Are you wasting time and resources on “Brand”?
Brand is what happens when your busy doing other things. This week on the If You Market podcast we talk with Paul Cowan about Brand, and why it probably isn’t something you should worry about. Paul believes most if not all companies should focus on providing a great customer experience and be obsessive about serving their customers. The brand will come naturally, as long as you have a good product and solve a problem you don’t need a megaphone to tell people what they should think about you.
Paul Cowan is not your run-of-the-mill marketing guy. Over a 20+ year career, he’s held leadership positions at large corporations, then left them to launch startups from scratch. He’s marketed phones, food, booze, toys, and SaaS products and he’s created award-winning viral ad campaigns. Now as CMO of FreshBooks, he’s using his unique skill set to help over 30 million people save time billing, and collect billions of dollars.
Contact : Paul Cowan
- Paul’s Twitter: @cowanpkc
- FreshBooks Twitter / IG: @freshbooks
- FreshBooks website: freshbooks.com
If you have questions about the If You Market podcast or would like to suggest a guest, please email us at info@IfYouMarket.com.
Listen wherever you get podcasts:
Transcript:
Sky
00:00:04 – 00:00:30
Here we go, 321 good morning marketers and welcome to the if you market podcast brought to you by Mountaintop Data, we are the only podcast that markets the ship out of it. I’m sky Cassidy and today we’ll be talking with Paul Cowan of fresh books about why brand doesn’t matter. So Paul is he’s not your run of the mill marketing guy. As you can guess with a topic like why brand doesn’t matter. But in his
Paul Cowan
00:00:30 – 00:00:31
20
Sky
00:00:31 – 00:01:01
plus year career, he’s held leadership positions at large corporations, then left them to launch startups from scratch. He’s marketed phones, food, booze, toys, software as a service products and he’s he’s created award winning viral ad campaigns. Now he’s a CMO of fresh books and he’s using his unique skill set to help their over 30 million people with their billing billing and uh collect billions of dollars. So Paul, thanks for coming on the show today.
Sky
00:01:01 – 00:01:11
So the topic why brand doesn’t matter, seems like Clickbait. Um is that really what we’re talking about here? Are you telling people that brand doesn’t matter.
Paul Cowan
00:01:11 – 00:02:08
It’s absolutely Clickbait. No, it’s of course the real topics Clickbait Clickbait, how great brands do it. Um No I think I think um you know, we’ve we’ve we’ve we’ve been um as as marketers and as as as brand marketers and I’ve been a brand marketer and through my career like I’ve spent gobs of dollars building building brands and from from the ground up or or taking um well established brands and and just kind of shepherding through the process. So um I think I think the, the interesting approach now is, is really around um let’s focus on brand and let’s focus on the structure of creating brand architectures and pyramids and guides and and really focusing on great products and great product market fit. So, you know, I’m in the sas space now, I’m at this company, fresh books, we’ve been around for 15 years
Paul Cowan
00:02:08 – 00:02:16
and uh and and we’re like super obsessed over our customer. Um we, when I came in, we had a kind of brand
Paul Cowan
00:02:16 – 00:02:56
guidelines and things like that, but we had a company vision admission, we wrote down brand guidelines and I’m like, do we even really need these things? Like, I don’t think so, as long as we all know what we’re doing as a company, we don’t really need to have all of this structure around brand anymore. Brand is, is simply the way that customers feel about you at the end of it all. And so if you’re doing what you need to do right, as a company and you’re focused on your customer and the different types of customers that you have, your brand could be a whole bunch of different things to different people and having this rigidity around brand structure and tone of voice and all of these kinds of things is this kind of like obsolete. And it’s a lot of Bs,
Sky
00:02:56 – 00:03:03
It reminds me of the B2B John Lennon song where he says brand is what happens when you’re busy doing other things.
Paul Cowan
00:03:03 – 00:03:05
Yeah, it’s gonna happen
Sky
00:03:05 – 00:03:07
anyway, right?
Paul Cowan
00:03:07 – 00:03:27
It’s, it’s an output. It’s not an input. It’s, it’s something that, that were, were uh, somewhat a little bit too obsessed over as a marketing group as the input to what we’re doing. But it’s, it’s really, you know, the, the output of, of, of what we want customers to, to think and feel and believe about us. You’re going to
Sky
00:03:27 – 00:03:43
have a brand. It isn’t like it’s your product and if you don’t make it, it won’t exist. You will have a brand of some type, you don’t want to control your brand some and that’s why I think the messaging and like, you know, have consistent colors and stuff like that, um comes across and that kind of direct branding
Paul Cowan
00:03:43 – 00:03:43
then
Sky
00:03:43 – 00:03:58
who you are as a company and stuff like that. People will come to based on whether you have a any sign of sort of help functions, somebody can call and get a live person. Um, I suppose those kind of things, whether you act evil or not, it’s kind of,
Paul Cowan
00:03:58 – 00:04:41
well, all companies at some point are going to act a little bit evil. Like, you know, through their time, they’re going to make mistakes, they might do something wrong. Uh they’re gonna act really well too. So, so, you know, companies are, are, are not as rigid as a, as a brand pyramid is and so, so I think that that, you know, we have to be a little bit looser around these brand standards and it’s really, really kind of dialed back into those experiences that you’re going to create the different types of customers audiences that you have. You think of of of companies, you know, like I look at companies that when they first started like Uber and Uber, Uber was is a great um is a company that had amazing product market fit and despite everything that happened around their brand,
Paul Cowan
00:04:41 – 00:05:01
doing really bad things to their employees, doing bad things to their customers, behaving very, very poorly. There’s still like the top one of the top 50 apps in the app store, there’s still one of the top 10 in terms of travel, if not the top one. And so like at the end of it all do do consumers really even care well, if you solve
Sky
00:05:01 – 00:05:04
a real problem they have, it’s like Dave chappelle.
