Great marketing doesn’t feel like marketing. But much of what we experience favours a low IQ approach: emails asking for a 15-minute call, followed by five more emails “bumping” it to the top of your inbox because you might have missed it. We didn’t miss it, we simply don’t want it.
The Marketing IQ Manifesto is a new methodology for creating marketing that matters. It embraces diversity, choosing extra, and being real, resulting in high-converting experiences that respect our audience's needs and who they are.
In this actionable and entertaining talk, Oli will show you:
The 10 guiding principles of a high-IQ marketer.
The 6 elements of Marketing IQ: Spatial Ability (conversion-centered design), Language Ability (conversion copywriting), Mathematical Ability (analytics & data), Memory Ability (repeatable processes & optimization), Emotional Intelligence, and Strategic Thinking.
And the MIQ Checklist which encapsulates your actionable guide to intelligent growth for your business
Auto-generated transcript - may contain errors.
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I drink a lot of Red Bull, and I love shopping. So whenever you combine those two things, it's almost guaranteed to be a really good time. Now, this is Shoppers Drug Mart. It's a pharmacy in Vancouver where I live. It's kinda like Boots here.
But the thing I don't like about it is they force you to go through the cosmetic section in order to get to the Red Bull. Now, as if I'm gonna be buying makeup. I mean, not to say that it hasn't happened a couple of times in the past, but that's not why I'm there today.
So I navigate through there without buying any lip gloss, and I find the Red Bull. Mission accomplished. But then I have to pay for it, and I have to go through the self checkout. A lot of people don't like them, but I do, because you don't have to talk to a human, and people are annoying.
So I go up and I and but the thing is, it's intent on having a conversation with me about having a receipt. Now, if I love shopping this much, I despise receipts that much. But I just don't understand the point of receipts. I mean, if it's really expensive, get it.
You might need to return it. But if it's a three dollar Red Bull, what is the point? Unless I'm going to have some kind of road map to explain in ten years why I end up getting diabetes, it has absolutely no value to me.
So I'm a little annoyed, and then have this conversation about how to do it. So I can print it. Don't want my email. Definitely not. Print and email. No. Not gonna happen. Or I can cancel. No. I don't know what I'm canceling. Am I canceling this conversation?
Am I canceling the entire transaction? I press it anyway and it closes this. But I this is this window, I have to go a hundred percent through this in order to get my Red Bull. So I go, okay. I print my receipt, and I'm annoyed about this.
And I crumple up in a little ball, and I walk outside. And at this point, I'm just getting so angry that I had to do this that I cannot get into this fight or flight mode. When this happens, the adrenaline rushes into your body, goes to your legs so you can run, goes to your chest and your arms so you can fight, and it goes to your eyes, and it's it basically it takes away a lot of your hearing in this moment so you can focus on what's in front of you,
which for me was this choose your own adventure kind of experience. And at this point, I'm just like, oh, what do I do? So I've got this crumbled in a little ball, but it's paper. The paper's got a slot like that. If I hadn't crumbled it, it would be flat.
It would make sense, but it's a ball. So I'm like, does it go in this one? I'm like, the copy and the designer conflicting and my emotional state is so screwed up. I can't understand what to do. So, at the end of the day, just throw it in the garbage.
I mean, the planet. Right? So, I'm like, I'm in this heightened state and it's it's frustrating. That's what I'd call that bad experience, I would call that low IQ. And then fixed IQ is kinda the average marketing. All the things that most companies are doing, they work a little bit, but they're not that impressive, and they it's hard to stand out against your competitors.
Then there's high IQ marketing, and that's what I'm gonna show you how to do today. Quick example to illustrate it. Who's familiar with the game show Jeopardy? It's North American, but k. All you need to know is if you answer a question in a box, you get that much money.
And for the last thirty five years, the way people have done it, they start at the top, the easy question, and when they figure out the category, they go down gradually to the more difficult questions. That's fixed IQ. That's the standard way of doing it.
Then this guy shows up. He's a sports gambler from Vegas, and he just changes everything entirely. He takes this and he flips it, and he starts at the bottom. He does the hard questions. He makes thousands of dollars, and everyone's like, oh, we only have two hundred, and he's got ten thousand, twenty thousand, a hundred thousand.
