it's reallocated six or $7 billion out of broadcast advertising
into its channel into stores.
It built 550 templates to the brand.
And I think that is almost part of the product.
My 12 year old and I were bored yesterday,
so we went to the Apple store.
So that's kind of consuming the product.
And I ended up buying screensavers and new cases
that I'm sure are 90 points a gross margin
that I could find to FNAC or Best Buy or someone
for less money, but we wanna be in that store
and in that environment.
So it's moving out of pre-purchase broadcast advertising
into the distribution channel and into innovation,
but the traditional norms of marketing or branding
as I taught it, that shit's over.
Don Draper has been drawn and quartered.
If you're watching a lot of advertising,
it means your life hasn't worked out.
The majority of people who are technically literate
or wealthy can avoid 80, 90% advertising now.
They watch Netflix, they subscribe to Spotify,
they live in cities where they have local officials
that demand you can't see a billboard from a park.
So the advertising is a tax on the poor
and the technologically illiterate.
So it's moved to more distribution and innovation.
But for God's sakes, don't avoid falling into the trap
of thinking that the masters of the universe
are branders or advertisers.
Having worked in the advertising industry, this is a conversation we have all the time with clients,
which is that you'll meet a certain type of client who's very religious about the bottom of the funnel.
If I can't track it and I don't know exactly...
I won't do it.
I won't do it.
Then you'll sometimes meet the opposite, which is someone who just loves to spend on brand.
And I don't necessarily think they're both wrong. I don't think they do. I mean, I mean, Mark Ritson,
very good marketing professor, always talks about the importance of bothism. And he says,
it's vitally important that when I actually speak about the importance of brand marketing,
that you do not interpret this as denigrating digital marketing. In fact, I go a bit further
and say, the bottom of the funnel in many respects is the thing you have to optimize first. Because there's no point
in actually, if there's a bottleneck at the bottom of the funnel, if there's some constraint
or a problem or a failing, you know, if you have very poor conversion, okay, there's no point in
spending money on advertising, because you'll just introduce more people to a disappointing experience.
You're wasting money.
So you've got to get the back end.
I would argue the first thing, in theory, you should optimize if you're being an absolute
purist is repeat purchase.
Because having gone through the expense to acquire these customers, and actually that's
the metric that always fascinates me because we were talking earlier about electric cars
and I said the question about electric cars isn't how many people are buying them, okay?
It's not what percentage of the new car market in the UK
in July were plug-in vehicles.
Now, only question worth asking really in the long term is,
does anybody who buys an electric car
go back to buying a gasoline car?
Because if the answer to that is hardly anybody,
then okay, you don't know
the exact shape of the S curve, but you know the growth is going to be pretty spectacular.
And so the thing to understand, I think, in a market is to what extent does your product
actually convert someone to something.
And then the lifetime value of that.
And so you'd start with repeat purchase, then you go to conversion, and then you'd work
your way up. But what tends to happen is that when people are obsessed with quantification of everything, okay,
it's worth noting, by the way, that all big data comes from the same place, the past.
All right. So there's a limit to how much big data, particularly if you've had some major event like
a pandemic in between, how much big data can actually tell you
about the future in any case.
As David Ogilvie famously said,
you're not advertising to a standing army,
you're advertising to a moving parade.
People are coming in and out of market all the time.
And so you're absolutely right.
You get some people who are just fame junkies.
And by the way, I suppose there are brand categories
where that's appropriate.
If it's sold through retailers, in other words, if it's mostly sold in the physical
space, you might argue to an extent, you know, for let's say a Burger King or a McDonald's,
that's not a totally crazy position. Although it is now because suddenly they've got to think
about delivery and whether people order through the app or order through an intermediary,
because it has a major bearing on their business.
But at the same time, yeah, I mean, the tragedy is this idea, this false dichotomy
between brand advertising and what you might call performance or digital marketing,
as if you have to be in one camp or the other.
