Steve sits down with Eric Sawitoski, an award-winning creative executive with 20+ years of success devising brand strategies and marketing solutions to increase ROI through digital innovations, experiential marketing, and campaign execution.
Eric is the Chief Marketing Officer at WNDR Museum, and a Strategic Advisor at ELAW CREATIVE, and an Advisory Committee Member at Workvana.
Listen in as Eric talks about his experience doing marketing in the pre-internet era and the timeless principles which he found apply to today’s market. He speaks on the difference between reactive marketing (“order-takers”) and proactive marketing (problem-solving which contributes to the bottom line).
Eric and Steve give their thoughts on maintaining a customer-led business no matter the size of the organization. “You don’t build brands for yourself,” explains Steve. Rather, you build it for the customer, and that customer needs to be the one making those big decisions.
Eric closes the conversation by inviting us to ask ourselves: “How are you focusing on your customer so that your offering aligns with what the opportunity spend is? If you don’t have insight into that, you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.”
Key Takeaways:
Connect with Eric Sawitoski on LinkedIn.
With 25+ years of marketing experience, Steve Goldhaber is a former head of global digital marketing for two Fortune 500 companies and the current CEO of 26 Characters, a content marketing agency in Chicago.
Connect with Steve on LinkedIn.
Steve Goldhaber: Hello everyone. Welcome back to Studio 26. Today I am joined by Eric Sawitoski. Eric, welcome to the show.
Eric Sawitoski: Steve. Thank you for having me.
Steve Goldhaber: Eric and I may or may not have worked together in a previous life. That's my legal disclaimer. You won't really know until the end of the podcast. So, Eric, give everyone a quick background about who you are.
Eric Sawitoski: First, Steve, thanks for having me. And I'm wondering for your audience, is that one of those breadcrumbs that you leave out there so people can do their digital sleuth to figure out where we may or may not have crossed paths, because I've been doing this for a minute, as the kids say, coming outta school, I started out as a hands-on designer working in a production capacity. And it's to date myself, I was working in film and hands on production and beta testing things such as power. So one of the early people's things that we just take for granted now like when I'm speaking with my family and talking with my nieces and nephews, like before the internet, and they're like, “Well, wait a minute. Stop. What? Yeah. What do you mean? Before the internet?” It's like I said before about electricity. So I started out, I went through a communications program and I should say one of the partners with my university was Apple. So I got a design and communications background that was also computer based. But as a creative or as a marketer, I looked at computers and technology as a tool the same way that I look at my medium mix today, and social media, that's just another channel. Channels are always gonna be changing. Tools are always going to be changing. It's how we adapt and adjust to those tools and channels so that we can use them for either solutions. That's how I look at creative problem solving or marketing opportunities, getting people into the funnel. So even though that kind of ages me into a specific category, I really look at it as an inflection point getting ready for where we are today as marketers and because of these things everyone can say that they're part of the marketing mix or that they're part of the creative world, or whether they're starting their own companies or client side, or how an individual can become an agency and that long journey, going through creative problem solving on the agency side, doing things on behalf of client to really getting midway through my career when I transitioned to the B2B side and worked for a Fortune two 50 company and went through a brand migration and doing brand projects that were tied to an acquisition strategy, I always look at marketing as something that's done in the best case scenario, marketing is something that's done in lockstep with a business strategy. That's what I've been doing throughout my career and where I find myself today in this great office using the best of both my problem solving skills and the marketing acumen that I've developed over, let's just say several decades.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah I can relate to the worldview of doing marketing in a pre-internet way and the new marketers will never understand the stress of shipping a TV spot that was like, this is it. We're shipping it or we are on press. So you have like an hour to make any final changes. Other than that, we are blowing through our budget. So both good and bad about the old days of marketing. Okay, so cool. Thank you for giving us an overview for advice.
