Episode 51: Branding, Gamification, and the Art of Effective Communication | Christian Klepp

In this episode, Steve Goldhaber sits down with Christian Klepp, the co-founder and director of EINBLICK Consulting, to delve into the intricate world of B2B marketing. They kick off the conversation with the complexities of branding in joint ventures, emphasizing the challenges and importance of merging different corporate cultures.

The episode also explores a successful case study where gamification was used to engage engineers, resulting in high engagement and lead generation. Another highlight is the turnaround story of a global adhesives company that revamped its internal communications strategy, achieving improved readership and engagement.

Both seasoned marketers share personal anecdotes from their careers, discussing highs and lows, including the importance of aligning on objectives and being open to external feedback. Christian offers valuable advice for emerging marketers, cautioning against the pitfalls of being a people-pleaser.

Whether you're new to the field or a seasoned marketer, this episode is packed with insights and practical tips that are not to be missed.

Connect with Christian Klepp and Steve Goldhaber on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Disclaimer: The transcription of our podcast episodes has been generated by a third-party AI tool. While we strive for accuracy, we cannot guarantee that all typos, errors, or misinterpretations have been corrected. So, if you come across any blunders, don't blame us. Blame the robots. (Just kidding, don't blame them either. They're doing their best.)

Steve Goldhaber: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Studio 26. I'm the host of this podcast Interesting, B2B marketers, and I'm excited to have Christian join us on the show today. Welcome.

Christian Klepp: Hi Steve. It's a pleasure to be here.

Steve Goldhaber: Alright, so before we jump into case studies, go ahead and give us a little 60-second background about who you are.

Christian Klepp: Okay, well here we go. I'm originally from Austria in Central Europe. Spent most of my life out in Asia, specifically the Philippines. Singapore. I spent the 13 years of my life out in Shanghai, China. I met my wonderful wife who was originally from Toronto, Canada. I'm just following me around the map so far.

And I am currently based here in the great city of Toronto with my wife and daughter, and I am also the co-founder and director of client engagement here at EINBLICK Consulting. So we are a consulting firm that specializes in branding and marketing for tech professional and I.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. Awesome. Cool. All right, let's jump into the case. The first one you're gonna walk us through has to do with a joint venture between two different companies. This is in the auto industry, and the need here is they needed to figure out some brand.

Christian Klepp: Absolutely. Absolutely. So I always like to call this one like the a mixed marriage, right?

Two different cultures coming together, and it really was true in every sense of the world, right? There were these two big conglomerates. They had very different ways of running their businesses, and this happened to be in the automotive spare parts industry, which I can attest to is a very, for lack of a better description, an intensely competitive space because you're dealing with a bigger brands who are fighting with product expertise, know-how product itself, and then you're dealing with the local counterparts who prices

challenge. Manyfold because you know, you had a new company, you had people from both sites, from two different companies and two different corporate cultures now becoming one team who had to work together. But you also had a new company, which you can rightfully attest to. There is zero brand awareness in the market.

They don't have an identity. Within a very short time, they had to prove that they were gonna be profitable, right? Which is no small feat by any means, right? So where did we come into the picture? We started basically by not designing a brochure first, we got everybody together on their teams, right?

The executive team, the mid-level managers, the junior level managers at separate times, of course, right? And we did what we call, we ran a diagnostic canvas, right? So what that basically means is, well, What do you see as the strength of your company? And please do not talk about your product. Alright? Yes.

What? What is it that you are trying to solve for your customer? Give us an understanding of this ecosystem that you are working in, and how does that help the customer? Right. From doing this exercise, it was interesting to extract from them. Of course, some of them couldn't help themselves and they dropped all the patented products and all that, and we're like, okay, well, well, we'll get to that in a second.

Right? But what is it that you guys actually do that helps your customers, right? And from digging and continuously probing, what we actually uncovered was not that the strength was the peak.

When the spare parts come into the production plan, into the assembly line. Right. And it all goes back to producing more, reducing downtime, reducing inefficiencies, reducing errors, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And because they understood that process so well, they were equipped with the know-how and the experience and the solutions, which.

Were able to package and that's what they were able to sell to the customer as a key selling, right? Yeah. Whereas everybody else in the competitive ecosystem, which we also happen to look at, they were talking about products, right? We, we've got the best this, we've got the best that we've got. Patented solution.