Paul Matz Where is the balance though?
And how does one go about is it just intuitive? There are figures on this so if you look at the work of
Lisbonette for example and Peter Field the ratio shifts a little bit but generally they'll stipulate
a figure around about the 60-40 mark in favor of what you might call brand mass media expenditure.
Because they have a mutually beneficial relationship. of what you might call brand mass media expenditure.
Because they have a mutually beneficial relationship.
Obviously, top of the funnel makes the bottom of the sheet.
The first 20 years of my life
was spent in direct marketing and actually,
you know, because direct marketing was unfashionable,
we spent a lot of time denigrating advertising spend
because they got much bigger budgets than us,
not necessarily, rightly, but they were also, you know,
much more indulged than we were,
because they didn't have to prove effectiveness down to the same sort of level of statistical
significance. But we came to realize pretty quickly that actually, first of all, there's
nothing harder than direct marketing a product that nobody's ever heard of. And that every time,
just to give an example, every time American Express went on television
or advertised big in mass media,
the response rates to direct mail
would not quite double maybe,
but they'd increased pretty significantly.
You had to work less hard.
And you had to work.
It's that wonderful phrase which comes from a book by,
let me get his job right, his name right.
I think it's Matt Johnson, who's just written a book called
Brands That Mean Business. And his wonderful line is having a great brand means you get
to play the game of capitalism in easy mode. And that's, and what is true is, is fame to
some extent, brings a load of benefits which aren't necessarily sales related. So for example, you can cock up and your customers will be more forgiving.
You okay?
Take the example of Apple.
I mean, on a couple of occasions, Apple has produced products which had fairly major flaws,
which might have proved pretty fatal to lesser brands.
You know, the famous phone where if you held it in the wrong way, it didn't make phone calls, for example.
And given the reality distortion field around the Apple brand, people have passed over those incredibly rapidly.
And so there are, you know, people are less price sensitive. That's not easy to measure, by the way, as well.
It's very easy to measure the extent to which something has an effect on sales, but the effect to which something has an effect on price elasticity and the extent to which you
can command a premium.
Because it's a great brand.
Because it's a great brand.
It's harder to measure because you don't have the counterfactual.
When you sell something, the counterfactual is that you assume that you wouldn't have
sold it otherwise.
But if you sell something for a high price, you can't in fact
determine that without your advertising, you wouldn't have sold it for that premium price.
So it's to some extent, this quest for perfect measurement to reduce marketing to a kind of
Newtonian physics is a bit of a false god. Fame, you talked about fame there. Fame can also be
applied in the topic of personal branding as well. Fame, you talked about fame there. Fame can also be applied in the topic
of personal branding as well.
Obviously social media has allowed us all now
to build our personal brands.
You've got the Gary Vaynerchuk's of the world
who have built, you know, their companies are famous
because they've branded a person.
At Ogilvy and within your sort of, your marketing,
what kind of shift have you seen in the desire
for people to become brands themselves
and how valuable do you think that is?
I think advertising always had those personal brands
and if anything, it's slightly diminished actually.
Really?
Campaign magazine always did a very good job
of making sure there were 30 or 40 sort of famous names
within the business.
That just happens in a different medium now, right? It happens on LinkedIn.
Yes, I agree. I mean, you know, so I mean, one of the greatest things, for example,
there's a wonderful, wonderful guy who now must be, I don't want to name his age, but he, you know,
he's, you know, past retirement age called Dave Trott, you probably know him.
Okay. He'd be a brilliant interviewee, by the way,
on the show.
Absolutely fantastic.
But what has been absolutely fantastic is that,
he's a glorious advertising mind.
I mean, just an absolute ornament to the industry.
And he, through Twitter and through blogging,
has had a completely new lease of life and influence
to a completely new lease of life and influence to a completely new generation of people,
and has been hugely valuable as a teacher. What's interesting about that actually is that of course,
he does that unpaid. And one of the things that is complicated about this new world,
okay, you know, the most valuable thing I often do in the course of a working week is either to give something away or to put somebody in touch with something else. Neither of which, you know, that kind of barter.
