Blame it on Marketing ™

Stop Guessing: Customer-Powered Marketing | E86 with Helen Saxton

• Season 11 • Episode 86

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Why do so many marketers build campaigns in a vacuum—then wonder why they flop? 🤔 We’ve all seen it: content calendars packed with guesswork, launch after launch… and still, crickets.

In this episode, we’re joined by Helen Saxton, customer-experience advocate and Blame It On Marketing’s newest bestie, to unpack why customers must be at the heart of every business—and how to turn real-world feedback into content that converts. 

We get into:
 ✅ Why brand managers who never speak to customers keep missing the mark
 ✅ Mining free insights from social comments, CS tickets & on-site reviews
 ✅ Balancing quant (surveys, NPS) with qual (deep-dive interviews) for true customer clarity
 ✅ Partnering with customer-success/service teams for an always-on feedback loop
 ✅ When to pick up the phone—and when to gather feedback asynchronously

If you’re tired of launching campaigns nobody asked for—or if you’ve been guilty of marketing by gut instead of data—this one’s for you.

We’re Ruta and Emma, the marketing consultants behind Blame it on Marketing. 

If you’re in B2B SaaS or professional services and looking to do marketing that actually drives revenue and profit, we’re here for it.

Visit blameitonmarketing.com and let’s get this show on the road.

welcome back to Blame It On Marketing in this week's episode, we are gonna be discussing marketing working with customers I've seen roles that I've had where I've never talked to a customer, repositioned a global brand without ever talking to a customer. You've got founders with a hundred ideas going a hundred miles an hour. Pet projects all over the place. if your customers aren't asking for it, why are you wasting your time doing it? I'd love to tell you speaking to customers is a dark art, it's not. It's actually just the most human you have to be in a business. Hi everyone and welcome back to Blame It On Marketing with Emma and Ruta. And in this week's episode, we are gonna be discussing one of our favourite topics always, which is to do with marketing working with customers and why you should be trying to work with your customers to generate great content. And we have got the wonderful Helen with us, who has got a thing or two to say about this topic. So Helen, before we get into it, over to you to introduce yourself. Thank you so much for having me. It's my inaugural podcast, so bear with me, but you've picked a topic that's very close to my heart. Completely by accident, if I'm totally honest, in my career I found my way into customer rather than, you know, it was never my calling, but I'm classically trained, sort of graduate scheme marketing program. worked through a number of brilliant roles with brilliant brands but quickly converged on themselves into managing customers, customer experience and like really bringing that into the heart of what I now stand for I think as a marketeer. Cause I've seen roles that I've had where I've never talked to a customer, which is insane when I look back on it, repositioned a global brand without ever talking to a customer. And then I, you know, worked in startup. No, crazy. I was thinking about it as I was prepping for this presentation. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But then, like it's just evolved and I went through that brand and looked after customer experience and VIP services. And then in my laterals and startup brands, if you don't know your customer, you can't scale, you can't like make the business work. Amazing. Do you want to tell us your marketing confession? feel like you, that could be one already. I just told you I couldn't think of any, but that's just come to me. Yeah, I mean, it's about 10 or 11 years ago now, was my first brand manager role. I was very lucky to be a black brand manager for Rolls-Royce Motorcars. It my first mid-senior position and I had four years there with kind of the remit. within the team to reposition the brand. Everyone in the world knows Rolls Royce, right? It's one of the best luxury brands in the world, but they were quite traditional at the time, had an older demographic, weren't really future-proofing themselves from a brand and customer perspective. So they had a program of launching like new cars, more sort of like perceived modern cars away from the more traditional end of the brand. So I did four product launches with them, which was a lot about film and photography and putting that out into the world as product launches and brand positioning. And through the relaunch and latter stages of that role, the flagship model came kind of a repositioning of the brand, a new brand statement, new brand identity, which is still being rolled out now. And I love to see colleagues that I've still got there. But on reflecting about why I'm love customers so much. I'm pretty sure in four years I did that I never talked to a customer. We can give you some grace because you were repositioning for new type of customer. So probably talking to your current customers wouldn't have given you the right information anyway. Maybe. was a huge, you know, I think you're giving me a lot of grace there. And at the time, I honestly, at the time, I honestly don't remember it occurring to me, but you know, in my slight defense, it's a big organization. was a huge project. There were always directors in the room, customer people in the room. And, know, fundamentally in an automotive as well, you work