But come on, nobody caress about that, right? And so we took that and we used that as part of the relevant brand strategy we we developed for them. We also then came up with the full brand identity, which was, if I do say so myself, I'm exceptionally different from what the competitors looked like. Right?

'cause it had to be, they had to stand up because they were, they were smaller in terms of size compared to the competitors. Right. But they, they were competing in the same space. They were going after the same RFPs.

Steve Goldhaber: Right. Rf.

The positioning is very interesting, and it's funny how just there's a safety net in product, right? Yes, yes. Any executive at the company who just kind of sit talks about product, product, product, it's safe. You know, sometimes you actually, they are, they're completely right. Yes. They have a superior product or some technical part of how they're manufactured or distributed is, is better, but is that of interest to someone who doesn't really know and trust you yet?

What I try to advise clients on is there's a time and a place to have that product war, meaning like you will go to combat and you're gonna talk about your competitor's product. There's a time and a place, but if you have that conversation too early, people aren't ready for it, they're gonna tune you out.

How was that struggle to get them to align on that, like unique positioning? Was it relatively easy? Did it hit them as like a, oh my God, it's been in front of us the whole time, or did you have to really drag them into it? It was a

Christian Klepp: process where they kind of knew that this was their unique selling point, but they had this, I'm gonna call it like ion, so an elevated revelation, right?

They had that, that ion when we actually mapped it out for them in a, in a workshop, and then they looked at that and took a step back and we could see them like looking at each. Yeah, that's it. Right. And you know, it was interesting to see that unfold because in the beginning they all had different opinions, right?

Yeah. They all agreed, they all agreed to a certain extent that it was their understanding of the customer's struggles that unified them. And there was something there. It was like that I think what was missing there was the in factor, and they needed to have that mapped out, diagram out. Yeah. In order for them to understand that.

Right.

Steve Goldhaber: So my next question, this is I'm smiling, so those watching the video will see that I'm smiling, but the, the audio listeners clearly cannot. Okay. So just know that I'm smiling audio listeners. So now you've got a good positioning. It's the decision that every marketer is faced with. Do you vet the positioning by talking to your customers?

Or do you just feel good about it and, and the launch? How did you guys proceed?

Christian Klepp: Yeah, so we did the latter, although we insisted that we needed to test it first. But this was one of these, as you know, as it tends to be, this is one of these situations where they said, look, we're, we understand that you have to go through that process and it's the right way to do it, but we're a little bit of on, on, on a time crunch and we have to show somebody higher up.

The board of directors, the c e o, somebody at Global HQ, that we are, that things are moving and that we are putting things out there and we're delivering. So unfortunately against our advice on, they just released that into the wild.

Steve Goldhaber: It's the most stressful time to to be, to be a marketer and based with that decision.

'cause everything just points to. Validate it, even if you have to do it like the wrong way. Meaning like, Hey, just grab 10 customers and get the reaction. As opposed to like formal focus groups, every marketer is faced with that decision. That would be a great, maybe we should, we should add a part to the podcast.

It's like betting everyone can bet on every case study. Did you validate it? Yeah. And yeah. I'd say most times not, you know, most time there is, there is such a sense of urgency and need or confidence by leadership that, that we got it right. But obviously that is so dangerous to do because you can just spend a good three to six months implementing something and then realize, oh my God, we got it wrong.

And now, now we've gotta backtrack.

Christian Klepp: Absolutely. Absolutely. But I will add in one caveat there, Steve, that we said, we said, okay, if you're the client at the end decision,

It's entirely up to you, but just, just know that we feel that this is the right way to do it. So we released that into the wild, but like six months later we did tell 'em, let's go now that you've got some clients, you've got some traction, let's go and test it out and see if what we put out there resonates.

Right. We eventually did conduct that survey with some customers and you know, of course, It's not always such a straightforward process, as you can rightfully attest it, because some people just flat out don't care. Yeah. Right. If they say, it doesn't make any difference to me, as long as they deliver a good product.

Right. So, and that goes back to why we understand like, yes, we get it, that the client wants to focus on the product because there are other, their customers are out there saying like, we don't care about your positioning. It's all about your product at the end of the day. We did get some customers that we interviewed where they did really give us great feedback and they said, well, yes, it resonates with me.

However, maybe you might wanna consider changing this and this. Yeah. So they actually did take the time to provide us with that constructive feedback that we were looking. All right.

Steve Goldhaber: Well that's good. Yeah. It was the right decision later in the process, which, which is good.

