The Competitor Chase: Why It's a Losing Game! E76

In this episode of Blame It on Marketing, Ruta and Emma take on the obsession with chasing competitors in B2B marketing. They dig into why marketers fall into the copycat trap, share their own experiences of getting it wrong, and discuss how to break out of the cycle with a strategy that actually works. The conversation covers the importance of knowing your own product and audience, the risks of playing it safe, and the ethical dilemmas that come with marketing today. Bottom line? Creativity beats imitation every time.

Takeaways

• Chasing competitors leads to bland, copy-paste marketing.
• Understanding your unique value proposition is non-negotiable.
• Creativity and originality win in the long run.
• A solid go-to-market strategy keeps you focused.
• Differentiation matters—especially in a crowded market.
• Managing internal stakeholders is just as important as external messaging.
• Ethical marketing is no longer optional.
• Marketers should prioritize their ideal customer profile (ICP) over industry trends.
• Copying competitors often results in surface-level strategies with no depth.
• Close collaboration with product teams can make or break marketing success.

Transcript

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Hi everyone and welcome to a very special episode of blame on marketing with Emma and Ruta and point that you for Emma. We're in my house and we're filming an episode because it's a special episode where we are going to talk all about competitors So should we in true blame on marketing style, start off with something that we fucked up recently. my God. You weren't ready for this. Where do we start? well, was meant to finish building the Blame It on Marketing website to show Emma today. And I was going to do that on the weekend. And then she reminded me, was like, that's what I was meant to do this weekend. OK, great. Thanks. So I'm sorry about that. I am trying to think of something that I've done recently that's been a bit of a fuck up. I mean there's the usual there's been loads of typos in in things made some pretty terrible thumbnails for some our linkedin lives with some floating shoulders which i have now rectified but you know you only do something at speed and you're like should have probably just taken a little bit longer to do them yeah just cropping the shoulders guys yeah just i know yeah i know but i've sorted it now yeah so apologies to anyone whose shoulders were floating previously or got narrowed if you're particularly proud of the width of your shoulders. I'm very sorry. Love that. Why are we talking about competitors? And what angle? So why are we talking about competitors? I personally think we're talking about competitors because we are kind of fed up with, you know, B2B businesses in particular trying to chase the tail of their competitors. And the reason I think we both think this is such difficult thing is because as we've said in previous episodes the market for products especially like b2b tech actually even professional services there are so many people who do a very similar thing to your business that if you are chasing the tail of your competitors you're just kind of never gonna catch up right? is that is that fair? it's a It's a game you can play where you're on purpose not getting ahead because you are chasing. If you're chasing and there's nothing to chase, it means that you're not chasing. But if there is, means that something's in front of you, Like, philosophically speaking. Nice voice. Thank you. So yeah, so it totally makes sense. And I think from a practical perspective, we've definitely been sucked into this. our competitors are doing and it's all great and like look at how cool this is or look at how well this is working. We've all had that conversation with either a founder or a CMO or whatever in a business and in reality like most of the time we don't know if what they're doing is working. Well that was the thing isn't it? at the most basic level like... and linkedin is rife with this stuff isn't it? like and if it's not b2b because it's hard to draw b2b comparisons but people are always drawing comparisons between like mcdonald's and burger king and like you know those big brands that you sort of think you have no freaking clue whether this stuff is working or not realistically other than the fact as a marketer you think the ad campaign is better than the other one which is subjective it's not objective at all so i guess why? Why do we think marketers or senior leaders in particular get into this habit of like trying to chase the tail of their competitors in the first place? I think when you have competitors, it's an easy benchmark to kind of look at. So it's, it's something obvious to compare yourself against. Cause God do I know that the world of startups is very strange and like, you never know if you're doing the right thing. So if you have a competitor, you're like, okay, they're doing this. They're our competitors, according to me. So we should be doing this. think that's one thing. also think there's like different ways to chase your competitors. So we spoke about this, there's like the marketing chase, but really there's the product chase, which you can or choose not to do. but obviously marketing stuff is usually easy to replicate and you know, it happens a lot more. So I think it's yeah, it's that, or maybe like you're a, sorry, I I'm like, mushing points together. Maybe