Ep 45 - From Music to Marketing: The Power of Acknowledging Influences

Watch the YouTube video version above or listen to the podcast below!

Ep 45 - From Music to Marketing: The Power of Acknowledging Influences Podcast and Video Transcript

[Disclaimer: This transcription was written by AI using a tool called Descript, and has not been edited for content.]

Dave Dougherty: Hello and welcome to Enterprising Minds, the latest episode. Alex and Dave present for this episode. Given the fact that it's towards the end of the year and people are winding things down and hopefully taking some time off.

The Influence of Musicians on Business

Dave Dougherty: Given the holidays we thought we'd do something a little fun kind of workshop and idea that I've been mulling around for a little bit from my previous life into the business and marketing world the idea, and then we'll kick over to Alex for initial reactions is, you know, in, in the musician world and the guitar world that I came out of everybody, you know, Is really open about who influences their playing, like who were the main bands, the main guitar players that, that you listen to and you try to, you know, mimic what you do through your own instrument.

And, you know, I have this love hate relationship with LinkedIn every once in a while, because you see some people peacocking to an extent where it's like, that's not your idea, man. That's been around for, you know, eight years. So just. Shut up, you know, or at least give credit where credit's due. Right. So I was just thinking, wouldn't it be nice if marketers and business people actually talk to one another?

About who has influenced their thinking. Like what kind of marketer are you? What kind of business person are you? Are you the financially driven one? Are you the creative that's accidentally business minded? Are you like, where, where on the spectrum are you? So. I guess, Alex, what is, what's your initial take on this being the non musician?

Alex's Perspective on Business Books

Alex Pokorny: Oh, I'm somewhere on that spectrum. Don't worry.

Yeah, so background's kind of all over the place. So when it became more kind of business career focused, I definitely tried finding business books and stuff like that, that were useful to me. Mm hmm. And if you go to like a bookstore and just start looking through like management books or books on business or something like that There are so many bad ones.

Dave Dougherty: Mm

Alex Pokorny: hmm Just so many ones that are just so I would say maybe Contextually driven where this was a great idea for this one person this one organization at that one time and I'm glad it worked out For them, but there's like nothing I can take from that because that's so unique, right? so It's taken quite a while to kind of come up with, you know, authors or, you know, writers who are, I don't know, a little bit more, I don't want to say strategic in their thought process where they're trying to make sure that basically it can be relevant to a broader audience versus trying to just tell their life story.

So, while there's a ton of great autobiographies and biographies of, you know, fantastic business people, you name them, they've probably got a book about them. I've never really gotten much out of those. I've really struggled to get, like, Really something influential kind of out of that kind of stuff. So, I guess some of the ones that I've geared towards have been ones either that I know don't really fit and I'm kind of forcing them into my context and I think Or the ones who just have these more broad based kind of concepts.

So less autobiographical, more kind of, I don't know, general.

Phil Knight's Shoe Dog and Simon Sinek's Core Concepts

Dave Dougherty: I will say for me, one of the books that I read this year was Phil Knight's shoe dog.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. You mentioned, yeah, I read that. book, like the short version.

Dave Dougherty: So it, the, most of the book falls into the category that you described, I would say, where it's like, that was really interesting for Nike in the seventies, but you know, that was a very long time ago.

I will say though, that it was like the introduction or the first paragraph or the first chapter Where he talks about his, like, early life pre Nike, I think that was the most informative chapter because it was about his thought process, all of the life experience that he had to have before he was comfortable going after this idea.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah.

Dave Dougherty: So, you know, it's not a tangible to do per se, like, you know, with all the click baity internet articles, it's so easy to get lost in the tactical of, you know, here's the 17 things you need to do in order to rank. Well, like, but that's just not how life works. Right? So you can't expect that from a.

