The Emotional Side of Buying Decisions | Gee Ranasinha

PROFITABLE TALKS....

In this conversation, G. Ranasinha, founder of Kexino, shares insights on the challenges of running a marketing agency, the importance of cash flow, and the complexities of human behavior in marketing. He emphasizes the need for strategic thinking and understanding emotional buying decisions, while also discussing the process of diagnosing marketing problems and evaluating effectiveness. Ranasinha highlights the concept of costly signaling and how perceived value can influence consumer behavior.

PROFITABLE TAKEAWAYS...

• Sales is the name of the game in marketing.
• Cash flow is the primary reason businesses fail.
• The suckiness of a product often stems from cash flow issues.
• Human behavior in marketing is complex and unpredictable.
• Effective marketing requires a solid strategy and understanding of the market.
• Emotional decisions drive buying behavior more than logical reasoning.
• Most businesses don't know their actual customer needs.
• Marketing effectiveness is declining despite increased spending.
• Costly signaling can enhance perceived value of products.
• Many marketing agencies lack genuine expertise.

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Transcript

Christian Brim (00:01.608)
Welcome to another edition of the profitable creative, the only place on the interweb where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host Christian Brim. Joining me today is G. Rannacina of Konexo. 

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (00:32.578)
I'm delighted to be here, Christian. Thanks very much for the invite.

Christian Brim (00:36.841)
Thank you for joining me. So give the audience a brief rundown of what you do. You're bona fides, if you will.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (00:46.434)
Okay, 36 ,000 feet view. I've been in marketing a long time, long, long time since days of black and white TV. Well, not quite, but certainly in the days of dial up internet and AOL CDs. But today what we do is we're a small business marketing, branding and behavioral science agency for the past 16 years.

We've been working with over 400 startups and small businesses and we help them increase their awareness, reputation, trust and most importantly sales. Because at the end of the day, sales is the name of the game, right? That's why we're doing it. You know, we're not a charity here. We're doing it to, if it doesn't move the needle, it's not marketing, it's fluff, okay?

Christian Brim (01:32.776)
That's exactly right.

Christian Brim (01:42.92)
So you have you talk kind of funny. So I'm assuming you're from the United Kingdom. Do you work in the United Kingdom or where do you where do you work with businesses?

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (01:57.154)
Talk funny? Well.

I resemble that remark, steady on. No, you would think, wouldn't you? I mean, it is a fair assumption and educated guess. However, you couldn't be more wrong. Actually, I live in Northwest France, which you can obviously, as you can tell from my very thick Northwest French accent, right?

Christian Brim (02:02.812)
Yes, yes.

Christian Brim (02:16.976)
Yes.

Christian Brim (02:24.988)
Of course.

Christian Brim (02:29.543)
Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (02:30.53)
Yes, no, I'm originally a Brit. Yes, okay, me a Culper. But I moved to France 23 years ago. 23 years ago. I have to say it twice because I can't believe it either. Originally I was head, I'm sorry, ahead.

Christian Brim (02:49.106)
And this was on purpose, not like you weren't out. Okay, good. All right.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (02:54.422)
I wasn't evading the police or anything, no, right. I was headhunted, not in that way, for any good way. I was headhunted to be the CMO for a software company. And I took the gig, I worked at that software company for seven years and we did some wonderful things. But we got to a point where there was just growing pains within the organization and

I was sort of a little bit treading water for a while and I needed to move and do bigger and better things. And this was at the end of 2007. So me and two now colleagues were looking around at the environment, at the industries, at what people were doing and

It was just at the time the iPhone had came out and people were just beginning to work out the potential of what the internet could be. But at that time, it was the larger organizations with pretty much infinite resources and deep pockets that were taking advantage of all of this.

Me and my colleagues had the brainwave that we needed to start an agency that was focused on startups and small businesses, i .e. organizations who didn't have limitless amounts of budget, to leverage

the power of what online could be at a time when it was still nascent and the big guys hadn't sort of carved up a large swathe of the market. And that's how Kexino, the agency, was born. And as I said, was 16 years ago. It was 2008, which you will probably remember was not exactly the best time to start a marketing agency. was not the best time to start anything, really.

Christian Brim (04:45.297)
Yes.