Eric Sawitoski: Oh, that gives me an anecdote though. That gives me a great anecdote. I think to tie a nice little bow on where we are today as marketers and how technology has really made, whether it is media relations, stakeholder management, just the ability to connect much easier. But you said something more about deadlines than I remember in my first job. I was working on a presentation for a company, and they said, no pressure, but they're holding the company plane at O'Hare. So as soon as you're done with this design, we're gonna rip the film and messenger it out to O'Hare. So now that can just be done via email, via Zoom?Via screen share.
Steve Goldhaber: Yep. That's awesome.I've never heard the plane story before. That's a good one. All right, so now we're gonna jump into the storytelling or the case study part of the show. So give us some context about the story that you wanna share today.
Eric Sawitoski: This is one of my favorite stories as both a marketer and as a creative. I spent over a decade working for a professional services firm that had grown through acquisition and there was a global firm, and it was the perfect confluence of a lot of being client side, structuring an internal or in-house agency model, having some really great partners that came, either other verticals within specific renet for marketing, say digital marketing or creative or public relations what I'd like to now call media relations and getting a small, nimble team within this very large organization. Like when we were talking about my career, not only were they making business transitions acquiring different companies or expertise areas so that they could have one unique offering, but also bringing the people together that could execute a go to market strategy and a brand strategy that aligned with a business strategy. And I feel at that time when the project started, the marketplace was changing too. People were moving away from offset printing and one of the quotes or one of the mantras that I would always hear, especially within a marketing and sales organization is, well, we've always done it that way, meaning, well, we've always had a sell sheet. Why wouldn't we have a piece of paper on that list? Here's the product offering or service and a description of it to where we look at now, like when's the last time you held a sell sheet, a marketing brochure, or looked at collateral or intellectual property from a large organization and actually felt it.
Steve Goldhaber: That's right. Marketing marketing's value was decided by how glossy you could get that one sheeter. If it was really glossy, then you had a really good marketing department.
Eric Sawitoski: Was that a heavy weight, was that 120 pound , glossy cover stock because that's an important product or service. I got that tactile feel. Yeah. And the interesting thing about the CMO of that organization, he understood both from a colleague perspective and either a client or a future client perspective, that there were certain marketing tactics based on an emotional connection, right? Breaking through the clutter or having an affinity for a brand, and that those things were measurable, whether it's through client satisfaction scores, net promoter scores, or even employee satisfaction scores, and the way to get through or get to that rich data and insights, which are table stakes today, is that you have to build credibility through your marketing organization to earn your seat at the table. And then once you get your seat at the table then to know that you're gonna be measured in multiple ways for the success of marketing and creative initiatives so that in that world. it was referred to as marketing communications, but then sales was embedded within the business units. And that prior to this great team starting marketing was looked at as a cost center. More as an investment tool. So like when you think about publicly traded companies, how do you align a marketing strategy to a business strategy that is the ultimate in this scenario. The ultimate KPI was really the stock price, you know? Yeah. So, and not attributing everything from a marketing position. To the stock price. But there was a terminology and it was akin to influence or something being attributable. And how much would a marketing program based on either a milestone date or something happening within a quarter, how much would you attribute a marketing program to an increase either in bottom line revenue or to stock?
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, I'm gonna stop you for a second. The one thing that you said that kind of caught my attention is marketing's being viewed as a cost center, and I feel like that is such a big determination in any company where you are and do you have a seat at the table? My analogy for that has always been marketing viewed as the pharmacist where their job is to just execute what the doctor has said, or is marketing viewed as the doctor, someone who can listen, diagnose, recommend, treatments. And I think it's just important context because you can't assume that all marketers in the organizations have the same degree of engagement. I've talked to some people this week who are like, I'm the guy leading up marketing, we've never had marketing before and that's a totally different world than like, no, we have a team of 50, a hundred marketers, they're a machine that we've built because they serve a specific purpose.