From an autobiography or something. But, you know, I think that if you're going to read a chapter, go get a cup of coffee at Barnes and Noble, read that chapter and put it back,

Alex Pokorny: you know, I have to say I'm a big fan of Simon Sinek. And I purchased a number of his books. But that last piece of advice could apply to probably most of his books, where there's a core concept that is definitely a great takeaway, and I think is actually like a meaningful one to learn. And then a lot of chapters on backing it up, showing lots and lots of examples of the exact same thing over and over again.

He has some great ideas though. And there was that one video, I swear it was a TEDx. And if you're finding a junkie video online that was like resolution of 320, you know, pretty bad, pretty blurry. It's like from Plum or something like that. And he does it starts with Y or the.

The Power of Brand Loyalty and Core Traits

Alex Pokorny: And that, yeah, no, you're why, no, you're why, yeah, that core concept piece of basically he had kind of three concentric circles, the outside being what you do, and then the inside of it basically being why, and then you're, you're kind of, instead of looking at a company of what kind of product are they producing, the question of kind of what is the core, Reasons where someone basically built affinity with that brand.

So in Apple's case, it's trying to be against the status quo, even though, I mean, obviously a super popular product line of, I mean, phones and everything. But still it was always positioned as the anti to PCs. Like they always had that like Mac versus PC and series that did really well. Basically constantly kind of pushing that, that same line or was that that 1980s one where they're kind of.

So running up, smashing through glass, I mean, you got that 1984, there you go, iconic imagery that basically plays against that brand piece, but it doesn't really talk about the specs of a particular phone. And if you can build a loyalty like that, so basically someone who subscribes to this You're going to basically get a successful company.

I think that's still true today where you have a lot of struggles with showing that you support small businesses. It's like this across the line, good idea. People should be doing it. Sort of a thing like. Yes, you should care about the environment. Also, yes, like that's when it's just kind of like a very basic kind of one.

But I mean, if you look at like the rise of Timo and Shine and all the other kind of, you know, app based sites that are out there that are pushing a large amount of product, trying to go against the grain and trying to become an opinion and try to show that your brand and your business is different, I think is a great way to basically fight against something like that, even if they're providing a cheaper product at higher volume, faster shipping.

By just showing that you have certain, you know, core traits and playing against those core traits and giving an audience who are basically affected by those same core traits and believe in those, you'll find success. So there's like things like that where I can take that away and I can even put it in a situation like today, which

Dave Dougherty: I don't

Alex Pokorny: know if Timo was even around when he originally came up with that video, but it still applies.

So ones like that are definitely useful. More on the autobiographical side of things. There's a book called Rubies in the Orchard. Which I really like it also just heavily plays on you don't need a marketing degree to do marketing. You have to understand people to do marketing and she created the author.

She created pomegranate juice, wonderful pistachios, number of other random things. And the story behind some of those is kind of fascinating to how she ended up with a bunch of pomegranate trees and. Why squeezing them is a really, really bad idea, but there's something that she thought was worth it.

So, I don't know, there's like little pieces there where basically you can kind of see through her lens of really understanding people and then pulling a product basically into that again, instead of trying to say, I've got a product, I'm going to try to push it on some people. I don't know. Those are some of the top two, I guess, that kind of come to mind first of.

At least early in my career, influencers, both of those were big.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah, it was interesting.

Influential Business Figures and Their Impact

Dave Dougherty: So when we, you know, before jumping on and recording, it was just kind of made a quick list of

who came to mind for me, right. At least in the business sense. And at least for me, because I started out as the guitarist and I fell into marketing and fell into this this lifestyle The web 2. 0 personalities were really important to my my development. So Brian Clark from copy blogger, like one of the first kind of freelance gigs that I had, I was literally handed a client list and a link to copy blogger and said, Memorize this site.

Okay.

Alex Pokorny: We have created a fantastic onboarding system known as go to the internet.