for the OEM, which is the head office, but it's the regions and the dealers that sell cars traditionally. And they were all bought along the journey, giving us feedback, like how would customers in the Middle East respond to this campaign? Like that was an intrinsic part of the job. But yeah, I was exposed to customer feedback through my colleagues. never went out and sought it for myself. So there's lots to unpack there. And the other irony. Maybe not fail, but the other irony is I then went on to lead customer experience at Rolls-Royce. So I did a complete flip within that business of like, having never talked to a customer to having four customer centric teams and that being my whole life to sit in the boardroom and represent the customer. but on reflection, I would never let a brand manager that works with me now not speak to a customer. How else do you learn though, right? How else do you learn? Like some of the things that happen when people are worried about marketing, speaking to customers is like this, and we kind of do it to ourselves sometimes. We're like, no, what if we say the wrong thing? So it gets quite scary. And in those bigger organizations, it's very structured, right? Everyone has roles and responsibilities. And I think it's changing now, but certainly, you know, my early years in big corporate environments, it wasn't my job to speak to customers. It was someone else's job to bring customer insight or feedback into the marketing team. And, you know, we can talk about the merits and the downfalls of that, but... That I think is still fairly standard and why a lot of marketers, to some of your points, don't speak because it's just the way it's done in the business, more traditional businesses I think these days. So we see all the time on LinkedIn these kind of like, you know, LinkedIn marketing gurus and sometimes customer experience gurus as well, just putting out there, you know, the statement, you should just talk to customers. But what is the reality of that? And what does that actually mean for marketers to be able to have access to customers and to actually make that meaningful conversation between the marketer and the customer? Yeah, it's tricky and I don't think it, you know, for anyone panicking out there, I don't think it's as literal as, you know, me as a human, so in a marketing department has to be on the phone to customers. Like it can be that and that could be wonderful, but the concept of marketing talking to customers is... Really about marketing listening to customers actually. And you think about how much feedback you get from customers without ever having to talk to them. That is a place that all marketing departments should start really. And that's free to them. If you think about all your social media comments on your posts that your social team are in every day, you're getting comments and DMs and interactions. If you think about the reviews that are left on your product, whether it's TrustPilot or things that you've embedded in your own site, that is the voice of the customer. you know, marketing having to talk to customers, that's the next stage. can talk about how that can happen, but actually the mandate should be marketing listening to customers. You know, it's not just marketing, to be honest, it's every part of the organization. Marketing has just become attached to it as kind of this conduit for customers into the business. But the reason it's important is because it allows you to focus on the right things, which just sounds really simple. you know, particularly, well, in any business, but particularly in a scaling business, the to-do list is so long. The wish list is so long and you've got a business full of know, tech developers who've got great new features they want to build. And you've got a marketing team with great ideas, great campaigns, great products. You've got founders with a hundred ideas going a hundred miles an hour. We could do this. We could do this. I want to do this. Pet projects all over the place. And you know, quite honestly, if your customers aren't asking for it, why are you wasting your time doing it? Now that's very simplistic view because you've got a lot of smart people pushing the world forward. But when it comes to streamlining priorities and actually growth hacking your business, you should be listening and talking about what your customer, what's failing your customers at the moment that you can improve. what's missing for your customers that you can introduce. And then you build a new set of wishlists. You build the must fix because it will unlock the bottleneck, bottleneck to conversion. You've got the wishlist of everyone's asking for this. Like it's a new opportunity. It's a new revenue stream. That's like product debit. And then you've got the, wish you guys would go to the moon and you've got the moon on the like the big blue sky wish list, Emma and I talk a lot about creating buying experiences for the actual customers, not for your internal company. And because I don't know, you want to have 12 layers of SQL and 300 qualifications and whatever it is. And I feel like this really circles back to that. Like if you actually worried about what your customer wanted, you wouldn't be building these processes out that are completely, maybe sometimes wrong. Maybe they're not sometimes wrong, but in a lot of cases, wrong and cumbersome. Emma has a lot of shmum shmum foe stories to tell about that. I think it's also really tricky right though because you do find yourself in this situation where you look at some