Christian Klepp: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Steve Goldhaber: Alright, anything else you wanna share about the first case study?

Christian Klepp: Yes, indeed, indeed. I've done a couple of these brand rollouts. And the brand rollouts are only as good as the consistency and the follow up. And the regular, I'm not gonna use the word policing, but like, you know, the regular monitoring. Right. And because we've been in situations before where the client insists now we just do it once and then that's it.

Right. And what we usually tend to see happening in the, in the succeeding months is, If the brand is not properly monitored, people will just go ahead and do whatever they want. Right? And we, we wanted to avoid that from happening with this kind of case because of the stakes that were involved. So what we did was, on the day that we actually launched the brand, we act, we had a formal workshop at the headquarters where we involved obviously the members of the board, members of the marketing team, but more important, The marketing team went around and selected what they called brand champions.

So people that are in a non-marketing function that were responsible for enforcing the brand and seeing that the brand is used properly. Right? And the way that we did the brand rollout was to, we, we did it, or we communicated it as if we were sitting in their own shoes or we were looking at this from their lens.

And what that basically means in layman's terms is why should somebody in HR or in accounting, Who's in charge of payroll care about the brand? Yeah. How is it relevant to them? Why should they care? And what's in it for them? So that's how we spun it in this rollout. And what we then did was every three or four months, we did a regular like grant workshop where we told them, okay, so this is the next step of the rollout and this is what you should be looking out for and this is why it's relevant to you.

These are the next steps. So everything was mapped out. There was a roadmap, there was an action plan, there was a calendar. And by doing it that way, and by having this regular and frequent communication, everybody was aligned regardless of they, whether they were marketing or not. Right? Because marketing or the brand team, they were.

They were the gatekeepers, right? They were, they were the ones leading the initiative. But everybody else understood that they were a part of this exercise as well. Yeah,

Steve Goldhaber: I think that's smart. Especially as you get into these really large companies, you realize absolutely that you can't, you can't, as marketers or brand marketers just muscle everything through on your own.

You've gotta provide the, the inspiration, the toolkit, the training, but recruiting top brand ambassadors is a great strategy. Yeah. Alright. Yeah. Let's jump into case study number two. This one is for a large tech software company, and we're gonna talk about playing some games. So the old gamification strategy, take it.

Christian Klepp: Okay. Just a very brief background to give people some context. Alright, so this client was a, or is, continues to be, excuse me, a leader in the testing equipment and computer software space. So what they wanted to do was conduct outreach to the target market and potentially drum up some new business by tapping into.

Who are we talking? Who are they talking to here? Who, who was it that they were trying to reach out to? Engineers, right? And so whether folks know this or not, but engineers love very technical things. That's short of stating the obvious. But they also love, they also love to analyze situations and startling them, right?

Like, because that's how, that's what they're trained to do, right? If they're working in a reactor or if they're working in a plaid, that they are trained to identify problems and solve them, right? So we had the idea of like, why don't we tap into what we know is that that need, that they have, that tendency that they have, and instead of just hosting content about this topic, which they most likely will, you know, the, the, the most likely reaction that you'll get is they'll scroll past it, right?

Why don't we gamify this a little bit, right? And spin it from that angle, like, okay, let's test your knowledge on this topic by coming up with an online quiz, right? So the client had their database of context that they wanted to reach out to and what they called their wishlist of like their three or 400 like ideal accounts that they wanted to tap into, right?

So what we did was we came up with a creative direct and an dm. We blasted out saying, There's this little quiz we want you guys to take if you're interested, and if you, if you are one of the first 10 contestants to sign in and participate, these are some of the prizes that you'll get. We also used influencers because yes, there are engineers that out there that have a huge following on social media that write about this stuff, right?

And obviously there was a campaign webpage. So what we did then was, okay, so we.

The target audience and saying like, okay, well we, we got, we, we all know you guys are smart, so let's see how well you do. And you know, like it was a really short quiz. There were only six questions, right? Mm-hmm. Because you, you, you want to, you wanna grab their attention, you want them to take action. And if you send out a quiz with 20 or 30 questions, then they'll just drop off, right?