Eric Sawitoski: Whether it was specifically at this organization that I was at, or what maybe a lot of people in the audience are experiencing is this whole idea of a marketing function can exist and I'm simplifying in two states you can react meaning order takers or you can be proactive, which is problem solving that's attributable to the bottom line. And it really depends on, I would say, the top tier of management. And what seat does marketing have at that table in my experience at this professional services the path was laid down by an executive committee, so essentially the executive committee was who reported to the board of directors and steered the direction of the company by having a head of marketing have a seat at that table.I think that was a way of saying that at the senior, most levels of the company value was associated with marketing as opposed to just cost. And whether it was my time at that organization or things that I've, even conversations I've been having more recently, you know, we're marketing is just earning a seat at the table going through that same process. How do I take a manufacturing company, a global manufacturing company with hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of revenue? and they're just dipping their toe into marketing. They're when you have a goal of getting to the number one position in any specific space, how do you maintain that position? If there's an endless amount of capital, sure you can keep acquiring, but then where do you start to see efficiency? I look at that, my experience with that one particular company and then the other company that I was advising, and there's things beyond the market that help give an organization that true north whether it's listing brand as a tangible asset on the balance sheet well, do you wanna have 25 disparate brands around the world, all with separate PNLs, all with redundant functions within those PNLs, all telling different messages, all leading to small, significant wins as opposed to larger combined wins that can lead to something greater in one example, it was driving stock price and securing market share than maintaining market share or market position. And the other example that was more recent, getting to that event is either potentially more investment capital or actually selling off the business.
Steve Goldhaber: What do you do if you were to define the one problem that you were up against in this story, what do you think it was, what were you trying to solve for? I mean we talked about efficiency, centralization, and consistency of messaging. What do you think is the biggest thing that you had to fix?
Eric Sawitoski: Jokingly, that was the one thing that we were always up against, I feel like it is time and expectation and getting to a measurable outcome. In the story that we're talking about right now, we're talking about a global organization, right? With a large colleague base spread out in over 700 offices and over 120 different countries in all of the marketing friction that comes along with that. Translation, stakeholder management, really getting people on the same page in, I'll speak generally in and a strategy, like when you're acquiring several, or in this case, hundreds of brands, you're growing your stakeholders, right? And people who have to say like, no, I built this book of business. I am solely responsible for why this company is successful within this geography, this region, this country, this part of the world, and only I know how to do it. And then to get that person to become internally a promoter and on the same page as the rest of the organization so that once we rightsize that message internally, how that resonates externally and when you're in that B2B space that's a tricky thing. This is in the story that we're talking about, there wasn't really a media spend. They tried it, but you know, it's just noise. Especially large organization with a defined buyer universe. At the start, it was how do you get to this more efficient digital model which was to earn content, earn media and publish content at the center. That was then shared out getting a large colleague base all on the same page so that then when those things started to resonate externally it was like for like for what the company was actually saying internally, and then finally getting to the point where even though you were doing, let's speak specifically about the content, geared towards a very specific audience. How could you then take more traditional marketing tactics or media tactics and go loud with those things so that you would be covering a larger audience, but really working a net promoter play so that the more people who were aware of a brand would be more likely to recommend that?
Steve Goldhaber: Yep. Tell me about the team that you had in creating the system. You know, what were their backgrounds, what were their challenges? What did they really focus on in creating the solution to take this brand in a different direction?
