The Chaos Tax: Marketing Drift in Action

Tom Nixon (00:02.232)
How did you go bankrupt? Bill asked. Two ways, Mike said. Gradually and then suddenly. Now, Curtis, I’m guessing it’s a bit unfair of a bull horns guy like me to quiz a bullseyes guy like you to come up with the origin of that passage. Does it sound familiar?

Curtis Hays (00:22.244)
I’ve heard you say it before.

Tom Nixon (00:24.48)
It’s from The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. And it resonates with me on several occasions, one of which has become more more frequent these days and a sort of becoming a theme for perhaps season three of Bullhorns and Bullseyes, which we welcome everyone back to, including me welcoming you back.

Curtis Hays (00:27.971)
Okay.

Curtis Hays (00:45.752)
Great to be back. Yeah, back in the saddle again.

Tom Nixon (00:47.554)
Yes, they said it couldn’t be done or they said it wouldn’t be done. I can’t remember which, but it’s been a while, but there’s a good reason for that. We’ve been planning and this season is going to take on a slightly different form than the two seasons prior in ways that I think are going to be exciting.

Curtis Hays (01:06.54)
Yeah, it’s been four months, I think, and a lot’s happened in four months, not just for us, but just in the world of marketing in general.

Tom Nixon (01:13.762)
Yeah. So this season is going to be, tied together more tightly as opposed to several threads that are sort of related, but not exactly sequential. This season is intended to be by the time we’re done an entire, complete video or audio lesson, however you intend to consume it that follows a sequence. So we are going to set the stage today. And then we hope that by the ninth or 10th episode, when this is complete, that people will have.

sort of an operating system that they can apply to their own business, whether big or small, whether they’re in marketing or not. Because we feel based on what you said, so much has changed that I think people need to change the way they think about marketing, advertising, even running a business these days. Because even in the four months that we’ve gone sort of quiet in doing our planning, AI seems to change the game almost daily. feels impossible to keep up in a lot of ways.

Curtis Hays (02:13.412)
It does. We’re going to bring back some familiar faces. So we’re going to get a chance to get their take on what they see happening in the industry. My feeling is, and I think we’ll get into this, but we need to get back to some Mad Men days. Were you a Mad Men fan? Yeah. And…

Tom Nixon (02:33.358)
yeah, huge fan.

Curtis Hays (02:39.032)
You know, there’s so much out there. I could open up probably my ex or my Reddit feed or YouTube right now and see God mode prompts and CMOs that are going to replace your whole marketing team. You know, everybody’s promising the world right now with AI and it’s a bit scary. I don’t know.

Tom Nixon (03:03.478)
It is, and I think I want to preface, with something with a clarifier because we are going to offer some cautionary tales. This is not a season nor is it our take that AI is bad, that it should be avoided. we’re big believers in AI. are investing heavily in AI and we think there is tremendous promise, but with a lot of things with great promise comes potentially great peril. And,

The thing that AI can do well is also the thing that could be an undoing for some people’s marketing and messaging and business in general.

Curtis Hays (03:40.579)
Yep, 100%. And we’ve been at this for well over a year. One of the reasons why we’ve been heads down over the last four months has been working on this. So you’re right, we’re definitely invested in AI. We have some things we want to show everybody. But I think part of that is just what’s the responsible use of it. And I’ve never been the person to do business.

and make promises. And there’s a lot of promises being made with AI. So just naturally for me, I’m a bit I take things with a bit of caution. That comes out in my strength finders, I think in my my various indexes. And so yeah, no, I’ve been looking heavily at it. And we’ve written some articles about it, if you want to check out our sub stack. And, you know, kind of really

getting an understanding of what this means, not just for marketing, but for businesses in general. And so I think there’s some things that you and I can dive into and share with our audience.

Tom Nixon (04:50.734)
Yeah. So in terms of what it does well, and then what challenges that presents. you know, AI is a great amplifier. It’s a great expediter. So it can do things quicker. It can do things incredibly fast. But it reminds me of the old joke. You know, someone says, my gosh, we’re going the wrong way. And the other person says, yeah, I know, but we’re making incredible time.

Curtis Hays (05:17.294)
planes, trains, and automobiles. He turns to him and he’s like, hi. And they’re like, and he’s like, what did they say? He’s like, they said we’re going the wrong way. And he’s like, well, how does he know where we’re going? He’s like, yeah, how does he know where he’s going? Thank you, bye. And then they look and here’s a semi coming right at him. John Candy, my God, one of the greatest movies, one of the greatest comedies.

Tom Nixon (05:19.65)
Yes.

Tom Nixon (05:24.813)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (05:40.45)
Right. Yeah.

Curtis Hays (05:45.518)
planes, trains and automobiles. I can’t believe you pulled that line out. That’s one of my favorites. You didn’t even know that.

Tom Nixon (05:49.593)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now see, I used AI, it figured it out for me. But then the other, dangers, the amplification, you and I have had these conversations. How do you know that what you’re amplifying is truly what you need to be known for, right? So you’re just, it’s like the radio that’s on the wrong station or it’s in between stations and it’s staticky and…

Curtis Hays (05:55.736)
There you go.

Tom Nixon (06:14.562)
You know, that’s, it’s the wrong thing. That’s not what anyone wants to hear. Well, you wouldn’t go to the volume knob and turn that up, would you? Or even worse, right? Your instinct would be turn it down. That’s not what I want. Here’s the worst problem though. Let’s say the radio is the media. Let’s say the product is the music and me as a listener is the customer and the radio is stuck on country music. Well, I hate country music. I’m never going to buy country music.