Yeah. So just make it like short and sweet, right? So we implemented that and response from fairly decent. I mean, let's. Initiative was only run for like four or five weeks, if I'm not mistaken. So we got a total of signup of 225 participants out 400 of which hundred 81 leads were generated, and outta which 15 of those were identified as on the client's wishlist of the big, of the big fish that they were trying to go after.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, it's, I'm, I've really like the, you know, gamification in the form of like, content meaning, like, that that is the thing. We're not just gonna talk about how important we are and we're not gonna get on our, you know, university professor lecture style delivery. Yeah. So I, I, I like that strategy. I always like, you know, and I think, you know, as, as a consumer of information too, like when anyone tries to challenge me, like, well, how good are you?

How you know? Yeah. Can you pass this? It's fun. You know, you're, you're, it's a psychological thing where you're, you're challenging someone and that's the, that's the inherent tension that you're creating with that content is, ooh, there's a challenge that's been thrown down. Can I pass it?

Christian Klepp: Absolutely. And going back to your point what we made sure we didn't do in this quiz was like, go on about the client's products.

Yeah, we focused on this trending topic, which yes, the client's company was involved in that, but they're not the only one. So it's a little bit more top level. Right. Because I mean, like, you know, people, engineers are pretty smart. They, they can, they can sniff out a veiled sales pitch, right? So, so we tried to make sure that it wasn't about the client's company at all.

It was a, it was about that.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. So you've got like these 15 clients, potential customers, right? What do you, what do you do next that you've got this great list? How do you follow up and, and ultimately try to engage them or sell them something?

Christian Klepp: Well, I mean that, that, that part of the process was, you know, like we saw on the backend, like, you know, compared their details to the client's database and said, Hey, this might be somebody who's a right fit for what you guys sell.

And then that then went to the client salespeople a follow up. Right. Okay.

Steve Goldhaber: So, yeah. Makes sense. Anything else about the case that you wanna share?

Christian Klepp: It was one, these examples of. Was very predictably technical. They had very specialized like products and services. And this was a great example of a client that was willing to, that had a little bit of an appetite for risk, if I may say so.

Right. 'cause there's always a risk in putting things out there. Right. But I think it was a, it was a calculated risk because it was a very, it was a very small campaign. It was a short campaign to test out. To get a finger on the pulse of the market to, to test things out. And it was great that the client was willing to go with us on that journey and take that, take that risk.

And it ended up actually being not just a fun, but an engaging exercise, not just for the client, but for their potential customers. Right. Because one of the things, and I forgot to mention this earlier, that we noticed, you know, from the data that was coming back, was the reason why participation.

This online quiz to Via DMM or E D M then shared it with other engineers, because going back to your point, they were like, Hey Jim, Hey Bob. So I got, I got like four out of six. Let's see how you do, right? Yep. So we got, we, we, we, we tended to get a lot of like information or data that described that kind of situation.

Steve Goldhaber: Yep. Yeah. That's awesome. Alright, we're gonna into case study number three. This one. For anyone who's worked at a large company, you realize the power and the need for internal comp. So many times we, we just figure these things out amongst US marketers and there's two or three or four of us in a room and we go, oh yeah, we, this is all, we've solved this problem, but we don't factor in the need to really.

Communicate it, get people on board, make sure that they're aligned. So that's, that's where you're gonna focus on for this next one as it relates to an adhesives company.

Christian Klepp: Yeah. So I think I can start up this case study by saying, this is where I really saw the adage out of sight, out of mind, play out, right.

And then, because when we started working with this client, they're a global adhesives company and we were working with their mark their internal communications team that was responsible for 10. 10 to 12 countries. Okay. So in in the Asia Pacific region. And there were many problems that they were confronted with, but I think if I'm gonna try to summarize it like, just for the, for the sake of, in the interest of time, a lot of what they were doing was quite reactive in the beginning.

Right. They were seeing very low readership rates in what they call their intranets, their internal platform. Where they posted content. They had a quarterly newsletter that was both available in print and on digital versions, and they were struggling to populate these newsletters with content. The fourth one, which I, which we also thought was, I mean, it was an interesting challenge, but many of their non communications colleagues in the other departments and business functions did.

Right. The question would always come up. I mean, it wasn't surprising, but it was still, it was still interesting to, to observe. Like, you know, we would, we would come across people that were like, oh, okay. Well what is it exactly that your, your function does? Right? So how do we solve that problem?

Because there were the, the, you know, this steep mountain decline, right? How we solved that problem was really to, we conducted an audit of the current assets because we gotta understand what we're dealing with here and what, what's currently being done, and focusing on the positive. So what is it that, you know, what is it that they're, you know, they're good at and they're doing well?