you're like a CEO that is aspiring to be like one of your competitors in terms of like size or like a product suite or like company team size. when you see them doing stuff, you're like, well, I want to get there. So I get there by doing what they're doing, right? Like I just copy. It's not an illogical thought process. What about you? Why do think people get into? that compels us so much. think i think yeah everything that you're saying i completely agree with with i also think we fall into this trap especially when i think the c-suite fall into this trap i'm going to say this is outside of marketing because they think that's kind of how marketing works if we just copy what they're doing we will have the same success but you don't know how much budget they're throwing into something you don't know what kind of specialism they've got you don't know what they're doing as you've said it rightly on the product side. So it's sort of this, I don't know, it's this icky thing. And it's like, yeah, you sort of feel like these people are doing it because they think they can replicate success when the reality is quite often I feel like these people do this stuff. Sometimes it just happens randomly and their success takes off or right moment in time. There's lots of factors that like stuff. Yeah. there's loads of factors that might come together. that you're just so unaware of. think we have a really good example of this where, so when we were working at Clear Review, shout outs to it as always, best CEO ever. I say that as a sarcasm, that's not sarcasm. So we were funded, but we only ever did like a really small amount of funding, like in the one million and a bit range kind of thing. And then one of our competitors who didn't really start out as our competitor, but then they built the bit that we were doing and then we built a bit of what they were doing. we were like almost neck and neck. Yeah. Neck and neck, but like opposite specialities. They got an insane round. What was it?$68 million of funding. it was insane. Yeah. It was wild. we started seeing like how they're spending that money, how they're promoting the performance management bit, which was our specialty. To us, I don't think at any point we thought, we must copy what they're doing. We were never requested to do it either, which was why Stuart's great. But some of the things that happened, for example, so for the entirety of the performance management and engagement market, the PPC keywords got wild because they were just pumping insane amount of cash to a point where clicks could cost in the thousand pounds, a click. could cost that much. And like, we know how much things sell for. We know what the margins are on these things. like Emma and I were like, yeah, we're not competing with that. Cause like, we're not even going to make money on this anymore if we're doing that. And if they want to blow their cash or did it suck that we had to, you know, not have as much success in the, in the PPC realm. Yeah, sure. like, we, you know, find other creative means, right? And I think that's, that's the thing. Yeah. When your product is neck and neck, I mean, we'll get into the product thing later. because I think we've also got some stuff around product to discuss when it comes to competitors. I think, yeah, like when you are, you don't have any idea either how successful that stuff's doing. So they were pumping this cash into Google ads, thinking they're biting up all of the hits, but you have no idea because like, let's be honest, right, even with Google ads now, we don't actually know how much intent there is when someone clicks through, were they even converting? we don't know. but all we know is that basically we've created this crazy competitive landscape that then we cannot be involved in. we can't play in that field. then like i say you have your... someone's just given us some money on monzo. i feel like we're like twitch streamers. hey! you can buy us a coffee. or a dog treat. or noot noot. whatever you like. yeah. and yeah so it just forced us to be more creative i think about the campaigns we were doing and i think we.. i'll be honest while we were working there and i have felt this since other companies that i've worked for i wasn't interested in what our competitors were doing really from a marketing point of view because we were focused on the kind of and and i hate to say this it sounds so cringy but we were really focused on trying to start what was actually kind of more of a movement around the platform that we were selling because we knew that realistically that tech wise they were very similar but we knew that if we could market the product in a way that spoke to not only our ICP but like tried to in this particular case tried to get employees engaged with performance management in this case from the get-go that we would have success because it's kind of like this top down bottom up approach like you're going to meet in the middle and eventually you're going to convince people that they need this thing. And that obviously worked for a clear review. So I think, yeah, we were not, I don't remember ever looking at what culture we're doing and being like, oh, we should be doing that. Yeah. And again, maybe that was that we were lucky and that was a mindset thing. Maybe we should have. I don't know, but we did for a long time. I think it was okay. No one complained. People are still talking about it to this very day. Yeah, so I guess