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Mark S A Smith: That’s absolutely true. We have a lot of polymaths on this show. That’s what creates disruption.

Geoffrey Colon: Yes. You got to think outside the box.

Mark S A Smith: You have to think on the box, in the box, we have to use every aspect of the box.

Geoffrey Colon: That’s right. I didn’t think about it that way, now I got a new line I can attribute to you. I’m going to use that.

Mark S A Smith: Jeffrey, steal it. I’ll write more.

Geoffrey Colon: I love it, yes.

Mark S A Smith: One of the things you talk about is designing disruption, which runs counter to a lot of current belief that you can’t design it, you actually just have to ride it. Tell me about your thoughts about how do we design disruption.

Geoffrey Colon: Think about how people behave, or better, how do the misbehave? I’m a big fan of what we call behavioral economics. Richard Thaler brought it to popularity. My dad was an economics professor, and I think he believed in a lot of this back in the 70s when the Chicago School of Thought was sort of the bible amongst economists. What behavioral economists believe is not everything can be attributed to rational behavior. People are going to do things based on emotions and feelings and wanting to be part of something bigger, or that’s intimate.

I think if you understand what motivates people, or what doesn’t motivate them, we can reverse engineer and design things that get them excited about the world, that possibly allow us to solve some of the world’s bigger problems. We can use these techniques to really get attention for things that have a hard time gaining attention, because you don’t have the biggest budget, you don’t have all the money in the world for advertising, or marketing as we’ve grown accustomed to.

Mark S A Smith: Right.

Geoffrey Colon: By tapping into that, there’s a way to actually get to the audience that really matters the most. Then it may spread to other people, and maybe it becomes a large phenomenon. You know Mark, I think the best marketing now is really meant for a qualified audience, a certain sub-cult…

Mark S A Smith: Absolutely.

Geoffrey Colon: … of people. We forget about that, because we’ve been, sort of, enamored with mass communication over the past 50 years, that we don’t know what it’s like to actually have a conversation like you and I are having, just two people talking about things. Maybe only a few other people may listen to it, but before you know it, those people put these sort of beliefs into action. That’s persuasion and influence. I don’t care how many followers you have on Instagram, or how many followers you have on LinkedIn.

It’s sort of absurd how we put all these quantified metrics into the world now. That’s really what I mean by designing. How we’re designing around what people will do, or what they will not do. It really gets back to the belief of putting people first in marketing, which we don’t talk about at all in this world of artificial intelligence and automation and digital transformation, all these really big words. Digital transformation is not a story. What happens to people through digital transformation is a story.

Mark S A Smith: Yeah, digital transformation is merely the methodology. I want to drill into something that you just said, and that is, it doesn’t matter how many people that you have following you on social media, the question is are they the right people? Are they the people that are responsive? Are they part of your tribe, or are they just fillers of space and a way to screw up your numbers when you do your marketing?

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, I mean, I could go out and buy a bunch of followers if I wanted to, or create a bunch of bots that make it look like I have a huge population and they spread all this information for me. We’re starting to see this more in the political world. Obviously it’s tied into the brand world as well.

Mark S A Smith: Sure. But on the other side, it’s really easy to spot those bots, because all you have to do is pop them open and see that they have no followers.

Geoffrey Colon: Yes. Yeah, no real picture. I think a lot of it is just because people are enamored with vanity metrics. You said it best, do you have people within your tribe and on LinkedIn one of the fabulous things, and I know you and I have talked back and forth on there is, I probably talk to around 20 or 25 people who I talk to a lot on a week by week basis. Other people chime in, I learn from them, but I think it’s important to learn from that tribe, because those people actually will spread then the discussion that you have. That actually moves into other people who are like, “Wait a minute. You’re saying things that I actually agree with, and I didn’t think other people would talk about this.” Then it gets more and more people to maybe adopt a methodology that happens within this disruptive world.

One of the things I think it’s really important for people to understand is, it’s hard to blueprint or make a template for these sort of tactics, because you have to look at each objective individually. You have to look at each business individually. You have to look at how that fits into the world. I’m not a big believer in like, “Hey you can just mimic all these into best practices.”

