Hello and welcome to Resilient Entrepreneurs podcast. Today's conversation is all about in-house marketing and I'm confident we'll travel down an unknown path with our guest, Kasper Sierslev. We're going to find out why he believes that in-house marketing is the best option for now and the future. And what does he even mean by that?
Kasper is the COO of a Danish firm called Zite and they've built and operated in-house agencies for well-known Danish companies and with brands such as Hyundai, Jaguar, Land Rover in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Just this week, they've accepted industry awards for creativity and social campaigns.
Kasper has authored a book called Moving In-House and another, Win-Win House. I'm sure he's going to share his research-backed opinions and lived experiences of in-house marketing with us all. The book and this podcast episode is perfect if you're a small business founder looking to make your marketing more effective.
We are of course, Resilient Entrepreneurs and we speak with business owners from all around the world and from all walks of life in the hopes that something you hear will leave your business a little richer. Our business, Two Four One Branding supports new entrepreneurs as you launch your business and we offer you the tools you need to succeed, which is exactly why we invite people like Kasper to share their wisdom with you on this podcast.
We would love to ask one small thing of you, a small thing with a big impact, which would be if you love this podcast please subscribe to the show on the platform you're listening or watching on now. It's gonna help us get this on the playlists of many more people and the bonus is that you will be notified of the next great episode, and you'll know you are part of sharing the love for someone else to discover and strengthen their resilient entrepreneur within them. Well enough from me. Kasper, welcome to our community of resilient entrepreneurs.
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Thank you. We appreciate you being here, and we're going to get right into the conversation on marketing because of course that's where Vicki and I love the most. So we're excited for this to talk about marketing, but let's help people understand a little bit more about in-house marketing. So there's different stages of starting a business, right? When you're first starting out and you're in the creative phase, maybe you're a solo entrepreneur, you're bootstrapping it and doing it all yourself, unless you're going out looking for capital to start and bring on a team early, you're figuring out the marketing and you're using Canva to create social media.
This is now the next stage, so you build that, business starts growing, you start to build a team, you bring on a financial officer, other people on your team to start building your business as you grow. This is how businesses become great businesses.
So let's talk about marketing when you bring it in-house. It's easy to understand external marketing - you hire a graphic designer, maybe you hire an art director, you hire somebody that works outside of your business, an agency and they do the work as you need it. You tell them you need a new website, they create a website for you.
I want to help people understand what the difference is between that and the agency side of marketing versus having someone on your team in-house. I actually started my career working as an in-house marketing person, so I absolutely get it. But Kasper, can you help people understand who are new to this, new business owners, what that means and why it's valuable?
Well, I think you're right. So when you start out, and I'm actually part of a small startup where we do everything ourselves as well, so I'm doing all the illustrations and so on, so I totally get that starting from scratch. And it makes a lot of sense because you don't have money to do it so you need a way to figure out how to do it. At one point you want to professionalise things and you go to external agencies and you get external people, freelancers and so on and get that quality - unless you're super great and you can do everything yourself like a jack of all trades. It makes sense to look at people who are good at this. But then at one point it seems you get to that top of the curve where you actually pay like a full time salary for someone sitting somewhere else or you have a lot of content that you need to do yourself. And this is often where it starts. You hire in a social media manager because you wanna be more, what do you say, I hate the word agile, but more speedy, so to speak. You want to be able to act faster, and that makes a lot of sense to have some people in-house that can act quickly when something changes. Like we have the car brands and let's say Tesla changes the price and they do that a lot of the time. We wanna do something very quick, follow up on something like that. We just did that this week actually so it's a really fun example - another car brand launching a campaign talking about how great Spanish cars are and we have a Chinese car brand, so we made a Danish pun on that, that was up later that afternoon. And that's one of the things when you're in-house, you can be very speedy and do something like that. But it's always a balance. You need to have enough work for those people you bring in, you don't necessarily want those jack of all trades that could do everything, but not really great. So it's very much about finding the right combination of, do you need people or are you paying too much to have them external?
Yeah, and it was a great explanation. Absolutely. The next stage of that is to help me understand you're sitting in the seat of an agency, yet you're talking about yourselves as in-house. So how does that hybrid blend work?
Yeah, you caught me on that one. Yeah, but it's actually true. I started out in-housing, I started out building the in-house agency at Maersk, a big logistics and shipping company and then I moved on to build several other companies. And I'm getting to the point, what I realised the second time I built the in-house agency was that I would say 85%, 90% of what I did was the same. It was a lot about all the boring stuff, the structures, the processes, workflows, and so on. And that's what we do. We help companies build those in-house agencies and sometimes we give them back to people, sometimes we just help them by hiring in or setting up what kind of flows, what kind of tools do you need in order to be effective, but also be creative - and then sometimes we run it for companies as well. We keep running it and learning from it and so on. So we do all kinds of things and sometimes it's all about just helping people get started and then they can do it themselves. Other times people realise that they may be really good at selling cars, we're in that category, they don't really know how to run an in-house agency so we do that for them. We're sitting on their premises right next to their people and our people almost feel like their people, you have it in other industries as well.