Paul Cowan
00:05:04 – 00:05:05
If a
Sky
00:05:05 – 00:05:31
guy is actually really good and funny, then it’s really hard to get rid of somebody, they will keep coming back. I mean, Mel Gibson still making movies because as long as you’re really good at your job, Look at athletes, it doesn’t matter like, okay, you beat up your wife in an elevator, but Man, you’re gonna really fast 40 time, you’re gonna find a team still, you can make terrible mistakes and as long as you still have the goods you can recover from them.
Paul Cowan
00:05:31 – 00:05:51
Yeah. And it’s I think, I think a lot there’s a, like a long history of of companies that have behaved very, very poorly and still do extremely well. Today, United is another good example. You know, they were like, you know, beating up passengers and killing dogs and breaking guitars and those kinds of things and they didn’t really suffer much from a booking standpoint in in the aftermath of that. I’m sure the last well actually
Sky
00:05:51 – 00:06:23
still need to get on flight now disclaimer here. Neither paul nor, I mean you’ll speak for myself, but I’ll assume neither paul nor I are condoning that companies do terrible things as long as you provide a service people want need. I think the message here is um, your brand can survive those things as long as you have an actual problem, you solve if you don’t really do any, it makes me think those companies that are all about brand probably don’t solve a real problem or they’re just a super commodity. So that’s all they have left.
Paul Cowan
00:06:23 – 00:06:51
Yeah. And or they’re they’re purely a marketing function. And so, you know, you look at a lot of the companies that have, what, what people typically looked at as great brands being, you know, the, the Nikes, the coca cola is the big CPG companies and it’s like they’re they’re definitely carved into a niche, but they all all have their problems and they have to start to behave better from their sourcing practices and everything that they’re doing. But the core of what they’re doing from a marketing and from a branding standpoint is still relatively the same in terms of what they were doing, what drove their growth, like through that
Sky
00:06:51 – 00:07:05
sugar water that gives everybody’s diabetes, like, and yet somehow they’re big love company. Um and they disappeared tomorrow, there’ll be plenty of other liquids we could drink and survive. It’s like they are Brondello from idiocracy.
Paul Cowan
00:07:05 – 00:07:15
Exactly. And and it’s this kind of like, you know, brand brand grew out of this one too many philosophy. And when when mass media started to to push
Paul Cowan
00:07:15 – 00:07:55
the ways that, that we would go out and reach customers and, and brand marketing. Um even when I talk to, you know, people who are entering the marketing industry, they’re still talking about brand marketing is something separate than marketing and and like I always tell my team I’m like, there’s no, there’s nothing separate as brand marketing. It’s all just marketing and all his different purposes. Um When if I’m going out and and running ads on Youtube or running ads on facebook or you know, t T or or in our SCM ads at the end of it all, I’m judged on how am I actually like, what, what’s the cat that I’m driving in the door, what’s my acquisition costs that I’m driving in the door and are those customers going to be valuable to us. And so
Sky
00:07:55 – 00:07:56
now we’re getting
Paul Cowan
00:07:56 – 00:07:57
to the meat
Sky
00:07:57 – 00:08:30
and bones of it here. Um it seems brand used to be extremely necessary when the targeting capabilities were extremely limited, like you’d buy ad space somewhere and that was about as good as you can do. But with all the ability to directly target whether you’re doing account based marketing or just google adwords, facebook ads, they all have have this niche marketing, the more you can directly target an audience, the less you have to vomit brand out and hope it sticks to some people.
Paul Cowan
00:08:30 – 00:08:31
And that’s kind of what we’re getting
Sky
00:08:31 – 00:08:43
at here because you said you don’t need brand or you said, uh why brand doesn’t matter? Are you really saying it doesn’t matter or that it’s just vastly diminished in today’s market?
Paul Cowan
00:08:43 – 00:08:57
Yeah, I think I think what it is is is the notion of brand is an input um really doesn’t exist. I think we need to want to behave in a certain way as a company and we need to build things that our customers are going to really love.