Dave Dougherty: Nice. But. As somebody with a creative writing degree, reading copy blogger to understand, okay, this is how I write for this particular audience. This is how I change it slightly. That was a huge help. It was a huge help. And yeah, the whole thing about tailoring keyword strategy and, and, and getting the, the clicks for the audience.

You know, to excite them to click over before it became all clickbaity and gross like it is now, right? But Brian Clark was a big one. Joe Polizzi and Robert Rose from Content Marketing Institute still remain big influences on me. Like the ability to use content to promote what you're doing is central to my thinking.

And they have some, just some great examples from the history of marketing. And that was something that I appreciated with them as they would be willing to go back to, you know, 1885 and John Deere, or, you know, some of the things that were being talked about in, in the 1950s and how that might influence like today.

Like, so I think having that knowledge, right. Definitely landed on my, My musical background where it's the, okay, you don't just like suddenly have Jimi Hendrix, right? You have all of the blues players before him and you have the electrification of the guitar and all the things that have to come together and Jimi Hendrix to be a thing.

Right. So yeah, there was that. And then ran Fishkin was another big one where it was like, all right, go learn SEO, go to Moz, do the whiteboard Fridays, read the Moz blog. And I mean, yeah, I'm still looking at, at ran stuff on, on Spark Toro you know, less actively than, than I used to, but One of the presentations that I will actively go back and rewatch was something that he did on the positioning of paid versus organic in organizations and why paid will always win over organic.

Yeah, which, I mean, that's just something that I've, I've had to play around with a lot, having been on the organic side for most of my career, you know, I have plenty of paid experience, but I have found myself having to advocate for organic more than more than paid. So it was definitely one of those presentations where it's like, okay, yeah, I need to, I need to memorize this as well.

But more lately, you know As you know, right? Your, your career and hopefully you as an individual do not stay stagnant. You develop a little bit, right? I've been getting more into.

Coaching and Leadership Insights

Dave Dougherty: Coaching books. So like Phil Jackson, you know, the, the legendary coach for the Chicago bulls in the nineties and the early 2000 Lakers with Kobe and Shaq and all those guys he's got 12 or 13 NBA rings with, you know, the most in history kind of thing but his use of.

Buddhism and Native American lore mixed with NBA basketball and Western ideals of sports and stuff is a really interesting mix on how to motivate players and get them to set their ego aside.

Alex Pokorny: How that kind of works, because you hear about different teams, you know, firing their head coach or defensive coach or whoever partway through a season. And then some newbie comes in And you're surrounded by all these players who, I mean, some of them are celebrities in their own right because of their skill set and unlikely that you are as well.

So you're coming into this crowd, somehow showing that you've got an idea to pull them together and to do the thing that they're supposed to do and to work with all the different. Personalities there that might have been pulled in partially. This wasn't the first choice. This is definitely a backup choice.

Maybe they're on their outs in their career and they already know it. Maybe they're nursing an injury suddenly and you've lost somebody who is kind of a key linchpin, keystone kind of player on the team. I've always seen some of those as just being like, Oh, that's gotta be such a tough situation. Like it's always tough being a manager thrown to a team to begin with.

But

Dave Dougherty: yeah,

Alex Pokorny: that's a heck of a situation where, I mean, you're very publicly watched and a million metrics on everything that your players did reflects on you.

Dave Dougherty: Right. And it's their performance that will determine whether or not you stay. Yeah. There are a couple of really good things on Netflix. If you want to go down that rabbit hole on this.

So the last dance the Michael Jordan documentary, there's a particular episode that focuses on Phil Jackson. And he's the one that came up with that name because. It was the last season that he was going to be coaching the Bulls and every year he would pick a theme for the season and then that theme would be reinforced through their practicing and through all the things and I mean, he was making players do yoga and like play in the dark or play in silence just to like, Change their perception of, you know, how you play, right?

Cause the stadium's so loud and it's this particular environment that just changing it up and making them have to think about it again was part of his tool set. So that's, that, that would be thing. Number one to go check out thing. Number two would be another one called the coaches. Playbook for life or something like that.