Eric Sawitoski: I would say at the center of it was the customer journey. A lot of people who know me and know my time at that company would probably point to a lot of other things that were just more tangible, whether it was partnerships or brand architecture. I think the thing that this company really got right from a strategic standpoint is something that we all hear a lot, which is Laser customer focus, right? So you're either speaking to someone who is a client or you know, talking about the company or their company's offerings in a way that somebody would be a future client. So there's a lot of different ways that we all know to get to that state. Usually larger. Let's bucket this category with large, publicly owned companies. People look at the overall market cap and they take a three to 5% number and say like, that's what their external agency spent, which was not the case in this category. So I think the CEO and the chief marketing officer partnered in identifying people with very specific skill sets, head of digital marketing as you're transitioning from offline to online, you need someone who understands overall customer journey and that plays in B2B and B2C because even within this specific example, there were B2C to B plays, so like marketing to organizations what people call affinity plays. So having practice leaders in digital when I talk about creative now, the way I like to look back at it is problem solving. A lot of people will put it in the category of design led thinking, and that actually was a position that they ended staffing for at a very senior level at this organization, and then creative as it relates to brand architecture. So how do you take highly matrix complex organizations and present them in a way that's not an org chart inside out. Right? So that it's more like the customer understands what the offering is more so than how the company is functionally organized from a human capital perspective.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, I agree on that. I mean, one thing I've seen the larger you go in terms of number of employees and just revenue, it becomes this thing where it tends to be who's the most important person or internal client in the room. And it's this whole debate about who's got more pull and who has more influence. And what I've been in those environments, what I've always tried to do is focus on the customer and bring them into the room, meaning , let the customer make those decisions if something is more meaningful or clear or interesting. And for the couple bigger companies I've worked for, that was always the challenge, right? It was the, Hey, we'll gladly spend four months having all these meetings, sharing the work, socializing it, getting alignment, and the customer was almost like, it was an afterthought because the effort required to align everyone internally. With such an undertaking it's hard. I think big companies really still struggle with letting the customer into those conversations so that they can very quickly guide it. Like my advice when I've done some brand work is you don't build brands for you. You don't build it for the brand or the head of marketing or the head of creative. If you build it for the customer and the customer needs to be making those decisions. Calling BS if you're saying something that's not true or it is true, but they don't believe it. So I don't know. That's my challenge. I still feel like a lot of the larger companies can benefit from just getting the customer in there and just having them get clarity from the get-go.
Eric Sawitoski: It's at this organization. That's where I learned the customer should be the center of every decision. And early on in my career or in this specific career or role I was presenting to the executive committee and it was something very subjective. I feel exactly what you're saying. There are a lot of people out there who are in this very spot. You have to present something from a marketing position whether it's consensus management or getting the CEO in on it, and that skill of presenting something through the lens off the customer so that it is less subjective and that it's a skill to present, say something based on customer or consumer data and to say I was sitting in a room, in a boardroom picture the Getty stock image of a boardroom, mahogany, the rich smell of leather the books on the walls, whiteboards. What have you, and the screen's behind me and I'm saying, look, I'm gonna show everyone in this room. A color change. We're talking about brand architecture and changing the one color that represents the brand. And I know that everyone in the room is responsible for how this company makes money. And I'm gonna use simple math. I already know half of you are gonna love it, half of you are going to hate it. Let's park that. Because both of those emotions. Work for what the goal is. Do you remember it? Does the customer remember this color as something unique and specific for this brand or is it in the mix of we have our top three competitors on the board. Are they gonna associate this color with one of our competitors or how we're trying to break out? And you could literally see them, like everyone was already with their opinions without having seen anything. You could see, like everyone's hitting their thing. Stuff like, I'm ready to give this young guy advice. And then, It takes the tension out of the room and forget that you're the CEO.
Steve Goldhaber: I call it what you just described. I call it defusing the bomb before it goes off in the sense that you're preparing the audience for, you're gonna see something, you're gonna be uncomfortable and you almost have to let them know you should be feeling that way. If you weren't feeling uncomfortable cuz it was new, then something's wrong. So sometimes it's like you said, it's just acknowledging their feelings so that they don't viscerally just say, I'm feeling so confused, you know?