Paul Cowan
00:08:57 – 00:09:49
Um we build software for owners that they really love. I have different types of owners that we’re trying to attract every day if I’m gonna be as myopic, as like a single brand personality is going to then appeal to everybody around the world. That’s just foolish in terms of of, of thinking that that’s how, how people are going to interpret it. And so, so I think that we have like this opportunity to have different voices as companies to appeal to different people in different ways to meet their different needs and their different lifestyles and and be able to address them. This is where like when, when I was doing like hardcore A. B. M. Marketing um and and and going after like big enterprise companies um this is where I love doing that 1 to 1 level stuff because we could go in and and and really appeal to that individual marketer within like a big CPG. And so we would be running campaigns where I was getting like,
Paul Cowan
00:09:49 – 00:10:11
we we actually had three cmos from from large packaged goods or organizations Loreal, Reckit Benkiser and um and nestle and they after seeing some of our A. B. M. Ads, we got the cmos from these companies to reply to our ads and say can you please stop using our branding there. And that actually we spun it into an opportunity
Paul Cowan
00:10:11 – 00:10:49
to say we’re not actually we’re targeting just you. And they had no idea that you had these targeting capabilities. So we used it as a, as a, as a mechanism then to go and talk to their marketing department and our attention, enterprise sales people went and sold and they were like, oh my God, you can actually do this. And we were showing them all this custom was when I was a shutter stock and we’re and we’re like, and here’s how you can use the stuff that we’re selling you to do this marketing trick. And so it was just funny because the thing that we were appealing to their was there like desire to be able to do 1 to 1 level targeting and they were like baffled by the ability to actually do this and this is not
Paul Cowan
00:10:49 – 00:11:27
not new. And it’s something that we’re all kind of chasing in this personalization era. But to be able to do it is hard, it’s really, really hard and that’s why we always just resort back to let’s just do some brand stuff because blasting something out one message out to as many people as I possibly can who are all going to respond to that same message. That’s the easiest thing for me to do. So you know, I only say, I always say marketers are super lazy, the only people lazier than than marketers are salespeople, but we do the least amount of work for the most amount of return. And and there’s nothing wrong with that. But at some point you want to start to get a bit more focused and being where does lazy
Sky
00:11:27 – 00:11:36
stop and efficient begin? You know it’s going to work most return. I can say markets are efficient, not lazy marketers are listening to this paul that’s the audience.
Paul Cowan
00:11:36 – 00:11:38
I know, I know well it’s inefficient, not
Sky
00:11:38 – 00:11:40
we’ll swap those words and don’t worry about
Paul Cowan
00:11:40 – 00:11:47
it, I I am I I’m a longtime marketers so I can I can I can I can be a little bit um self deprecating but
Sky
00:11:47 – 00:11:52
trash marketers all the time and I say not only are marketers lazy but they ruin everything they
Paul Cowan
00:11:52 – 00:11:54
talk about. Oh yeah, well everything can
Sky
00:11:54 – 00:12:37
abuse it until it doesn’t work anymore. Um but so I want to get this A B. M. Thing. I know A B. M. Is the topic, but it seems like A B. M. Is almost a side effect of the targeting capabilities. And it was really important. You were saying that with brand going into a big company, remember one of the things I recognized early on with A B. M. Was oh basically this allows you to build brand with individual targets instead of having to spend on the whole market, you could do A B. M. With one company and make them think you’re a very big brand with a huge ad spend. And thus they’re interested in talking to you when really it’s only them that are seeing you and only them that are seeing this particular messaging, so you’re able to do
Sky
00:12:37 – 00:12:46
branding, it’s just one on one messaging and branding or much more targeted messaging and branding because of all the tools we have today.
Paul Cowan
00:12:46 – 00:13:01
Yeah and this is where I think you really have to dial into the the two people’s motivations. And so the era of branding was there is one motivation that everybody is going to have and there is one way that they are going to then feel about us after we have communicated to them
Sky
00:13:01 – 00:13:07
because you only had the ability to put out one commercial. So you had like you say, who are we going to target? That’s it.
Paul Cowan
00:13:07 – 00:13:14
Yeah. Well yeah, I mean with what people used to do was okay, we’re going to regionalize it because that’s the way
Paul Cowan
00:13:14 – 00:13:53
that’s the way the entertainment industry was built. So so it was, it was like a matter of convenience in which like most of most marketing is actually built, it’s built by the the tools that we have at our disposal. And so as new tools came came to be I think what is what has really shown us was the ability for anybody to be able to spin up and beat a customer need regardless of what the brand actually meant. I just purchased a pair of waterproof shoes from a company called Jesse who’s based out of um at a british Columbia in Canada. And it’s like the minute I clicked on one of their ads and I was actually in the market for waterproof shoes as the fall and winter was kind of coming
Paul Cowan
00:13:53 – 00:14:17
and then all of a sudden like you know, you, your, all of your feeds around around everywhere on the internet are now filled with all birds and this and that and all these different types of shoe companies that now are trying to get get get me to look at them and and it comes down to like my purchase decision was based, I’m based in Toronto Canada and I wanted to buy from a company that was based in Canada. So I, I bought from them and that was that
Sky
00:14:17 – 00:14:54
they need more intelligent um tracking on that because a year from now you’ll still be getting shoe ads and that they need like by the product, they need to have it expire after a short time because on a product like a snickers bar, like you don’t have to show me different candy bars everywhere. I go on the internet. I either bought it or at that moment I didn’t um there’s these products, there’s like, this isn’t a six month buying cycle. This was an impulse buy please, I don’t want to see but it’s better than seeing something generic everywhere I suppose. I mean we all get tracked all around which then leads to, okay,
Sky
00:14:54 – 00:15:39
there’s a lot, we’ve had a lot of episodes about um data privacy and all the restrictions and all the data privacy laws and the impact they’re having on this type of marketing actually. So we’re talking about the ability to brand directly or not have to brand to reach people directly, but that can be taken away because that’s all data based on data privacy could remove that and then Madison Avenue says you now you have to come just by giant sweeping add coverage from us. So then I guess I’m going down a conspiracy? Holy, what I’m saying is Madison Avenue behind all the data privacy because they’re saying, hey, we got to get people back to us and away from this direct target. We need to get them to these brand building campaigns for massive spends. The,
Paul Cowan
00:15:39 – 00:16:24
the illuminati must go deep because like I think, I mean one has come all from its come from europe, it’s like G D P R was the folks who have been forcing the hand and, and, and primarily the, the, the highly restrictive uh, privacy rules in, in Germany and, and I think that it’s, it’s, it’s a Madison Avenue is a lucky beneficiary of this or potentially will be a lucky beneficiary at this. I think as, as a marketer. Um, I’ve always my, my approach in running activities from the, the, the corporate side have always been like, I like to build my own teams internally, I have my own media teams, um, we use agency support, um, tactically or, or, or strategically, um, but they’re not retainer based, um,
Paul Cowan
00:16:24 – 00:17:00
retainer based relationships and and we, we try to build all of our activity close to home because we are going to be the experts of the customer and we’re gonna be the experts in deployment. So I think that what what marketers need to do is get smarter and and think more about about what is this next evolution as we move into this kind of cookie less world and as privacy increases and and how are other marketers going to create coalitions of, of like minded marketers? So you know, I like to go and talk to other folks who are, who are trying to attract the similar type of customers ours and say how do we share data
Paul Cowan
00:17:00 – 00:17:27
Instead of instead of being reliant on Google and and Facebook to to be the ones who are aggregating all the data together. We’re running we’re all running these acquisition funnels and and you know, we’re tossing away 90% of the 90% of the trials or or um or free accounts and stuff like that that we create. So so why why why aren’t we working together so that we can build data coalitions because we don’t need that much data to do a really good job. But it’s just.