You just do coach's playbook. It'll, it'll come up, but it's a collection of like really famous coaches from a whole bunch of sports. And it's the how do you deal with the tough situations? How do you motivate players? Like there's one tennis one. That's really interesting because it was, how do you motivate players that are self destructing and turn it around, you know?

So. Yeah, those, those have been really interesting for me and, and where I find, you know, myself in, in my career as it stands now. But then also Ray Dalio, his book called principles, it is big. I, I fully recommend just getting the audio book and listening to it when you take your dog for a walk.

Cause that. It's there's a lot in it, but it was one of the few books where I had just light bulbs going off all the time, you know, or even just to know that I wasn't the only one that was thinking this way, you know was really nice. Cause sometimes that's all you need.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, no, that's definitely, I was actually thinking about that with Clayton Christensen we referenced him and his work before the podcast, just because of some of the core ideas that he came up with and theories that he came up with that were very applicable in different situations.

I mean, man, he understood some of the bare basics of kind of how. Selling a product works and also how, why, how and why people would want something like, yeah, aspects that get so glossed over so fast.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah.

SEO and Marketing Strategies

Dave Dougherty: And that's where, for me, I think starting my career out in SEO at least in the very beginning, it was, there was always a question of, well, are your marketing teams, is your organization aligned?

To do SEO well, right? Because not only did you need your marketers talking to your sales people, you also needed them talking to it,

Alex Pokorny: right?

Dave Dougherty: Which That's much better suited for the small medium businesses than the huge enterprises, right? So I mean, it took him 20 years to figure out the org structure to have, you know, SEOs in house or whatever else, right?

Depending on what business you're in. But that, so for me with that lens, I've always had a particular focus on like, Well, how's the York set up? Because what are they actually going to do? Right. So some of these like organizational design, organizational behavior type thinkers are, are a lot of my radar now, as opposed to early in my career, which was much more tactical, like how do you write a headline?

How do you you know, optimize this particular channel? You know, like I like Adam Grant, but he, to your point with Simon Sinek, it's like, there's, I like what you're doing here. And I understand the need to have all of these sort of allegories to. You know, not have it be just a research book, but at the same time, do I need 40 diving examples?

No, no, I don't need 40 diving examples.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah to the point about like organizational kind of issues. The one and only book that I really found useful, this is one I mentioned before, but it's a funny one, is the three meter zone and it's a book written for NCOs, non commissioned officers. So there'd be basically someone who started only 18 years old in the military, kind of rose up through the ranks doing infantry kind of grunt work and then through time, basically entered into being an officer.

So they didn't go to officer training school. They're not. Typically also kind of college educated, you're probably high school education straight into this. And then you're kind of just in charge of other individuals, your peers, and then kind of moving up additional people, additional teams kind of keep moving up and up additional teams of different types.

You know, that's sort of same kind of organizational growth and it's full of, and it's one NCO, it's kind of an unofficial guide really. It's by no means A military document binding means that it's a person who realized that basically there isn't great training for individuals in this situation. And he was as well.

So he wrote a book that was helpful, right? Basically, it's full of little exercises. And as you go down the line, there's a bunch of them trying to figure out what is your leadership style, which you never had a team before. That's a really good question. How to basically deal with a lot of tough situations and individuals who are resistant to you telling them what to do or the goals and mission that you're been tasked with.

How do you communicate it better? How do you understand their perspective and work through this? How do you introduce yourself even to a new team who might be resistant to you? I mean, there's like a whole bunch of these little exercises piece by piece. And I've come up with this habit of shoving a business card as a bookmark in it.

I basically start from the beginning and get to a point of something that's useful that I can apply to the situation and then I usually put a You know, bookmarking it and then deal with whatever I'm dealing with and set the book down. I don't know if I've ever actually finished it. I've probably read this.