So you have a dedicated team per client to be in your client offices?
Yeah, yeah. And then we have something that you don't have when you're in an in-house. We also have, for lack of a better name, I call them the travel team. So that's our team that can travel between the different offices when they need something out of the ordinary, when you have maternity leave or illness or peak periods or something like that. And then we have a community. When I was working in-house, we were I don't know, 10 people maybe, so I didn't have any other to spare to talk to when we had to come up with ideas, new ideas, or our copywriter was the only copywriter there, and now we have a community of copywriters that can actually talk to each other and say, âHow would you do this?â or social media managers and so on. I'm not going to promote our business story, that's not the purpose, the idea was, having peers that you can talk to, learn from each other and so on. That's the idea.
What is the importance of being in the office? Because aren't we already in this era of not needing to be next to each other in the same space?
I think that's a really good question. And we've been asked that, I think last week from one of our customers that is really global, and they are so big in the small town in Denmark where they're sitting that they actually own pretty much the entire town and they are sitting in different places in the same town so they don't walk to each other and so on. But I think the importance is still that, when you're in that office you actually learn from someone who's better and sometimes you need to put things up on the wall with a white paper and a marker and see things in that area.
But it's also for, I think for the younger people, it's also learning the craft. So sometimes working with someone older or more experienced or from a different background, when you're sitting next to each other, it's just slightly different. I know we have a great conversation here and my own startup is actually in the US and I've never met Aaron the founder, in person. We've been working on this for, I don't know five years. So I don't think it necessarily is important, but you need to have that closeness, at least then you've got to focus on working on the social things with your coworkers so you know each other. Especially when you work with creativity it's a lot about coming up with bad ideas. I always say you need to come up with a lot of bad ideas to have a decent one. But luckily, it's really difficult to come up with 100 bad ideas in a row so if you keep trying and I keep telling you about all my bad ideas, you will eventually pick up something and say, okay that's decent, maybe I can use that. And I think that's really necessary in order to get great work out, is that you can, I don't know if you say that in English, ping pong, play ball with each other on ideas and honestly I think it works best when you're next to each other.
Yeah, I think even beyond the physicality of being next to each other, it's that focus on one business. I think what you don't get when you hire externally is someone that is absolutely 100% in your brand, knowing your business inside and out and therefore can create content, like you said, really quickly, because we are in an age of digital everything and content is king and being able to create lots of good content is hard. And if you've got to constantly be just feeding an external person ideas, it's really hard to get them, if they're also focusing on five other brands because they're an agency and that's what agencies do, you have a lot of brands. They might have one dedicated person to your brand, but even then there's not that really in-depth closeness that you get working in-house. Like I said earlier, I started my whole career working in-house for a retail business. It was back when it took two weeks to design one ad. So it's very different than the speed we work at now. But there was that intimacy, I knew everything. I knew when the new arrivals were in store, for example. I knew when the new brands were coming out. So always we're able to be that one step ahead. And I think there's so much value in that, that's why having an in-house marketing person can be really valuable. So when somebody is there, they're scaling, there's funds now, they're spending that much money on marketing that they can afford to hire in-house, who's the first person they need to hire? What's the job role of the first one on the team they need?
It depends - traditionally, and I know this because every year we're coming out with, and I have it here, a report that we call the In-house Barometer. This is the last year's version and I am presenting the new one tomorrow so the data is rather fresh. And traditionally you would start with graphic designers. That's the first role that everybody used to bring in. But now it seems like it's more, you wouldn't say brand managers, but it's people or it's creative strategists and so on, that's actually owning the creativity or the brand and so on. That's one of the roles that we see and a lot of companies are bringing in now, not necessarily crafting it themselves but having that brand intimacy where they know the brand, just like you explained, they know all the bits and pieces, they know the products, but they're also able to breathe an external agency. So even when you're, I would still say the graphic designer or the web designer is one of the key roles to bring in because it's a very easy calculation to do, how much are you paying on a freelancer and how much time do you spend if it's more than, and our calculation says 63% utilisation, bring them in - itâs way better and they know your tools, your web platforms and such for updating stuff and so on, and they know your brand. So I would say that's the first role I would bring in. But then I would actually start thinking about the more strategic creativity part of it. So you don't get that from, and I think especially as you mentioned, when you have a lot of different digital platforms and you use a lot of different agencies, even though you have a brand guideline and so on, people and agencies tend to cherry pick the pieces that they like and say, oh we like the bold font here and we like the blue colour over here or something like that, so having that in-house and core to the business is, I think is important.
Laura, you mentioned a really interesting point which resonated with me as well, being more on the communication side - Laura is the graphic designer of our dream team and I'm the wordsmith, and one thing, when I say wordsmith it's really about communication and getting ahead of the communication, whether it's for PR or other purposes, and the one thing about being in-house is its definite advantage of understanding and being part of the strategy, knowing why something's happening, knowing when it's going to happen, perhaps intercepting something before it happens. So definitely that in-house piece, I'd be on board with that, is there's an advantage to that. So why is this important to you?