You know what's doing well and where's the room for improvement. And after that, we then went on to conduct interviews with communications people in the different.

R and d sales, et cetera, et cetera. And we asked them questions like, okay, do you, do you log onto the internet? Do you read the newsletter? Why or why not? What is it you find interesting and why? What content would you like to see? So we tried to get insights from the potential reader's perspective and to no surprise.

The answers that they came up with were different from the answers that the communications team came up with. So we gathered all those insights and we conducted a workshop with the communications team. So everybody flew in from the, from the different regions and including one representative from the global hq.

And we said, okay, so this is the research that we did. This is what people like and this is what needs to improve and this is the reason why. So it's nothing personal. It's like, look, you guys wanna improve this, how? Within, within that one full day, we hammered out an entire communication strategy for the entire year complete with a content plan for the newsletter and for the intranet, right?

Yep. So strategy. Then we came up with the action plan because, you know, like a strategy is only gonna be as good as its implementation. Right. Checklists of what to look for when you're, you know, when you're searching for content. Every month had a different theme. The reason why they were running out of things to write is because there was no strategy.

It was no theme to think of. Right, right. And, and when they did gather this information from people, they weren't asking the right questions. So we.

The new approach and implemented all these initiatives based on the new strategy and spurts. And what I mean by that is like launch monitor test, it repeats, right? Yeah. And, and we saw over the a period of, I'm gonna say from six to 12 months, we ended up seeing eventually like a. Between 40 to 50% increase in readership in the intranet.

We got to a point with a newsletter where there was too much content and we had, we had to park it. We had to park some of the content, move it to the next quarter, right? People started becoming more cognizant, I'm gonna say more aware of the communications department. They were contacting the communications department with stories to contribute, right?

Or when they, when they had a call for interviewee, if people sign up and said, I wanted to be in, I want to be interviewed by you now. Yeah. Or whereas previously that wasn't the case at all. So these were improvements that did not happen overnight. I'm gonna be honest. I mean, but they, they were incremental.

But I think in the, within the span of like two years, two to three years, I mean, we, we did see some visible improvements there.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. It's, you know, it's such a beast to align companies, especially when you're dealing with multiple countries where sometimes there's language and culture differences.

Absolutely. You realize when you put the time into internal comms and in this case an intranet to kind of be the hub, you start to see how eventually everyone starts talking about it and how it just becomes the new normal. Yes. But it's, it's never fast. I've never seen one of these projects happen in fewer than a year, year and a half.

Yeah. And that, like you said, I've seen it way where it's. You just gotta get enough momentum. And then once you've hit that like tipping point, then you're like, all right, now everyone understands it. Now we can get better and we can fine tune it.

Christian Klepp: Absolutely. Absolutely. If I, if I can just jump in. There was one other thing that we observed, which was really interesting.

When we first engaged with this client, we saw that a lot, not all of their content, but, but majority of their content revolved all interview with c.

Interview with all these people that were like upper levels of the organization, right? And the reason why the readership was low is because people could just not like, associate with this person was too, you know, too high up. Right? But when we started changing that angle where we, we were not saying like, don't interview the c e o at all.

Of course, you know, every quarter there should be something like a, like in the newsletter there should be a message from the C, but.

For example, they had a theme about like simplification, which I think is, which I think is great because they had a talent to overcomplicate everything, right? So simplify was such a, was such a great theme. So we would interview this mid-level manager from the engineering department this intern that was starting out in hr.

So it was people from different stages or different levels in different business units within the organizations within the organization that were being interview. That tended to resonate better with people. Why? Yep. Because I know Sally from hr. Yeah. She just started last week. Exactly. Yeah. Et cetera, et cetera.

Right. So it it, it goes down to like how you make the content relevant to the organization, relevant to the reader, but also highly relatable.

Steve Goldhaber: I agree. I think I've seen companies over index on executive leadership and yes, they need to have a presence in all these things, but almost absolutely it's dangerous to.

Just rely on that. I remember one of the companies I was working for started hit hitting up everyone with more of a video strategy because Yeah, the emails that the executives were sending out were just so boring. Yeah. Like it just was like, you would see these long emails come out and in three to five seconds you would go, yep, I'm not interested in this, and there's really nothing new going on.

And part of the, the way to get around that was just doing video so that you had to actually. Watch the person speak and you had a more of a real connection listening and watching a video as opposed to just an email that just seemed overproduced. You know? It was kind of like the PR team was there, the internal comms team was there, but video just as a really powerful way just to kind of feel like you're connecting to humans one-to-one.