I can't tell you how many times,

Dave Dougherty: right?

Alex Pokorny: But the book now is full of different business cards and all these different random points. You can see what some of them have. Yeah. I got like three quarters of the way through the book before I finally found something for that one.

Dave Dougherty: Well, good on you for actually finding a use for business cards.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, see, you know, a giant box for a thousand. Thank you. Random company that always prints off insane amount.

Interesting. Some of those kind of core pieces that I think of like as traits and values over, I don't know, job descriptions, maybe put it is trying to understand, you know, what are your. Main values and things that you want out of an organization and that you need to see out of an organization I mean some people are great with ultra competitive environments others find that to be either Intimidating or a reason to leave the company like right and they don't like that kind of internal pressure Others do some thrive I mean, you've got to kind of figure out what is the mix that works for you and then also try to find Organizations and roles that align to that.

So I think there's a Certain influences that I think can kind of help you understand more about kind of an introspective level of yourself And then also try to understand the organizations that you would work well in.

I don't know, throwing out some other names though, man, going back kind of the SEO history books, Matt Cutts, man That was that's a main one. Google's unofficial SEO spokesman who eventually got out of it, but And he was great for beginning what he had and hugely controversial always because he had like the the company bias Definitely coming through some of his words.

So do you trust what he says or not? I mean all the rest of that kind of comes up right? One that I used to go to and has completely failed From the seo side of things of staying relevant a black hat world a random forum for various people doing spammy stuff You It used to be much more of the affiliate, which was helpful to me because it was actually also very tactical.

There's so many SEOs who talked about SEO in almost a philosophical terms that there was clear they weren't actually doing the work. They were just repeating the mantras of somebody else that thanks for the generic statement. You're not going to help me do my job on Tuesday, right? People who were grinding for those results, though, a lot of affiliates, a lot of people who basically had small sites, they're doing all the work.

They're really in depth into it. They're learning as much as they can and kind of trying to reproduce it and make money every day. Those were helpful to me, so it used to be a helpful site in terms of there's individuals. And again, kind of with like, 3 meter zone, you got to take away the grain of salt and apply it to your context.

But certain pieces of that where I felt helpful today, though, I find it hilarious. I went back to that site just recently. They are full of people saying like, Oh, I'm doing like this rebellious against the terms and conditions, black hat, you know, method. So I'm, I'm writing the, all the blog articles myself and I'm putting out dozens a day on all these different stuff.

Wait a second, like, I was like, exactly what actually literally Google tells you to do. That is the whitest of the white hat in terms of like, you're not going to get banned for anything. No, you're literally doing what they told you to do. You're like, oh, yeah, i'm a pirate. I'm a rebel

That that jolly roger is gone So, I don't know. I'm sure some of those groups have probably gone over to transition to other sites and stuff I'm, not knowledgeable of and other methods. I'm sure it's all on discord now and well, it's private groups The importance of public forum Man, I thought that was so funny though.

There were so many people who had these like daily diaries of like, this is what I did today. This is what I did the next day.

Dave Dougherty: Right. Yeah.

Alex Pokorny: I'm so

Dave Dougherty: proud. I'm good. Yeah,

Alex Pokorny: exactly. I'm trying to get out like everybody else.

Dave Dougherty: That's funny. Yeah.

The Evolution of Advertising

Dave Dougherty: Cause it, you know, we've taught, you know, we've touched on, on some of these topics a lot this year, I think as, as the year's gone on either with, you know, AI or with, um, You have some of the HR stuff that we've talked about and, and other things. It's interesting to see like how what worked for us previously doesn't anymore, or it doesn't apply anymore, or especially with like SEO or social media marketing, right? I mean, that's such a commodity and it turns so fast that. Yeah, there's some good basic practices, but it should really be more of a, you know, your marketing mix kind of thing.