They're all ******** themselves, and then he just destroys everyone because he completely changed how the game is played. That's high IQ. So when we think about IQ, there are many ways of looking at it, but a simple way is just to break it into four sections.
So the spatial, ability, language, mathematical, and memory. Now, I've transposed these into elements of marketing IQ. Spatial ability translates into design, design patterns, visual hierarchy, things like that. Language is obviously copywriting, clarity, information hierarchy, readability, mathematical, analytics, data, and any numerical part of our marketing memory.
This is repeatable processes. Then I added two more, emotional intelligence and strategic thinking. Okay. So these are six. What I'm gonna do, I'm gonna go through the elements, and as I do, I will kind of illuminate the ten principles of a high IQ marketer.
These are the rules to live by if you want to do more intelligent, more impactful marketing. And in the end, there'll be a checklist, which is kind of like a, oh ****. Won't do that again. Okay. So the other kind of the rules to live by, and this is a detailed look at it.
It's a PDF you can download if you want to get a more detailed look at what I'm talking about. So this idea, the principle here is flipping upside down. So do this with anything you have. If it's a landing page, reverse it. If it's a funnel, look at it from the other side.
Pricing page, put the grid upside down. Whatever it is, just as a creative exercise, don't just actually do that, because you'll see things from a different perspective, and it might give you different ideas about how you can do things differently to other people.
Familiar question. Right? How many people does it take to change a light bulb? Well, I'm gonna flip that to how many light bulbs does it take to change people. I think it's two, or more specifically, two versions of the same bulb. Now, this is a smart bulb from GE, and I'm gonna show you a video.
This is an instructional video for how you do a factory reset in case it gets confused and doesn't connect to WiFi. Start with your bulb off for at least five seconds. Then turn on the bulb for eight seconds. Turn off for two seconds.
Turn on for eight seconds. I sped these up so you don't have to suffer through eight seconds every time. On for eight seconds. I hate how happy he is about this. For two seconds. Turn on for eight seconds. Turn off for two seconds. Seconds, turn off for two seconds, and then turn it on one last time.
Yes. The bulb will flash on and off three times to show that the reset was successful. If it doesn't, your bulb may be running on an older version of firmware and will need to try the second factory reset process. Which is exactly the same as the first one with some unidentifiable difference.
Please just just please just put a little reset button on the bulb. It's that simple. I mean, I know it's an edge case where it might be in the ceiling that you can't reach, but please just make that the only situation we have to remember the ******* launch codes to turn this thing off and fix it.
Design is supposed to make things better. Right? And that's kind of the opposite. Here's a different example. There's a company in the Netherlands. They make bikes, and they are growing. So they start shipping them to the US, but they kept getting damaged. They didn't know why.
What was wrong with the shipping or the people moving these boxes? So they did what everybody else does. They start playing with putting icons on there, but it's kind of like banner blindness. You know? These delivery people are like, okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's gotta be pointing up, and it might contain broken wine glasses.
But this is a big box. I doubt that's true. Must carry an umbrella while carting this box around, and I don't know what kind of force field this thing is to hold the box in the air. This is totally meaningless. So they're brainstorming how could they actually solve this problem?
How can we make the delivery people feel something more about this so they're more careful? Because putting fragile on it didn't work. Putting a bike on there didn't work because bikes are strong. Why would you be careful? So what they did, they put a TV on there.
Because people are gonna be careful with TVs. Everybody has a TV. Reduce the damages by eighty percent overnight. That's a brilliant piece of creativity using design to change behavior. Since the industrial revolution, lathes and drill presses have caused thousands of injuries, missing eyes, limbs, death even, because of the chuck key.
Because you put it in, people forget, and you turn it on at five thousand rpm and it smashes you in the face or someone else. It's kinda dangerous. This guy's gonna demonstrate how that works. This is what happens when you leave it in there.
You turn if you turn it on on accident. Look how smug he is. He just did that to other people with no protective clothing. Like, it's just a Darwin Award candidate right there. That's how it used to be. Now I have one of these.
I got it recently, and I'll show you how it works now. It's spring loaded, so when you put it in, you have to hold it to turn it. There is absolutely no way that that thing can remain in there. It pushes itself out.