products that exist. Like let's take apple as the classic example of this. Right did anybody need apple? No. But you know Steve Jobs kind of.. I mean you can argue if you want with rooters like I'm going to argue with you. But not necessarily. No there you go. New genre. Yeah. new genre of tech. Yeah, I get that. Yeah. creating a new, yeah, a new kind of market or a new, yeah, a new genre, whatever, of tech or whatever it is that you might be building, sometimes it's not that the need is already there, is it? So that's always difficult, because it's kind of like that chicken and egg situation, where you're like, am I building things for customers and what they really need right now, or am I building something that I want people to need? And therefore eventually they will, I don't know, I'm going off on a slight tangent, but I think that's, that's difficult for founders to balance in their own minds. That difference between listening to customers, listening to their market or their, whoever they think their ICP or their audiences versus what they actually want to do. so if you've got a founder from the get-go who's like i've just got this really great idea and i want to do it and you're not taking into consideration what you think customers want from the outset It's tricky. I think there's so many layers to what you just said as well, because, you know, the world moves forward because founders and entrepreneurs have great ideas and they spot a gap in the market, create a new category. At some, you know, the early stages of that, that's a punt. They're smart people, they'll have figured it out, but it's called product market fit for a reason, right? That is about the customer. You've got the best idea in the world and no one wants to buy it. You're not going to succeed. So that's like the highest level first stage. And no matter how brave you are as a founder, if you can't sell your product, your business isn't going to work. You are intrinsically listening to your customer. But yeah, at every stage it gets a bit deeper. I'm not going to tell you that every business that listens to customers isn't distracted with some pet projects over here and the founders and the leadership teams still don't have like big award-winning things that they want to do to win awards or, you know, get in the magazines. But ultimately those things won't succeed if there isn't a customer responding to them. so many different industries are. are playing a slightly different game. can develop tech and you can do things just for PR as well, particularly in the tech space. You know, you can, well out of my depth talking about tech, but you can, you can build things and, and push the industry forward without customers. that's, you know, R and D that's learning that's B2B that's thought leadership. Like you're doing that for a different reason other than revenue driving, making money, making your business work. So I'm not saying don't ever deliver the crazy idea, but what are your priorities? know, and if you've got a business full of people that have targets and ultimately need to be employed for the business to be successful, then it's got to be about what your customers want and anything that's not attached to a customer has to come in the spare time. Yeah, I think your point also perfectly applies to marketing campaigns. So Emma and I have been in a couple of situations where, typically founders will see a marketing campaign and they will judge it as themselves and they don't know how to judge it as a customer. So you end up putting a campaign out that the founder likes, but that isn't necessarily perfectly geared towards the customer. So when it comes to creating campaigns, again, if the customer isn't responding to your campaigns, then something is wrong. It might be the campaign itself, it might be distribution, might be, but something is wrong where you're not reaching that customer or you're not saying the right thing in the right way for that customer. So feel like that's a really easy way to always kind of circle back into that feedback loop as well without actually physically speaking to a customer. But you'll know if something's working, right? If something hits, you'll know in your marketing. Yeah, 100%. And you will always get it wrong. Like people are just, you know, people are advocating for being able to make mistakes. Sometimes the stakes are higher than other times, you know, but we've all delivered marketing campaigns that we love, haven't quite hit right in the marketplace. We've also all delivered marketing campaigns that have been bastardized by customer feedback or product dev. You know, I'm my my past we've introduced products that I, it just made me feel a bit sick to introduce them or to make that change because it wasn't the purest idea. It like, maybe it went against what we were trying to do as principled, you know, business entrepreneurs, but the customer didn't respond the first time. are clearly asking you for something you didn't want to do. And lo and behold, that's successful, right? So we've all seen both sides of that coin. And it's, you know, to one of your earlier questions, it's really easy to get customer feedback on marketing campaigns now. You know, so there are, you know, you can go into research and people think you have to spend weeks and hours like in focus groups, stress testing your campaigns and, you you worry that, you know, particularly, agencies and like the creative team are worried like all pieces of feedback are going to manipulate this idea out of something that