Christian Brim (05:04.558)
No. No.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (05:10.048)
not my best business decision ever. But

Christian Brim (05:13.638)
Well, let me ask you that in that context. What were some of your financial roadblocks or struggles in starting up an agency?

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (05:29.218)
the same financial struggles that beset pretty much every single new business which is the c -word no not that c -word the other c -word the other c -word cash flow yes businesses don't go under because of lack of customers because their product sucks they go out of business because of cash flow unless you can manage

Christian Brim (05:36.305)
Mm -hmm.

Christian Brim (05:41.328)
Not that Z word. Cash? Yes.

Christian Brim (05:57.48)
That's exactly right.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (05:59.079)
unless you can manage cash flow you are royally screwed.

Christian Brim (06:02.94)
Can you say that louder for those in the back? Gee.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (06:07.554)
Maybe I'll say it slower as well so that they can hear it. There are only three reasons why a business goes under. Cash flow, cash flow and cash flow. Unless you... That's parodying Conrad Hilton, of course, as you killed.

Christian Brim (06:09.681)
Okay, go ahead.

Christian Brim (06:18.674)
Perfect.

Christian Brim (06:24.156)
Well, I think a lot of people get confused, you know, all the statistics about business failures and startups. But, you know, they go out of business because they run out of money. Now, there are a lot of reasons why they could run out of money, right? Maybe, maybe their product sucks. But usually that's not the case. Usually it's

And I'm curious about your experience. I would say more businesses struggle with successful growth and cash flow than not having any sales at all. What would you say?

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (07:09.378)
yeah, I wouldn't say more businesses. I mean, you just need to look at the stats, right? 50 % of small businesses go under in the first year, right? 75 go under in two years. It's like, if you look at it over like five years, 96 % of small businesses go under within five years, right? Now that's not, that's not because, like you've just mentioned, that's not because all their products suck, no.

Christian Brim (07:16.817)
Right?

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (07:39.682)
suckiness, that is a word I invented it, I'm just telling you that, right, and patenting it, you can't actually use that now. The suckiness of a product is a symptom of cash flow, right? The lack of customers is a symptom of the cash flow situation. I would say more, well, let's sort of pull back a bit. I think there's also a case of especially

Christian Brim (07:42.758)
You just made it up, yes.

Christian Brim (07:47.973)
Understood.

Christian Brim (07:54.76)
Hmm.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (08:09.226)
startups spending spending the money that they have on stupid friggin things that they don't frigging need notice I said I modified my language just in case there were people of a of a a

Christian Brim (08:10.984)
Mm -hmm.

Christian Brim (08:26.085)
That's wanted a stupid fucking things, but he edited himself for me. Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (08:31.626)
Yes! You know, all of these people who think, okay, what we need to do is buy top of the range technical equipment and you know, those Charles Eames armchairs and those super duper office chairs that cost three grand and the, the espresso machine that costs five grand, all of that crap, the foosball table in the corner. No, no, and no, okay? You're spending your money on crap because you're believing the BS.

Christian Brim (08:58.908)
Yes?

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (08:59.17)
And if you focus exactly what you need, and especially from the marketing standpoint, because there are plenty of vultures circling above you who can smell the green and would be only too happy to help you spend your money, of which 99 % of the marketing technology software applications, the Ma Tech Stack, as is the vernacular of today, is total

horseshit for vast amount of small businesses. It is not necessary.

Christian Brim (09:33.242)
Okay. You caught me on a particular day, G, because I was sitting this morning in the shower. Actually I was standing and I was thinking. Yes. So I have this disdain for economists, right? Because I think it's a pseudoscience and I think it's a pseudoscience because it really is impossible to predict with any accuracy human behavior. And

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (09:42.764)
was going to say you probably drowned if you were sitting, right?

Christian Brim (10:03.385)
I had this realization this morning that my disdain for marketing and my frustration with marketing as a business owner is that it is in the same vein. Like the struggles that marketers have is because of the complexities of human behavior. And it's not just the human behavior of the buyer. It's the human behavior of the seller.

And it's the human behavior of any of the intermediaries, like agencies. What say you?

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (10:42.728)
Economists should be thought of as double glazing salesmen or aluminum siding salesmen. I said aluminum, notice, because I had to. Thank you. But, you know, not necessarily. I'm sure your audience is more North American based, as is as indeed in mine is. The vast majority of let's call it classical Chicago style heterogenics economics. OK.