Neither of those things is in any way monetizable, is it?
Well, reciprocity would say otherwise.
I know. I suppose you've just got to rely on a high degree of reciprocity in some respect. I mean, it always it always bothers me about this, which is that we're in a business advertising, which
is paid by the hour, which is a terrible way to pay for ideas.
Because the value of something has no relation to the time devoted to its inception.
And it is genuine.
I mean, I always joke about this.
The most valuable thing I probably did was almost accidentally my working life,
which was to go to the government's behavioral insights team.
And as a sort of fanatical vapor, I'd been a longtime smoker
and had been able to quit for the first time successfully by switching to vaping.
It took me a little while.
But once I'd made the switch, I'd never gone back.
And I went to the government's behavioral
insights team and I said, look, these things are coming over from both Japan and the United
States, they're electronic cigarettes. I think there are two things you need to be alert
to in psychology. One of which is that because they actually replicate the habit of smoking,
not just the nicotine, they are a major kind of what you might call a gateway drug out. They're
a major source of harm reduction at the very least. It may help people to quit. At the
very least, it'll help people to shift to something a much less harmful delivery device.
Versus patches. Versus patches and guns and things like that, which didn't replicate the
behavior. And then the second thing I said is the second thing you got to be alert to
is that because of peculiar human psychology, half the people in the what you might call the health and
anti-smoking lobby will be fanatical about banning electronic cigarettes.
And all credit is on the Behavioral Insights team, a guy called David Halpen, I think they
went to the Cameron government and said, favor here, can we have a light touch on vaping
regulation please? And various parts of the EU have gone for much stricter regulation.
There were some countries which were more or less banning it. The US has banned Juul
for some reason.
Yeah, bizarre. On that point of personal branding though, do you think building a personal brand
is important?
Yeah, it's very interesting. I mean, you have a personal brand, whether you like it or not.
But that's one really important point about branding, which is that everybody, you know,
and that's, by the way, why I think marketing is so important, because it's not the brand is not the heated steering wheel of the marketing world.
You know, the optional extra that you can do without, but it's quite nice to have.
People are going to perceive you in some way,
regardless of anything you do, okay? They're going to form an impression of you, they're
going to form an impression of what you're worth, what kind of business you are, you
know, and they will use all manner of kind of inferences and heuristics to arrive at
this conclusion. And in many ways, I suppose, this is why I argue that marketing isn't an optional extra,
it's an essential, because the worst thing you can do is build a great product and fail
to present it in a way that is convincing, appealing, attractive, or which confers status
on its users.
And the same applies for your personal brand.
And the same applies, you're going to have a personal brand whether you like it or not.
So you might as well try and have a good one.
I think it probably is true to say that the personal brand requires sacrifice.
You know that old saying that strategy is the art of sacrifice.
But wait, not totally true.
I think there are win-wins, you know.
What is the sacrifice of a personal brand?
But well, I suspect. You don't need to suspect. You've of a personal brand? But well, I suspect...
You don't need to suspect, you've got a personal brand.
You have to have weaknesses as well as strengths.
Now interestingly, for example, one of the things that will be part of my personal brand
is I'm not a CEO, I have no aspiration to be a CEO, and I know enough about myself to
know I would not be good at that job. Okay? There are certain forms of ambition and aspiration which, you know, consonant with a personal brand that
I have, are basically their avenues that are closed to me. I'm not very good at administration.
I'm very bad at making difficult decisions.
Self-awareness is a personal brand strength.
Yeah, I suppose. But I'm, you know, where I'd be useful, I'd be useful at making oblique or
unusual suggestions.
I'd be useful at getting people
to consider the same thing in five
different ways or promoting
a counterintuitive thought.