Mark S A Smith: No.

Geoffrey Colon: Once we have knowledge, that can be exploited and everybody has that to their advantage. That’s why you have to recreate things constantly. Maybe I think more like an artist than I do a technologist.

Mark S A Smith: Well you are a creative person, so that doesn’t surprise me a bit. Yet the whole point here is in marketing, it’s contextual.

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah. We think contents going to drive everything. It’s really the context of the scenario that’s around us. That’s why, when you have people who plan for a campaign and they’re like, “Hey, we’re going to go live with this campaign.” And then something happens that day, and you’re like, “Wait a minute, are you sure you want to start that conversation? This just happened in the real world. You’re going to look like you have no empathy, or you’re just trying to take advantage of the situation.”

How human can you be in this world? Especially because we are becoming more automated, more analytical. The more human you are, I think the more you have a chance of actually succeeding, because everything around us is just becoming much more robotic in some respects.

Mark S A Smith: Well I think that’s one of the key points to disruptive marketing, is it’s about authenticity, transparency, and reality. It’s the backlash to all the automation and AI that’s being foist upon us, in some cases, willingly. That authenticity really is what drives people saying, “Yeah, that’s like me. That’s my identity. That’s who I want to be.”

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, I’m not against using tools to help do work.

Mark S A Smith: No, we want to do tools. Tools work.

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, tools work.

Mark S A Smith: Yeah. They allow us to be more creative.

Geoffrey Colon: Exactly. I think it’s a matter of, how do you use those tools in ways that maybe the creators didn’t imagine. I just had this conversation with a colleague of mine here at Microsoft. Think of how a person who developed live video for social platforms intended that to work. She was like, “Well you know, it was a way to probably share maybe a birthday moment with people who are on the other side of the world.”

Mark S A Smith: Sure.

Geoffrey Colon: I’m like, “Yes, but now think about how people use it.” She’s like, “They use it show the resistance. Unfortunately some people use it to show people getting killed.” I’m like, “Exactly.” You have to think about how people will misbehave when they use these channels. Marketers have to think about how do you actually misbehave to become creative in a way that people wouldn’t think you would use that channel for. Good example is people ask for recommendations now.

Mark S A Smith: Right, we are recommendation driven world. Nobody buys anything from Amazon, doesn’t go to any restaurant without checking the recommendations first.

Geoffrey Colon: Exactly, but that system is meant to almost be hacked now.

Mark S A Smith: Yes.

Geoffrey Colon: Like how do you start recommending things that are off the wall? That people go, “Whoa, I’m paying attention to this, because I didn’t think anybody would every use it for that.” If anybody is already in the process of doing that, kudos to you, because I think that’s the next wave of disruption in terms of marketing, is how we use a lot of these systems that are built in a very rational way, in a rational manner.

Mark S A Smith: You pointed out that we look for ways to misbehave. Disruption and misbehaving are often tied together. I was called disruptive when I was a kid, it’s only because I was bored in school. Today of course disruption is part of my brand. Yes, I disrupt, and so do you. One of the things that you talk about is the disruption of the marketing department. We are moving to this world of everybody’s a marketer. Everybody is now in marketing with everybody’s social media presence.

You talked about how marketing is now a 24/7/365 behavior. Every time somebody uses the product, they are in your marketing department, and no amount of marketing can save bad products, in fact, bad products die so much faster today, thank you very much. Then what you said earlier, which triggered me to think about this, is vanity metrics, customer identification surveys and polls, and there’s your brand or vanity metrics. That really changes how we look at marketing from a traditional standpoint.

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, in some respects, the marketers should really be at the table with the research and development team, the product development team.

Mark S A Smith: Sure, the customer support team.

Geoffrey Colon: There’s customer support team, everything.

Mark S A Smith: Yeah.

Geoffrey Colon: You almost become, instead of a division, or a silo, you are really in every area of a company whether it’s small or large. It’s interesting, because small business owners will tell me, “Geoff, I do all my own marketing, but I love the fact that I also do all the other things, like maybe order products for the store. I know what’s selling, I do the supply chain management. I pay my employees. I train everyone.”