Sky
00:17:27 – 00:17:37
targeting, I mean you have the walled garden platforms, you can still do it within google, you can still do it within their power. You can’t follow people around as much on the internet. So what do
Paul Cowan
00:17:37 – 00:17:39
you really need to follow him around
Sky
00:17:39 – 00:18:14
back to, you know, beginner marketing, find out where they are and market to them there and that all the platforms still have the target audiences. Companies like ours provide data that’s still a targeted audience. There’s still a ton of data out there, There’s just a slight tweak on the ad retargeting and so I know for some people that’s a big deal. But for me, I say, who cares? Like you said, you probably already, the shoes don’t need to follow you around the internet. That might not be nearly as valuable as people thought. They may have just been sinking a bunch of money into showing people something they already bought.
Paul Cowan
00:18:14 – 00:18:21
Yeah, it’s always, it’s post purchase. They have a 30 day expiry on it and it’s like, it’s all I’ve already put it in my cart and bought it. So
Sky
00:18:21 – 00:18:26
every time my competitor closes the deal, I want to waste money on that. They already
Paul Cowan
00:18:26 – 00:18:27
sold to
Sky
00:18:27 – 00:18:38
that, that is the pitch to me for, for that kind of retargeting. It’s like, no, I don’t want to throw money away. It’s like every time my competitor succeeds, I’m gonna fail even more.
Paul Cowan
00:18:38 – 00:18:39
No, no,
Sky
00:18:39 – 00:19:28
thank you. There’s tons of other targeting targeting methods here. Okay, so we have a lot more to go over though. I want to take a quick break here. Get back to talking about, um, when we come back, we’re gonna talk a little bit more about you about fresh books and then back to this brand doesn’t matter question mark, uh, thing. Again, it seems to be that brand is what you should pay attention to once all your other marketing problems are solved maybe. Um, but it shouldn’t be the top of mind type activity, but I’ll let you, I’ll let you get the word in on that. Um when we come back, you listen to the market podcast, we’ve got paul cowan on, he’s the CMO of fresh books and we’ll be right back.
Sky
00:19:28 – 00:19:33
Alright. We got a little pause there.
Sky
00:19:33 – 00:20:04
Alright, we’re back, we’re back here with paul cowan, CMO fresh books, talking about brand and why it doesn’t matter before we get back into that pole. I want to talk about paul cowan and how you got here. We had that great introduction to you which alluded to a lot of things at the beginning of the show to your career in marketing. Yeah, kind of startups, big companies, all these things. Um But let’s dig into that, can you, can you tell us kind of where you started and then lead us through to how you got to where you are now?
Paul Cowan
00:20:04 – 00:20:41
Yeah. Yeah, sure. So um you know if you if someone looks at my linkedin um it looks kind of weird like it there’s definitely no kind of pattern. Um I’ve done a lot of shifting between like large corporate um jobs and then small startups. And and so I think like the pattern that I’ve I’ve followed is is like I you know, I’ve always loved marketing, I knew I would go into that as a as a career um kind of early on and probably when I was like in my teens um and and so I kind of put marketing together with like I love technology. So you know, I, when I grew up, I I actually, my dad worked for IBM
Paul Cowan
00:20:41 – 00:20:53
and uh when other kids were off like, you know, doing some wonderful things, I went to computer camp and learned how to code dos, which was incredibly, incredibly useful to me now.