Christian Klepp: Absolutely. Absolutely. Another little anecdote I'd like to throw in here. Something that I can't claim credit for this, this is something my ex-colleague said who used to be a journalist, and he said, you gotta look at it with a journalist's eye or look at it from a journalist's angle. And what that basically means is this more than one way to tell a story.

In fact, one of the workshops that we did with the communications team was we, we said, okay, so this is the exercise, this is the topic. Come up with seven to eight different story angles, right? Yes. Because you can't, you can't just go at it from one angle. Why we, why we got them to do this exercise is because we, you know, when we, when we started working them with them, we would see content like, okay, the global team visited the facility and they toured the lab.

So how can we make that more interesting or make somebody that doesn't care about that? Like, how can we peak their interest? Oh, the r and d team, we don't have to mention the name of the product, but they came up with a solution and this is the adhesive that goes into your, to your mobile device. And this is how long it takes them to make it, and this is what it consists of, et cetera, et cetera.

And we, you know, we come up with infographics and video, for example. Right. So you're taking this, what would've otherwise been this very dry and boring topic. Yeah. Of like, okay, the global team visited the lab as they would in like 30 other countries, but what made this particular visit so interesting?

Yeah.

Steve Goldhaber: Alright, thanks for sharing case study number three. We're gonna jump into q and a. So Christian, tell us about your first gig in marketing. What were you doing?

Christian Klepp: Yeah, so I mean, specifically for, with E two B marketing that career for me officially started in 2011. Right? So I was based out in Shanghai, China at the time and I was working in an, an advertising agency that positioned itself as one that does unconventional advertising.

Well, what that basically means is gorilla marketing and you know, all those kinds of stuffs, okay. Creative. And I was senior account director at the time and also responsible for a new business. And I had just secured us a meeting where we were going to pitch for the Diageo Bailey's business, right? So we went through the motions, came up with these great ideas, even produced some of the items that we were, you know, proposing for the gift pack.

We worked tirelessly on that for four or five weeks, including weekends, and we finally presented it to the client and the client loved the presentation. Two weeks later, we got the phone call that we did not get the business. We were not awarded the business. As you can imagine, that was extremely demoralizing for the team who had worked day and night.

Yeah. Burning the midnight oil, as they say. And that kind of fell. That fell back on me because I was the one that, you know, that was my contact and I reached out to you. That process happened was. Two or three days later, I had gone to a networking event and this is where the story gets interesting. So I'm at the bar waiting for my drink and I, I chat with this American gentleman, we exchanged name cards and he says, oh, you guys doing advertising?

Okay, well you know, this is my company and I'm not gonna say who they are. Heavy machinery. We need a corporate video, can.

B2B marketing project and Okay. Because we, if I can say so myself, we over-delivered on that project and that client continued to give us business and he became my long-term client for like eight or nine years Yeah. Until he retired.

Steve Goldhaber: That's great. I'm gonna go back to the pitch meeting that you talked about, you know?

Sure. I've done a lot of pitches. Yeah. Some that, you know, they're long, long windows of pitching, right? Mm-hmm. So it's a two month, three month. Four month thing. Yep. And you become a, you know, you become obsessed, right? And you Yes. And you are so passionate about your ideas and yes, you're aware that you're, you're competing against other agencies.

Yeah. But it's always, it always is so interesting when you find out whether you won or lost. And if you do lose, it's almost like you can't believe it, right? Like it's always, I don't understand what happened. And there's, there's always. I shouldn't say always. There's usually very relevant feedback that you're given.

Yes, absolutely. And it's, and sometimes it has nothing to do with the idea or the energy that went into the, into the production of that meeting. It's, it's something totally different. It's about, yeah, skill sets or this was a safer decision, so, but the moment that you find out if you win or lose is always an exciting yet stressful day.

Christian Klepp: I'm gonna be brutally honest, Steve, because I know why we lost that pitch. Yeah. Why? And I can, I can, I can talk about it now in hindsight because it happened, it happened a while back. But we were essentially as an agency functioning within the silo. And in that silo, we all believed that our ideas were so hot that the client has to love it.

And the mistake that we made there was not getting external feedback or validation. Right? Yes. We shoulda shared, I should have shared this with. My friends who were working at other agencies who were creative directors and say, you know, Hey Brad. Yeah. Can, can you have a quick look at this key visual, you know, gimme your thoughts on it.