Right. Yeah. And for me, I find like, you know, talking about going backwards and looking at kind of standards, right. In the jazz world, there's this collection of books called the real books and what they are a collection of all the kind of. jazz standards that have come up and all the like really popular jazz songs.

So if you're going to book a three hour brunch gig, these are the songs you're going to, you're going to play. You know, and it's funny to look at some of the things on LinkedIn to be like, okay, you can try to pitch that as your idea. But that's been around since like 1950, you know, or that was actually 1980 and in this book and, you know, whatever else, like, this is not a new revolutionary thing.

You just discovered it. Right. So let's be honest. You just discovered it. Say that. You know, give the person who came up with the idea originally the credit. Right. You know, like musicians do this all the time. You can like take a line to reference somebody and that reference ends up being a fun little thing right within a song, but you could also be Felix Mendelsohn that was a Bach wannabe and made a career out of trying to sound like Bach 200 years after Bach was.

You know alive which okay fine that works that it worked for him good for him. It's not how I would want to do it

You know But we're still talking about him. So, you know good on good on him Do you see that with any of the the stuff that you've you've read or like old concepts that you come back to

Alex Pokorny: the cycle? Yeah,

Dave Dougherty: I

Alex Pokorny: mean everybody's kind of the old becomes the new the new becomes the old again.

Dave Dougherty: Mm hmm email

Alex Pokorny: marketing

One I don't know it's it's kind of funny actually my background you can see some of them And if anybody knows of an international version of these please please reach out and let me know because I've been looking for them And I cannot find anything like this, but the books are called all american ads there are compendiums by decade.

So 1910 to 1920, a lot of American ads at that time, random advertisements printed off in a book, kind of showing some of the differences as they change throughout the decades, kind of that go after that. Originally I have some of the odds right now I'm missing some of the events. I got the sixties, but I did the twenties, forties and eighties.

And I think the series stopped maybe in the late nineties, two thousands. I swear still that if you take some of those older vintage, you know, kind of hand painted imagery, use that today and try to break out of the mold. I mean, it doesn't matter what kind of banner ad you have, it would improve it.

Just to have something different, but I think that's, you get that cycle, the old becomes the new because somebody finally tries that they realized, hey, you can break out of this thing. Kind of fun. Same kind of design that we're basically everybody's playing off the same template. Now, how can we change that up?

Change it up a little bit. You can break out of it. And then people start to, you know, glom onto that idea and they, yeah. All start doing the same thing. And then that becomes the latest design. I mean, you get those natural cycles. And actually, if you look through enough decades of advertisement, you can see some of those cycles, but we're probably never going to go back to, I mean, there's a lot of things like that.

Those old ads, the amount of copy in an ad, if you look at it like a magazine full page print ad today, a couple of sentences, like that's it. Back then, my gosh, 500 words would be nothing on a page. I mean, you're, you're talking seven 50 more. It's amazing amount of texts they're talking about and going through all the different points and everything.

So very, very confident. Some of the old

Dave Dougherty: car ads, you'd have that like, you know, two thirds. It would be the image and then you'd have

Alex Pokorny: bottom is all four

Dave Dougherty: lines, a columns, a copy talking about how great the 64 Chevy Malibu is or whatever it is, right? It

Alex Pokorny: went out for a long time and there's a lot of old brands that are still trying to get that same amount of attention.

And I get that how difficult it is today to get that amount of attention. I don't know a lot of those kinds of ideas, I think are going to naturally cycle as people kind of rediscover different aspects of them in new context. So again,

everything's been done.

Dave Dougherty: Oh, of course. Yeah. Especially now that agencies are global and more of the work is done globally. I know we're all referencing the same, the same ideas, same concepts.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Dave Dougherty: Yeah, Ruthi joined us just in time for me to say, thank you for paying attention and listening to our discussion.

We will see you. In the next episode. Don't quite know if we're going to have another one for 2024. If not, have a great holiday. If we do, we'll see you then. And thanks for listening. Have a, have a wonderful time.