it was. But it's actually very easy to get feedback on campaigns now. You know, there are so many businesses and systems, know, loops comes to mind that we've used, which you can put creative executions into a platform and a hundred people in an hour can watch them, comment on them, rate them. It's a bit like System One, but there's like lots of businesses doing entry-level versions of what System One does. And you can do that with raw creative, you can do that with storyboards, you can do that with concept boards, you can do that with first cut films rather than finished cut films. If you've got a high stakes marketing campaign where you've got a lot of investment going into either the campaign itself or the media that is going to take the campaign, it's so easy to get feedback now and not spend hundreds of thousands of pounds finishing something that you love that you've never stress tested in the market. So I'd recommend that to anyone as well. very wise words. So when it comes to the kind of internal turmoil I think that a lot of marketers have when it like talking to customers or you know just even getting the feedback why are certain areas of businesses terrified to let marketing loose with customers or customer feedback? Hehehehehe So think there's two points to that, is let loose with the customers themselves and then let loose with the feedback. So let loose with the customers themselves. I'd love to tell you speaking to customers is a dark art, but it's not. It's actually just the most human you have to be in a business. If you think you probably wear quite a professional hat in some parts of your business, if you talk to the board or you're doing financial reporting. But when you're talking to a customer, obviously you can't tell them what's normal, but you do have to be your most human self. If something's gone wrong, have to be like, I'm so sorry. Like it's really like you have to humanize their experience with your brand. And there's a fear, there's a traditional fear with customer service, customer experience experts that everyone else in the business. can't do that human, that salespeople will get on the phone to a customer and just be really salesy, try and sell them the next product, try and understand why they didn't buy the first product. And marketing might get on the phone and be a bit wishy washy, like, what did you think of this picture? How did you feel when you watched this film? So customer service teams are traditionally very protective of... customers and probably quite rightly so because customer service and the voice your business has to the customer, I believe it's one of the most powerful like brand building measures. So if you let a rogue salesperson or a lofty marketeer get on the phone, like freak out the customer is the traditional view. I think people are smarter than you give them credit for. I think you'd rarely put a salesperson on the phone without being chaperoned by someone who does customer relationship management. it's always a nice interplay, like a trio of conversation. And there's also a fear from the other side, there's fear from marketers, salespeople, operations people. Like what if the customer kicks off? What if they bring up a problem that's to do with the business area that I don't? look after, like what do I say, like how do I not put the business in the shit. But also, you know, people aren't adept at customer service, like some people very fairly aren't emotionally in tune, aren't wired that way, you know, to be that relationship person. So there's a fear around it. Everyone I know that then does it. that fear breaks down very quickly if you're just a human, because customers are also just humans. If you take away big scary complaints and customers kicking off sort of a regular interaction with a customer is, you know, they've got an inquiry, you can answer the inquiry. If you can't answer it, you just be honest and say, I can't, I'll come back to you. And I remember one of the girls in one of my teams, you know, took responsibility for our social comments, she was social media manager. And then at the time we were still running comments and DMS in that team rather than customer service. And she was so afraid of it. like, what if I say the wrong answer? Like, what if I, you what if, you know, what ifs? And then when she started doing it, she saw what I know people see and why I advocate for it. But she's like, it's so interesting to hear what they ask. I understand where they're coming from. you know, and being in that and seeing that every day and the power of a simple, know, people don't expect brands to answer questions, right? So the power of a brand responding to you. And then this person being like, thank you so much. You've made my day, you've solved all my problems. And that warm fuzzy feeling that the marketing team gets kind of that. we talk about marketing, but any part of the business, but it's that tangible validation. She then went back into her social media content job and she's like, understand what people want from me now and I understand I'm not just producing content because you're asking me to as a business, I'm producing content because it's making a difference to these customers. So. People are afraid of just got to be forced to do it a little bit, but by forcing them, they, I do believe they quickly see the benefit and being handheld by the people that do talk to customers, being teed up for that conversation. Like you're looking after me on my first podcast. I'd look after someone in the operations team