And they should have, like, they should have ripped the work apart because that would've helped us to improve. Yeah. And I think that's why, that's why we lost, right? Because we did not approach this with deep humility and get that, that feedback that we needed. Yeah. Before the actual client presentation.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, that's pretty, that's a powerful insight and I think that I can relate to that. My, the early part of my career, I was always so excited about an idea that I had come up with, or the team I was working on had come up with that. You just fight for the idea and you realize now, after you've done it for a while, that's a very bad thing.

You should not fight for the idea because one. You, you're just blindly going into it thinking that it's great and it is not necessarily great. So when I, when I kind of try to mentor younger folks in the industry, I kind of say like, you literally, you're not pitching the idea. You're sharing an idea and you have to look at it almost like.

The ideas on the wall, and you and the other person are standing side by side looking at the idea. So you're not representing the idea. I'm not trying to win you over, right? It's just, Hey, there's an idea on the wall. Let's talk about what's working, what's not working. And I wish I had that advice early on in my career because that's where you get better feedback and some ideas just need to be scrapped.

They're not good. Yep. But many times someone can give feedback and take an idea and make it better. And that's where you realize that's the really, the power of sharing ideas as opposed to pitching.

Christian Klepp: Absolutely. Absolutely. And thing I, I, which I fairly quickly, but I wish, I wish, especially some. I should have adopted this skill much earlier on in the piece.

Do not take the feedback personally. It's got nothing to do with you. Yeah, right. And I, I, I find that we would've avoided so many unpleasant conversations or, you know, confrontations if people would've just taken the feedback as listen. This is why it doesn't work, and this is why, and this is what you can do about it.

And you know, how often have we have you and I been in, you know, brainstorming sessions or you know, first internal review where the creative guy gets up and tears, you know, tears everything up and says, you guys don't appreciate my work. It's, it's not about that at all. It's about how does this help our work client ultimately if we get this business.

Steve Goldhaber: It's, it's challenging, you know, creative people are, are wired very differently. Oh yes. In a good way. Like, intentionally you want them wired differently because they don't, they don't always approach things conventionally, but you do have to bring them into the world of reality. Whether that's the, hey, the client's running a business.

Hey, this idea is a little too risky. Yeah. My, my pet peeve when I worked a longer time ago in the, on the agency slash advertising world. Was the, like, I cannot see another idea that needs a celebrity spokesperson to pull it off. I'm like the clients. Yep. Like very few clients have that money or that appetite for a big celebrity name.

And my, my advice to the teams was always, if the idea works without a celebrity, then it's still an idea. But you, you can't just bank on the celebrity to pull everything off. What what do you enjoy most about marketing? You, you and I have been doing it for a while. What gets you excited?

Christian Klepp: Yeah. Believe it or not, I, I, I love solving problems and I think a big part of marketing is the ability to solve a client's problem.

I think it's not the only reason why this profession or this discipline exists, but it is one of the primary reasons, I believe. So it's the ability to solve problems, the ability to address these inherent challenges that their business is facing with their customers. Potentially also within the organization, you know, I mean, you know, back to the internal communications piece, right?

So that's what gets me excited about marketing and you know, with every case it's different, right? Like even if you can say like, oh, it's a communications issue, but it's gonna be a different level of that different, it's a different type of problem with each case, right? Because it depends on the stage that the company is in, the level of maturity, the type of team that they have, the different dynamics.

And so,

Steve Goldhaber: I'm, I'm with you on the problem solving. I'm, I'm super passionate in trying to figure out the problem, and I'm always surprised how many people Yes. That I work with when they, where we, we talk marketing, right? Mm-hmm. So we're in the trenches. We are knee deep in marketing and comps. Yeah.

Conversations. And then you ask, well, what's the business problem we're trying to solve her? And they just don't have an answer. Yeah. And that's a good place to be. Meaning like you've now uncovered something that really will help. Refine your marketing program because yes, if you cannot say, this is the business problem and this is how we're gonna solve it, it really is just a di it, it's a conversation that anyone can win.

Like it, it's just who's the most important person in the room is gonna determine what we're doing as opposed to the, what's the best plan to solve that problem. Absolutely. What gets you frustrated with marketing? What is something that you're like, oh man, if I could get rid of this one thing. I'd be so much more happy.