Christian Brim (10:52.328)
Okay. Aluminium. Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (11:12.674)
makes ludicrous assumptions about bio -behavior and about cause and effect. It assumes perfect information, perfect utility. It assumes everything works. It assumes, I can't even remember the term in economics, it slipped my memory.

Christian Brim (11:20.765)
Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (11:40.586)
It assumes that by taking a sample of the average in the middle of the Bayall curve is representative of the entire sample, which of course is totally friggin' ridiculous. You cannot make a science out of human behavior because humans are irrational, emotional, contextually led entities.

Christian Brim (11:49.735)
Yes.

Christian Brim (11:54.258)
Yes.

Christian Brim (12:03.559)
Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (12:08.606)
and more power to their elbow. That's how it should be. But the problem what economists, finance people, bean counters, engineering type background people are trying to do with marketing is they're trying to make it an exact cause and effect reactive closed system, which marketing is not.

Christian Brim (12:36.314)
Yes. Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (12:37.826)
But the thing is, their reasoning is sound because pretty much every other area of the business operates like that. If you look at procurement, look at R &D, look at sales, you look at all of these things, basically look at R &D, you look at manufacturing, okay? Supposing I'm making widgets. Now, the idea is to make as an efficient machine, a system to make my widgets as possible by efficient.

it means to lower input as much as possible to create a particular output. Now you can do that by, you know, finding cheaper raw materials or maybe, you know, creating, buying a faster machine or, you know, something that will increase the productivity and lower the per unit cost. And that way everybody's happy, pat on the back.

pay raise, weekend in carbo, whatever it may be. Okay, everybody's happy. Unfortunately, logical, rational thought process works because you have total transparency over each unit of the logical progression of the manufacturer, which you do not in marketing.

for two reasons. Firstly, because the targets of our marketing are not rational logic entities. Okay, they're human beings. And as human beings, as buyers, we are anything but rational. We are illogical and our buyer behavior is totally context dependent.

Christian Brim (14:23.944)
Correct.

Christian Brim (14:31.548)
So let me ask you a question. you read the book by your fellow countrymen? It was called Alchemy here in the States. I think it published in Britain in a different, by Rory Sutherland.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (14:32.138)
What? Go on.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (14:47.052)
Yes, Rory's, I would call Rory a friend. We've hung out a few times together and he prompt, well, there may have been alcohol involved, yeah. Okay, what are you saying? Yes.

Christian Brim (14:53.328)
You've had cocktails.

Christian Brim (14:57.84)
Yes. Okay. Well, so, you know, his, his, thesis in this book is that, the age of reason, where we live in where, which, you know, started a few centuries ago with like, you, you can, the scientific model where you can, learn, understand, improve, doesn't fit with human behavior and therefore marketing.

because of just what you said that we're not rational, but there are some, themes or threads, that, that, you know, can be, tugged on if you will. but at the end of the day, you probably are not going to know why your marketing is successful.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (15:48.734)
or why it sucks if you look at the other side of the coin.

Christian Brim (15:51.905)
Right. So how is, how is, well, how is a marketer? Do you address that you're you go in and you pitch a client that, you know, you have, you have a marketing need. I can fill it yet. It's not like me who is dealing with numbers and are my results are predictable. I have confidence in telling people what I tell them. How do you have confidence in telling them?

that you can solve their marketing problem.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (16:22.786)
Firstly, we don't know whether the problem is a marketing problem. What we know, what we know is there is a business problem, okay? Because we rattled the piggy bank and there's not many coins in there. So we know there is a business problem. So any marketing agency worth their salt, which unfortunately there are not that many, okay? Will start...

Christian Brim (16:27.602)
Fair enough.

Christian Brim (16:32.551)
Yes.

Christian Brim (16:37.68)
Right. Right.

Christian Brim (16:48.848)
I would agree with that segment.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (16:52.182)
We'll start with, we call it discovery, but different agencies call it different things, at the end of the day, potato, potato, right? We will all talk about the same thing. We need to do a diagnosis, okay? And we need to understand every part of the business. We have to understand the industry, the category, the other players within the category, how the product market fit is.

to see what the hell is going on because quite often what happens is the business owner, the marketing manager, whoever else will come to us and say, I need X. And it's like, really? So you're a marketing expert, are you? You know what you need, okay? Nine times out of 10, they haven't got a clue what they need. It's something that they want. We need a new website. okay. Why do you need a new website?