Paul Cowan
00:20:53 – 00:21:42
Um but so I, I’ve, I’ve always kind of stuck in this technology world, so whether if I worked at agencies or when I was in a wireless company, I always tried to combine technology and, and uh, and marketing and then tried tried to just ride some waves. So it was like, you know, in a wireless company during the the, the, the post or like the feature phone, the smartphone era and and worked on the launch of of of iphone and stuff on the carrier side and and went into social media and social media sas products and stuff when when facebook was taking off and I moved over into the toy space um when I had young kids because I thought that would make me the coolest dad ever and then realized, I, I don’t really like the toy space very much and uh, and and moved out of there, um I started, I went into the, the food tech space. So when a whole bunch of money was going into
Paul Cowan
00:21:42 – 00:21:54
companies like Maple and Montreal II uh founded a company up in Toronto that was very similar to the, to the maple model, which was down in new york and we launched,
Sky
00:21:54 – 00:21:54
Yeah,
Paul Cowan
00:21:54 – 00:22:09
yeah, that’s a feast. So that was, that was a fun endeavor, although, and we suffered the same fate as, as all the other companies in this kind of vertical food food space. Um, uh, Unit economics don’t work out very well and food has very, very razor thin margins.
Sky
00:22:09 – 00:22:22
Um that one of the, because I, I see all these products and it’s like, hey, we’ll ship these ingredients to you and you’re gonna pay five times as much, but it’s convenient and there’s gonna be £10 of styrofoam. Um, so
Paul Cowan
00:22:22 – 00:22:35
we, we were doing more like chef chef made meals on demand. So you would, you would call and we would be there within 10 minutes to deliver um, a super, super high quality restaurant. Um, great meal at your door.
Sky
00:22:35 – 00:22:56
I always felt the model for those companies was acquired, customers acquire customers acquire customers. Emperor has no clothes get sold and then it’ll do something will happen to it down the road, who cares? I mean it’s a hot, like all the box things box this box box, this box that I’m like, I don’t know the long term, this doesn’t seem like it’s viable.
Paul Cowan
00:22:56 – 00:23:29
It’s very, it’s very challenging. I think I think with, with this, we, we knew what are, what are our, when we would get cash flow positive and we’re very focused on that. So, so we were unlike other ones that, that had gobs of money into the hundreds of million dollars of funding, we were still, we had we had a much smaller amount of funding going into the company. So we we were much more focused on that, but we could only get two to about like half to three quarters of the volume that we needed before we got to break even. So we’re close, but we just didn’t didn’t see a path to making it work unfortunately. So that the
Sky
00:23:29 – 00:23:33
model, you have the wrong model, the model is.
Paul Cowan
00:23:33 – 00:23:57
Yeah, I know, I know we actually ended up selling it to a food, another food organization, but um it wasn’t a massive exit money stretch, but it’s just like it’s just food food is very finicky world and and I what I learned from that was much more about like you just supply chain management and supply chain management is much more critical in the food space than than anything that you do in terms of the actual product that you put out in market,
Paul Cowan
00:23:57 – 00:24:59
because people don’t care where their beef comes from. They some do, but the most people don’t, they just want to know that they want to trust you that you’re making the right choices, but they do not care that much about about having having amazing quality food. Yeah, I know exactly the convenience, convenience and taste are the two main things. Um The I I was already shutter soccer and Smb and enterprise marketing there for for a few years uh for running a global team there? And and then I kind of then shifted order fresh book. So you know, when when friends books came calling, they were looking to to to start to really kind of accelerate growth. The company had been around for, you know, 15 years and and had gone through different growth cycles and and now was going into really pushing into international growth and um and uh and and doing some things a little bit differently. So I got really excited about the opportunity and and and came on board and and started doing a couple of things. I did the cliche stuff that all marketers do. I I reordered and rebranded
Paul Cowan
00:24:59 – 00:25:11
um because of course I’d rebrand when when we talk about how branding is not is not important, but um it was it was it was an interesting experience, I can tell you a little bit more uh why about that too?
Sky
00:25:11 – 00:25:57
Well, maybe the whole branding is not important. Again, that is the brand doesn’t matter, but you softening it now as we go along saying that yeah, that’s a little bit Clickbait, it’s more brands, not as important, but once you get bigger your brand is this, this umbrella that hangs over the whole company and it there’s a little tweaks here and there, but maybe it shouldn’t be your primary marketing focus, it seems to be the topic here. So fresh books now that we put that disclaimer and try to save the topic a little for the listeners. Um can you tell us a little bit about fresh books? Pretend we have no idea what fresh books even does. Are we talking about? Is this is this like, are you going back to selling books about food? I have no idea what’s fresh books.
Paul Cowan
00:25:57 – 00:26:40
So we’re we’re a accounting platform, so we’re we’re software, we’re specifically focused on owners. Um so we we help them manage their books and their business um so that owners don’t have to really be financial managers. Um Key differentiator between us and other folks like Quickbooks, who are the Goliaths in the space are are like their platforms are primarily built for accountants. Um They make it harder for owners to understand what’s going on because um no owners love to do accounting unless they’re an accountant, and even that might be somewhat suspect. So, so we’re really, really mission built around how do we help owners um run their business and run their books. Um and so that they can really kind of focus on what they’re good at
Paul Cowan
00:26:40 – 00:26:46
and uh and then and then but still keep close to understanding how the financial health of their business.
Sky
00:26:46 – 00:27:06
So it seems like a company, like, and this is what we’re saying, product differentiation versus brand, a company, like Quickbooks is saying, let’s sell to 100,000 accountants that each have Uh you know, 10, 20, 100 clients, you’re saying, we want to sell to a million individual business owners um directly to that are doing their books themselves.