that's a good example of somewhere where we could kind of see what they were doing. You don't always get that. And also you don't always get news like, they've got a bunch of new funding. Obviously we knew what to expect when that happened, kind of from a product and marketing perspective. I think there are probably some other examples where things are much smaller and maybe more opaque in terms of your competitors. I don't know if you got one off the top of your mind. I think I would go have to go kind of maybe outside of the tech world to talk about that sort of stuff. think when you are super niche for example I feel like it's easier to tell what they're doing because your product is for like a let's say like a particular industry and therefore it's like the norm is this thing that everybody does And if your product follows the norm and it's like this really specific thing that it does like performance management is huge. Everyone in a company does it. If it's, I'm really struggling to think of a real specific example, but like if you make, don't know, technology that is for public sector workers so that they can communicate effectively while they're out on their job. I do know someone who works for a tech company like this. That's where the specific comes from. Yeah. It's like, Of course you kind of know what your competitors are doing because I imagine lots of the conversations with your customers are really going to be focused on like why should I change over from this and that when it's very much like a this or that, like a direct comparison. And so in those sorts of cases I can see not that SO being a need but you would need to be conscious of your competitors I think in that space. Not everybody can do the clear review starting a moment thing. And I'm not advocating for that either. It worked because of the specific situation and the time as well. The timing is everything. You know, like the world was changing at that point. I guess that kind of delves into more, maybe, maybe more the product side of things. Because when you're going up against another tech, for example, and you're like comparing feature for feature. you obviously need to be aware of what they are if that conversation happens a lot. I think that's where, you know, actually differentiating in the product might be better than differentiating in the marketing or copying in the marketing, depending on how, which way you go. Because it will get just confusing, right, for the buyer. Like, and they all look very similar. Yeah. We'll just get the cheapest one. Thanks, bye. And then you're on a price war. Who wants to be in that? No one wants to be in that either. So it's like, I think on the product thing, as well. think a lot of this is where like your go to market is the should be the kind of guiding star your North star rather than your what your competitors doing, which again, I think is a trap that a lot of people fall into. It's like lots of people don't even have a freaking go to market strategy, let alone like business strategy sometimes, which is probably why they're chasing their competitors in the first place because they don't have the to market strategy. just imitate yeah and i think yeah the go-to-market strategy should be the thing that sort of dictates ultimately the direction of the product which should then dictate everything else which is so uncommon you know and it's also even just understanding where your product sits so you go on g2 or whatever captera and you look at their quadrant and you see where you fit in that like product space And it's like, do you even understand? Is your product niche? Is it premium? Is it like, I don't know, like is it cheapest chips? Yeah, cheapest chips for everybody. know, like what market are you actually trying to capture? And then therefore that equally like, I think that kind of helps you double down on your ICP. Cause it's then like, not only are we super niche or something, we know specifically who it is that is able to buy our thing. then that's the thing that we're making, we're making a product for those people that they need and therefore then you're not bothered about your competitors because you have your ICP in mind and you know where your product is positioned in the market. You're talking to your ICP so you're dabbing for your ICP and you know. Well let's hope so. Let's hope so. Fingers crossed. I mean again. Yeah. So the example with Clear Review was that at one point we built out like an engagement bit to the platform. It was a thing that was happening across the industry and our CEO kind of identified it was like, we've got to cover ourselves somehow in that area. And we did that and that was really good. And that was like, of like understanding where we are, where the industry is going and what we need to do to be able to keep competing rather than us just blindly copying our, you know, competitors and what they were doing. Um, so I think that was a really good product led thing. And then obviously we did a bunch of marketing off the back of that. That was maybe a little more similar to the competitor stuff because it was about the bit our competitors were like specialized in. we, we were specific on the use of it. So that was the difference, right? We had a take on yes, okay. In the platform, the thing is very similar to the other things, but we have a specific methodology that sits behind that, which is why we built it like that. that had gravitas, know, it