Christian Brim (17:31.675)
Mm -hmm.

Christian Brim (17:36.359)
Yes?

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (17:49.12)
because this website isn't bringing us leads. Okay, so when they say we need a new website, what most people mean is they need a new website design.

Christian Brim (18:04.061)
Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (18:04.95)
Now, the design of a website is of course extremely important. However,

Christian Brim (18:11.527)
Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (18:15.304)
I think the number of buyers who select a vendor based upon the prettiness of their website is a fraction of a percentage of a fraction of a percentage and of no statistical validity. What sells is copy. What sells is text. And narrowing people down,

Christian Brim (18:39.676)
Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (18:44.64)
when they're talking about the website. Most of the time when we see this, I speak to a lot of business owners, okay, in my day job. yeah. Most of the time, the problem with their website, yeah, okay, maybe it needs a little bit of a tickle here and there, okay, who doesn't? So I certainly do now and again, right? But hey, but you know, what I get up to in my weekends is just down to me. Anyway.

Christian Brim (18:52.423)
Yes?

Christian Brim (19:06.187)
I prefer it.

Christian Brim (19:12.188)
Exactly right.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (19:13.118)
What usually happens is that, yes, OK, the design might need a little bit of TLC. But the biggest problem with the website is not the design. It's that the words don't work. The words just are insipid, vapid, mediocre, and don't speak to the buyer, the visitor, the audience member. The problem is usually...

that the company, the organization concerned has done no real marketing. You know, real marketing, the stuff, the nine tenths that are below the waterline that nobody knows even exists because they think marketing is all about promotions. It's all about tactical stuff. It's webinars and ads and SEO and podcasts and video and all of that crap at the end of the.

which is at the end of the stuff. What's much more interesting is the strategy stuff that we do right at the beginning. The strategy, the positioning, the messaging, the segmentation, the targeting and all of that sort of stuff, which nobody bothers with because it doesn't sound sexy. It isn't. It's very boring. It's very tedious, but it needs to be in place because if it's not in place, we have what we have today, which is messaging.

that doesn't resonate, which is instantly forgettable. We're globally as an industry, we're spending $1 .1 trillion on marketing and 86 % of it is being totally ignored by our target audience. So how can that be when we have all of these highfalutin, martech solutions, AI, goodness knows whatever else coming around the corner? How is it?

that was doing that because the effectiveness of marketing is going down instead of up because we're automating the wrong shit. We're automating the productivity. We're automating the ideation when the creative aspect is being exercised out of the equation because we can't quantify it as a cost. We can't look at the marketing campaign and say, okay, we're going to spend

Christian Brim (21:17.031)
Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (21:39.234)
$200 on media spend, we're gonna spend $100 on design, we're gonna spend $50 on, I don't know.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (21:51.266)
printing, but we're going to spend $273 on creative. What does that mean? We can't quantify it. So what we do is we automate it and we think, well, okay, if we throw enough brown stuff at the fan, something is going to come back. if you can't hit the target, hit what you can and call that the target, right? That's what we're doing.

Christian Brim (22:13.701)
It will.

Christian Brim (22:20.082)
I think this is a fascinating insight and I will, it's kind of analogous to the finances and I hope this isn't too tortured analogy. But you know, the financial processes and systems in a business aren't sexy, but it's impossible to do any of the more valuable things like analysis, projections, forecasting.

without good processes to give you good data. And I think that it's one of those things that because it's not sexy, no one wants to do it and no one wants to pay for it. But then they want what they can't have because those things aren't in place. And so then the analogy to the marketing is what they want is the sizzle, but they don't want to pay for the frying pan.

I just made that one up. I don't know if that's a good one or not. Okay, all right. So would you say that's a good analogy? that track for you?

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (23:21.398)
That'll work, I'll take it.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (23:29.406)
I think it's very much so. we're trying to do is make marketing...

We're trying to look at marketing like we're looking at Newtonian physics. Like two plus two is always four and the only way to get to four is by adding two with two. The problem with, now that works within a finance world, an economics world, within an engineering world, two plus two is always four and never anything else, right?