One of the things is sometimes when we work in really big companies, you're actually the one that knows things that other departments doesn't know because you've been working on a project over here that does something and another one here. So sometimes you are like the heartbeat of the organisation where you actually know all the different initiatives from so many different parts of the organisation and you know the products because you've been reading and writing about it for years.
Precisely and I think any good larger organisation or even a small business would have a communications person on their leadership team or in their C-Suite because those decisions need to be made early on when other operational decisions are being made. Doesn't always happen, but if you're listening to this and you feel that something's going wrong with the communications, that could well be the problem. So Kasper, why is it important to you? Why is this your passion? Why do you love this whole conversation?
For me, when I started in house was a place where creative people went to die. It was like the burial yard of people who used to be creative. And then I just realised a lot of advantages in being in-house. So I have a personal agenda on actually saying, it's not true, a lot of creativity can happen in house, maybe it's actually more, a more modern way of working. I mean, the advertising agency in Scandinavia, where I come from, and the UK where I've worked for years, is not healthy in the way that you do a lot of pitches, you do a lot of late nights and so on. And maybe that's actually not the way that creativity works. I'm on the third book now about creativity and so on, and I've started a small school. So I've studied a lot of how people work with creativity and how they work with ideas and so on and how you come up with it. And I think there could be a better way. So that's my big mission here is actually to teach in-house companies to bring in creativity. Well, that's a big word, but you know what I mean.
Tell us more then, tell us more about how a person is creative, what drives that, this research that's still bubbling for your next book.
It's actually pretty done. I'm just proofreading now and there's just a lot of work to be done. It's a boring part of writing a new book.
But first of all, the misconception of the creative moment, that big, oh, I just get inspiration and the creative eureka moment or something like that, which I think is bollocks. I mean, I think it's really stupid. I know a lot of people say, yeah, then I smoke some cigarettes and walk around and then the idea pops up. And in my opinion, creativity is a habit. Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us go to work - which is a quote I stole totally. It's a lot about getting, sitting down, starting to work on getting ideas, having some methodology in how you do it, bringing in different aspects and so on, and I can see that it works. So, it's not that big black box of things. It's really something that you can learn at least to some degree. And with the use of AI and something like that, you can actually speed up the process. Maybe not getting that one really great Cannes Lion award-winning idea, but you can get pretty high on that ladder in terms of getting great ideas. And you're not starting from scratch every time if you have a method and a workflow.
And do you release that method in your book?
Yeah, that's it. And some tools and tips so we can all get better ideas.
I love it.
Let's talk about the value of strategy in all this too, because I think when a brand has a very clear strategy and they've done the work to understand their target market, their goals and objectives, their messaging, their identity and all that is built. And you mentioned brand guidelines before, I'm the biggest fan, please every brand create guidelines! I don't care how small you're, I don't care if you're even a solo entrepreneur, create brand guidelines for yourself. It makes all the difference, especially when you're hiring creatives because it helps them know where the boundaries should be so that they're not going way out on left field creating something for you and you're like, hang on, that's not at all who we are. So let's talk about strategy and when you work with building an in-house team for a company, do you talk to them about their strategy and understanding it and the role that plays in hiring the right creative person?
Yeah, but it's not the first couple of steps. The first steps is really, really boring actually. It's a lot about understanding how much work do they do? What kind of work do they wanna do? So I think the other thing is important once you get to work, but building the in-house agency is very much understanding do you have seasonality? What kind of types of off-marketing tasks or type of content do you wanna put out? How often, how fast do you wanna be? And then we start talking about it, for me creativity is the most important thing in what we do and in-housing is the means to getting better marketing and better marketing is, per definition for me, creative work. So creative can be a lot of different things. It could be looks, it could be wordsmithing, it could be that idea or that event somewhere. I think it's Bill Bernbach once said, you can't bore people to buy your product. And I think you need that creativity to catch their interest and so on. So it's just to say creativity is very important, even though what we start with is the boring part of the math, so to speak. I think having that guideline, that tone of voice document, those examples sometimes of this is the direction we want to go, it's so much easier to come up with the next stuff and bring in extra people because they know the playing field of where we are. So in terms of strategy, yes, but it's just not where we start, it's normally we start with the building process and so on.
Yeah, that makes so much sense. I'd like to switch gears just a little bit, because this is something Vicki and I've been talking about over the last year with different people. Obviously, economy goes up and down and when the economy is up, everyone's hiring, there's plenty of money going around, plenty of money is being spent on marketing. That's kind of normal across most industries. But we notice, and we know this, that when the economy is on a decline, one of the first budgets that most businesses cut is their marketing budget. So let's talk about that for a minute and why marketing is even important for a company because I get it, you cut budgets, you don't want to advertise, you cut down your spend because you don't want to cut somebody's salary. Right. It's a lot harder to look at Jim next door and say âSorry Jim, you got to goâ, than it is to go âWell we can just slash our advertising budget over hereâ. But, history has proven that brands who continue advertising through recessions, economic downturns,
are the ones that survive past it and usually end up thriving while others end up collapsing. So I want to talk about that, if you don't mind, for a minute about the importance of marketing through difficult economic times.