Eric Sawitoski: You don't want to get in this story. One of the executives around the table had an 8 billion dollar p and l. Like, do I really want to get in the weeds with whether or not we feel like this person is managing a global organization, like making decisions like that. Of course they're gonna have an opinion on color.. Relaying it through the eyes, the customer. And then also that there wasn't an anecdotal decision. There was this saying at the company, if you can't measure it, don't do it. Which just helped me and my team that was tasked with a lot of subjective decisions to really get into the why we were doing things. And then when they hired the chief design officer, he had the greatest way of defusing the bomb, which was having this very pragmatic approach to problem solving. And he always teed up with the bridge analogy and to get a room filled with whether you're your stakeholders or CEOs or you know, heads of sales. Everyone has an opinion on the best way to do marketing. So the analogy is, how would you build a bridge? And of course, just like in the color example, every, well, I'd hire the best engineers. I'd hire the best site survey, I'd hire the best gc, the best construction company. I would make sure the supply chain is ready to meet the demand for all the materials we're gonna have. I would make sure that I have the best location to build it and then the best infrastructure surrounding the project so that it could be supportive. Take in all those answers and then you'd stand up in front of the room and say, the question is, do we even need a bridge ? And I think that's a great way of where this story started. People were used to doing things a certain way. Well, of course we need a bridge. We've always used bridges. What about a tunnel? What about air transport? What about two manufacturing facilities? Do you really need the bridge? We always feel the answer is obvious. Spend more money in media or hire more for media relations, create more content. But when you pull it back through the eye of the customer or the lens of the customer it gives you, I'm not saying question everything, but just be ready to do something unexpected and we had several examples of that within that organization.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. All right. Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing the story. We are now gonna jump into the get to know part about you, Eric. So I'm gonna kind of start with a question of it's a Monday morning, you don't have any meetings on your calendar. I know that this is a theoretical question, right? But let's say there are no meetings and you're like, I get to do whatever I want to do today. What are you gonna do? What gets you excited?
Eric Sawitoski: And family's not a consideration. Correct ?
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. That's the only requirement. You cannot take the day off to spend with your family. Okay. You can spend the day off with your family on Monday, Tuesday. Same opportunity. No meetings. What do you do on Tuesday?
Eric Sawitoski: So this is something I actually learned from someone in my network. He was a chief creative officer for a very large global advertising agency and what he would do is when he would go out. We're both photographers. He would go out, he would listen to music and he would go shoot photos. Now his approach is very different from mine. I studied photography in college. I've done everything from shooting live music to celebrities, to sports figures, really things outside of a studio. He would find himself in a location waiting for something to happen and then capture that moment. I look for it as a way to especially with people today, you find people like this, right? They're always in this world. For me, it's seeing the world differently, seeing how people respond to things, capturing a frame. Just and even though like everyone's a photographer, everyone has a phone I like to do it more in a sense of how I'm framing what I see. So doing it with a traditional camera body, it's something that helps me to focus and then also to pay attention because distraction is the enemy of everything right now. If you bring it back to a marketing conversation, it's either noise or clutter and it's something whether, you know, from being a manager of services that I'm challenged with, like how do I break through the noise? How am I guiding a company or an offering? To be seen like, well then for me it's how do I see things? How do I see the world? And then how do I get out of that screen mentality, so that I'm developing programs or helping develop creative that truly does resonate and doesn't just get lost in the sauce with everything. The same way that we're having a conversation right now, so that people engage with something outside of the way that they normally get their information. Something from that's more personal.
Steve Goldhaber: Alright, so I like that answer. I share your interest in enthusiasm and photography so I can appreciate that it's a camera that is also kind of a good metaphor for just being a marketer because you've got different lenses, you've got different variables to control, I mean, light speed subject framing. What are you doing? Post processing? Post capture and even when I when I was younger, I spend a ton of time in downtown Chicago in the loop just looking for stuff, and I would almost force myself to go out like two or three days in a row at different moments in time and just see different patterns and be completely different outcomes in the mood of the photograph or if it was in the morning rush hour, you would have a totally different vibe than what a Sunday morning would be like, and you just downtown Chicago for me was always just a great playground to experiment with photography.