Christian Brim (23:51.037)
Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (24:05.068)
unless you're in base five or something, okay, just to be awkward, right? But otherwise it's always the same. The problem with marketing is that to quote Rory Sutherland, who you mentioned earlier on, the opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea. What I would say is there's more than one way to skin a cat, which is probably less politically correct. There is a number of ways to get to the outcome, which is not necessarily the most obvious.

Christian Brim (24:08.454)
Yes.

Christian Brim (24:25.799)
Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (24:34.966)
and is totally conditioned upon the behavioral drivers, the levers we can pull to influence a buying decision by the audience from an emotional level. Anything as consumers, as buyers, whether it's B2B or B2C makes absolutely zero difference. All of us buy from here. No, not from the nipple. We buy from the heart.

Christian Brim (25:01.576)
That would be awkward.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (25:03.122)
It would indeed, yes, yeah, it gives a whole new meaning to touch and pay, doesn't it really? But anyway, let's move on. That's for another podcast, clearly. The point is we buy emotionally and then we post -rationalize logically. We tell ourselves a story to justify it, okay? We buy something from our heart, from our...

Christian Brim (25:24.818)
Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (25:32.652)
from our emotions, whatever that emotion may be, you know, it may be pleasure, it may be fear, it may be regret, it may be, there's a hundred different reasons why we buy. And then, you know, imagine you buy something, you treat yourself to something and you get it home and maybe, you you suddenly get the realization is, you know what? I spent a shit ton of money on this. How on earth?

Am I going to, why the hell? was I thinking? What was I smoking for goodness sake? Right? And what happens then? You tell yourself a story. but yeah, but you know, look how well this thing is made. I mean, it's been engineered within an inch of its life. This thing is so durable. It's going to last so much longer than the thing it's replacing. You know, it's actually going to save me money because I won't have to buy a new one every couple of years.

Christian Brim (26:12.829)
Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (26:30.284)
You tell yourself a story, right? Now, if it's a believable story, you keep it. If not, you're back the next day and returning it. But that's what we're doing. We're all post -rationalizing. Now, I would contend that that would be the same for anything we buy with the single exception of a commodity product. If you're selling a commodity, the reasons for buying

Because there is no obvious differentiation between vendors, hence the term commodity, you're buying on price. I personally don't care which brand of paper clips I buy. I'm sure you're probably of the similar persuasion there, Christian. I don't really care. Well, there you go. Now, if you're a commodity, then you've got a whole other set of headaches to worry about. Because if you're a commodity, then

Christian Brim (27:16.274)
don't know, paperclips are pretty important.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (27:29.13)
you'll know that no matter what you're selling, no matter whom you're selling it to, there is always somebody somewhere who's going to sell it to them for less. So you're going to get into a price war and then you're in a downward spiral. And if that's a race you do not want

Christian Brim (27:39.515)
So I'm going to.

Christian Brim (27:46.044)
going to circle back and force you to answer your answer my question of how do you how do you or at least I'm going to restate the question you whether you answer it's up to you when you're pitching to a prospect of being able to solve their problem problem how do you do that knowing that

you're either unsure of what the problem is or whether the solution will work.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (28:21.018)
Well, we have a process. Now it changes obviously for every client, but it's a process. So like I said, discovery, which starts with diagnosis. We work out what the hell is going on, what's working, what's not working. We need to find out what and where the pain points are. Now this is absolutely crucial because until we know the real problem, you can't come up with a solution, right? You need to have insight to drive your approach.

otherwise you're not in marketing you're just running around waving a wet finger in the air right now diagnosis is a practical thing it's not rocket science okay it's low down dirty hands in the mud kind of work there's a standard way of generating insight and data within our world okay you may start off by doing qualitative research which is you know customer interviews focus groups

Christian Brim (28:54.642)
Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (29:20.756)
ethnography, whatever, you know, particularly works for that particular organization, to inductively understand the market and the businesses placed within that market. Once we've done that, then we channel those insights, the qual, into quant, quantitative data, which is usually some kind of survey with a list of questions. And I'm sure you've seen those sorts of things. They ask you a bunch of questions and you say, you know, how much do you agree with this from, you know, zero being

Christian Brim (29:31.325)
Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (29:49.876)
no friggin way to like five being apps and friggin' Lutely. So you ask a representative sample of the market, confidence intervals, you know, all that kind of stuff. And that's probably about the standards that it gets in our industry. Okay. And there's other things you can do to get that. You can partner with publications, know, industry groups, conferences, seminars, often they create reports and stuff, but.