Curtis Hays (06:22.549)
No, your instinct. Yeah.

Tom Nixon (06:45.05)
AI would say, just turn it up, turn it louder, right? You’ll convince them, just turn it louder, make it, you know, all I’m thinking of is this is not for me. So what’s my inclination is to change the channel. And I think that’s people are falling into a trap, which is, wow, look how easy this is. Look how quick it can be done. We need to just deploy, deploy, deploy, deploy, totally divorced from, we the right station for the right listener? And.

That’s when AI becomes a false prophet.

Curtis Hays (07:17.314)
It’s easy to fall into that trap too. Like I said, you can go on any online platform, sub stack even, and there’s thousands of promises. There’s thousands of prompts where people can say, you can replace your marketing team. You can replace a sales person. You can do outbound emails at scale. You can do campaigns at scale. You can have it write your ad copy at scale. You could build a one year campaign.

and have all the execution pieces in place in 45 minutes, probably. Hey, you might burn through quite a few tokens. Know that when you’re in AI, you’re spending money, first of all. If you get into the sophisticated AI, you’re burning tokens, and those tokens can go pretty fast, depending on the models you’re in. So you got to know where you’re going, but there’s a foundation.

that I think we’ll talk about today, that’s where you need to start before you really start asking AI to build you an entire campaign that, like you said, might be just creating a bunch of noise.

Tom Nixon (08:26.734)
Yeah, the expression you kept using was at scale, at scale, at scale. Yes, you can do everything at scale. Do you want to do the wrong thing at scale? No, I mean, that’s no better than doing the wrong thing slowly. It’s actually worse, right? There comes a cost to it because the trap is, well, we just spend more money because we have more assets and we have more bandwidth to do the things we want it to do. So you’re spending twice though. There’s the actual spend, right? And if it’s not aligned with

You if it’s not the right radio station for the right listener, you’re just spending money, right? To put out the wrong message in the wrong medium to the wrong audience. But there’s also this hidden tax that we’ll come back to later and ask you defined it as the chaos tax, which is you, you know, you’ve expedited all expedited all this activity. There’s plenty of things happening, but it’s not resulting in what you wanted it to result in, which is at end of the day, revenue. So, but now you’re busier.

Curtis Hays (09:10.841)
right.

Tom Nixon (09:24.568)
You’ve got more things out there. There’s more activity. There’s more moving parts. That has a tax that’s hidden. What do you mean by the chaos tax?

Curtis Hays (09:33.848)
Well, and what was your quote that you said earlier from the book? Because I think it tries that.

Tom Nixon (09:38.131)
well about how we went bankrupt, right? Gradually and then suddenly.

Curtis Hays (09:42.949)
Right, right. So in, let’s call it the old world of marketing, it took time. You know, there was like a bigger rock to push in order to create campaigns and put out messaging and all those things. And now we can do it really, really fast. And so the tendency is to chase those fast things. I told somebody recently, it’s kind of like whack-a-mole. You’re out here and you’re like…

you know, trying this thing, trying this thing and the customer keeps escaping you every time you go to hit it over the head, like become my customer and it’s gone. It’s like, what how I just burned that money. I just burned that money. I just burned that money. And so while things appear to be maybe less costs in some ways, to me, feels like companies are accelerating their spend and getting nothing in return.

and that chaos tax is not knowing what’s happening in the middle. That there is some level of chaos, not just with your marketing, it could be in sales, it could be in delivery, it could be in customer service, it could be in fulfillment. There’s some sort of chaos likely happening inside the organization and it’s bleeding money and you don’t know what to do about it. You don’t know how to fix it.

but you just keep putting money at it to try to solve the problem, and yet you keep bleeding. And that’s the danger of AI is it just accelerates that process.

Tom Nixon (11:17.705)
Going the wrong way.

Tom Nixon (11:22.702)
Yeah, going the wrong way faster, making incredible time, right? Which is why, you know, getting back to the Mad Men days is, you know, they didn’t have AI obviously, but so they had, they lived at a different pace. But what was interesting about those days in real life and in the show was that there was always this diagnosis first, right? There’s like, all right, well, I’ll never forget the season. And it was kind of later in the season when they figured out that they could interview

Curtis Hays (11:25.954)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (11:50.799)
customers into focus groups and people would tell them what they like about a product and what they didn’t like about the product and it dawns on Don Draper. Shouldn’t we just tell the people what they’re telling us that they want? But because we’re playing whack-a-mole, we are not taking the time to stop and diagnose. Wait a minute. The whack-a-mole machine was never even plugged in. So there were no heads popping out to begin with. We were in the wrong machine. We needed to be over here. And maybe we should have been playing whack-a-mole to begin with.

there’s a resistance it seems because of these tools that are available to go to market and do things faster. There’s a resistance to say, hold on, what problem are we even trying to fix? Do we even know what problem we’re trying to fix? Are we the wrong media? Do we have the wrong message? Do we have the wrong market? Do we have the wrong tools? Do we have the wrong budget? Do we have, you know, it’s like, nah, nah, just go for it, right?