Mark S A Smith: Yeah, I even do Microsoft support.

Geoffrey Colon: Exactly.

Mark S A Smith: Right.

Geoffrey Colon: I mean, it allows them to know more and feel what their customers are doing. If you just are a division, “Oh hey, I have a marketer,” you might not really know what does someone go through when they call customer support?

Mark S A Smith: Yeah.

Geoffrey Colon: That’s important to understand those things.

Mark S A Smith: Right, why do they call?

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah.

Mark S A Smith: What’s their feeling when they call? What’s the feeling you want them to have when they exit the call, because that is part of your marketing behaviors today.

Geoffrey Colon: We thought of what a chief marketing officer was back in the day. It was that person in the board room who represented the voice of the customer, who could say to the board, “I don’t know that’s the right move for us.” Now, chief marketing officers are usually just people who are part of the C-Suite, who say, “Let’s not even think about the customer. We’ll just do this, because that’s the best way for us to make more profit.” You need more rebels in those chairs thinking about, “Is this the right move for the customer? If it’s the right move for the customer, then it’s the right move for the company.” We don’t have a lot of that thinking in the C-Suite yet Mark.

Mark S A Smith: Well that’s got to change, because companies that are doing that are doomed for failure. In a recent information age article, that they predicted that 40% of the Fortune 500 Companies are not going to survive the digital disruption, because of the number of reasons I believe this is a big one, for me, a massive change of course is how millennials view the world. I raised five millennial kids. Their view of the world, was radically different than mine. My view is becoming more like their view, because quite frankly, I raised them the way that I wished that I had been raised.

Geoffrey Colon: That’s right. That’s right.

Mark S A Smith: For them, transparency, and authenticity is critical. They are willing to pay more to work with a company that has a reflection of their values verses somebody that’s selling them something that’s the cheapest possible thing. My kids get by with less of higher quality.

Geoffrey Colon: That’s right. That’s exactly it.

Mark S A Smith: It’s a huge disrupter. If you don’t get this, and you do not align those values with your customers, you will be disrupted by companies like us, who do that. One of the things you talked about, which I thought, which was really great, is the concept of the ABL approach, which really dovetails into what we’ve been talking about all the way. Explain the ABL approach to marketing.

Geoffrey Colon: What it represents is, always be listening, which goes into, if you manage people, if you run a business, if you’re a marketer, if you’re anything in life, the best approach is to really sit down and listen to what people have to say, and not come with a straight solution. What always I think turns me off is people that come direct to me and say like, “This is what you need to do,” without really understanding what is the context of my situation? Who am I as a person? What do I need? What gives me purpose?

Mark S A Smith: That’s right.

Geoffrey Colon: But if you sit down and listen, and you can actually shut up for a little bit, which I think marketers have a hard time doing, you can really learn a lot. You can learn a lot about yourself. You can learn about where you stand in the world. You can really learn about what people want more of, rather than drinking the Kool-Aid and saying, “We’re great, we have the best solution, and here’s why you’re going to love it.”

Mark S A Smith: That strategy doesn’t work anymore. Now, from a selling disruption standpoint, the difference is, old school sales and marketing was about manufactured consent. We did that by talking about features, advantages and benefits, which was an attempt to map the product to a customer motivation.

Geoffrey Colon: Yep.

Mark S A Smith: What’s changing is we reverse this. Let’s figure out what’s motivating our customers, and then map that to the product.

Geoffrey Colon: That’s right.

Mark S A Smith: Everything we’re talking about here, ABL, always be listening, is about understanding their motivational sets, and then constructing messaging and content that aligns with our motivational sets, so that we can create a relevant dialogue that continues to a relationship.

Geoffrey Colon: There’s another meaning to that acronym, which is, agility beats lifting. What I mean by that is, yoga is all about flowing through whatever the moment is that you’re in. Whereas weight lifting, you’re planning what that deadlift is, “I’m going to bench 500 pounds right now,” it takes a lot of planning and concentration to actually get there, whereas, yoga’s much more about in the moment, and so, if you listen, you can actually become more agile.