I started out a long time ago, 25 years ago at Millward Brown, actually measuring a lot of advertising and so on. And we had this case story from our UK office where they studied a couple of companies and some of them who cut marketing almost like 85% or something, it was really a lot of cutting. Just saying âNo, weâre not going to do it, we think we'll just trust sales to bring in thingsâ. All those five companies in that big study went bankrupt within five years or something like that, it was like a long term study. And I think the problem is that it's not short term. It's very easy to develop a new product and say, âOh, people will come, our product is so greatâ or it's very easy to say âOur sales rep, he will meet people and he will sell it to themâ. And that's the problem with marketing. It's really difficult to put that, you can do it with all the modern marketing, the performance marketing stuff, the problem is it's just, in my opinion, a bit lower funnel. It's very much when people have a brand that you can actually start putting a measure on all that stuff. So I think the problem is often showing the value. McKinsey made a big study. There's a lot of great studies out there actually showing the value of being creative or doing marketing and so on. I just think itâs just not as fancy as the finance stuff or the sales or itâs just, you don't have that one-to-one connections and you have a big ad, people will buy your product the next day and it's sometimes really difficult to see that uplift. I mean, we build in-house agencies, it takes one, two, three years from our first contact till they actually come to us and say, yeah, we're ready. And that's, I don't know, 60, 70 touch points sometimes. It's really difficult to say it was being on your podcast that actually brought me to their attention or it was, I don't know, something else we posted somewhere. Maybe we could cut two or three or five of those initiatives and people wouldn't notice. Youâll never know. It's really difficult to have that contribution method, I guess.
Yeah, I'm really glad you raised that Kasper, because I think a lot of people that we speak to about marketing, they just want a direct line. They want to say, what am I going to do? Am I going to do social media? Or am I going to do Google ads? Our job is to help people understand that marketing is the ecosphere. It's the everything. It's all the little pieces of the puzzle that either fit or don't fit together, but somehow they all makes a big beautiful picture that brings and attracts your clients to you, versus pushing out a promotion and a message and an ad. Even though ads are great for promoting, ads also will attract if they've done well. Now, you recently accepted an award for some creative advertising. Tell us about that and congratulations by the way.
Oh, thank you. It's the first time, I'm the CCO, but we never talked about the second C. So sometimes it's Chief Creative, sometimes it's Commercial. So I come from a creative background, but now I'm more just talking. So this is the first time that I wasn't directly involved in the project, which I'm very proud of as being head of creative, that itâs actually my team who done the work.
So it was two different cases. One was a winter tire campaign where we decided not to show, I mean, it's probably not a big problem in Bermuda or Australia, but here up north we do get some snow sometimes and the cars tend to slip around a bit. So it's very important to tell people to change to different kinds of tires in the winter. And all those campaigns are normally really, really boring, showing a tire on snow or a happy mechanic holding a tire or something like that. And this time we decided to try something else, showing all the usage of old winter tires, like people making a swing out of them and so on, so that was the main idea in this thing. You don't need to change it everywhere, but on your car, is maybe a great idea.
That's great. I think I saw an image of a polar bear with the tire over his head. That was really cute.
Yeah. So it's also about giving benefits to make the car pass on to the next generation. So it was kind of fun.
And the other one was for, we have a client that has a media house where they do radio ads and podcasts and so on. And our graphic designer art director up there, he designed an entire universe for all their podcasts. So in their brand colours, he did illustrations for all the different shows they did. So some of them were soccer, some of them were true crime stories. And it was about creating a uniform design for all of those. So doing illustration that actually fit within the theme of the podcast. So that was a more graphic design task. It was fun.
But actually, I think what you said before, it's all the different things that you do that's marketing. It's not just the ad. Sometimes the ad is great, sometimes it's doing something outdoor, like maybe a billboard, but it's also, it could be creating something out of the ordinary that people stop and just talk about because it's there in the middle of the street. And that's what I think at the moment is the most interesting part of advertising that throws big ideas out there that people will stop and think about, or it could be something in the product where you do something that actually helps people. I have this story, it's in the book also because it's old, three or four years old, where I was Head of Creative at Georg Jensen, which is a jewellery company. Head of E-Com came down and said âWe need to change the colours on the website because it's boring and it's too Scandinavian, it's too dullâ. He was from the UK, so he needed more colours. He said âIt's bluish and oh yeah, people are not buying enough. They can't find the buy button because it's too boringâ. And then we talked to each other and said it can't be true. And we went in and we looked at the website and we could see that a lot of men came in, they went to the shop, they found the ring, clicked on it, they went to the product page and they clicked on the buy button. So the colour wasn't a problem. The problem was they clicked again and then they clicked again, and then they realised this small drop down on top of it where they had to pick the ring size, then they chose that one and they had 14 different sizes and then they left because nobody knows even their own ring size, I guess.