Paul Cowan
00:27:06 – 00:27:46
Yeah, and we don’t ignore the accountants, like there’s there’s an obvious um there’s an obvious uh play that we can have where you know, when you’re when when you’re looking at at Intuit and Quickbooks, who is a is a major force in this space is a very very good strategy, would just be to ride in the wake of their churn and um but but what we’ve really kind of dialed into from a company strategy standpoint is to is to dial in on owners, we know that owners work with accountants, so our software is different accountants are used to working with something like like a Quickbooks or zero when they come into our platform, they have to have new workflows and stuff, so it’s,
Paul Cowan
00:27:46 – 00:28:12
we kind of ride this other um uh side of the spectrum where what we’re doing is trying to help the accountants understand the new types of workflows that they have to adapt to, so so we over kind of rotate there, so are all the A. B. M. Type of activity that we do is against accountants and and we have like a very very turn and burn um funnel against against owners, so so that those are the two kind of main areas that we focus on from a from a go to market standpoint.
Sky
00:28:12 – 00:28:46
So I had a thought here related to the branding and how you guys and I want to get into kind of how you guys are marketing, but it seems like there’s some much larger players in your market and they have huge brands and strategically for you guys to try to compete on a brand level. You’re, you’re trying to go head to head with the larger player on their field. Um, to go with the hay brand doesn’t matter. We’re going to go after the individuals and target the, the audience with the, with the product value kind of, and and those kind of messaging,
Sky
00:28:46 – 00:29:10
it gives you a way to, to win against the larger brand versus saying, yeah, let’s just line up out on the field and shoot at each other, like, well they’re just a much bigger brand if you play that game, um you can’t really win. So it seems like the brand doesn’t matter, approach is much more useful for companies that don’t already have a huge brand. Like you guys are bigger than a lot of companies that are listening probably, but your competitors are even bigger
Paul Cowan
00:29:10 – 00:29:46
and and it’s, it’s like, I mean there’s there’s some practical things where when people know about you, it works in your favor. Um and and you you get those kind of flywheels going where um other people start to refer and and and drive like network growth versus versus pure paid growth. So you know, we we we want to make sure people know who we are and and and recommend us and and things to that effect. So I think what what our focus is more about is understanding the different types of owners. So you know, if you, if you think of our audience, we’re trying to target anybody who will run a business
Paul Cowan
00:29:46 – 00:30:30
And and so try to try to um D average that down to or or average that down to like 11 core insight and and try to then then have that that be relevant to everybody who’s like whether they’re starting a business running a business, have a business for 20 years. It’s it’s next to impossible across every vertical across every like trying to appeal to a a dog walker that’s making $30,000 a year versus a legal consulting professional who’s who’s building $900,000 a year to be able to talk to both of those people through an instagram or facebook ad is next to impossible. So fresh books has to represent something to each of them that’s uniquely different, but the same. So that’s where
Sky
00:30:30 – 00:30:33
they’re small and they don’t have an employee that does the books for them.
Paul Cowan
00:30:33 – 00:31:14
Yeah. Or or they do, we might go up to a company of like, you know, 2050 people and they’ve got like they might have a bookkeeper on staff for someone to, so so when when you’re trying to appeal to this, this very broad set of owners, it’s very challenging. Which is why like you know when you connected into like brands are so rigid in terms of trying to represent one thing to a group of people or or maybe something to 2 to 3 different constituents of people or segments to try to then do it across the entire um you know, all the every type of owner across the U. S. Is one thing. And then when you’re thinking of like the world, that’s a that’s a whole different type of thing. Once we start to layer in cultural nuance and that kind of stuff.
Sky
00:31:14 – 00:32:02
So this is where it seems like the brand doesn’t matter is more relevant in B. Two B. Than B two C. Because B two C. Is so frequently commodity. And it’s all about brand is all you have left. But you guys are in this unique B two B. Space where you actually have a very large audience. Most B two B spaces are by the nature of the product niche, but small business owners, small businesses is a massive B two B audience that a lot of B. Two B. Products don’t necessarily target. Um So you’re you’re in this space where it’s in this weird space, it seems like where brand would be the type of targeting a company like yours. You’re one of the few B two B. Companies that could have a super bowl ad and have impact. Not a good idea for us
Paul Cowan
00:32:02 – 00:32:37
and Quickbooks does have Super Bowl ads and I’m sure the marketing team loves going down to Arizona and enjoying the wonderful, the wonderful week of extravaganza experiences that you get with that. But we just happen to be a little bit more pragmatic with our budgets and we focus them and so as we’re kind of in this like growth mode, which most organizations are most aren’t, aren’t in this kind of world of of, hey, let’s let’s spend a whole whack of money just because we have it. Um, we just really, really focus on on what we’re doing. So when, when everything grows out from the company from a, how are we gonna solve owner problems and how are we going to solve different owner workflows?
Paul Cowan
00:32:37 – 00:33:05
And now we need to start to look at the different types of owners that are going to come in and, and start with us or the type of co owners that have grown with us or, or, or even large companies coming in, uh, we, we have to get really, really kind of focused on these different types of experiences that we’re creating. So, so the takeaway from like, you know, a quote unquote brand perspective or, or what they feel about us is going to be different for every, every customer. They may have a consistent thing that links them together. Like man, they really get me as an owner.