Eric Sawitoski: Totally agree. And you brought up a really subtle point, like with the other photographer that I mentioned, he has, like me, we both started out traditionally as designers and then moved to managers of services. He's now started his own content agency. He has incredible post shop work. Whereas for me, I'm trying to stay just in that moment and capture that moment. But we as photographers would know as in camera. So I tried not to do too much with my per post workflow. It’s that really just capturing it while it happens. There was another photographer where, uh, that I'm close with, he had this great way of breaking down barriers because when you think of photography, it's transactional. Can I take your photo? And then especially, DSLRs and everything being digital and everyone being a phone, you're always taking something away from your subject. So what he would do is he would bring a Polaroid with him and it's the Polaroid where you're peeling the emulsion to get the print, and then he's handing the print to the subject and then scanning the emulsion so that like , Danny Clinch, you're getting that unique border around every print. But as we bring this back to marketing, like what is someone getting out of something that feels transactional, right? Marketing geared towards ultimately getting someone in the funnel and then converting. So along that journey, back to the customer journey, if it's always a take or an ask without a benefit or a value, like there's a deficiency in the program and that was just a very simple way of like, Hey, I'm gonna take your photo, I'm gonna give you something. And then that way both parties are walking away with something. It was a really insightful little nugget that that photographer gave me.
Steve Goldhaber: Photographers are always interesting people. It's like a photographer in Chicago, Bob Davis, who I followed years ago, described it as photography as my passport and being,he had done work, I think for the Sun times and he had followed Jordan during his kind of like heyday, and he was like, this was my passport. My camera has gotten me into places or talking to people. So photographers usually have really fascinating lives. Maybe that would be my career path. If I didn't do the marketing thing, I would be a photographer. But the traditional kind, not the, not the Instagram/ tiktok view.
Eric Sawitoski: It's an interesting place that we find ourselves, if you think about the global phenomenon of Michael Jordan and how the younger generation will argue who the goat is, who the greatest of all time is, and the power of imagery going back to where we started with our first story, imagery became a very particular way to resonate with the customer. How do you show a professional service? Something that can sometimes be intangible through an image. And then talking about Jordan, how an image of Jordan would show up in the most remote areas of the world, the same way that you can find the crest for Manchester United somewhere so far off the beaten path where there really is nothing other than spoken word or radio. And how a message or an image can permeate throughout the world, whereas there's this. I'm not gonna get the stat right. It's that the amount of photos taken today outweighs all of the photos taken. Yeah. Like being taken right now. Yeah. Outweighs all the photos that have been taken in history and that, you know, I'm not even gonna give you the number of photos on my phone that never see the light of day. Just live on the telephone.
Steve Goldhaber: The Jordan story's great because there's a joke about Michael Jordan's greatest accomplishment was if you were a tourist and said Chicago, you no longer said, oh, Al Capone. Yeah, haha. It was like, oh, Chicago, Michael Jordan. So he put Al Capone Jordan in the number two position, which is always…
Eric Sawitoski: I still get the bang thing
Steve Goldhaber: …with finger guns too. The double bang I'm gonna take, a path down memory lane here. So this is the question that I ask a lot of guests is like, go back and, and talk to your young self. When you started out on this journey, what are some things that you would say that you're totally wrong. You should've done this instead of whatever it was. What have you kind of, how have you grown as a marketer and a communicator?