Christian Brim (29:54.802)
Mm -hmm.

Christian Brim (30:04.498)
Right?

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (30:16.256)
You know, if you're a really small company, you could probably get away with just doing the qual, if you know what you're doing. Once you've moved on from that, traditional next steps after research and diagnosis are STMP, which is segmentation, targeting, and positioning. So you segment your target audience, because there's always segmentation, to understand what those segments are, because the targeting and positioning

Christian Brim (30:33.202)
Okay.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (30:45.078)
will lead to the types of messaging that you're going to push to those different segments. Based upon that there are commonalities in why people are buying your product or service, products or services, and it makes sense to structure your messaging according to a particular segment, right? So you do market orientation, okay? Which is identifying the needs and desires of your ideal.

Christian Brim (31:04.412)
Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (31:13.474)
customer profile, your ICP, and making sure that there's proper product market fit, whether the product and service that you're offering actually satisfies the problem they identify as having, which is something 99 % of businesses don't know, even though they think they do, because they think they are their customer when they're not. But obviously that's for another day, we won't go in there. Anyway, you gather your research data.

Christian Brim (31:36.284)
That's the, yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (31:40.224)
And then you complete your market segmentation, the drivers, behaviors, commonalities, three phases of diagnosis. And then you get to the strategy stage. So you evaluate the targeting choices we have, and we have to make some decisions on what we do phase one. Who are we going after? And we position ourselves to those targets, what our objectives are, and come up with a strategy. And the strategy, be honest, is very simple.

Well, it's not simple. It's simple as to write down. It's usually like a couple of paragraphs maximum, maybe not even that. It's hard to do, but it's because it's as much what you say no to as what you say yes to, which gets very difficult, especially when you're talking to small companies or founder -led CEO type companies who just want to say yes to every possible opportunity. Right? The answer is yes. Now, what's the question?

Christian Brim (32:35.782)
Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (32:38.434)
And the problem is if you want to have a certain type of customer, you need to be working only with those type of customers, even if that means turning away business for customers who do not fit your ICP. Because we've all been there where we've acquiesced and said yes when we should have said no.

Christian Brim (33:01.415)
Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (33:02.486)
and we've been bitten on the toshi, right? We've come to regret it.

Christian Brim (33:04.509)
Yes.

Christian Brim (33:07.879)
Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (33:08.93)
And then it's very simple, it's not very simple. Again, it's listening to that little voice. Because when you made that decision, there was your little voice saying, you know what, we shouldn't be doing this. But you went ahead regardless, because you just saw the zeros at the end of the proposal. The problem was the zeros didn't make it anywhere near enough of an impact as it turned out to be, because you were hand -holding the client for more than necessary, or it was just...

Christian Brim (33:20.327)
Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (33:38.506)
impossible to please them. Even when you bent over backwards and did over and above what you could be expected to do, they still left unsatisfied, which meant they're never going to sing your praises after the event. So, hiding to nothing. You were never going to win that game.

Christian Brim (33:54.414)
Yes. And so, you know, one of the things I do is I look at the numbers at a macro level and I say, okay, I spent X dollars on marketing efforts, not trying to segment that spend at all, but I spent X dollars and what happened to my bottom line?

And I do that on a rolling 12 month basis. So it's, it's looking at the previous 12 months. And if that number is going the right direction, I don't, I don't interfere with the marketing efforts. say, okay, this is working. I don't need to understand why it's working or how it's working. it is, but if those numbers start going the wrong direction,

I don't know what is going wrong, but I know that the marketing is not effective. Is there, from an owner's standpoint, is there some better way to make that analysis or is there a more detailed analysis that you would recommend?

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (35:17.324)
give you the marketer's cop -out answer, which is, it depends.

Christian Brim (35:24.647)
Yes?

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (35:26.498)
It depends on the type of business. depends on the industry. depends on the, for instance, it depends upon the customer buying frequency. It depends upon the sales cycle. If your sales cycle is 18 months, right, then whether it's 18 months or 18 days, to be honest, there is always a latency in what you're doing today with marketing and the effect of what that marketing is, right?