Companies need to be this way, where instead of saying, “What’s our process? What’s our structure?” That doesn’t work either Mark, because customers change so quickly based on technology and communication, that by setting yourself up in a vertical, you’re actually destroying your future potential. You want to actually be less defined so you can move into new areas. I always ask people, “What is Amazon’s vertical?” They’re like, “Oh, well they’re a retailer.” I’m like, “Oh, but they make devices, and they’re in the cloud,” and they look at me like, “Oh wait a minute. You’re right.” Tesla, they don’t make cars. They’re an energy company.

Mark S A Smith: That’s right.

Geoffrey Colon: This is how we have to think now. If you’re like, “Well that’s not for me Geoff,” then you’re going to have a really hard time I think surviving in the twenty-first century, because it is about being vague, it is about being open to new ideas and opportunities. Again, you have to be a polymath now. You have to be a Renaissance man or woman to really succeed.

Mark S A Smith: Yeah, you have to have a wide variety of interests and be able to communicate on a lot of different levels to make this worth … Actually I think Geoff, that the business that Tesla’s in is prestige.

Geoffrey Colon: Yes. There you go. Four out of every 10 cars in California, yeah, you see is a Tesla now. You’re right.

Mark S A Smith: An interesting chapter in your book is talking about giving back. Ethics as The New Marketing. I see this concept of aligning values and ethics as being a key driver in disruptive marketing. It’s a massive shift from the manufactured consent model of old. Share with me your thoughts about ethics as the new marketing.

Geoffrey Colon: Look at what’s happened with companies that haven’t done what you’ve brought up Mark, which is you have to be more transparent. You have to be more open with customers and your employees about who you are and why you’re doing it. To steal from Simon Sinek, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” Yet we have a large amount of companies that think, “Hey let’s not tell anybody what we’re doing. Let’s just run a business that’s for growth’s sake. Let’s do it for all the shareholder’s.”

You get short lived companies rather than sustainability and longevity, because things happen and people aren’t open about situations and then that gets out, and it spreads faster to people, because of the way that we communicate. Before you know it, people are like, “I’m not going to do business with that company…

Mark S A Smith: That’s right.

Geoffrey Colon: … “I don’t like the way that they treat their employees. I don’t like the way they treat their customers. I don’t like what they do with their profits in terms of taking advantage of maybe like the earth’s resources.” We’re in a totally different age that, 30 years ago, if we talked about this, I think people would have been like, “You guys are absolutely nuts.”

Mark S A Smith: Of course they would. There’s a lot of marketers that resist that concept of people buy why you do something, which it gets to the values and ethics, not the personal, well I love doing what I do. That’s not the why, it’s the personal ethics, it’s the taking care of the community, it’s taking care of the earth. What we’re talking about is more global why verses an individual why.

Geoffrey Colon: Yes.

Mark S A Smith: People miss that. Yet, a really important … I went into this too, is that, very few things today are true monopolies. One of the things that Tesla’s doing is disrupting the utilities business.

Geoffrey Colon: Yep.

Mark S A Smith: Where you don’t have to buy your power from your local power grid. You can get it other ways, solar energy, things like that. People have a choice across the board. They insist on choice, and they’re going to be choosing what aligns with their value set over any brand.

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah. What it leads to, is less brand loyalty and people choosing things based on their moral, or ethical convictions. This is a hard thing for a lot of brand marketers to understand. I’ve been on battles on LinkedIn about this, where people are like, “Brands shouldn’t show what their value is, they’re just a product.” I’m like, “That’s not how people buy anymore.”

Mark S A Smith: If they feel that way, I’d be delighted to go into business competing with them, because I’m going to beat them.

Geoffrey Colon: That’s exactly right. These are things that I think you have to think about if you’re the head of a company, or you’re trying to build a company for this new era. How are people choosing the products that they use, or the companies that they utilize. Also, we don’t want to think in a linear fashion. There’s a tendency of many of us to say, “Oh, that company disrupted this industry,” but we don’t think about, “Hey, but there’s other people who may disrupt them.” This is not a line that we get to with an S curve and then it stops. It’s very scraggly, moves up and down, it’s all over the place. Anybody who says that they know that, “Hey that company’s going to own the future in perpetuity is lying.”