was, you know, there was an occupational psychologist involved, you know, all that kind of stuff. So like really gave the product, the bit of tech meaning, if you like, which you could say is just marketing bullshit if you really want to. Yeah. But I think it comes through in like then the content that you make. Yeah. Like if you know who you are and you know what your specific take is. And again, I get that a lot of people don't have that specificity in their roles and haven't like distilled that. We again, very luckily had a very specific take on what we're doing and we're very well informed. Like we had a sheet that we could like give to people to teach them what the take is kind of thing. We could then create content and create really great stuff and know exactly like what our ethos is and how this is going to work together. But that only comes from knowing where you're going and who you want to be as a business and a product and how you want to serve people. For the most part, like I'm really pro competition. in a sense of like if you're a new business and there's no other competitors, that's actually a red flag. Like why are there no competitors? So if you have competitors, don't feel bad. You're good. But you just gotta, you have to meta understand where you're at rather than like go in and copy. And it's okay to like do your keyword research, look at your competitors websites in SEMrush. Do all of that stuff. Have a look at the sort of things that they say and they do. as a way of maybe understanding like where your USPs are and where your business stands out. So that's the way I would do it. It's like a almost doing a SWOT on your, I mean, everyone hates a SWOT analysis. I don't love them. It's very 19 fricking eighties, but whatever. Like it's still, it's still a useful exercise to look at your competitors and to have those kinds of battle cards ready for sales people and those sorts of things. That's completely understandable. But like, think, yeah, it's basically trying to replicate what they do and always being one step behind. Cause you will always be one step behind, right? Oh yeah, you can't. you're like, they've done this, we must do this now or we must react because they've done that. that's just, it means you also cannot follow any kind of strategy. just can't. No, you just gotta keep like copying as it comes up. And the other thing is that we, you know, like we touched on when we were talking about Clear Review that the competitor that we mentioned had got a huge amount of funding. Yeah, you don't always know. So you don't always know what people are spending. So you cannot compete. You really actually cannot compete with some of your competitors because you don't know what their marketing budget is. You know, like, and you don't know how much they're willing to blow on each customer, how much wasted, what they're Yeah, what's there? We know what our customer acquisition cost is, but what's theirs? We don't know. So you don't know. The only thing you can do is like basically send to everything around your ICP, I think, and serve them. And if you have current clients, try and get more clients that love you the way that your current clients love you. Like really niche down on that. And I think that's one of the ways that you could probably... I think as a marketer, you're probably in the camp of someone is telling you to copy your competitors, probably rather than you being like, they're doing. So one of the ways that you can have a conversation as a marketer about not copying your competitors is by bringing up those kind of hard numbers and explaining that based on what you have to use, actually your strategy is the most efficient strategy. And I don't know what our competitors numbers are. So I can't say that this move is the right move to copy. very wise, very wise. i think also if that is the type of conversation that you're having with someone senior where they're like do this! yeah obviously the numbers fantastic but i think you can basically always tie it back to whatever your strategy is and say i don't see that in our strategy and our usps are xyz and therefore this is why we're going down this route rather than kind of going off on a tangent and like trying to do something that's already kind of been done. I mean, I'm trying to think in my mind, does this ever actually work for anyone? I can't think of a client that I've worked for where we've ever had those conversations and acted off the back of it and it's worked out. I just, I don't see. If you're in a position where you are... the company with the huge budget and you have a competitor that may be smaller than you, but you really think that this is where you should be going. You can probably out copy them. So take what they do plus add all of your budget fire behind it. You can probably do it that way around. But if you're in the smaller company, budget-wise and resource-wise trying to copy up, you're going to struggle. You're going to struggle. need your own thing. the whole, and I'm telling marketers to suck eggs, you need to differentiate, right? Like that's how you're going to win, not by copying, especially in complex products with lots of buyers. Like this isn't someone buying shoes, even then like that's a big topic. Shoes is not a good example. This isn't someone buying like Samsung versus iPhone of the same like, expensiveness and the same like, feature flag situation. it's different and you might differentiate