Eric Sawitoski: This one came out of a meeting just yesterday, right? And we were looking at conversion, how, depending on where you are in the funnel, how you do something to convert. And we were talking about marketing principles, media principles, things that we know that work. And I was thinking, This is something that the CEO at that professional services company said. He's like, I'm not afraid of failure. I'm not encouraging everyone to fail. Failure is okay as long as you learn from it and fail fast. Like as I think about my career in totality, is when I got out of the university and I was doing things, it was more of “do this” because this is what everyone's doing. Like as a designer, like here are the things that, “this is great design”, “this is what typography everyone's using”, “this is color theory”, “Pantone does Color of the Year, have I used it?” Those types of things or even if you look at the media landscape, What's trending, how do I make something go viral? The most annoying thing ever . It's really like taking risks. Not being risk averse. You know, I've worked at companies, advising companies on risk mitigation strategies as it relates to marketing, and I think a lot of times what happens is people do play it safe, whether it's with an agency partner or with building an internal team. It's like, where are you taking chances? One of the greatest things about my career was something so unexpected that happened at an organization that if you had told me prior to it happening, I would say there's no way that this is going to happen. And it was a huge risk because it really hadn't been done before. Now explaining. Whether or not that program was successful to me, I have a point of view. I think it was extremely successful, but I think a lot of marketers are risk averse. They don't wanna put the thing in front of either their peer set, their management team, their stakeholders that say things like, Hey, this is risky and we should do it. A lot of people or at least in my experience, I don't wanna project on the people I have seen, you know, I wanna do this because we've done it before. I wanna spend this way because I'm looking at my last three years. My budget where I am either year over year, or how you measure success, whether it's week over week or month over month and say let's do some more of that. Whereas I'm sitting in this meeting yesterday and it came down to a platform solution where the platform was actually pushing something that didn't have measurement yet, and we had seen incremental success and there was sentiment that it was like, let's do what we're doing and then to see from leadership to say, let's push harder. Let's push harder on the unknown because what comes with that? A greater upside there's also a downside to that too, but I think finding those spots where you're comfortable to take risks. That's what's gonna get you ahead.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. You know, it's the unspoken thing in the room when you evaluate marketing or creative, no one would ever give feedback saying like, I'm really scared. Here's why. Like, it's, it's nuanced. They're not gonna say like, I think this is a mistake, because it's gonna put them personally in a position where they're going to be exposed to some risk. It's fascinating. Some people I've worked with are like, look, I am gonna make the most safe decisions because I wanna ride this position out for five or 10 years, and that's my goal. And that's their decision making framework, regardless of what you bring to them. There are other people who are just of the mindset that if I don't try something new or shake things up in two years, I'm gonna get fired. Right? So it's that that cultural part of marketing is so rarely discussed, and it has the biggest impact in it, and it's very rare that a leader truly will embrace the failing fast. I think that Silicon Valley has done such a great job of that, purely because if you couldn't test something and fail in three months, someone else was gonna build it. Big companies have adopted that mindset because they wanna be more nimble, but it's hard to always put into place. I had one of my previous jobs, there were maybe five different categories that all employees were graded on, and the term was flawless execution. And there started to be a movement of you can't push flawless execution and fear of not being afraid to fail as anywhere in the same room. And they eventually migrated away from flawless execution. But it took years for the c e o to be like You know, even though flawless execution is a good thing, like it was, it was scaring people because you couldn't make one mistake otherwise it was gonna show up in a review that you had not flawlessly executed.
Eric Sawitoski: I always look at that and I've heard similar, not the exact, to me that keep doing what we're doing right and do it well and checking boxes. I think about tenure in the CMO position, following this execution gets you that safe. 18-month. CMO spot, right? Like, Hey, I'm just executing. I'm keeping this plane in the air. Yeah. You know, there's so many analogies around the airplane, like, we're building the plane while we're flying it, or like, we're just keeping the plane in the air. We got to land this plane. Like enough about aviation,
Steve Goldhaber: That was successful, that was the aviation association. They have successfully lobbied their way into corporate vernacular.
Eric Sawitoski: Right. But where we started, And flawless execution is, that's keeping things to plan for me. I think marketing should always uncover new insight. Yeah. Uncovering a new way, a new methodology, a new way to either customer or consumer success. Something that leads to ultimately a balance sheet improvement. And I don't think that it shouldn't be something where you're just pulling in your toolbox and saying like, ah, here's the right tool that we're gonna use for this. There has to be something that you're trying that's new, whether it's a technology, whether it's a platform, whether it's a hiring strategy, you know, looking at your human capital plan and how you manage, retain, and attract top talent, like mix up the people. Mix up the people. I love the idea of some technology companies hiring engineers without college degrees. You know one of my friends who wanted to hire at an agency with people who had no experience in marketing, like they had experience being consumers. Yeah. You know, it's a really interesting time that we find ourselves right sizing, you know, the appetite or, you know, how you look at it is how much margin do you have for error? For failure, you know? Yeah. And measuring that against the upside Yeah. Of what you're doing that's what I'm doing right after this.