They have eradicated this problem entirely. There's no way it can ever cause injuries again. So this is number two. Make obstacles obsolete. We're used to thinking about friction. Woah. There's a fly on my bottle there. That is really weird. You're have to carry this.
Instead of thinking about just reducing friction, think about segmenting all of your friction points so you can find the ones where the obstacle is you can actually remove it entirely. Think about selling tickets for a conference. One of the biggest barriers is the cost of the travel.
Not just the ticket, but the travel to get to the conference. Now you take a segment of people who live in that city, you eradicate that problem entirely. So if you think about it like that, you look at all the segments you have, you can find these ways.
Then you can market locally, and you'll have a lot more success because that's how you'll communicate to them that they don't have that obstacle. Okay. Copy. So when we're speaking and someone is listening, there's a gap. And there's a further gap between listening and actually hearing.
Right? So the gap between speaking and hearing is quite large. It's very important that we talk very clearly and people can actually understand our message. Who's heard of the rock band, Alterbridge? Just a couple of you. Right? Okay. It doesn't matter. Just listen to a little part of one of their songs.
I'm pretty sure their target market is not I like turtles. Testudinologists, which is the name for people who are responsible for looking after sea turtles. Whether that's what he said or not, it doesn't matter because what was heard is different to what was said.
If you're a high IQ marketer, run experiments, five second tests something like that to validate whether people can actually understand what you're saying. So that's accidental misconception. Then there's more intentional. We're all familiar with Tresme. Right? ****** shampoo. But their tagline is used by professionals.
Now, if you've ever been in the salon, you'll know that the shelf space is high priced. You only get really good stuff in there. Tresme would never be on that shelf in any salon in the world. There's no way. It's just it's just not good.
So how can they get away with that? Well, all they need is two people from this group to buy it. Two for plural and then it is used by professionals. Not professional hairdressers, just professional people like doctors. They're just gaming the system. I mean clever maybe, works maybe, but I think that's kinda like you.
I don't think that's very I don't know. I'm not really on board with that. I don't think that speaks to having, you know, strong values or something. I don't really like that. Okay. Let's start with numbers analytics. I think we can all agree that by the time we leave high school that people have pretty much lost all basic arithmetic ability.
We kind of leave that behind and so then but then we're faced with it all the time. We go shopping. See this and seventy percent more. Is it seventy percent more cleaning power or seventy percent more seventy percent extra free? No. It's seventy percent more than the other smaller tub that has forty two.
I don't give a dusty **** if that's got more than the other one. That's like saying a large t shirt has more cotton than a medium t shirt. It doesn't matter. And it's and okay. What I care about are the unit economics. Right?
How much is one of them in this one compared to one in another one? And some supermarkets will have that. I'll show you. Some don't. If you're in Tesco, a lot of shelf space. You might have all of these. Tesco Metro, you might just have one.
So there's no point of reference. It makes absolutely no sense. It's just gonna confuse you. Don't get me start oh, Amazon does a great job. Waitrose does not show you that. And don't get me started on toilet paper. It's the most confusing thing you can ever buy.
And what site super mega, double plus, mega plus, regular. It's just awful. It's designed to confuse adults. Okay. So numbers are confusing. I did a little research poll. What's the biggest challenge when it comes to data? And access is a lot, but accuracy is the biggest problem.
I think there's a big mistrust in data because it's really hard to make it accurate in your business. And the the kind of there's two ways of looking at it. There's internal and external. Internal is your business metrics. So you might have dashboards.
You might have when you're a startup, it's a little easier. As you grow, you'll have data coming from your back end systems, from Recurly or your payment processor, from your accounting. They all kinda come in together when it works. Excuse me. That's great.
One thing falls over though, and everything tends to fall over, and it's frustrating. And then external, finding a trusted source is really difficult because someone publishes a case study which may or may not be scientifically well done, then someone else copies that, then someone else copies that, then someone does a ****** infographic with that and there changes the numbers, cites it incorrectly and someone writes about that.
And you see this by that point it's got nothing to do with that even if that was good. So it's hard to know what to trust. What I would say for the internal part is have a spreadsheet. A simple old school spreadsheet. They update once a month.