Curtis Hays (12:46.04)
Well, and I think this is a tendency that I was doing, I’ve seen in my entire career, until you helped me look at it differently, Tom, which is our natural tendency is to turn inward for the diagnosis. Which you could argue if that should be first or second, you should turn inward in some ways. But what you taught me is…

Tom Nixon (13:04.238)
Hmm.

Curtis Hays (13:14.368)
there has to be a let’s take a look at the customer first. And I can’t remember how you said it originally. But there’s this, hey, we’re just looking at a mirror, you need to turn that mirror around and look through a window. And it’s your customer who’s on the other side of that window. Have you ever asked them? Have you ever pulled back the onion? You know, I’ve watched you

pull back the onion with customers and you think like AI could do voice of customer, right? Like it could scrape the internet for reviews and customer sentiment and go through Reddit and all kinds of things or you could give it data analysis and have it churn through all of that. But what it can’t do, which is what I see you do is in a, well, for sure in a face-to-face interview, see somebody get uncomfortable in their seat.

Or maybe there’s a slight sigh after they say, yeah, it’s fine. You know, something that like in a transcript, it’s fine to AI might be it’s good. I mean, like fine. My dad loved to play around with the word fine because like he’d come over for dinner and Stephanie would make dinner and she was like, how did you enjoy dinner? And he would say, it’s fine. It was fine.

And she’d be like, it was fine. And he goes, well, there’s fine jewelry. There’s fine wine. So why couldn’t your dinner be fine? It wasn’t what she expected, but it had a different meaning. And he was kind of pressing at something to kind of get a little bit of a rise out of her. But it’s true in AI, the word fine is not the same as you may be hearing it with some sort of tone or something within that individual.

And when you get that face-to-face interaction and you can peel back the onion, whether it’s with a business owner or it’s with a customer, now you get to truth. And that’s where you can stop looking at the mirror, start looking at the customer and really figure out where the customer’s reality is coming from. What do they hold true in belief? maybe what are they holding that they’re not sharing, that there’s no way AI is going to pick that up at all?

Tom Nixon (15:36.633)
Yeah, so I’m going to quiz you with another passage from literature. This one’s easier. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? I’m sure you recognize the line. You may not recognize immediately that’s from Snow White. And of course this articulates a fallacy, which is in this case, the godmother, I think the queen keeps asking the mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest? And the mirror knows what the queen wants to hear.

Curtis Hays (15:41.261)
Okay.

Tom Nixon (16:04.938)
is more than willing to oblige because he wants or it wants to keep the Queen happy. you are, you are the fairest in the kingdom. So the Queen is completely pacified by this. good. This is exactly what I thought. Eventually, the mirror says there’s someone who has become more fair than thee, and it is Snow White. And the Queen goes into a rage. No, that can’t be true. Right? Where the f… I was the fairest of them all.

But the truth is what matters most, not what the queen thought, which the queen only thought I have the best product. I have the best people. I have the longest history in this industry. I have the best solution. Look at the mirror and I’m going to say, I’m the fairest of them all. Let’s put that on our website. Let’s put that on our copy. Let’s put that everywhere we can. Now let’s pour AI on it. Amplify that as much as possible. But what we haven’t done is gotten to the truth, which is.

Are we the fairest of them all? Who thinks we’re the fairest of them all? Why do they think we’re the fairest of them all? And why do these other people not think that? And to your point about going out and asking the market, this is what they did in the madman days is they said, before we spend a ton of money, because advertising may have been even more expensive back then than it is today, actual dollars adjusted for inflation, because they were buying TV and they were buying radio and they were buying billboards. So they had to get it right.

Right. But now it’s like, no, we have AI, we have tools, we can just test things. Why we want to talk directly to the customer to get to the truth is and why this can’t be wholly done by AI is what you mentioned is that when we’re in a conversation with a human and a human says,

It’s fine. Right. So I made a face and like you’re listening on podcast. I hesitated, I side all of the things that the transcripts not going to show it to your point. can say, can I go back real quick? You hesitated and you said it was fine, but you hesitated and I don’t know, maybe I was picking up on your body language that it wasn’t fine. The transcript doesn’t have the ability to go back and do that. Right. It’s static. is what it is. But when you’re talking to someone and then the person says,

Tom Nixon (18:22.926)
Can I say something that you won’t report back to anyone? Can I just say this off the record? Then you’re getting to the true heart of who is the fairest of them all because they have taken their guard down. Over time, you’ve endeared them so that they trust you and they’re willing to say, me let my guard down and tell you what happened. You’ve been in these interviews and depending on who the client is, sometimes there are literal tears that come out in these interviews.

Curtis Hays (18:50.008)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (18:52.366)
Now that tells me who the fairest of them all is. Right? So that’s why we think, all right, so now we’re in a world where we have AI. We have two people emailing, but really it’s an AI conversing with the other person’s AI and we’ve removed all humanity out of everything. And we think we’re going to be able to put AI on top of that amplify. And somehow we’re going to convince real humans to make an emotional purchase, which believe it or not, every purchase is emotional.

And that is the trap that we’re saying people are falling into.

Curtis Hays (19:25.58)
And stay with the visualization there. just basically have AI is just reflecting off of your mirror because we’re going to talk about something eventually called context. And so you’re training the AI with if you’re training it without your customer, you’re training it with the mirror. And if it all it understands is the mirror, you’re just polishing your mirror creating a better reflection.

of yourself, but that does not mean it’s a reflection of your customer’s reality. And I don’t think anyone does this intentionally. So the witch or queen, she’s a queen in Snow White, that’s fairly intentional. I think she’s got quite a few of the seven deadly sins, including pride, deep down in her.