Christian Brim (35:52.648)
True. True.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (35:56.404)
just as the effects that you're getting today with your marketing are based not about you posting that video of you dancing on TikTok, which I'm sure you do very often. Must be AI. Must have been AI. Okay. There is latency both ends.

Christian Brim (36:10.064)
It did not, that did not happen G. don't, that was not me. It was Jack Black. It wasn't me. Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (36:25.152)
The way to measure the effectiveness, if, hang on, I'm jumping ahead of myself. The way to measure the effectiveness is not at a super granular level because that's not what hubby is by, okay? You can't say that the reason why we close this piece of business is because of this particular tactic that we did for this particular campaign at this particular time. It can't be done at that sort of granular level.

Christian Brim (36:36.264)
Alright.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (36:53.77)
And that is because there is no single channel of engagement that is influencing the customer to the point of purchase. It is a combination. This is why they call it the marketing mix. Right? Just like, for example, if I go to the gym and I decide to work out my biceps and I suddenly notice

while looking in the mirror that my biceps have got larger. I can't say that my biceps have got larger because of the gym session I did on the 22nd of March was the exact reasons why my biceps got bigger, right? The reason my biceps got bigger is because I used a particular channel, a particular medium over the longer term.

Christian Brim (37:28.328)
Yes.

Christian Brim (37:38.972)
Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (37:51.36)
which may or may not have brought results. And that's the way I think you look at any particular tactical execution. You have to look at it from a channel level and not on a content level. So you can do something. Supposing you wanna try TikTok. Try TikTok for six months. See if you can actually reverse engineer the attribution to what you're doing specifically to TikTok as a channel. And then make the decision whether TikTok is a viable outreach channel.

Christian Brim (37:54.194)
Well, I'll -

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (38:20.789)
for your marketing mix.

Christian Brim (38:23.504)
Yes, and I'll give you a practical example from my business. I decided to write a book last year. I published it this March and it, well, thank you. The title is Profit First for Creatives. Well, you know, my analytical brain thought that, okay, X number of people are going to buy it, X number of people are going to read it.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (38:35.778)
Congratulations!

Christian Brim (38:51.982)
X number of people are going to sign up for additional resources and you know, a certain number of them will eventually become clients, right? I thought that there would be a direct cause and effect. And the reality is that just the book being out there, whether someone read it or not, that they know it exists.

affects marketing. It affects their buying decision. And that's not the quantifiable result business owners are looking for. This book has a very long tail to use the parlance. And was it worth the time and money invested in publishing it? I'm not going to know that for

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (39:25.206)
Absolutely.

Christian Brim (39:52.402)
some time. And I think that's what the frustration is with dealing with business owners is getting them to understand that, yeah, is it gonna help? Yes. Is it gonna help enough to justify the time and cost? We don't know.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (40:12.274)
its own probably not but what you've stumbled upon actually is a very interesting effect which is called costly signaling and it's something from evolutionary biology and I won't go into the depth speak for two reasons firstly it'll take up a long time and secondly I probably don't know enough to be able to talk at a knowledgeable level costly excuse me costly signaling if

Christian Brim (40:19.611)
Okay.

Okay.

Christian Brim (40:29.51)
I appreciate it.

Christian Brim (40:34.002)
Fair enough.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (40:41.864)
If you're going to market or advertise a product or service, the very fact of you advertising it across a medium or channel, which is perceived as being either expensive or extremely public.

has a positive effect on the perceptional value of what you're selling. So if I'm selling a bunch of chef's knives and I run a bunch of ads on Facebook and these chef's knives are, I don't know, $1 ,000 for a of chef's knives, okay? You're gonna scroll through Facebook or

Christian Brim (41:07.482)
Okay, I'd agree with that.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (41:29.25)
Instagram, TikTok, whatever your chosen method of politics is, right? You'll see it and you'll say, how much? What? It's very expensive for a chef's knife to scroll on, right? Now, if we did the same thing with a 48 sheet poster at a major intersection in a particular city, the very fact that we know

Christian Brim (41:54.397)
Mm -hmm.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (41:59.458)
that putting the creative and production and advertising costs together for a 48 sheet poster at a major intersection.

is a lot of money. We're going to look at the perceived quality of those chef's knives in a different way. They have to be worth the money, otherwise these guys wouldn't spend the money to advertise it. Okay? It's similar to the way flowers, this is why I say it's got its roots in evolutionary biology. It's the same way as flowers have very ornate petals.