talking to their first customer, you know, being that like facilitator. yeah definitely making sure you go into those calls with a purpose as well like it like your point about people being human is so true but making sure that you've got something if you're the marketer to actually talk to the customer about not just ask them for something which is the which is the always the thing that market it know it's like actually sometimes if you take your time if you build relationships if you sit in on QBRs or regular customer meetings and you build relationships with your customers, before the ask, you know, it's going to be received in a way greater way. And you will also like glean from those conversations, the understanding about how to ask, what to ask for and you know, what their challenges are. And I think because marketers, we're always in a bit of a rush, aren't we? We're always like a hundred miles an hour sometimes. I think we go straight in for the like, how do I get the thing I want as soon as I possibly can? And they kind of forget that there's actually a relationship that needs building and some trust that needs building to generate good content, right? That's, know, which is good for everybody. ultimately what you want, because a customer can't tell you the answer, a customer can't tell you whether campaign A or campaign B is better for your business. I come back to that point of it's not really about talking to your customers, about listening to your customers. And when you get on those calls, you know, not the transactional calls where you're trying to solve their inquiries and their problems. But if you're on a learning call, if you want to get in the customer's head, what do they need, what do they want, what do they feel, it's about asking open-ended questions, know, tell us how you found our brand, what were you doing when you found our brand and you'd be surprised like if you don't lead the horse to water you get the life story, you get the, you know, it's not about I need paint my living room because I want to paint my living room. It's because you know I've been divorced and I'm starting a new life journey and it's all about my new identity as a human or you know very commonly having a family and like got to convert a lost spare room into the nursery for the most precious thing in your life. So you ask open-ended questions. Don't go... with a premeditated idea of the answers you're going to get. And that takes quite a lot of work to then bring that feedback in, like create trends, like see the trends, see the themes in it. I wouldn't ever want marketing teams to talk to customers if they desperately need an answer to something. You've got to do it as an always on activity and sort of feed. the vibe back in basically rather than a hard and fast answer. So if you're a marketer and you're so on board with this, you wanna be talking to customers, you wanna incorporate their feedback, but you're in an organization where that is just not done and you asking is just like throwing up a bunch of red flags for everyone, what are the kind of steps that you would take and maybe have taken before to start to get through those barriers? gosh, well, I'm not sure I've ever experienced it that bad, to be honest. So if anyone is experiencing that, like get in touch because I would love to think that's very rare. No? God, okay. We've known multiple people to have lived it too. it's a tech thing. Maybe it's a SaaS tech thing because CS is so powerful in, in yeah. And protective in tech, but yeah, it happens. fair. Okay. So I would only come at it then from personal development. And I think that would speak to a different part of the company. Like, remember one of my very early roles, very early roles, I was given a project, which at the time I thought was a bit of BS, to be honest, I thought they were sort of just filling my time rather than I needed this project to be delivered. But I did go out. with some of the sales guys on the road and did field visits and customer visits. So I think if you've, if you're sat in a marketing team or any department really, where you believe the customer or access to the customer is fundamental to your role, you actually don't believe that because it's just your role. You believe that because of the skills you want to develop, you believe it because of who you are. So if you come at it from a personal development perspective and not needing answers for your campaign. I think if you ask, you know, the leadership team or the people responsible for those departments and accessing those, can you just sit in? Can you watch what they do? Can you be exposed to that world before you need anything from it? Like, I'm interested in it. Can I shadow you for a day? Simpler things like that. Yeah, I think that's it, isn't it? And it's like, also, like you said, Helen, previously, there are other ways to access feedback, like your social channels, that's free for you to have a look at. If your sales calls are recorded, you can go through transcripts, you can listen to the calls, you can listen to demos, you can ask to join demos. So this is even before someone becomes a customer. So you've kind of got an awareness from a prospect perspective all the way through to customers. Those are... things that should be available to you. And I do, I like the way you framed it, Helen, which is like, this is personal development. This is only going to make our marketing stronger if I can do this before. Yeah. Like you say. And the other thing that I think that quite a lot of marketers