I don’t think any of these businesses do this purposely. I think it’s just a natural flaw that we have as human beings, that we seek kind of inward reflection first, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We just have to pull ourselves out of that. And instead of us doing the reflection, mean, be like me trying to diagnose my customers and my business, very difficult to do. But if I say, hey, Tom, could you write some case studies for me? Would you interview some of my customers?

Would you pull back the onion for me a little bit and help me see what I’m not seeing? Because we can’t, as humans, do a very good job of turning the mirror away from ourselves to look at people on the other side. Some people are really good at it. Some people are not. And they’re just, they’re in their business. And you don’t usually get into business with this intention. It’s just what happens. You’re just focused on the day to day of running your business and all the things that need to do it. And you just lose focus at some point on the customer.

Tom Nixon (21:18.104)
Yeah. And I would maybe even suggest it’s even more benign than neglect or just you called it a flaw. I don’t know if it’s a flaw. think it’s an inclination because we go into a project, let’s say a website and we presume, well, all right, well, the website should talk about why we’re great. Right? That’s why the customer is there is to know why we’re better than somebody else. Let’s tell them why we’re better than somebody else, but there’s a misalignment there. for a small segment of

the website visiting population. They are of the mind that they are going to hire you or somebody else. And maybe they’re just vetting and they’re comparing, but we talked about mind states last season and there are several mind states that predate that visit to the website where somebody has decided they are going to make a purchase. just a matter of yours or somebody else’s product. And when you speak in only mirror language, you are ignoring probably

83%, I think is the number I said of the sales process where people have not yet even decided they’re making a purchase. And so that’s why we think mapping to, again, turning the mirror into a window is we’re mapping to the broader spectrum of the customer journey in the customer analysis, which starts with, I think I have a problem that I think I’m finally willing to spend money to fix. There’s a pain.

It’s that moment that I always talk about, I can’t live like this anymore. So they decide they have a problem. They haven’t decided whether they’re going to hire you or somebody else yet. They’re just like, would this cost me to fix that type of thing? What are my options? Like, does anyone else have this problem? How have they solved it? Maybe I’m going to do a search. It’s not going to be for your company. It’s going to be for a category or is there such a thing or it’s going to be a phone call or an email to a.

colleague or a friend, Hey, who do you use for such and such? Because I think I might want to. Right. And so there’s all this why sort of underpinning to this. It’s not your what yet that people care about. They will eventually buy the what, but there’s so much of your buying potential buying population that’s still in this why mentality. Like, I think I need to do this. Right. And that’s why that’s in again. now effective marketing and advertising and messaging.

Tom Nixon (23:41.335)
identifies the why, their why, and says, I understand your pain. This is what you’re feeling. Totally understandable. Lots of people go through this. We actually have a system that removes that pain and we do it differently than everybody else. But let’s start with the fact that we get what hurts. And then if you’re interested in learning how we do it better than somebody else, then we could show you that as well. At the end of the day, what we sell and what their competitor sells are pretty much the same.

That how is different in our house different because we understand your why. That’s how you turn a mirror into a window.

Curtis Hays (24:12.388)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (24:19.326)
And so if I could move to a concept that you helped sort of identify for me as I was doing some of our research at Kaleidoscope, which is this marketing drift, right? And I think most businesses, when they get into business, they probably understand that why, because they got into business to solve a specific problem. Whether it’s a product that solves a problem, the service they’re offering that they’re good at helping somebody solve a problem, whatever it is.

At some point though, along the way, as they hire more people, as their organization grows, as you mentioned, mind states change, their customers change, the problems their customers face every day change. There is what you’re calling drift. And I layered on top of that, well, you’ve got algorithms that change, you’ve got platforms that change, you’ve got technologies that change, like AI.

And so you have this North Star when you create a business of where you’re headed. And then over time, and he goes back to this like, yeah, it’s not all at once that you go bankrupt. It’s slowly over time, you are sent off course, a new director of marketing, a new agency, a whoever and you think that the course correction is replacing that person or replacing the agency.

or a different channel, or somebody who knows the algorithm better, or more budget. But these things just continue to take you off course, which that drift, that’s what I’m saying, inside of that drift, if we had a visualization for it, right, that in between your North Star and wherever you’re at today is the chaos tax. Inside of that is some sort of chaos that you probably don’t understand today where

a leak is and you’ve got to stop and figure that out.

Tom Nixon (26:19.704)
Yeah. Right. yeah, drift happens two ways. Gradually, but then suddenly, but it also happens two ways in that the ways that you articulated one is we’re drifting from our own North star. So because of all the reasons you stated, or the market is drifting away from us and we don’t even understand why for a, it’s taking us too long to figure out, figure out that it’s happening. just see sales flat, right? So marketing spend is going up.

But sales are flat. What’s wrong? I don’t know. Let’s put more budget or change channels or whatever. But it’s the, let’s, let’s do, you know what we need? A lead magnet. That’s what’s going to solve this. Right. So it’s all these sort of tactical, you know, fine tuning to something that, you know, well, there’s a huge hole in the bottom of the, the, was it? Hall or keel, right? That’s why we’re sinking. Did anyone go look at that?

Curtis Hays (26:54.338)
It’s the landing page.