So true.
So what we did was actually building a small app on a phone where you could steal a ring from your loved one and take your own ring off and put it on the screen. And you could see what size it was. Really, really simple. It didn't cost a lot to do, and that was also advertising. Even though it was kind of a product, it was also advertising. And people started sharing this on social media saying, âLook, Thomas, I think this one's for you.â Her girlfriend posted her, or tagged her husband or something like that and âNow there's no excuse anymoreâ and so on. So I think, trying to tell that story of being helpful or being out there as well is also marketing. It's about telling the same story of being available in all kinds of situations.
That's such an ingenious solution too and I love that story because you have a functional issue on the website that's preventing sales, which is not at all unusual. Yet the solution was going to be, had you not examined it further, the solution would have been to change something that would have made no difference at all. And I think ultimately what you're talking about there Kasper, is the customer experience, which in my opinion is what marketing is. It's anticipating what is the best possible customer experience and then delivering it.
I think you're right. And I think it's always looking for that human problem or that human insight. Why? I mean, not necessarily looking at, oh, the colour is wrong but trying to figure out, just observing people or observing the website or looking at it and saying, âOh, they all do this weird, they have this weird habit. Why is that? Maybe we can help them. Maybe there's something we need to changeâ. So itâs more like behavioural science, or something like that. It's also figuring out, why are people reading our ads like they do, are they jumping to the conclusion?
Nobody reads anything, really. That's why the graphic designers win.
Yeah, the only purpose is now to have a lot of text that looks like you're clever, and then people will just jump to the images and graphs.
They assume it. I think people don't really understand your marketing, just how much science is behind it. They think you just hire a graphic designer to make you a pretty looking business card or brochure or website, but there's actually so much science and psychology and sociology, like you're mentioning, behaviour that you have to understand before you even start creating things. If you're a startup and you're listening to this and you're like, I can't afford a marketing person full time yet. If you could just get someone in marketing to do an audit of what you have already created, it could be massively helpful because they can start seeing these user experience problems. I know that's something Vicki and I have done a lot over the last few years together is going through websites and people's social media and, you can see the things that aren't working right. And it can be as simple as a button, it can be like you said, just that people don't understand a ring size, but if you don't think like that, you think, okay, I made this easy drop down, they can just pick their size and on they go, but it's the block, it's that roadblock. So not knowing the roadblocks, I think hurts a lot of businesses because they just say, well, the website's not working, and they don't know why the website's not working. And they might hire someone to recreate a new website for them but the reality was it was just that little piece missing.
And that's the problem with in-house, just to be fair. I mean, you get that tunnel vision sometimes, even if you're in the creative department and you're really great, you end up using, you can't see the things from outside because you're still in-house and you've been working on extra spacethis, you start using the same words that your marketing department or finance department are using. So you need that, go to external agencies to get that really great idea that you couldn't see yourself because you were too many trees to see the forest or something like that. Just buy that idea, just buy that outside perspective, not necessarily the whole agency house, but just get their viewpoint on it because that's one of the pitfalls of being too close to the business.
Can we touch on AI and the growing need for prompt engineering?
I can see from the last year that we implemented our own GPT, which is just a version that doesn't share information out, we just called it something else. But I think what I can see from our copywriters is they are moving away from copywriting, actually crafting the copy to become more editors. So in terms of copy and ideas and so on they say, brainstorm 20 ideas on what's the friction from people buying a Chinese electric car, for instance. And then you get some ideas, oh, that might be an idea for a blog post or something like that. So we use a lot of AI to come up with ideas, get us, I don't know, 50% down the road having ideas for something, and then sometimes the AI writes something, sometimes we use it, sometimes we use the ideas and craft it ourselves and use it as proofreading. I have no idea where this is going to be honest. I'm equally scared and enthusiastic about it. But I think where it is right now, it's about adapting the possibilities and using it for proofreading or creating ideas. Sometimes you get 90 bad ideas and then you get one decent that can actually spark the next prompt or something like that. That's in terms of the copy machines. When it comes to the images, I still think it's difficult to get something you can actually use. You can get something that looks decent and then you spend the next five nights trying to get it the way you want it. So in that way, I'm very old fashioned and I like to draw everything and write it in bad handwriting on a piece of paper and put it up on the wall because then you don't fall in love with the idea. It's just up there and you can move on and so on. So that's not really AI, I know. In terms of the image side of it, I'm not there yet. I think it's inspirational, it's fun, we have done some campaigns where we used it, but we also spent a lot of times afterwards trying to fix it. So that's when things like Midjourney or Dalle or something like that. Of course, for graphic designers sitting in Photoshop and just being able to extend an image is amazing. It's things we spent I wouldn't say weeks, but at least days on, just two, three years ago, I have to do some banner or something and you just need some extra space or a staircase, and you couldnâtâŚ.
I'm loving that. I am loving those features in Photoshop right now. Absolutely. Just extending sky lazy so you can put text on the top of an image and it looks so real, it's amazing.