forget in this whole, like, can I have access to customers please? Is to build a really strong bond and relationship with your customer service or customer success, whoever it is that has the relationship with the customer. because I think so often what happens is marketing again, like we're like, if you are focused on relationships, you're thinking about that. How can I, yeah, prove myself to be a useful person to the customer? But actually, if you can also prove yourself to be a useful person to the customer success people or customer service people, equally, you will gain access quicker because you're showing yourself to be like a real trustworthy person who is only going to act. in the best interest of the customer success person in the first place. That's always been what I've done. And also naturally, I like customer success people. I I would hope most marketers do because of what our job is. We should be like, have some empath stuff going on. And so I think if you can befriend that team and prove yourself to be useful. Yeah, you will get access to stuff a lot quicker. You will end up on customer calls if you want to be there and you need to be there a lot quicker. instance. I don't know if, yeah. don't start when you need something, you have to start way before that because I totally agree, like going out off the bat and asking anyone for anything that doesn't know you or care about what you're doing is really hard. And I'm not surprised that CS don't want you to do it. I'm the same, I have a small startup and like, I try to engage with people and kind of solve their problems. And then if I need some feedback from a customer, I'm like, hey, like you know we're talking about this maybe this is relevant what do you think so it's not just like bam can you give me your thoughts because well thoughts are expensive Thoughts are expensive time is, you know, precious for a customer. Like why should a customer get on the phone and talk to you for 30 minutes? Like they'll get on the phone if they got a problem. But if you want something from them, like true qualitative feedback, that's, you know, that's a relationship based give. And I think doing things in partnership with CS and I'm a firm believer. I've built CS into some marketing teams that I've headed up. So CS is very easy to put in operations. It's very easy to be like, this is an operational topic. Phone systems, know, call center systems, it's all like an operations person's problem. But, and to some extent, it does sit in operations because you're intrinsically connected to the factory and delivery systems. But actually, if you can get CS to straddle operations and marketing and have the brand director or CMO partially responsible for customer experience, the two sit side by side. And that dialogue that you're talking about is every day. I hate seeing companies outsource customer service if you can make it sit in your business and you have the right feedback loops, and that is about the leadership of those areas as well, know, CS has a wealth, wealth of insight to bring back. And we're talking about trends. You can't respond to every problem on every phone call because one customer's got this problem and the whole business can't move to solve that one problem. But if you're looking at your CS, tickets and the cases that they're solving and you know that lead the leadership of that team is bringing that back into the business and saying you know we had a massive uptick in people asking this question this month or these three months ideally these three or four months that that question has been going up that's a question that marketing can answer they can you know through the next campaign, through the next set of emails that they send out or through a jig on the website that the tech team can help you with, like bringing that insight back in. So again, talking to the customer, let the CS team do the talking to the customer. And if their systems are robust enough to classify the inquiries, classify the tickets, classify the topics. That should be your every day. It should definitely be your monthly reporting out of CS into the business. You know, and the last business I worked and we kind of had three layers. had customer service bring it insight into the business of what, like mostly problems. Let's face it, like customers get in touch and it gives, you know, on a monthly basis, both the operations and marketing team, gives those teams something to hack, you know, problems with shipping. have gone skyrocketing this month, then you've got a problem with your shipping service and that's it's in the operations team. If you know the number of people asking questions about this color or this product has gone up, then you're not communicating that product clearly enough and marketing can take that on. as a task. So you should be getting that in monthly from your customer service team and then working with customer service you can and should be deploying surveys very regularly. And you know, if marketing aren't deemed to be wording that correctly or it's being too scary and aggressive, then write it with the customer service team. know, marketing, what do you want to know for your brand? get the customer service team to soften it up if necessary, deploy it and both stick with those answers together. What does this mean? So you've got that kind of two layers of quant, always on quant, which should just be part of your business reporting. And then when you get to speaking to a customer, that should be very rare, like from a rare in terms of