Curtis Hays (26:59.748)
you

Curtis Hays (27:12.376)
Yeah, sure.

Tom Nixon (27:17.71)
But so I think that’s again, that’s why I love the term chaos tax is because it’s happening and you’re not even recognize it in your, you’re losing potential revenue and maybe existing spend by not fixing the problem. So the expression you like to use is diagnosis before deployment.

So we’re good. So AI is going to deploy the heck out of whatever you got going on. Right. But it may not die. You know, if you don’t stop to diagnose, then how do you look and this doesn’t have to be this long drawn out thing that costs, you know, thousands and thousands of dollars and take six months to complete like it did in the madman days. You know, they would spend six months creating a survey and it would take six more months to execute it. We’re not suggesting that. So we’re not saying stop everything you’re doing, spend a ton of money just on

Curtis Hays (27:45.251)
you

Tom Nixon (28:12.376)
fluffy, you know, reports and PowerPoints that never get enacted. It’s like, no, no, no, just stop. Get the voice of the customer. If you have it great. And you’re confident it’s accurate even better. But if you don’t, so if you haven’t done this in the last six to 18 months, chances are drift is already happening, whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, whether you acknowledge it or not, this drift is happening and there’s never been a better time to say, hold on, let’s figure this out.

We might even use AI tools to do some of that. So it’s not like we’re anti AI yet. Anti AI, that’s hard to say. Very much in favor of AI, but AI used for the things that it’s good at and not for the things it’s not good.

Curtis Hays (28:54.996)
I want you to, before I go into that, because I do want to talk about the diagnosis first. And I think we need to be clear on what marketing actually is before we go and diagnose what’s wrong with marketing. And many people think marketing is campaigns and it’s these tools and it’s, you know, website and all of these things. But it’s much simpler than that at its core. It’s a very complex system. I’m still learning it.

a lot and realizing I didn’t know what I thought I knew. And that’s why I want to get back to the Mad Men days and understand how they understood marketing back then, because I feel like we’ve lost our way a bit and we need to get back on track. to me, it’s been more about a way that you communicate to an audience, right? That it’s…

a connection to somebody that the marketing has way more meaning behind it than what we’ve defined it as today, which is a tool to generate leads or sales. That’s what it’s viewed at. And it’s not viewed as, no, we’re going to look through a window and we’re going to see that there’s a person, not a persona, not an ICP, that there is a little literal person, a customer who we want to help.

who is on the other side. And marketing’s job is to make that connection between the brand and that potential future customer. I don’t know, how did I do articulating that?

Tom Nixon (30:37.048)
Yeah, you’re right. The way I see it is unfortunately over the last decade. So I think marketing has many roles. Over the last decade, marketing has been reduced to a single role, is that which is visible and attributable inside of HubSpot or some other CRM, right? So did this activity lead to another activity that led to a opportunity that led to a sale? If not, then that activity is worthless, which is not how customers.

move through the decision making process. We talked about the sales funnel a lot in season one and season two, right? And so what HubSpot measures is the attribution that happens at the bottom of the funnel, there’s marketing historically has all sorts of other roles that include sort of branding, affinity, driving preference. Like marketing is sometimes working even when the customer isn’t even in market. And that’s what HubSpot’s never going to pick up on.

Right. The person who has not yet identified the pain, but maybe could recognize the pain if somebody articulated it well enough to them in say a branded campaign. So not by my product, but a lot of people have this problem. that sounds familiar. didn’t, well, she’s, I didn’t even know I had that particular problem, but now you’re right. I do. I wasn’t even aware that there was a category of product or service that

Address that well now I just went from unaware to aware marketing played a role there that is not yet even attributable inside a HubSpot. get my point. it all sorts of these, what it’s been reduced to through digital technology is a single outcome and a single activity when there’s probably a handful, if not more in the full spectrum where marketing plays a role in not only finding a customer potentially attracting them.

keeping them, retaining them, flipping the funnel so that they tell their friends how great and wonderful you are. And I think that’s going to be the further danger. I had to look into a crystal ball, knowing that AI is just going to amplify what has happened over the last 10 years, it’s that. It’s that, okay, well, AI should only be amplifying the levers or, you know, greasing the gears that specifically lead to…

Tom Nixon (32:54.826)
a lead magnet download or a form fill or in it’s missing all of these other opportunities. And it’s that’s going to happen gradually. And then suddenly there’s going to be brands that figure out, wait, how come we’re not winning anymore? We’ve got all the tools in place. We’re throwing money at it. We’re throwing AI at it. And again, sales are flat. So what happened? And I think what you suggested is exactly what happened. People forgot that there’s a human that needs to be convinced somewhere out there in the universe. They’re not in your CRM yet. So.

Curtis Hays (33:08.814)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (33:23.98)
That was the people you’re missing.

Curtis Hays (33:25.89)
Yeah, and you said brand and I had this realization in season one that I thought marketing sat above brand, that branding was a function of marketing. And now I realize branding or brand sits above marketing. Are you familiar with the new soda? I shouldn’t say it’s new, it’s now five years old, but the popies?

Tom Nixon (33:53.57)
No.