yourself in like service, I don't know. You can without copying your competitors do that. There's lots of ways to do that. Definitely, definitely. some of the ways, yeah, if your product is very, I guess that's what we should maybe talk about now is maybe if your product is very similar to another that's out there on the market, which we expect there to be. What are some of the ways that you would go out about finding your differentiators? That's hard to say, especially after one glass of wine. Age. Age. Like, yeah, what are some of the things that you would do? I've got some ideas, but you go first. What are some of the things you might do? So I would look out. So it depends. Are we talking about like homogeneous products, like identical? Yeah, basically, feel like if the feature set is like for like, like if you had a checklist and there was like, they did, we all do basically the same thing. Like, so I would look for different audiences to go after, because it'll be much easier to go after usually a specific audience with specific needs, even if the product's identical. I would look at, what your current users love you for. And if it's like very, well-defined use cases, I would sell on those. use cases rather than like the whole product, like feature list basically. I would look at who is employed there and see if I can figure out what kind of marketing they're doing based on like the marketing team stack. for example, maybe their founder is like some person from a financial background and that actually has nothing to do with this. It's just they were able to set up a business whilst you have a leader in that industry, okay cool, we need to focus on the fact that we know what we're talking about and we've been dealing with this and vice versa if you don't have that and is somebody from an unrelated industry that's starting then okay how can we make that work for us and how can we you know how can we get in other people or whatever so like it's almost like identifying the differences and then seeing what ways you can make them work for you. Yeah, definitely. I don't, yeah, I'm trying to think of when copying could be useful and I, copying may be like what places people hang out in. Yeah. So like maybe if, if you're not on LinkedIn as a B2B business, yeah, all your competitors are, then you should maybe think about it. Like, you know, things like that, but that's like, So it's not copying. It's not content, it? It's like channels, which is fine. I think, that is fine. We're talking about literally people copying, almost verbatim what someone does. Which has also happened to us. yeah. So when people start copying you, you know you're doing the good shit. Yeah. yeah what about you what are some of the ways you look for? definitely yeah the the point you made about who they have in their company is really important the expertise you have on your team versus what the expertise you perceive those people to have on their team i think that's really important because you can differentiate there like if your product director has you know like i don't know 30 years experience i mean i not that i think years of experience equates good by the way but if that is you know something you need to do because I don't know, you work in FinTech and that's really important to the buyers, whatever. That's a classic example, I think, there. Then I can understand that you would be able to be like, our product director has done this and blah, blah, blah. And like, that's really good to able to do that. And then I would focus on other things like, yeah, the service you provide. So like, if you have a really awesome customer success team in tech or customer service team. who are experts in that area. So say for example, yeah, in the FinTech space or HR tech, you have people who are ex HR, HRBPs or, you know, their ex banking or whatever, and they're working in your, in those teams. Find a way to highlight that and to make it really crystal clear that you have like a level of expertise that your competitors don't have. I think that's really important. And then the other things are around, which obviously talked about marketing tactics, but I think, you there's also things around community and customer advocacy and those sorts of things, which are really public. So are people actually talking about your competitors or is it your competitors screaming into the void? Yeah, which you're subscribed to for some reason, because they're a competitor, right? Yep. So you can differentiate yourself there. Like even on review websites, if you see. your competitors have like two g2 reviews and you you don't have any you can all of a sudden dominate that and i think that's a good thing to try and do again if like for example you see your competitors have loads of different communities and you're like actually that's no good for us because therefore you're you're trying to draw people away from places that they naturally hang out how can you either infiltrate other communities, like even just going on Reddit or like other places that you might not have considered and trying to start conversations through experts. I think those are the things that I would do when the products are very like the like. And then I guess my question from that is if you're in marketing and you're worried that your product is very samey samey. what are some of the things that marketing can do to influence the product? she went there. She went there. Bring back Talia quickly. Yeah, Talia, you at? I have never done this successfully. So I can only talk to what our other speakers have done and told us. it to figure out who your product person is, who's making those decisions and then figure out what they need to be to impress and convinced before you do anything else. just try and figure them out as a human being. and then have empathy and try to understand their workflows so that you can understand what their priorities are because you can come up with the best idea ever. Like they might love it, but if it's not, able to move up their priority list and it hasn't got urgency behind it, it's never going to happen. So it's, I feel like it's like in the people management and understanding people realm, it's not actually about what you're asking them to do. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Or, you know, go above the head. I've never done that before. I have. So one of my clients, actually, I have a very good relationship with the product people. And because the CEO is also very, the founder is very close to the product and then the product director is really good. And he and the head of engineering are really interested actually in the commercial aspect of the business, which is the kind of the green light to be able to have these conversations. So I think, Ruta, you're right. It's that if you can... get them interested in the commercial aspects of the business. You are kind of opening the gateway to the conversations. yeah, can't, the conversation cannot start, I haven't got anything to market or this is what our competitors are doing and da da da da da. Again, it's all got to be framed around your ICP. The other thing is, ideal customer profiles are for the entire business. They're not supposed to be just for marketing. They're supposed to dictate. product roadmap, the sales processes you have, the customer success processes you have or service processes you have, they shouldn't just be a marketing thing. So again, and that's really hard because again, that is a different way of working for a lot of people because traditionally it has been something that just marketing uses. So again, I would just say like, if you are going through an ICP process or you've got an ICP, I think making sure you've got those stakeholders in the room to input. from the product side, again, it just makes it easier to have a product conversation further down the line. And the other thing I was just going to say about the client that I mentioned where we have a good conversation. I think they kind of, the guys that I work with, I hope if they hear this, they're like, okay, yeah, she's not just talking crap. That I think they want me to come to them and say, this is what our ICP want. And... there's customer success and then there's marketing and we are the two sets of people who can do that. So if you can also get customer success on board, then the two of you having the conversation with product is so much stronger. cause there's that, cause then it's like, it's real pressure. so yeah, I, I, and that works with these, guys that I work with. I'm very lucky. The one time I have had product change prioritized was actually when I floated the idea in just a senior management meeting as a concern. And it wasn't the product person that was really like on board with it. It was the CFO, which I would have never expected, but because they were the CFO, they literally pushed it through in like weeks. were like, go pay for it, go do it, get engineering to get involved. And I was like, Whoa, okay. So sometimes it's not going to be necessarily the product person that maybe is going to be your ally in this. There'll be other people that are an ally. Same with like a CRO or whatever. Or like even the CEO. So you know, when we were planning to build the Clear Review community, my then boss was kind of like, okay, yeah, but like, let's test it out in little bit. And then I randomly spoke about it to Stuart and he was like, this sounds fantastic. Like go do it. And I was like, okay, cool. So then we went and did it and it was a great success. But yeah, so sometimes you'll, yeah, sometimes just, you know, float things by people and see what reaction that you get. Cause you might find unexpected allies that want the same things as you do. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But again, it just goes back to that. With any management of stakeholders, that marketing education piece, that is like a core bit of our job. You know, like I think you and I have been talking about this a lot lately with other groups. You know, we recently did a lovely thing with Girls in Marketing. We loved it. And we were talking about that. So much of our job is the stakeholder management side. if you... if you're senior. my gosh. That's my senior job. Yeah, that is like 90 % of your job basically is managing. the other people in the kind of in the c-suite with you and yeah i mean even if you're junior you've still got to manage upwards you know it's it's all of that so i think that rings true for the product conversation we were just having and also the competitor conversation because if you can't manage the relationships with people internally you're going to struggle Yeah I think that's really great advice and it's being obsessed with your competitors and copying what they do is kind of illogical. Like you can always you can always kind of figure it out it's like no no if we want to compete we