you're not going to speak to all your customers all the time for true qual. insights so when you get on the phone and just want to learn and that's about adding colour to all these layers of quant that you get all the time that should just be part of your business reporting and growth hacking. By the time you know I'd recommend half yearly or quarterly get on the phone with 30 customers 30 minutes and just let them tell you about their life and their experience with you without many hard and fast questions and all of a sudden you'll be adding the color and the context to all these always on data points. And then that's just a really rich view of your customer. It's actually not about answers, it's about validating the answers you think you're already sat in front of and adding context to it. Obsessed. How? of this is is basically is very similar but i just think just to clear it so for anyone of our friends who listening who are b2b it's that implementation of within the product having nps or c-sat that's going out regularly that's giving you that feedback there is also always a pushback in tech about having that embedded into the platform you know like if you if you know like asking regularly what people think about things, asking users versus admins what they think about things, but if you don't know what your admins think versus your users, you know, like that's that's really important feedback for the tech team, for marketing, for everybody, so for customer success. that's something for everybody to have a think about if you are in B2B, especially tech, you know, think about how you can collect that feedback. It's easier for us to have more regular conversations with people, less customers, less volume. You know, it's easier to build those real long lasting relationships with people. And that's where things like, you know, you're an advocacy program or your customer marketer comes in to try and help with that stuff. But yeah, don't shy away from collecting that really important feedback and getting that. quantitative data like Helen said and pairing that with your qualitative even if you're in B2B because it's doable and you can do it. It's easier. Surely it's easier in B2B. So much easier. talk to your clients like you know who they are. They're not just people purchasing stuff in the world, you know. And when I say quant, it could scare a lot of people because I'm not talking like reams of numbers and data. talking, you know, it's surveys, it's tick box answers, it's answers without much context to them. But, you know, you can still in quant feedback, you can say, you know, what are the top three things you love about our brand? Tick the box, tick the boxes. That's quant feedback you know, I've been in businesses before where the top three things we thought people loved about our brand were never the top three things that people tick the box. So then all of a sudden that pivots. everything. You know, it doesn't mean what you think your brand is about is irrelevant. It's still there. It's still baked into the DNA of the business. But just that very simple example, what are the top three things people love about our brand? If all your customers that have transacted with you are loving that, turn that into your acquisition tool. If you're then putting acquisition messages out that aren't one of those three things, you're not speaking the same language between acquisition and and retention and the people that already love you. So that's what I mean by quant. Don't get scared of thinking you have to be like some super data numbers person as a marketeer. It's more like uncontextual feedback on surveys is what I mean. So we are at that time of the episode where we are going to ask you for some marketing gossip. Is there anything you've seen that's kind of been living in your head? Anything that's annoyed you? Anything that's made you go wow recently? Gosh, so much. I consume adverts, consume marketing. I have a love hate relationship with LinkedIn because of it, because there's a lot of noise of, you know, people want their voices to be heard. I think the thing that I hate is people aren't talking enough about the revival stories that everyone wants to see the challenger brand. Everyone wants to see the fight. Everyone wants to see big brands doing odd things like Tesco not putting their logo on the ad, but actually no one is talking about, well, not many people in the mainstream are talking about things like the Marks and Spencer's revival. and how one of the biggest and most loved brands on the high street was truly dying a couple of years ago. It was just for my grandma. And now I could pretty much exclusively shop in Marks and Spencer's for my homeware, my fashion, my food. And that's been a real turnaround. So kind of the turnarounds you used to study at university when I was studying marketing, like retail turnarounds. So. I think there's, you know, it's not hate, it's a gripe that not enough people are focusing on learning from wonderful stories like Marks and Spencer's, everyone's obsessed with the underdogs becoming unicorns and like people doing daring things, which I love to see, love to watch, love to comment on, but actually there's some fairly Traditional brands are marketing out there doing wonderful things that we shouldn't ignore. Wonderful. Well, Helen, thank you so much. I think me and Emma are feeling thoroughly inspired this morning when it comes to customer feedback and integrating that into our lives and work. thank you everyone. And we'll see you on the next episode.