I agree. It's one of those things that you spend so much time on it, and it didn't really add value for the customer. It's just something that just, can you just add more sky or, yeah.
Yeah, I'm really glad you mentioned that you put so much effort into editing copy, because that's really my bugbear right now. I am so sick and tired of reading GPT everywhere I go. I'm reading emails that are sent to us. I'm reading copy, I'm reading social media posts, and you know that was not written by the person who published it. And the sad part for me is, and this is not a criticism, it's just awareness that they read it and think it's good because they're not the expert in this. They don't know what to look for, and this is the trap that I think we can fall into as business founders or business people who are not marketing minded, we don't know what's the difference between great and terrible, and whatever lies in between. And so just having the awareness of, getting it checked or just, yeah, I don't know what the answer is.
Yeah, âin the ever evolvingâ or whatever it tends to write every time. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, the bottom level as such is decent, it would have helped me a lot in Georg Jensen, when we had to write a hundred different product pages for rings made out of silver with a diamond, looking Scandinavian, it was kind of a complicated task and really, really cumbersome.
But just posting everything that you get right out of ChatGPT is not the solution. I think the combination when you use it to get new ideas, maybe proofreading, that's a really, really powerful tool. Just using it out of the box, we can all see it as soon as it's up there, âthat was a Chat GPT solutionâ and you also get, I think you have that feeling that people are getting lazy. They're not really looking through what they're posting. And I must admit, I sometimes even fall into that as well myself, sometimes you just need that help and say, Oh, this is fine, but.
I think this is just a message to people that when you get lazy, you're really going to get lazy and you're not going to get the results you're looking for. Because if you don't care, why would somebody else care more than you care? And that's the piece right there.
That's the purpose of what we're doing is to get attention. So if you look like everybody else, you won't get that attention. So that's the whole purpose of marketing, and of course it will help creating from a long article, creating ideas for different blog posts and so on. And it's really nice, but it's just, if you don't add that something on top of it that will bring attention, then it doesn't really matter then you can just keep crafting variations of the same boring ad.
Yeah, and I think what gets lost in that is trust. And I think I've got the philosophy that people are gonna move towards more authenticity, wanting it more, we're gonna want more human realness. We're not gonna want the fake robot voice and the fake robot avatars that will look real, but we know they're not because there's just that little things that aren't right. I'm definitely with you, I don't think the images look real enough yet. I think if you're doing something fantasy and you want fantasy, to illustrate a book that maybe you can come up with some really cool images on those AI generators. But when it comes to anything real, it's nowhere near there yet. Yeah, I'll say yet, because we're all waiting to see what the future holds. But I think we're gonna move towards more wanting real, wanting authentic, wanting to see people natural and a little bit messy and imperfect. And I think that's good. My feeling is marketing is going to go more towards that. How can we show the less polished, the more real, the more natural, the more emotional and make connections. And that's harder to do, but it's going to have more value in the long run. Cause we want to put our most beautiful faces out there. We want to put our most perfect edited images and content and everything out there. But my feeling is it's not going to be, what do you think?
I agree. And that actually taps back to what I said earlier on about creating events in real life. Last year, we have these benches in Copenhagen, which is like a standard design for 100 years. And then the Danish television station had a month where they talked about climate. So they changed, I would say not a lot, 20 benches and made them really high. So they would fit when the water rises, that's one metre or something like that. And they put them up all around Copenhagen and the other big cities in Denmark. So people would stop and look at those high benches and sit up and jump on them and say, oh, this is strange. It looks strange with having a bench that's one metre high or something like that. And I think those kind of ideas that are out there where you actually stop and think about this is strange. I mean, we can't trust anything we see on the screen anymore, it's a long time gone now, but we can actually, we can see things happening in real life. And I also think that in terms of all that AI, I mean, it's back to the human insight in people, all those things we notice, almost like stand-up comedians notice things like Seinfeld and all those old guys. Noticing weird things that happened, when you walk out of the bus and you're the only two guys, one of you guys have to slow down or speed up. It's really unnatural if you walk next to each other or something like that. All those things, you wouldn't get that idea from an AI at the moment. I don't know what the future will bring. But all those insights into weirdness or human nature or authenticity, I think that's really a great place to look for the next idea that you should do.
May I ask you a random question? I've been admiring the double bass behind you for this whole conversation.
Actually, I sometimes use it as a storyteller.
I love it.
Because a long time ago, I used to play in a jazz club at night and I used that sometimes. I was the worst in that band, but we were like the sitting-in band and then people would come in, great musicians to jam with us every Thursday night. And then in jazz there's like 40 different standards or something like that, that you need to know and then you could get some fake books and you can pretty much fake it. So whenever people came in and they asked for a song and so it's like, oh yeah, you could play that one. And if you knew those 40 songs, you were good to go. They had to do all the fancy stuff with the solos and all that, the people would look down their pipe and nod and say, oooh, they would understand jazz. And I use that as a metaphor of how we work. So we built the standards, the normal workflows in our agencies, how to do this and that at certain times. And then, you know, the great idea is on top of that. That's something else, but you don't need to reinvent the wheel in terms of come up with a new way of posting a social media post or creating a new banner or something like that. That's very much craftsmanship or workflows and so on. Sorry, that was a really lame metaphor, you asked for it.