I might be useful at suggesting
somebody, you know, I've got a
fairly good personal Rolodex,
you know, before you run off and do
this on your own.
Why don't you talk to this guy at
this university who's been studying this for the last 15 years?
In those early years of Tinder, I remember being told the story maybe 10 years ago in
San Francisco when I was working there with a guy called Michael Birch, who was the old
Bebo founder.
In his little sort of incubator that I was in when I was 20, they were telling me the
Tinder story of how you went to a fraternity. For people that don't know what a fraternity is, what's a fraternity?
So I guess in the UK it would be like college clubs maybe? Do they have like members clubs or
something like that? So basically sororities and fraternities and sororities are a house of women
and fraternities are a house of men and essentially a lot of college students,
And fraternities are a house of men. And essentially a lot of college students,
they do something called rush,
where they rush and they go house to house
and they meet all the women or all the men.
And then they basically preff,
they put in the name of the one
they would really love to be a part of.
And then they see who accepted them back.
It's been criticized up and down.
And there's a lot of things that are not,
spectacular about it,
but this is a way a lot of people
find friendship and community.
It's a community gathering for their college campus.
So with Tinder, I essentially went back
to my alma mater at SMU.
I'd just graduated, so a lot of my best friends
were still in school.
So I got access to the campus, and I
would start at the sororities and then go to the
fraternity.
So I'd essentially have all the young women download it and then run to the fraternity
and then they would download it and then everyone would start connecting.
So you know, is that good?
Is that bad?
How do you want to chop that up 10 years later?
Who knows?
But that's the reality and you know, can't escape the truth.
But so you, so you heard about this way back when I heard heard about this 10 years ago because we were building community centric apps.
We're building something called Blab, which resembles what Clubhouse is now.
And when we were talking about the marketing strategy, Tinder kept coming up.
And but yeah, that was the that was the thesis.
It was like, should we go to fraternities and go get, you know,
and to try and build that sort of isolated isolated tight community to try and get product market
fit because network effects really, really matter, especially in the dating game.
The most important.
That's why there's only a handful of dating apps that have ever survived.
I mean, at least during my time doing this, which is almost a decade now.
But what's interesting is there's such a, not to say only I could do this
or only somebody else could do this,
but there was a superpower in the timing of it all
because I had just graduated
and I knew all of these people.
So if some random startup founder knocks on a sorority door,
the police are coming, you know, like you can't do that.
So I felt like I had this insider hook, right?
Because I was technically an extension of that by proxy
because I had just been on the college campus.
I took the photo of one of my guy friends back then
who was, you know, all the young women had mega crush on him.
And then I took the photo of my best friend Danielle,
who was very well liked on campus.
And I went into Danny's journalism class
because she was still a student.
And I basically snuck into her journalism class
and used Photoshop.
And I took the Tinder screens and I put the guy's face on one
and her face on the other and I said,
find out who likes you on campus.
And then I saved it to a file because this is the olden days
at this point.
And I went to FedEx, which is like the office supply
store across the street.
And I printed 1,000 copies.
And I quite literally handed different students on campus
$20 to go distribute them under dorm doors and to put them on windshields and to put them, you know, in their different social clubs and to essentially distribute these flyers everywhere.
So this entire campus and now in hindsight, it's probably not great. It's littering. There's all sorts of bad things involved with it. But like I'm just telling you a story. So yeah, basically that was just one of the tactics
I used to go and put it all over campus.
And then I had a few t-shirts printed up that said,
don't ask for my number, find me on Tinder.
And I had my girlfriends wear the t-shirts
and we went to the bar.
And so I gave them a couple hundred bucks
and they would go around and buy drinks.
And then when people would ask for their number,
they'd essentially say, you have to download Tinder.
So it was a lot of these tiny hacking concepts
that made no sense.
No one had ever done these things before.
I had no playbook.
It wasn't like, you know,
I was reading some manual to marketing.