Mark S A Smith: Absolutely true.

Geoffrey Colon: Because, that’s just not how business works.

Mark S A Smith: I think a great example of that is Microsoft Azure cloud disrupting AWS.

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah.

Mark S A Smith: Do you remember the old quote from Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM? He said in the 40s that he believed there was a world market for six computers. Do you remember that quote?

Geoffrey Colon: I do remember that quote, yes.

Mark S A Smith: I think he’s right. We’re going to end up with six clouds.

Geoffrey Colon: Yes. We are. That’s the other thing that’s quite interesting too, Mark, is recently Apple just announced the HomePod.

Mark S A Smith: Right.

Geoffrey Colon: Of course, everyone who I’m friends with is like, “Oh, another device, that’s the fourth one.” I said, “That’s not where it’s going to even end.”

Mark S A Smith: That’s right.

Geoffrey Colon: There may be 15 others from companies like Dell, or HP, or you name it, they’re going to make these things and possibly integrate it with other people’s technology. We don’t just stop because there’s four companies in the tech sector and say, “That’s all.” You have people, I think, working in the loft space or their garage, or somewhere around the planet coming up with new ideas. That’s what makes the cognitive world very interesting compared to how things operated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Mark S A Smith: That’s right. Back in those days, it was all about manufacturing. Now it’s all about innovation and how quickly can we get this stuff out. You know, the world is being disrupted by 3D printing, and software, and cloud. The acceleration is happening so rapidly. IBM recently said that we’ve generated more data in the past two years than all of humanity in the time prior to that.

Disruption is the new normal. Whether we disrupt marketing, we disrupt sales, we disrupt products, we’ve got to do this with an intentional view of why is this changing? How is this changing? In the book you talk about unicorns and how they are disrupting the marketplace. Share with this some of your insights on how unicorns do what they do.

Geoffrey Colon: They look at a problem that exists, and they try to figure out a new solution that the legacy companies have not thought about. As a result, they grow at a much more rapid rate. One of the areas that I didn’t mention in the book, and I think we’re starting to see it based off of population data and census data, is the majority of unicorns in the past decade have been built mainly by a lot of college drop outs, mainly men, mostly in the social networking space.

I think what you’ll see in the next 10 years is things in the areas of how do you improve your life solutions that are developed more by women. Many of them over the age of 50, many of them left out of the corporate world, or forced out of the corporate world, who come up with wonderful ideas. That’s what makes the world fascinating too, Mark, is we have a very diverse world of ideas out there, and all of them have the ability, I think now, to go somewhere, especially if they’re good ideas.

Mark S A Smith: Yes.

Geoffrey Colon: Unicorns grow very, very quickly, because they help solve a problem that legacy companies just have failed to address because it doesn’t help their bottom line, but people are really looking for it.

Mark S A Smith: What we’re moving to is a passion driven world of products versus a profit driven world.

Geoffrey Colon: Yes. It’s very hard for a lot of people I think to adapt to a view, pay a lot of attention to profits and Wall Street, and IPOs and things of that nature. We could actually be turning into a world again, very much like my great-grandparents, who, there was no Wall Street from them to IPO, but they had sustaining business, that allowed them to live. They made enough money to maybe buy a house to live in, and feed their kids, and get them educated.

That’s where we may be returning to, because instead of the agricultural and the manufacturing era, we’re really a society around ideas, which is why we have such urban growth again. People want to live in cities so they can be close to one another and talk to one another. We are social animals.

Mark S A Smith: We are. We are tribes. I think one of the interesting things about this conversation is we’re pulling together this notion of successful products in the future, being driven by marketing disruption, are going to be tribes of people that share the same passion, and will invent things for our fellow tribe members and be very successful, because we have rapid distribution, rapid proof, rapid changes and adjustments to the product, and we’re going to do that in a social environment, which is what you describe in Disruptive Marketing in your book.