Christian Brim (42:15.026)
Mm -hmm.

Christian Brim (42:31.442)
Okay.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (42:43.154)
invite bees in to collect their pollen. Now they need to be able to deliver on that pollen otherwise bee ain't gonna come back. Peacock's tails, same thing. From an evolutionary perspective it's a total waste of time, money and effort. time and effort. But from a reproductive perspective

Christian Brim (42:45.191)
Yes.

Yes?

Christian Brim (42:55.73)
Correct.

Christian Brim (43:05.638)
Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (43:12.172)
from a mating perspective, it clearly has value because the female of the peacock species is looking for a jacked up peacock who's going to be around to cater for her poor young. What's a young peacock called? I have no idea. A pea chick? I don't know. Whatever the... See, there we go. That's something we should look up. What's the name for a young peacock? Anyway, you get my point.

Christian Brim (43:30.564)
No idea.

Christian Brim (43:40.935)
Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (43:41.31)
It's the fact that we're demonstrating the value of our product ostentatiously increases the value, the perceived value of what we're selling because clearly we're not selling some crap because we wouldn't put ourselves out there if we were. And what we're doing by ignoring, let's call them the more traditional channels and pushing our wares purely on an online

Christian Brim (43:58.744)
I, yeah.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (44:11.298)
from an online tactical perspective is we're not creating value in the minds of our buyer. They see it in the same way as they see the 50 cents crap that you drop ship from China.

Christian Brim (44:27.624)
I really like that insight. And unfortunately, G, because I feel like we could talk forever, I'm going to have to draw this session to a close. How do you do? You did. You did. But it was pleasurable. So, you know, and it's fine. How do people reach you if they want to learn more about what you do?

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (44:38.102)
you see I did warn you Christian didn't I? did warn you right so sold the scene

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (44:53.73)
The best way to get hold of is on LinkedIn. Amazing enough you'll find this in a fascinating fact Christian I know you will get this. I am the only g -ranacina on LinkedIn. Can you believe it?

Christian Brim (45:13.251)
Yes, yes I can.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (45:14.306)
yeah, okay, yeah, you can. So yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. I spout these kind of diatribe on a regular basis on LinkedIn. I do little 60 second videos twice a week, which I've been doing for a couple of years now about particular things about marketing, business, sales, behavioral science, or just shit that's pissed me off that week. Various things like that. So you can find me there.

Christian Brim (45:37.735)
Yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (45:42.046)
feel free to reach out and let's have a conversation. Talk is free, at least the first time anyway. After that, let's stay. And if I can help, I will. If it means that help is to push you in an opposite direction to where I am, that's fine too, because the object of the exercise is to be the right fit for where your organization is at its particular level. And it's to save you as a business owner.

dodging a bullet because unfortunately our industry is crammed with charlatans and snake oil sellers who are promising the earth and cannot deliver. And I spent a lot of my time speaking with business owners who are crying into their beer after having spent a lot of money in the wrong direction by listening to what I call marketing bros.

you know the guys, the guys who crouch down in front of Lamborghini's throwing gang signs, right? And they're talking about marketing today, yesterday they were talking about Web 3, and the day before that they were talking about NFTs, and tomorrow they're talking about AI, and whatever shining object they think they can pull the eyes over some poor unsuspecting victim. So if I can help you dodge a bullet, I will, because

Christian Brim (46:36.666)
Yeah, yes.

Christian Brim (46:42.15)
Yes, yes.

Gee Ranasinha | Kexino.com (47:04.544)
marketing agencies of repute are unfortunately very thin on the ground. And I think it just makes our jobs that much easier. If you're pushed in the right direction, know, rising tide lifts all boats, right? And it needs to be that way. So that's the way I'm doing it. I haven't got a podcaster plug. I haven't got a book to sell, nothing else. I'm doing this purely Mr. or Ms. business owner to save you a shit ton of money by

And that is it.

Christian Brim (47:37.266)
I love it. Listeners, if you like what you hear, click subscribe, rate the podcast. If you don't like what you hear, send us a message and tell us that you don't like G and we'll get somebody else on. Until later, ta -ta for now.