If you're a start up, do it yourself. If you're larger, have someone else do it. But just once a month, add in the core business metrics that matter to you. Like low IQ is you don't use data. Fixed IQ, you think GA can save your life, and you try to get everything out of there, and you get confused because it's too much.
High IQ is you know these are the six metrics that define the health of my business. That's all I'm gonna pay attention to for the most part. Then you can hook this up. I did this on the plane over here. I used Data Box to just pull that stuff.
Beautiful dashboard that won't fall over because it's just coming from a manual setup. You can connect to all the other complex things as well, but just having this, this means you can be the person in the room who knows the baseline standards. If you're in a room and an investor or your boss says, what's the average blah blah blah?
If you're the person with the answer, you look really smart because most people have no clue. So that's a good technique to just make sure you always know what the health of your business is. I live on a whiteboard. I think whiteboards are great.
I needed some whiteboard cleaner. I've had this one before, but I went to buy some and I noticed it's only three and a half stars. I'm like, oh, well, was it changed? What's actually wrong with this? So I went down to the reviews to see what was going on.
First one. James Murphy. Clean your whiteboard. They say it's non toxic, but I didn't drink any. It's good to know that you're a smart man, James. What I did do is clean my whiteboard and I have to admit, they needed it. This is a cracking narrative you're building here.
In fact, I forgot it was even a whiteboard, so messy it was. This guy has got a lot of layers to his skills. But one white with this amazing product and it was white again. James G Murphy, what is wrong with you? Just in a whiteboard way.
And that's how I like my whiteboard. Two people found this helpful. Seriously. But this speaks to your brand, and you can control the part that's on your website and your marketing, but you can't control what other people do to it. Comments there or if people set up a display in a department store if you have physical products.
So you have to check-in on that stuff sometimes. If you have thousands of products, it doesn't scale, but you need to find a way to at least check-in sometimes. Because funny like this, but if you were looking down this and you see the word racist, and I saw some reaction, you kind of recall and go like, why are they saying that?
That reflects to the product, and you might just leave the page because you didn't like it. Right? So you have to kind of check on some of these things. Only two important things when it comes to marketing. First is obvious. Second one is important.
It's QA, which is something nobody in marketing does. And I know it's boring, but people do it in software development, but nobody in marketing does it. And it's super important because there are always mistakes. And the way I like to do it So this gets us in a process, which is boring but shouldn't be boring.
There's some cool ways we can do this. So I did another poll. Why are people not running these processes? In this case, optimizing your landing page or your website. Not enough time was the number one thing. If you do it right, you make more time over time.
But there are always different ways that you can get a little extra time. Everyone has a problem with time. But the day is twenty four hours, and we sleep six. Now I know there are some out there that say, woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. I need eight.
Well, I say just sleep a little faster. So that's one way you can reclaim some time. It's a great technique. But really what you want are faster optimization cycles. And the way you do that is the same method you use to create your marketing.
The way you think, the way you work, however you go, the mechanics of how you do stuff, you also use that method when you critique your own work or you critique someone else's on your team and the same method to QA it. When you do this, you're always looking at your work from the same lens.
So I make it like this, then you check on it and go, I didn't actually. Okay. I need to fix that, that, and that. And you understand better and the cycles get faster and faster and faster because you're always using the same thing no matter where you're looking at it.
So the principle here is to reverse engineer what you're really good at. Whether it's the way you talk about your product, whether it's the the way you write about your product, whatever it is. Find a way to reverse engineer, unpack it, so you can define what the things are that made that great.
Which goes to the next one, which is learning complex methods. Your IQ doesn't really change after you're you kinda reach a certain part in childhood. That's what most people think. But some people think you can tweak it a little bit later in life if you learn more complex methods.
You invest in more complexity, figuring that out. It could maybe have a change. Because communication Simplicity is good for communication in your marketing, but complexity is what you need to achieve actual growth personally. K. So we released the pop ups product a couple years ago to go with our landing pages, and I was concerned.
A lot of us were concerned like how is this gonna impact our brand? How is it gonna impact how people think about us? Because that that's a true statement but that and that's why. Right? If people use them like that, that's when they suck.
But this is also true. If they're done right, really right, you shouldn't really feel it. You're just like, oh that was actually kinda useful. I'd like that. Go on about your business. If it's done right. Problem is a lot of people are abusing and manipulating in the wrong way.