have to have something to compete for. and that isn't doing more of the same thing as our competitors are doing. And we probably won't do it as well because like they're ahead of us. They probably have a deep reason to why they're doing it and we're just copying like those intricacies aren't there. just do things that you are committed to and like that will make sense for your strategy and your brand. Should we do a quick confessions or gossip? I'm so sorry. Gossip not convictions. Yes. As you were just saying that I was actually just thinking the word that came to my head when you were just saying that was how superficial copying someone is it's so surface layer level because you cannot you cannot have any possible understanding about how successful something you know there's like corporate espionage. Yeah. And you actually know what's going on that's different. I mean every now and again you know we would have a drink with someone and we find out and then we're like ooh. that's not corporate espionage by the way. that's just people. mates. telling each other. but yeah. yeah. so true. so gossip. yeah. okay. anything that's irked you that you love. what do you wanna.. what do you wanna air? marketing gossip. Marketing got fucksip. I've kind of spoken about this before, but I'm not enjoying this like, stage capitalism we're in, where tech companies are like, buying billboards. For like, B2B tech. you're not loving that? No, it worries me. Yeah. Because like, it means we're going after splashier and splashier channels, which means that we're, know. Doom. HubSpot advertising on Amazon Prime. Just I know that's not billboards. Yeah, but it's like yeah, I know you got the budget guys, but what the fuck it it feels far-reaching and like we love we love still yeah same like when they had the billboards in City Airport like I was just like what in the sponsor a tube station as well probably I Get it, but I don't get it and also makes me worry about the economy. I think that's why of bugs me when i see that stuff because it's like you feel like it's the first sign of my god we're fucked we're fishing for for anything we can get at this point yeah what about you ick my is also an ick obviously we're not supposed to talk about politics but we cannot avoid it because i think what we saw at donald trump's inauguration and the fact that the tech companies are all literally next to trump that worries me because not only is it kind of again a sign of like i mean let's not get into the toxic masculinity involved with all that shit but what concerns me is you have channels that especially when we are kind of moving towards this more like purposeful marketing, empathy marketing all the feels and it's like that is at odds now with using those platforms and I don't know how to reconcile that in my brain yet and I posted about it the other day and I noticed that nobody engaged with the post apart from you because obviously obviously I'm working with buddies yeah but I thought to myself is that because everyone thinks I'm mental because I'm looking at no Zuckerberg going I don't want to use meta now yeah no I think it's you know like what do you do we have Facebook accounts because we sometimes have to use it for marketing yeah we don't go on them, but like if we're spending money on advertisement, then that's the worst case scenario of all of the engagements you can do. You're actually giving them money, right? So yeah, I think a lot of marketers do have major ick about everyone that was at the inauguration. I know. Even the open AI guy who was a gay man openly saying that he wants like supports Donald Trump. mean, I get that they do for like, you know, lobbying and tax reasons and openness. we're not stupid by the way we get why we want the money but they'll be the same people that will get called in for monopoly yeah so it's yeah like yeah majoric. i just don't yeah i don't know so i don't know if you ever have looked into the campaign against hate stop funding hate stuff which is basically a campaign in the uk which basically says if you're a marketer, there's a lot of stuff to it, but if you're a marketer, don't advertise on things like the Daily Mail, for example, which you can easily avoid doing. And it just makes me wonder, like, where does this now stop? Like, you don't want to fund hate. I don't want my company to become famous because loads of people clicked on an ad that was in any way... yeah connected with these people. Yeah that's a toughie. My existential crisis will probably continue for the next four years so more on that later. It's really like it's a deep ethics problem right? As a person and as a business. Yeah and it's difficult because yeah if you're an organisation that doesn't support that stuff or you know. But imagine you're a charity. I mean, that's... But you have to fundraise on Facebook because it's very successful. And lots of them do. Yeah, how do you reconcile that? It's... Fun times. I don't know. Anyway, whatever. We're not here to solve that. And on that bombshell, I think that's the best outro anyone's ever done in history is the Tokyo outro. On that bombshell. On that bombshell. Yeah, we'll see you next week. Yeah, on that bombshell, thank you so much for joining us. hope this gave you some confidence in batting back those copy our competitors comments. And yeah, if you have any questions, please let us know. And we will see you in the next episode. And in Blame it on marketing.com.