Curtis Hays (33:54.531)
The drink? Really? Okay, fastest growing soft drink ever. Zero to 500 million in five years. And if you were to ask the founder, woman founder, I think she made it in her kitchen. If you were to ask her what success looked like for them and how they got to 500 million in five years, I don’t think she’s going to tell you it was viral social campaigns. She’s not going to tell you it was Google advertising. She’s not going to tell you it’s any of these things that…

All of these companies are coming to me, talking to me about saying that they want, are going to be these like magic wands that are going to fix their business. You know what she’s going to tell you? It was brand. They built a brand that people wanted to be a part of. It wasn’t that they had the best probiotic soda. They didn’t market that. They didn’t market they had the best tasting sodas. Yes, those are the what’s or maybe the how’s and the differentiators.

but they built a brand and people wanted to be a part of that brand and they wanted to have that soft drink because of that brand and what that brand stood for and all of those types of things. again, it just sort of makes me think like, okay, from a diagnosis perspective, do we even have that right yet? You know, I came from a world of IT and I was fixing networks and servers and all these things and we were taught

You start with simple. It’s like I know you get frustrated. You call the IT help desk and the first thing they say is have you rebooted yet? Well, there’s a reason for that because if you think the problem is the network or the server or something else and I go and reboot that well, that’s going to take 1000 other people down that are in the building. I don’t think we want to do that as the first thing we try. I think we want to start with the simplest thing. Is it plugged in?

Is your network cable plugged in? Have you moved it recently? Are there batteries in your mouse? Do they need to be changed? Like, there are so many things that you can start with on the simple side that eventually get you to, it could be the network. And then we have to make that decision of, what’s the cost of downtime or what’s the cost to replacing the server? And so it’s a bit more methodical in the IT world than it’s been in marketing. So I spent like the first

Curtis Hays (36:20.164)
12 to 15 years of my career in IT and now the last 15 years or so in marketing and just really coming to realize how quick companies are to come to me and say, we need to do Google Ads. Somebody said that would solve our problem or people are having success. Our competitors are doing really well in Meadow right now. I’m going to give you $5,000 a month. Go spend it there.

You’re telling me you’re ready to go buy a new server, but you haven’t checked yet to determine whether or not all you need to do is a reboot. And so this is this whole reason for diagnosis before deployment is I don’t want to see you go spend a bunch of money, particularly in the age of AI where it can be amplified at scale. And now you’re spending a bunch of money trying to fix something that maybe isn’t the thing that’s really broken or you’re

Creating additional chaos and additional broken systems because the foundation isn’t right and the foundation should be starting with your customer

Tom Nixon (37:26.59)
You used a word earlier on brand. think most people, yeah, obviously they know the term. I think sometimes they associate it with something that’s soft, right? It’s like, don’t need a new brand. need more customers, right? But you’re saying the same thing. mean, Apple built an entire empire on exactly what you just said, Popeys did, right? They created a cool club that people wanted to be a part of. Let’s just put it that way. This is what Brian,

Clark was talking about last year about audience first. It’s what Mark Schaefer talked about last season in terms of wanting a community and belonging. And that’s like an emotion that humans have been a part of since they were tribes, right? Seth Godin talks about tribes, finding your tribe. So there’s a reason why this works. And we’re not suggesting that you’re going to become the next Apple. What we’re suggesting is that you’re starting at the end. You’re starting at the, let’s,

replace the server for $3 million. Right. It’s like you haven’t even, so why not just start at the beginning? know because there’s this lure that if we start at the end, the end is where the sales happen. Right. So why don’t we start there and just make more sales happen? Why would you do this other stuff? And I guess what we say is if that works for you, then absolutely go do it. We’re talking about the people who have been doing that for years or maybe even decade or war in their

coming to us, they’re saying, we’re not getting the performance we got before. Like our agency’s doing something wrong or this isn’t working anymore. Would you go look at why our Google ads aren’t configured properly? Because they used to work, but they’re not working now. Hmm. Well, what’s changed? There’s been some drift where that drift has happened. You’re not, you don’t want to stop to find out. You just want to say, turn it back on in a different way. I mean, that’s to me, you know what the

Definition of insanity is it’s the doing things gradually, gradually, gradually, gradually in expecting that suddenly it’s never going to get here. And it does. So, that’s what season three is going to be about. We’re going to teach people our process for doing this. Right. we have what we call an operating system that takes all of this into account. It’s not just about.

Curtis Hays (39:25.378)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (39:48.963)
You know, we’re not a branding company that only cares about getting your messaging right. And then we’ll hand it off to somebody to go execute. It’s not what we’re saying. but we’re saying that if you don’t know where the problem exists, you have to start at the beginning. You then you’re either going to solve it there or you’re going to solve it at the next step. You’re going to solve it the next step, but you’re not going to solve what’s broken at the beginning by starting at the end. I have a client and, call him, listen or Paul who talks about the.

concept of the river Delta. So the river Delta is where all of the sediment settles from the flow of the river, right? And that it’s very obvious where all the rubbish has ended up the seat, you know, the river rock and all that stuff has ended up there. What you don’t know is where it came from and why it broke off from wherever it was. It’s so, if you only focus on the Delta to fix a problem,

Curtis Hays (40:24.676)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (40:42.274)
You’re ignoring all of the things you could fix the Delta. could remove the Delta, but it’s going to be replaced because something else further upstream is happening. And that’s all we’re suggesting. And then we have a system to look at the entire river, but start at the beginning and then create a bulletproof system that insulates your business, your activities from draft because there’s accountability and there’s truth built into it. It’s not assumptions. It’s not, let’s pour gasoline on a fire that we’re trying to put out.

that sort of thing. You said diagnosis before deployment. Add three more of those because they’re just rife with alliteration. And you know how I love that. Coherence. Coherence before creativity. This is mine, right? I love the creative side of the business, but I can’t be creative if I don’t understand in a coherent way what I’m trying to be creative about. And I could give you all sorts of great taglines. Matter of fact,

Curtis Hays (41:20.388)
Meaning of… go ahead.