So if you have that problem or anything in your product marketing, whatever you're doing, if you have to you know present it like how do you want people to perceive it? And for me I wanted a few things. I wanted us to lead by example.
To teach people how to do it right, to encourage good behavior. I want it to be defensible. If people were asking me questions about it, I wanted to justify why we were doing this, why it was helpful for marketers, and not damaging to other people if it was done right.
And then I wanted, in ten years from now, this little guy, if he asked me about it, so I could actually feel good about proud about what I did. This is Hendrix, my son. He's four months old. This is my first time away from him.
So whatever it is you need to lean on, whether it's your core values or the fact that you're away from your kid for the first time, you need to choose one of those things so that you can make sure you're ascribing the right values to what it is you're doing.
So the way I did this, looking at reverse engineering and complex methods, I reverse engineered a really good pop up, a delightful experience, which oxymoronic maybe, but it can be done. So I broke it down by these seven values, respect, clarity, control, creativity, relevance, charm, and value.
And because if you do these things right, you can create a good experience no matter what it is you're talking about. One example, because I can't go through it all. For control, to get maximum points for this in the equation, you need to have a close button like the x, maybe a cancel.
If you click around it, it has to close. If you use the escape key, it has to close. Right? That's one little part of it. You have to have full control over this experience because it's the ****** ones that don't let you do that.
Right? So you can find ways of making anything excellent if you do it the right way. And that's values based marketing. Wherever you get them from, you can embed your core values in your marketing, in the way you use your own products, the way you educate people to do it as well.
I won't go through it, but if you get the slides and you wanna dig into it, how it works, and try and do it for your own thing, that digs into exactly how I did it. Alright. Emotion. How do people feel? This is a bathroom and a bar near my office.
If you look at my slides over the years, spent an inordinate amount of time taking photos in bathrooms. I don't know why that is. You look here, you got the this is a gender neutral bathroom. Right? Very common now. And this is the also common, trying to be stylish copper piping where you get the water.
Right? But where do you get the soap? Now I've covered it up for now. It's up there. Now why is that a problem? Well, on a good day, if I'm wearing heels and I'm stretching, I'm six feet, and I had to reach up here to get it.
Not to mention that you have to use the palm of your hand to push it in to try and get the soap out. So they are segmenting people out by doing this. The average height of a male in Scotland is five nine. Female five three and a half.
So they're removing all of these people from the ability to engage in this experience. When we think about accessibility, on the web we think about readable text. In the physical world we think about wheelchairs. But we're not looking at all of these other ways that we're hurting people by these ridiculous design ideas.
Okay? And that can hurt the way it just hurt people's feelings when they encounter things like that. They don't feel included. Segmentation is great because you can narrow in all these people and make it perfect for them. The imagery used, the the tone, all that kind of stuff.
But sometimes you have to also step back and find what the commonality is in all those segments, so your overall messaging can speak to everybody in a more inclusive way. Here's a great example of that. Toronto Raptors, they won the NBA championship this year, and they're the only Canadian basketball team.
Used to have one in Vancouver, but they left. So the the marketing team at the Raptors, they're amazing. They did such a great job. I'll explain what they did. So Nike gives a custom jersey to every team that makes the playoffs. And usually it's just about the city.
Something about what the city is. They didn't do that here. They used red and white for Canada. They used an arrow pointing up to Canada, and they used one word north to represent Canada. They didn't mention Toronto or tall. Right? And raptors is a reference to dinosaurs.
So they had these Jurassic Park things across the country. Tens of thousands of people in stadiums and on the streets watching on big screens as they won the championship. They ignited the entire country. The notable exception here is Vancouver. There was no was no Jurassic Park in Vancouver, and I think there's Hannah Bazoff tomorrow, she's from Toronto, as is Tiffany.
I think it was because Vancouverites have a little bit of a different relationship with people from Toronto. Those people call themselves the Torontonians. I thought that was a little bit pretentious. We are the Torontonians, for we have Ram's legs. That aside, they did a great job.
They smashed the all time sales record by eighty percent, and fifty six people fifty six percent of all Canadians watched some part of that because they treated the whole country as a segment instead of just Toronto. Was a brilliant piece of marketing. Brilliant strategy. Nice segue.