Steve Goldhaber: When I've led teams in the past, I feel like I'm a big believer in structure defines how ultimately things are managed. And I would try to structure things to say, these are the programs that are heads down, execute. You can put that in the Flawless Execution camp because we know they work and run. And then there are disruption or growth projects where it's unacceptable to bring the same solution over and over again. Like you have to do it. So sometimes that structure helped people get a little more comfortable to say like, okay, I can fail. And you know, I always tried to say , you just gotta have success in one project out of three should have success in an experimentation philosophy where like that one in three wasn't the formula on the business side of it. Right. But some people are comfortable, others are not. Like you don't announce that you're afraid of making a decision in the room, that's kind of my, “I'll ask myself a question now.” That's the great thing about having your own podcast, Eric, you just ask yourself questions. But my big learning has always been so much of marketing early on, I thought it was the technical knowledge whether it was consumer insights or research or like, I was so fascinated with, like, I wanna learn all that technical knowledge of how to build something really good and I looked back at that and said, Steve, you have to understand how human beings make decisions. Are they scared? Are they not scared? What's the business context behind how a marketing idea is being presented? Because you could have a great marketing solution that doesn't solve a problem. So it's something that isn't really taught. In marketing creative schools really like there's just so much more time that should be dedicated to how the brain makes decisions and how to understand people's left versus right brain decision making.
Eric Sawitoski: I think you're probably setting up your next podcast, which is whether it's corporate culture, Or organizational culture where people are given the latitude to do certain things. Like what you were saying, one in three projects need to be successful based on these metrics and coming outta the pandemic. Right. A lot of organizations were shaken up. Uh, one in particular that I worked with, which was focused on retail or on-prem chains. That whole experience-based economy changed overnight and forever. So coming out of that, whether I was advising clients or looking for my next opportunity, the thing that became, love to say mission critical, that was really at the forefront of my thinking is what culture do I want to be in. Do I wanna be a part of something that's more entrepreneurial and gives you the room to really solve problems from a risk reward standpoint? or is it, what are the organizations that survived the pandemic in whatever way? So I could just find this place where I'd park myself and like we were talking about earlier, and have a tenured career. Obviously I made a very specific choice and it's interesting and finding organizations that provide that culture or each even encourage it. I think when you look at the economy today, when you look at hiring today, or you look at either as someone who's a team leader, like. Who's the right fit for the organization? What am I investing in them? How am I keeping them, and how are they helping the organization grow? Steve, you are great at generating the ideas for content.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. Well, Eric, I've enjoyed having you on the show today. Give us some knowledge. Give us a gift as we wrap things up. What's either like a prediction that you've got could be some advice. What would you like to share with the viewers before we wrap it up?
Eric Sawitoski: So I'll end where we began and I pulled a phrase out of that professional services term tenure. That role that I had where it came up a lot and it was B2B, but B2B in a sense of when you look at, at. Right. It was share of wallet. It's how they looked at their customer base and based on the product and service offerings, what share of wallet would they get from the Fortune 1000? What part of their budget would they get for their services or offerings? And then I looked at where we are today in inflation, jobs, hiring, I just listed a new marketing role and all of the inbound cvs that are coming in. And then when I think about our customer journey, share of wallet, like really. Marketing programs have to be, and it's whether it's B2B or B2C, like how are you focusing on your customer so that your offering aligns with what the opportunity spend is? And if you don't have insight into that, you're literally throwing the spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. So it's that share of wallet concept.I was surprised I even said it out loud. I'm like, we have to be thinking about the shared wallet. We have to be thinking about where we are at the end of the year and where our budgets are and what people have to spend. And yeah, I could see that having been in that role several years ago or in the role that I'm today.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. Awesome. All right. Well, I enjoyed connecting with you, Eric. Thank you for joining us today in Studio 26. We'll see you next time on interesting B2B marketers. Take care, everyone.
Eric Sawitoski: Thank you.