Paul Cowan
00:33:05 – 00:33:43
Um, but, but that’s just like, that’s like the output of everything that we do. So we really, we ground ourselves in trying to understand owners at a very grassroots level and how they run their businesses and the things that are highly emotional to them, like things like, you know, there’s the old adage, hey, it’s lonely at the top. That is 100% true. We hear a day in and day out that owners feel isolated, whether you’re at a, you’re running a 20 person ad agency or, or you’re a single, uh, a person who’s a plumber, um, they always have this problem of like, they’re going to revert back to the thing that they love to do when the, when the going gets tough, which is their craft and they’re going to ignore their finances. I
Sky
00:33:43 – 00:33:49
think that’s how the NFL sells those Super Bowl suites. They say it’s lonely at the top, but it’s not lonely in this sweet.
Paul Cowan
00:33:49 – 00:34:20
Here you go, enjoy, enjoy these parties. They’re fantastic. And you also get a commercial that comes along with this. Yeah, don’t tell, don’t tell anybody you’re coming down to because it will be jealous. But it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s great because I think the, the, the hard part about, about, um, about doing doing marketing right is good marketing is hard to do. And you know, when I go back to saying, hey, you know, we marketers are lazy. I’m like 100% we are, but to do things the right way and to be able to create
Paul Cowan
00:34:20 – 00:35:06
personalized experiences, whether it’s 1 to 11 too many, one too few as when people are onboarding onto fresh books. That’s really, really hard to do to do that, to change our website for different people coming in. That’s really hard to do. So I think that the, the changing times, what marketers need to focus on is focus less on on the output of brand or trying to construct brand as an input and focus more on the customer and the customer experience and then the brand will come along. It’s like, then then people are going to say, okay, great. I get, I get what we want. I think there needs to be like that upfront organizational understanding of the things that, that you, you are focused on and we say, hey, owners at a grassroots level. So that should inform everything from like our product strategy,
Paul Cowan
00:35:06 – 00:35:28
to our marketing strategies, to our CSR strategies and how, how we’re going to be doing corporate social responsibility, but it’s going to be rooted in that. So we’re not going to go and all of a sudden create a, you know, a sponsorship strategy or philanthropy cause marketing strategy that’s going to be off, like, you know, giving money to a cause that has no relation to us whatsoever, but maybe it makes people
Sky
00:35:28 – 00:35:36
think you’re not bad and I don’t think we really talked about this and we’re gonna run out, We’re not, we definitely don’t have time to get into y and cause marketing and stuff like that.
Paul Cowan
00:35:36 – 00:35:37
Um but
Sky
00:35:37 – 00:35:45
talk about going overboard on wasting on brand and and convincing people you’re not evil is your new purpose.
Paul Cowan
00:35:45 – 00:35:47
Um so
Sky
00:35:47 – 00:36:20
I don’t want to dig into that, but it seems like you’re saying they’re fresh or let’s let’s shift this real quick to what specifically are you guys doing as fresh books with your marketing? That’s not, I mean, you already have a brand, It happens naturally. I get it, you’re a restaurant and you can spend a lot of time and energy developing your brand or you can cook good food and deliver it quickly, and then that’s the brand people get from you, or you can tell people you cook good food and sort of crap and guess what? They’ll believe the food over what you tell them. Um
Paul Cowan
00:36:20 – 00:36:21
So what do you guys do
Sky
00:36:21 – 00:36:28
their specifically, what do you guys do outside of the brand marketing or instead of the brand marketing?
Paul Cowan
00:36:28 – 00:37:13
Yeah, sure. So, I mean, everything kind of flows from this, like how are we, how are we hellbent on on understanding the owner and understanding the business owner that’s like at the top of everything that we do, and it’s part of every decision that we need to make as an organization, so that’s like the core core of of of what we are all about. We have like a couple of pillars around like around personalization and, and just making sure we can create these, these really great and segmented experiences for people, so whether it’s going through the website, whether it’s going through our onboarding flows, these are the areas that we are, are, are super dialed into uh, in terms of, of creating better experiences for our customers, this is where we’re investing all of our, all of our dollars,
Sky
00:37:13 – 00:37:28
does that come down to just things like when they go to sign up online may be different industries or whatever it is, they go through a different sign up flow, their slightly different questions, wording, whatever it is, just talking about those kind of customization,
Paul Cowan
00:37:28 – 00:37:49
Absolutely, and and doing as much as we can through, through latent signals or signals, like whether we’re, you know, buying different bits of kit that help us understand people who we don’t no, and we need to start to to, you know, make the people who have this like fuzzy data that’s around them and, and, and we can start to progressively profile them to give them better experiences before they even sign up for a trial
Sky
00:37:49 – 00:37:51
or
Paul Cowan
00:37:51 – 00:38:25
no, but it’s like, it’s, but then we get them into that trial because like, you know, a year ago, we were treating every single trial the exact same and we’re like, you know, we need to get, we need to start understanding these different motivations and intent and and uh and stage of a business and maturity and all of these types of things to be able to, to help people, even like if someone’s coming in switching from work using Word and Excel, which is the great majority of the small business market today, they’re still gonna have like workflows in ways that they do stuff and the ways that they’re proud of the of how they work, that we need to kind of take them on our our journey with the ways
Sky
00:38:25 – 00:38:29
they understand stuff too. You’re talking about the confusion of trying to use a new platform
Paul Cowan
00:38:29 – 00:39:08