So strategy, strategic thinking. Who likes that term? Nobody. Right? It's really annoying. Problem that's annoying is because nobody understands it and nobody does it right. To me, it means two things. One, original thought. You have to have your own thoughts that aren't anyone else's, and you're trying to make something different.
You're trying to bring something new. But then also you have to have an opinion. It's not just about publishing lots of content or being out there, you know, it's it's about you have to have an original thought and you have to have an opinion.
The problem is all thought leaders for the most part are founders of companies. Because they had an idea, they started a company, and they're the ones that go out and speak about it. The biggest problem though is that management squashes people with opinions, which is not a nice thing.
Right? They want to run it their way. They don't let people you know, people are afraid to have an opinion. And if we're going to have more diversity and more people actually with an opinion they can share and make things better, we have to stop squashing people from having an opinion.
We have to encourage people to have an opinion. And if you want the best tip for how to do that Oh, before that. So spot content. Single point of truth. This is a good content strategy. If you are trying to lead with your content, you'll have content everywhere.
Right? And that can start watering down the actual message you have internally and for your customers. Doing this, ours will be our landing page certification course, which all employees will have to go through and pass, and then our customers will do it. So everyone will have a shared vocabulary.
If someone's on the phone, sales of CS or marketing, they're talking about the same thing in the same way. They have the same perspective about what this part of conversion means or whatever, instead of people may be under pressure making things up or saying something that was a seven year old reference.
Right? It's a great way of getting people to talk in the same way. But if you want to know how to get people to develop having an opinion, this is the only way to start. This is actually breaking news on some local station in Boston. I don't understand that. Okay. So quick poll.
Over. Under. You're all wrong. Okay. We can debate that afterwards. Great new phone case. I bought this. Look at this. Great design. Right? And it's super strong. It's a drilling piece of wood. They're drilling the case, and it does nothing. That is amazing. Let's watch it in slow motion.
They're cheating. They're lying. It's in reverse. That's never gonna do any harm. Right? It's right on the wood. They lift it out. It cuts, and then they go backwards on the glass. It's just not That's like the Trezorman thing. But even worse, they don't care about their cut There's thousands of comments on this Instagram thread.
But they don't care. They probably made millions of dollars, then they'll change their name, do another product, and just keep doing that because they don't care. They're not an important brand. They're just that's not the way we should be doing it. So number nine is deliver on your promises. Right?
Whatever it is, whether it's a landing page matching your ad or just whatever it is you're telling your customers or your staff, you have to follow through on that or you're just not really a respectful company. I made a promise that there would be a checklist.
So this is kind of what it looks like. I'll share a URL where you can get a PDF so it's bigger so can actually read it. That covers everything I was talking about. Kind of explains it in a different way. So number ten.
This is a simple one. It's basically just combine these six elements of marketing IQ. Put them together. Start trying to share knowledge with different people in your in your company. You know, talk about copy with a designer. Reverse that. Talk strategy with the kids.
Whatever it is, do it a little bit differently, and always think about these different elements. When you're doing your work, go, oh I didn't think about the copy, or I didn't think about how this will affect people emotionally. You do that, it'll be better. Now, quickly back to this guy.
After he destroyed everyone and changed his game entirely, for weeks contestants were copying him, doing the same thing. At least two out of every three contestants were doing the same thing. Really successfully, they were being bold and risky. Then three weeks after that, everybody returned to doing it the same way as they did before.
Which is ridiculous because it was proven to work. And there's another reason. He analyzed the data to find out whether daily doubles, which is you can make more money. He found out exactly where they are, and they tend to be closer to the bottom.
So his strategy was brilliant. It was very high IQ. So you might think going back to this method, that's the fixed IQ. That's fixed IQ. No. It's not. That's low IQ because they know there's a better way, but they're not doing it. And that's not a good way to behave.
You can never get better if you just do what is kinda everyone else is doing, especially if you know there's a better way. We can do better marketing. Everyone here can do better marketing. You wouldn't be here if you didn't want to do that. Right?
And it's up to us to try and make a bit of a difference doing better marketing because marketing a lot of it's not very good. So especially if you wanna be different to your competitors. Thank you very much. You can get the slides and the checklist there.