Geoffrey Colon: That’s exactly it. If you think about it, why certain companies have grown so quick, Mark, is they’ve tapped into that tribal ideology. If you think about why Facebook grew really fast in the first couple of years when you could get on and you didn’t need a .edu email address, it’s because there was a tribe of people. In my case, it was my interns at my agency, and a lot of my younger co-workers who were like, “Geoff, now that you don’t need a .edu, you need to get on this network. This is where people share. It’s designed very well, aesthetically it’s pleasant. That allows for growth, but now we’re even seeing like, do you need to be in this mass institution anymore? I think people really want to be in these smaller collectives. I always use the example of skateboard culture…

Mark S A Smith: Sure.

Geoffrey Colon: …which I was really a big part of. Punk rock, or hip hop culture, those are tribes and people love those, and they tap into them. Everybody sort of knows what the morays or the rules are within those tribes. Everyone’s accepted, as long as you can find, sort of like, these similar identities. The problem with this tribal nature for some companies is they’re built really on a mass scale nature.

Mark S A Smith: Right.

Geoffrey Colon: They’re going to have to actually reconfigure. It’s not about getting to 10 billion people, it’s about getting maybe to 100 million people, but those people constantly sustaining you in perpetuity by you developing things, as you said, for them.

Mark S A Smith: Right. It’s going to be all built on that passion. You talked about Apple a little bit earlier, Apple has fans.

Geoffrey Colon: Yes.

Mark S A Smith: They have a raving group of fans that spend an extraordinary amount of money, and are willing to spend 3x, 10x, what a competitor charges for a very similar product.

Geoffrey Colon: That’s right.

Mark S A Smith: Why? Because, they’ve created a culture. They’ve created a relationship with their fans, that they say, “No, I’m buying it from Apple, because I know it just works. It fits my lifestyle.” It’s like the Tesla of technology.

Geoffrey Colon: Yes. We’re going to see more people trying to learn this and implement it. Either new companies, or say to older companies, more established companies, “Hey if you’re going to survive, we can’t run by the old playbook,” we really need to figure out how to tap into this fan-centric culture, or sub-culture, which helps drive much of the economy nowadays.

Mark S A Smith: It’s so true. We are disrupted forever. I think for the better. This has been a great conversation Geoff. Thank you for sharing your insights with disruptive marketing. Your parting thoughts for our listener?

Geoffrey Colon: If you are on the fringe, and what I mean by this, is if you are that person at a company or you’re trying to start a company, and that idea is really different, and you get a lot of people saying, “That will never work.” Take that with a grain of salt…

Mark S A Smith: Or just do it.

Geoffrey Colon: …because usually, when people say things, it means that there is something there. If you look at the world of physics, if you’re bubbling, you’re heating up, which means you’re going to boil. That boiling is either going to be turned off because someone removes the heat, or it’s going to boil over. It’s very difficult to stop movements from being adopted if you really can tap into that sub-cultural zeitgeist, and really get people behind you.

We have to think more about answering the question, who is our sub-culture of customers, rather than saying, “Well, everyone’s our customer.” If I hear that from any marketers out there, I think they should maybe find another line of work, because not everyone is going to be our customer in the twenty-first century economy.

Mark S A Smith: To tag on to that beautiful closing idea, if somebody tells you it’s a stupid idea and it shouldn’t be done, they probably don’t see the same passion vision you do. They’re about to be disrupted. If you’re feeling the passion, you’ve got a tribe that is willing to support, go for it. How can our listener get a hold of you? Shall they go buy the book?

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah. I would love that. People have read it, either love this book, or hate it, which I love, because it either turns people off because they just don’t like what is being said in it, or they are like, “Wow, this actually where I do see the world going,” and it reaffirms. Yeah, I’d love if people buy the book. You can visit my website, geoffreycolon.net, that’s the Geoffrey British phonetic spelling so, G-E-O-F-F-R-E-Y C-O-L-O-N.net. There’s a schedule of places where you can see me speak around the country, around the globe. Then of course, if you can’t see me in person, I do a podcast, as you mentioned called Disruptive FM, which I put out weekly, and do a video blog, called the Disruptive Marketer, which you can find on YouTube.

Mark S A Smith: Thank Geoffrey for sharing your ideas and being part of the disruptive tribe.

Geoffrey Colon: Thank you, Mark.