Curtis Hays (41:27.981)
Yeah, yeah.

Tom Nixon (41:39.916)
Hey, I can give you plenty of creative little slogans. Are they going to be effective? How would I know unless I talk to your customers and find out what hurts and where it hurts and why. that’s coherence before creativity. You’re big on diagnosis before deployment, which we talked about. What are the other two?

Curtis Hays (41:58.997)
Meaning before media and and this is where you you stop and you Talk to five customers that you do your research you find the truth You figure out where the meaning is and what really matters to your customers and then you go spend $20,000 on some commercials and then you am to amplify them at $5,000 a month or whatever your budget is but to go and spend money

on the activity because you looked at your competitors and they were doing something and you think you have to do something similar without really having meaning behind what you’re doing, more chaos tax.

Tom Nixon (42:38.318)
Yeah. And we will show you then later this season, that’s when you deploy AI. Once you’ve gotten the clarity, the coherence, right? You’ve done the diagnosis, you have true meaning that’s rooted in truth. Then AI becomes your biggest ally because it’s amplifying the right things in the right way to the right outcomes. Everything’s aligned and now you’re cooking with gas. You said meeting before media. So.

Meaning being you understand your own meaning, but you understand the customer’s meaning. Yeah. It’s.

Curtis Hays (43:15.204)
Mm hmm. Yep. Yep. Yep. You understand. So this is the question I ask all the time now on every sales call. Do you know why your customer buys from you? And if that is a reflection of something that you say, which is likely, I would say 90 % of the time, the answer is maybe commodity driven.

Oh, well, we have a better price. We have a better product. We offer a better service. That puts you into the commodity category, which is not a category you want to live in. You want to live in the brand category. I think everybody who has a business aspires to be in that brand category, that people want to be a part of this, that what I’m building has some meaning. It’s just that meaning can’t be a reflection of your own meaning. That meaning has to be on the other side, right?

Tom Nixon (43:56.792)
Well, for sure.

Curtis Hays (44:10.944)
And so I’ll give you an example. Assisted Living Home Care Services, Mario, we’ve got on the show many times, provides home care to seniors and people with disabilities. They can play in the commodity market. They can be Connecticut, 30 years, family owned.

Tom Nixon (44:11.177)
the window.

Curtis Hays (44:39.672)
good caregivers, well-trained, all of these things that in some way their competitors can say or have some sort of position against. But when they say, you know what, it’s an honor for us to have an opportunity to care for your loved one. And they truly mean that and carry that out, that that comes across in everything that they do.

Now you have meaning and you can translate that meaning into marketing. And people will feel it. Like when people feel your brand, that’s when it starts to get transformative. If they don’t feel your brand, I’m sorry, you’re gonna struggle. And we see it in their reviews, don’t we? Like we see people share reviews like your caregiver took all this weight off my shoulders and I just don’t know where we would be without

Tom Nixon (45:24.802)
Right. Yeah, exactly.

Curtis Hays (45:39.862)
Mary, who’s taking care of my mom right now. And she’s just a joy to have at our house. And she’s like part of the family now. Exactly. Those are the reviews that bring a tear to your eye because there’s a meaning behind what it is you’re doing. And not every business is going to have something that creates tearjerkers. Some of what we do is dry and those types of things. But there’s likely an executive on the other side of maybe whatever you do that

Tom Nixon (45:51.245)
Right.

Curtis Hays (46:09.315)
They’ve got something that keeps them up at night that you might have a problem that you can solve. And you can find meaning in that. And that’s what we’re looking for. It’s like, well, do you know the hammer analogy? Like, you could sell a hammer, but what is the customer actually buying the hammer for? Well, it’s to nail a nail on the wall that they’re going to take a family photo of and put up there.

The meaning is getting the family photo up on the wall so they can see it, be proud of the family. It’s not the hammer.

Tom Nixon (46:43.672)
Yep. And here’s a quick litmus test for people to go and try out. You can play this game at home is to look at.

Curtis Hays (46:49.111)
This is the is this the the mirror test? Okay.

Tom Nixon (46:52.622)
It is the mirror test, which is if your copy on your homepage starts with any form of a first person pronoun, then you’re looking at a mirror. If it’s we do this, our business has been this, our proprietary software does that. Then you’ve missed this alignment with the meaning of the customer. Your example that we chose, that you chose because you allowed us to interview

their customer. Those are their conversations I was talking about earlier where tears started to come to people’s eyes because of how transformative assisted living services was in their own lives. Not only does my mom get to live with the dignity of staying in her own home, I get my life back. And I’ve been spending all of my energy, time, resources, pain for the last six months taking care of somebody, yes, I love, but I don’t.