It works, I love that. It brought us right back around full circle. And now the other question I have for you is, you have touched on the business that you have with a business partner who you've never met in person, even though you've been working together for five years. He's in the US, you're in Denmark. Can you tell us what it is?
The story is that he is a biology teacher or was a biology teacher teaching in colleges outside Chicago in the US. And he's a botanist, so he's very much into spending his weeks in a pond somewhere and painting nail polish on a frog or something like that. And when he was teaching, he said, âOh, it's so annoying that I have to spend two weeks of the whole course teaching them Excel, teaching them how to work with data, teaching students how to do statistical analysis and so on. That's not biology in my terms.â And then I have a friend, long story, someone I know, a British programmer actually, but living in Copenhagen, and he did another program and posted it somewhere, something like a simulator of tree growing or something like that. And they met online on this forum and he said, don't you think this is a great idea? And Aaron, the founder of this company says, yeah, decent, but we're going to do my project. And that's how they started out what's now called Data Classroom, which is this online tool for teachers to helping them teach statistics and data science and so on. And then, it was five years ago, I met them and I was just supposed to help them with a website project in the summer holidays and I knew him and we had some beers and I said, I can do that. And then it ended up being a long-term thing where we came up with this idea to do what I called, we called ready to teach or ready to teach us. So it was something where we had data in them, the program on the platform, and it could be anything. And then we wrote the assignment that teachers could take on with anything from, and I did the illustrations by hand and so on. So it was something like, if you have small classes, you could print this guidebook and you could go to a pond somewhere and observe the different kind of insects, and you could go back to our tool and type in how many you saw of each and do all these kinds of graphs and so on. And now we've been doing all kinds of Ready To Teaches for teachers. I do it once or twice a week, on Sundays with my iPad on my stomach and the sofa and so on. And it's anything from racial profiling in the US to climate change data that we got from NASA and so on. So it's pretty much anything. And that's actually our only marketing, promoting those Ready To Teach is that content marketing of telling the stories of how easy it is to try out the platform because otherwise people had to bring in the data themselves and then figuring how to do it by bringing people in and let them try the platform with data that's already formatted in the right format, it's an easy way for them to try it out. So long story.
Fascinating. I love that you're such a varied entrepreneur.
I think it probably has a name like a diagnosis or something like that.
It's a condition, it's a human condition.
It's a very entrepreneurial mindset. That's all I see it as. Absolutely. You could scientifically probably come up with something else, but this is what entrepreneurs do and this is what is making me excited because we find a problem and we fix it. And this is, your friend had this issue, he fixed it. Like, let's solve this problem so that I can get past that and get to do the things I love to do. And if he has got that problem, you can guarantee there is plenty of other people that have that problem too. So solving the problems is what entrepreneurs do. And that's why we need more entrepreneurs in the world because we just think differently. And you combine all your different experiences, your different conversations, your different friends and their experiences and build something together. I think that's amazing. I love that.
I totally agree. And I think that's one of the things I try to live by, is try it out, help out people when you can. Sometimes you'll f**k something up and it won't work or you need to redo it. But if you're just sitting at home and thinking about all the great ideas that you could have if you had the time, I think you're not going to get anywhere. The first thing is just start out, build the first website, which was horrible. The next one was better, and then we started doing something that actually worked.
That's the journey of entrepreneurship. Do it badly, keep doing it a little better every time and you get there in the end.
You should probably be embarrassed by the first two or three things you do, right? I think that's a quote somewhere from someone.
Progress before perfection, right?
Yeah.
Itâs so true. I cringe looking back at some of my early portfolio pieces and things that I did, but if I hadn't done those back then, I probably wouldn't be doing what I do today. So it all works out the way it's meant to. But yeah, take the action first.
So Kasper, I want to throw you a good curve ball here because we didn't give you a heads up on this before we started. I would like to invite you to do this new thing that Vicki and I are now adding to our Resilient Entrepreneurs podcast and invite you to ask us a question. So you turn into the podcast host for a second and throw us a question that can be on anything to do with what we've talked about today or anything you're curious about Vicki and I.
Okay, then I will ask you, how did you end up in this niche of marketing world? How did you end up doing the entrepreneurial side of things? Because I was just curious.