Christian Klepp: Yeah. So, yeah. You know what, Steve, I've been thinking about this one for a while, right? Because there's so many ways I could go with this, but people that come and ask you for your advice or your recommendations, you give it to them and they say, okay, you know what? I'm gonna go and do the complete opposite of what you just told me to do.

And then they come back and complain that it didn't work. Yeah, that drives me absolutely nuts, right? Yeah. The second one, which I've seen both on the client side and internally on the agency side, is this constant you, you've probably heard of these diseases 'cause they're not rare, right? They're very common actually.

So first disease is anana analysis paralysis, and the second disease is opinion. Sitis. It's nice.

Steve Goldhaber: I've heard of the first disease, not the second disease.

Christian Klepp: That's I've, I've learned something new today. I've been in situations before, and again, I'm not naming names, but where there was a website revamp or there was a rebrand and it went through six to, it was supposed to be a three month exercise and then became an 18 month exercise, then a 24 month exercise because people could just not agree.

On. They just were not aligned on where this is all going. And with every new design, every new positioning that came, we came up with every iteration. There was just something new that had to be thrown into the pot. And those kinds of situations drive me up the wall because the road nowhere.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, that's, yeah, I've always been a big fan of, I call those like tiebreaker moments and my recommendation that I've tried to make policy is just, No worries.

If we have a tiebreaker customer gets to decide. Yes. And there's nothing that I've seen be more productive where the customer is making those decisions, whether it's a focus group or something, right? Mm-hmm. And quickly you will see the, the person who is representing idea one or Idea two, like they just have to rally around what the customer's saying.

Like, you can't dismiss the customer as well. They don't know what they're talking about, or they're not smart. It's like they're the customer. And they have more skin in the game than we do in our own Absolutely. Work. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Last question for you. I sound like I'm, I'm positioning us as two old people, but we are, we're, we're veteran marketers.

We're not old veteran. It's alright. Ask away what's the, what you, you alluded to this in one of the conversations already about, you know, looking back like we were too passionate about the idea. We, we didn't. We didn't share to get feedback. Yeah. What are some other things that you've learned over your career that you could pass along to someone kind of just start starting out in marketing and say, yeah, this was a mistake I used to make, but I don't make it anymore?

Christian Klepp: Yeah. Again, this is an all one of these questions that I reflected on because there are so many things, you know, there's so many ways I could go with this, but if I were to summarize it, it would be as follows, on number one, stop being a people pleaser. It gets you nowhere fast and it opens the door to people taking advantage of you.

And that happened very early on in my career and I ended up doing the job of three or four other people because I thought it was actually teamwork. Right. But what they were doing was they were just farming off their work to me. Right. And for those of you starting out in your career, please be wary and cognizant of people learning how.

On things that are not within your own interest or within the interest of your company and the interest of your clients is perhaps one of the most powerful things that you can do professionally, in my opinion. Yeah. Right. Learning how to say, no, it took me years, Steve, to master that one because I always felt, I don't know if you, if you can relate to this, but I, I always felt guilty when I, when I would turn something down, but I would say no, whether it was internally or whether it was from a client.

Right. I would always be like, yeah, okay. Sure. Yeah. At the end of the you know, 6:00 PM rolled around and I've got like 15 unfinished tasks. Right. And because I didn't know how to prioritize, I didn't know how to manage my time at that point. It's because I just did not know how to say no. Right. Yeah. So there's that Don't be influenced too much by the opinions of others.

I think there's another one that was something also, again, kind of interconnected, the. It's something that I always took to heart and, which is why I mentioned earlier on in the conversation, do not take this feedback personally, even if sometimes it might be you have to learn, and this is something an an ex boss of mine told me.

When you're in this business, you just gotta grow a thicker skin. You gotta be like an anky, allosaurus or a handle, and you just gotta grow that armor, man. Yeah. And when somebody shoots arrow at you'll,

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, great advice. You are almost ready to retire. You've, you've passed along many learnings over the course of your career.

We're gonna turn the podcast into, into your retirement party for sharing so much wisdom with us today.

Christian Klepp: Thank you. But yeah, not anytime soon. Yeah.

Steve Goldhaber: All right, Christian, I, I enjoyed getting to know you more. I know our listeners did as well, so thank you for being on the podcast. And everyone else. Thank you for tuning in to listen again to another episode of interesting B2B marketers.

We'll see you again here at Studio 26. Take care everyone. Bye.

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