I’m not equipped to do it and I can’t do it anymore. That’s the, can’t live like this anymore moment. Right. And so the messaging should say, your mom deserves to live with the dignity of staying in her home and you deserve to get your life back. If you connect on that level, everybody selling this trained professionals and you know, 30 years in business and that’s great, but that’s totally incongruent with what.

drove that person to make the phone call in the first place, which is, can’t live like this anymore. And mom shouldn’t have to either. So, just think about how powerful now think about me interviewing these parents, these adult children of these folks with aging parents. Imagine how emotional those interviews got. You read the transcript, but you weren’t there. I mean, I saw the tears in the eyes, right? And I said, I, I’ve got this. And so the proof is in the pudding. We can get back to that later, but that’s what we mean by meaning before media.

The last one I’m going to ask you to explain because this is what we’re talking about. Revenue before reach.

Curtis Hays (48:56.001)
Right. So once you’ve done the diagnostics and you’ve done these other things and we can take messaging and we can put it into campaigns, we still need to test it. Like we’re making assumptions that this stuff works. In IT, you make an assumption, you do something, you think it works, but then you go back up the chain and you make sure everything’s running properly. So let’s test it. Let’s see if we’re getting revenue from the output and then we can scale it. So that’s all. Let’s prove the revenue first.

And you might not realize the revenue right away. If you’re in a B2B sales business with, you know, 60 days to six months of a buying cycle, it might take some time to see if what it is you’re doing is actually leading to revenue. So before we go and scale something, just pause and see, is this scalable? Is it actually working? And now we can go and reach new audiences with that. Now, thankfully,

The algorithms help us do this now. And so that is really the importance of having the right media that has meaning to a target audience that you know well, because the algorithms will pick it up for you and they’ll go deliver it to more people like you. And so the scaling actually becomes easier when you’ve done all this pre-work. It’s not a lever as an agency owner or a button that I’m going to push in the system that’s going to make it better. I don’t have a secret.

in meta or Google ads or TikTok or LinkedIn that’s going to make your ads run any better than any other agency. It’s going to come down to whether or not your brand has a message that’s going to connect with a target audience. From that, yes, we can set up the tools in the right way, but then we need to measure it and make sure when we’re getting revenue, we now can amplify that revenue and reach new customers.

Tom Nixon (50:52.686)
I’m going to leave people with my assigned homework and I am going to assume that exactly zero people listening to this or watching this will do it. And this is the homework. It’s to go have actual conversations with five customers. You can decide if they’re happy or unhappy customers. Ask them three questions. One is describe to me what life was like before you even heard of us. What was life like? Why did you go looking for someone like us? Describe that pain.

Second question is, why did you choose us? You could have chosen anybody. What was it about us that made you confident that we could make that pain go away? And then three is, describe what life has been like now that you’ve been working with us for a while. How is your life different? Did we change? Did we make that pain go away? And then if you have the answers to all of those, you’ve got the foundation for your meaning before media.

your coherence before creativity. Now, why I suspect zero people will do this is two reasons. One is they’re afraid to ask. They’re afraid that a customer might say, I’m glad you called Tom, because we’re not as happy as we used to be, right? You have to get over that fear. The other reason is because, I know what they’re going to say. They’re going to say they appreciate the fact that we’ve been in business for 30 years. Our salespeople are very responsive.

We beat our competitors on price. Consider then if you don’t do the homework that I, what is the cost of getting your assumptions wrong or not knowing what your customer is currently feeling. Consider that cost. That’s a chaos tax and it’s costing you more than you think.

Curtis Hays (52:39.489)
And if I could add to that, now imagine you have that answer. Imagine you went and did that with five customers and you got to some sort of truth. Now imagine you took that information into the world of AI and you gave that context now to AI and you said, yep, go crawl all my competitors, go figure out what their messaging is, go figure out what they’re saying. I’ve got something different I want to say. Let me give context to that system.

Let me give context to that system about my business and what I’m trying to do and all those different types of things. Now, with that context, instead of without it, all I’m getting is the average of everything that AI knows. Instead of the average, I’m getting me. And me is hopefully something somebody on the other side needs. And AI can now take that and amplify that.

But without that, it doesn’t know. I could go into a room of 100 executives and I could ask them all what’s keeping them up at night. And I’m going to get a lot of different answers, maybe some that are similar. And then I could go to my chat GPT and I could ask the exact same question, these 100 executives in this room right now, what’s keeping them up at night? And it’s going to come up with a pretty good answer. It’s actually trained not to give me a I don’t know.

Do it. Say, right now, hey, chat GPT, I’m in a room with 100 executives. What’s keeping them up at night? It’ll give you an answer. It won’t say, hey, I’m not in the room with you. I don’t know. So you guys, it will confidently give you an answer. And this is the problem. That when you go and you trust now AI that it has the answer for you and it goes to amplify it, there’s the chaos tax. There’s the money you’re going to burn on something that isn’t truth.

Tom Nixon (54:21.994)
I give you an answer.

Curtis Hays (54:38.007)
But when you have truth and you put it into the system and then you say, hey, agent, here’s context, here’s truth, this is my customer, go find me more people like them, help me solve their problem, boom, all these other things can happen.

Tom Nixon (54:54.254)
And that’s what we’re going to solve for in season three. We are going to eliminate the chaos tax. We are going to show you how to get coherence. We’re going to show you how to diagnose. We’re going to show you how to find and define the meeting. And we’re going to show you how this translates into revenue. We will eliminate the chaos tax and we will prevent AI from amplifying the wrong things. How? Gradually and then suddenly.

And with that, we will welcome you back to season three of Bullhorns and Bullseyes, and we’ll see you next time.