totally and all and all of that, it’s like, like marketing now is incredibly complex and having being able to power that requires such a such more of an investment in in great tools and technology and data and data scientists and and having people that are like hyper focused on growth and experiments, but but all of these things have to like dial them into into that that kind of customer mindset and and psyche so that you know what these motivating motivating factors are for them. So, so this is where I think the instead of focusing on on brand and and making sure that we’re super rigid with our inputs, What I wanna do is have
Paul Cowan
00:39:08 – 00:39:43
everybody focusing on like massive amounts of experimentation and trying different things without the rigidity of of these constraints because in my years of marketing, the one thing that I’ll tell you, I’m gonna I’m gonna be right with is that I’m going to be wrong. It’s like the messaging that I think is gonna be is gonna hunt well, like, if we’re like, hey, let’s put up to facebook ads, that one’s gonna be the best, and it’s like, nope, when I was at shutter stock, we had one ad, it was a book on the desk, we could throw all of the awesome imagery that we had up in, up in all of our ads, make videos and all this kind of stuff. We had this one ad that was a book on the desk that drove the most booking revenue
Paul Cowan
00:39:43 – 00:39:52
for our enterprise team. We had no idea why people internally hated the ad, but they’re like, they’re like, paul you’ve got to get rid of that ad, it’s horrible. I’m like, you’re right. But it drives
Sky
00:39:52 – 00:40:18
dr advised clients on marketing. We’ve looked at campaigns and said, this campaign is so old and stupid, it’s totally crapped out. And yet it drives a lot of sign ups and and leads still, and yeah, you can’t have advised clients on their email campaigns before and in the past, and then they bombed. And then we just said, well, let’s run their their original concept that we told them was terrible, and then it was really successful and
Paul Cowan
00:40:18 – 00:40:19
just like, never mind
Sky
00:40:19 – 00:40:27
never suggesting anything again, you have no idea, so what you have this, this brand doesn’t matter,
Paul Cowan
00:40:27 – 00:40:28
um,
Sky
00:40:28 – 00:40:38
concept, where did that come from for you? I see you jump from startups to big companies, started the big company, um, are these startups funded or bootstrapped, I guess would be maybe a good lead into
Paul Cowan
00:40:38 – 00:40:54
- Some, some funded some bootstrapped. I think the biggest, the biggest moment for me came from after I left the wireless space and we’re spending gobs and gobs of money trying to get kids to buy cell phones, uh, which, and we were successful at it. And, and then when we entered into where
Sky
00:40:54 – 00:40:57
they were going to buy phones anyway, well,
Paul Cowan
00:40:57 – 00:41:37
according, according to, to my bonuses, I was successful at it. So, so we had our, we hit our targets, right. Um, so then, you know, I think as we went through the social area, what that really taught me was that, um, you can really start to target people a lot better and be a lot smarter than what we’re doing. And, and as marketers, we just weren’t taking advantage of everything and we’re just letting, letting the next great ad tech company come into play play to, to help us out. And so I think that that what, where, where I just kind of took that and what I’m trying to move it is to, to just be really smart with what we’re doing, really, really pragmatic with our spend,
Paul Cowan
00:41:37 – 00:41:45
um, focus it and do lots of, lots of different things to see what’s actually going to hunt the best and, and, and that’s the things that marketers need to do today.
Sky
00:41:45 – 00:41:48
The boots on the ground, actual work marketing.
Paul Cowan
00:41:48 – 00:42:19
Yeah. And, and the one thing that I’ve always kind of kept kept close with is tools. So it’s like, you know, I love having access to sales for us or go into our facebook ads and poke around and see what’s actually working. And so one thing I’ve, I’ve liked to do much to the dismay of some people on my team is, is to go inside of things and look at how stuff works and, and to stay inquisitive about what’s the next thing that I should be looking at and that’s, I think everybody needs to do. And just because they have a playbook doesn’t mean that playbook is the right one for the next place there at
Sky
00:42:19 – 00:42:35
you’ve mentioned many times, marketers are lazy. This doesn’t sound like a lazy activity paul, I don’t know, so awesome. It’s been great having you on the show if I see fresh books, um, commercial in the next Super Bowl. I’m gonna be very disappointed with you paul.
Paul Cowan
00:42:35 – 00:42:35
So
Sky
00:42:35 – 00:42:41
excited for you. I don’t know which one I’d better get a ticket. Uh, you know,
Paul Cowan
00:42:41 – 00:42:51
absolutely. I will, I’ll make sure of it or you can make sure you bring you bring me on to explain myself and then I’ll have to, I’ll have to take you to the next one. It’s a safe bet
Sky
00:42:51 – 00:43:16
you could give me a ticket if you go because you know your your company isn’t gonna throw money at that kind of a thing. Excellent. Thank you for coming on. Let me see. People can find you where we have fresh books dot com of course at fresh books is your guys twitter. Um and we’ll put this on the show notes as well. Um but your twitter cowan P. K. C. You got it? What’s the P. K. C. For their?
Paul Cowan
00:43:16 – 00:43:25
It was just a nickname all through all through university and stuff. I think I I activated my twitter account right after university. So that that’s why.
Sky
00:43:25 – 00:44:08
Okay. We won’t make you say what the nickname was. The university nickname? Probably by the CMO. Um and then um let’s see. Yeah, you can find that. The show notes on if you market dot com will have all this information and thank you for sharing us with friends for put saying nice things about us on social, giving us reviews all those kind of things on behalf of the if you market team and paul cowan of fresh books. Thank you for listening to the market podcast as well where we believe if you market the ship out of it with what should we market the show. I don’t even know what this one without brand. If you market the ship out of it and ignore brand. They will come.