It was just what felt around me.
It was just bringing the real life
dating experience to life through an app marketing.
There's like so many important messages of marketing there. I mean, the first one that
you said was that you were the customer. You were so close to the customer that you understood
them. I mean, even you said about how if another startup had come and knocked on the sorority,
well, they wouldn't have even known which door to knock on for a start.
That's true. They would have knocked on the wrong door,
got the wrong people, and they wouldn't have understood those people, their motivation.
So like really you being the customer, I think is such a key thing. And then
the second thing you said about like, if I'd read a marketing book
and you were kind of just doing it based on intuition, I've seen over and over again from
speaking to really successful CEOs and founders, how important naivety was, like not knowing rules.
So important, just following your gut.
Yeah, because that's like first print, that's creating something from first principles as
opposed to convention. That's real innovation, right? Like, and it creates solutions that
are more suited for today and for the challenge that you're solving, which no one has ever
had the challenge of solving on that date ever. But naivety, you know, this is sometimes why I
think some of the best founders don't come from like business school or from marketing school.
The best marketing is not marketing graduates because naivety is such a superpower.
It's a superpower and following your instinct. And if you understand what moves people and what motivates people, then you have
this opportunity to connect with them on a real level. I mean, we've done things that are
ridiculous. So I remember we would make these signs that said they had the big X's like, no,
you know, like you're not allowed to. And they said, no Facebook, no Instagram,
no Snapchat, no Bumble.
This was like week three of Bumble or something,
some ridiculous early, maybe first year,
I can't remember at this point.
And we would post those all over the universities.
So there was this association where it was like,
wait, I can't do the things I really wanna do.
I wanna sit in class and Snapchat.
I wanna sit in class and Instagram. I wanna sit in class and Instagram.
What the hell is Bumble?
And so we were essentially seeding this psychological-
Curiosity. Curiosity.
And then we were actually sending young women
wearing Bumble shirts into classes 10 or 15 minutes late
interrupting a class of 300 people and saying,
oh, sorry, wrong room,
but everyone's looking at this young woman
and or young man, whoever it was,
wearing a Bumble t-shirt.
So we were seeding curiosity in this like,
why is Bumble everywhere type of thing?
And so, you know, a lot of people think,
oh, well, I can just go start an app
and I'll just buy some, you know start an app and I'll just buy some Instagram ads
and I'll just be successful.
But if people only knew the fraction
of the insane everyday little hacks
that I did and our team did to bring this to life,
we were the first people, certainly the first tech brand to do humor accounts,
to pay for the humor memes. Do you remember the humor memes?
Well, we ran out of 100 million followers on meme accounts.
Yeah. So you know all about this, but like we were way back years and years ago, I remember
reaching out to, I can't remember what it was, one of these meme accounts and they're
like, wait, you want to pay us to, I'm confused. How does that work? And we're like, okay, here's the
deal. We'll give you a hundred bucks or whatever it was. We turn around a year later, that
same account is charging a hundred thousand dollars a post. So we, there's also something
about luck and timing being just right before something, you know? And if you look at Bumble,
we were also beating the woman drum,
this drum of we need to advocate for women,
beating this drum of let's put women first,
let's elevate women,
women are not equal in their relationships,
women are not being treated respectfully,
women are being abused on the internet, women are not being treated respectfully. Women are being abused on the internet.
Women are not being treated right.
We were saying this in 2014,
and then Me Too would come a couple of years later.
So I think we've been lucky as a business
to basically be right before the wave.
And then we've been able to be a part of that wave
versus chasing a wave. And so many people chase a part of that wave versus chasing a wave.
And so many people chase a wave.
So many people chase a wave.
They look around them like, well, what's cool?
How do I chase that?
And I feel like we've always had the good fortune or whatever you want to call it.
Conviction?
Sure.
Inspiration?
To go first.
And so that's been maybe a superpower of ours over the years.