I get to go first. Okay, so thank you for asking that question because we absolutely love our story of how we got here. Vicki and I started working together on a project. We decided we really liked working together so we wanted to do more of it. So we decided in 2019 to do this whole business. The idea for our business was more employer branding, internal marketing, kind of in-house agency, but working more as a consultant in that role. So we had this whole idea and then COVID hit and we went, yeah, nobody wants that, cause all the marketing budgets were gone. People were, it was a disaster. So we said, how can we help? There was a need throughout some little things we were doing, where we were seeing small businesses really struggling to get any marketing going. They didn't have social media pages up and running, they didn't have websites. A lot of them were used to foot traffic or word of mouth marketing. And so we put on a few workshops and webinars because guess what? Everyone was at home and looking for any information they could find online. So we hopped online with a couple of cool brands like an entrepreneurial incubator here in Bermuda and we started there and we started with workshops and we started webinars and then we started doing more of that. We started Level Up Your Marketing, which was a course we ran, a digital course, just to help people do that solo marketing thing, figure stuff out as we were all trying to figure out online. And then that grew into more of a mindset workshop webinar series we did where we brought in guests from all different areas and finance and coaching and mindset, mindfulness, all kinds of things to just help people get through. We're all trying to get through the pandemic times, and we kind of really loved that. And Vicki and I had once hosted a radio show on marketing and we had sort of put that to bed for a while. And then we said, well, we like podcasting, let's see if we can get into podcasting, and because during that time, we have talked to so many entrepreneurs in different stages, in different issues and areas. We realised that a lot of it was mindset and a lot of people were just struggling with that imposter syndrome or money mindset or just how to do marketing and feel confident online and all these just little things to do with businesses. And we loved supporting entrepreneurs because it's an exciting, crazy, wild journey, rollercoaster. Vicki and I are both entrepreneurs, we get it. We've been on this ride for a long time, but even before we started our business, we were both entrepreneurs before that. And we just wanted to help. So this podcast is all about mindset and bringing in experts like yourself who really understand an area of entrepreneurship, real specifically, that can come and give great advice and inspiration is what we're all about. So yeah, this podcast is just that. It's just bringing really great people to talk to entrepreneurs, to keep them resilient. That was obviously a big word during pandemic and post pandemic times, right? Surviving and being resilient and how to grow. And we're just on this mission to help as many entrepreneurs launch their business, scale it up, grow it and just not quit, right? Stay in the game.
Oh, that's a great story.
Thanks.
I totally get it. Yeah, I get it. I guess my company as well is entrepreneurial. We just never thought of it that way.
Yep. That's often the case. Yeah. Our company. Isn't it amazing to say our company? I mean, that feels so good when you can say it's yours, right? You have some ownership of it. And I do believe the world needs more entrepreneurs, we need more owners, we need small businesses because we're the ones that really bring change. Every big brand starts as a small business, people forget that.
I agree. Actually, one of the things that's really great with what we're doing is that a lot of the big companies are getting too complicated to what they do. So they do a lot of PowerPoint presentations and strategies and so on. And I'm not saying you shouldn't do strategy, it's just at one point, it's better to actually do something that people will see. I think it's like an illness that I see a lot of, at least in Scandinavia, that people are overthinking a lot of what they want to do. And sometimes it is really the entrepreneurial side of things where you think about it, you talk to a couple of people and you say, okay, let's try it. Maybe people will like it, maybe people will pick it up, maybe they won't, and then we do something else. And a lot of companies are analysing and doing plans and so on.
You've made such a good point there. And I think what people get overwhelmed with marketing is they think they have to get it perfect every time and nail it and have the most viral video on social media and have an ad that converts 10 times ROI and all this stuff. The reality is all of marketing is an ongoing experiment because what works for one company may not work for another. What works now isn't gonna work in the future. Things change, algorithms shift constantly. There's so much experimentation that is needed. And out of every hundred posts, maybe one will go viral and that'll be like, wow, huge win, and you're not gonna replicate that. So it's just understanding that should take the pressure off a business and understanding that it's all about the consistency of marketing, the being out there, raising your brand awareness, building, all of that over time. It just takes time and it takes the doing. So you're absolutely right when you're saying it's about the doing, it's not about the perfect, it's not about the ideal, it's not about even having the right team, but it's about figuring it out together. And so much value in in-house marketing you've discussed today, I think will help people as they're scaling or thinking about scaling, when's the right time to bring on somebody. Thinking of them as a C-suite, they should be at the table with the leaders so that they're building with the team, I think is important to note too. So anyone out there listening, this is a great messaging about how to scale up, how to understand marketing a little bit better. And Kasper, thank you so much for all that you've helped to unveil for our listeners today. We really appreciate you and appreciate your time today. So thanks for being on Resilient Entrepreneurs.
Thank you for having me. It was really nice talking to you and some great subjects today. So thank you.
You can tell we loved it too, because anytime we could talk about marketing, Vicki and I get very excited. So thank you so much.
I love it. I have to tell you, I think I'm decent at doing marketing and I do a lot of our own marketing. Every time we do a post like this saying our new book is out or the report is out, it performs way better than anything else. All the clever headlines, all the things. It's just really annoying when you really think you're okay at what you're doing. It's just like a nice picture or not even nice, going somewhere with this book. It's super annoying that you come up with a great idea and spend time on the after-effects doing an animation and it turns out it's just a selfie with a book or a report or something like that.
So on the books we will include the book titles and links in the show notes and we'll keep an eye out for your soon to be released book.
Thank you, Thank you for having me. Bye.
