Chris Norton: 0:04

Hello and welcome back to Embracing Marketing Mistakes. I'm your host, chris Norton, and today we've got the brilliant Paul Archer joining us to talk about all things brand advocacy and, of course, to share a mistake or two. Paul is the founder of Juul, a company that has a mission to help brands grow through the power of their customers. So with him, we discuss the power of brand advocacy, how it can help create genuine word-of-mouth marketing and how the power of their customers. So with him, we discuss the power of brand advocacy, how it can help create genuine word-of-mouth marketing, and how the future of marketing belongs to communities and not large corporations. As we know, it's not all plain sailing. So Paul opens up about a mistake he made in his early days when working with a children's wear brand, and how he learned a valuable lesson about transparency and quick problem solving. So, as always, sit back, relax and let's get into the world of brand advocacy and how you can use it to build proper brand loyalty. Enjoy.

Paul Archer: 0:58

My name is Paul Archer. I'm the founder of a brand advocacy company called Yule. I talk and evangelize about the whole idea that brands in fact every business should grow through the power of their customers, and we are a services and strategy agency all around advocacy and, most importantly of all, we are the software layer that powers it for the biggest brands in the world.

Chris Norton: 1:21

Yeah, so obviously brand advocacy is your thing. Do you want to explain the product that you've got? So Dual, how does it work? Is it brand advocacy with influencers or with customers, clients? Can you explain or both?

Paul Archer: 1:37

Yeah, so brand advocacy itself is the playbook of how businesses can grow through the people that love them. What know what's changed over the past few years is that we are now hyper-connected with thousands of people all of us, some people with tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people that they can actually talk to, they can convey a message and an idea, and so it means that the way that brands' stories travel between people has, well, it's kind of changed, but it's also gone back to the original way. You know, companies always grew through word of mouth, but actually more recently now, word of mouth is something that can be transmitted in seconds across the world, and so the way that companies grow in 2025, 26, and beyond from there is via people, because the majority of content that we consume is through social media platforms. You know, it's about 65% of all attention compared to the rest, which is everything else. So all TV, all Netflix, all cinemas, that's just 35% of people's attention span, which basically means that if an organization wants to get out there and wants to tap into people's attention so they can sell more stuff, you know, marketers, that's what we do they have to do it through social media, and social is this incredible democratized platform. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about TikTok or YouTube or Pinterest or any of the future ones that haven't been invented yet. They are human-powered. They're powered by individuals like you and I. Some people have outsized weights, sometimes there's organizations, but if you were to open up any one of your feeds, what you're going to find is the vast majority of the content you're going to consume comes from normal people.

Paul Archer: 3:20

So it means that since COVID, when this really sort of shifted towards this direction is that the entire go-to-market of how a brand, how every company, needs to grow has radically changed.

Paul Archer: 3:32

They now need to get hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of individuals to talk about them, to post about them in a way that is authentic, that it's real, so that people learn about their products and their brand and their services in a way that kind of transmits.

Paul Archer: 3:48

And this is a not only is this just such a huge change, but it's also a massive level of sophistication that brands need to do to engage with this audience, with these communities of individuals, and so what we do at Duel is is we help them figure this out, so we help them understand where the opportunity is as a brand, where their network of different individuals, of advocates, who could talk about them, are.

Paul Archer: 4:10

Largely, these are people who are creators of some variety, in that they're creating content for an audience and then sort of corralling them and working with them, building relationships with them so that they talk about their brand, incentivizing them, rewarding them for it sometimes with products, sometimes with payment but really kind of engaging with them so that it happens again and again. And the dual technology allows the larger brands in the world to do this at massive scale. So if you imagine these massive billion-dollar brands, they need to have tens of thousands of individuals scattered across 18 different territories and languages and the complexity that that means and the sophistication of their solution that is required to get there. That's what we specialize in, and so we advise them and our software platform unlocks that scale for them.

Will Ockenden: 4:56

Is part of this about trust. I mean, you'll have read the Edelman Trust Barometer and every year it seems to be that trust in corporations is down. Trust in business leaders is down. Trust in business leaders is down. But the one area where trust is up is is is the everyday in. Uh, you know the everyday person, so you know is. Is this a? Are consumers or prospective customers trusting the views of individuals over? You know traditional advertising? Is that a driver as well?

Paul Archer: 5:23

yeah, isn't it funny that the sort of trust in trust in your friends is up um. It's like I always thought that we probably would have trusted our friends and families, hopefully at some point.

Paul Archer: 5:32

But um it is true, like it's this kind of like people, the trust is massively down, as you're saying, in institutions and governments, and then now companies and and brands, and and you see that the brands that are doing the best are the ones that people are more connected to emotionally. They feel that they trust them more, and then the people they really trust are the individuals. And it's about the currency of trust, is about authenticity. If you're pretending to do something, people get sniffed out quite quickly, and I think that's kind of one of the problems that you see a lot with conventional influencer marketing is, you know, it involves going out to a marketplace where you can find a bunch of people who, for the right price, will pretend to like your brand, and when you think about it like that, it's unsurprising that that lacks the authenticity and doesn't quite have the effect, that it's unsurprising that that lacks the authenticity and doesn't quite have the effect that it will sort of was hoped that it would do. Yeah, because the way that brands need to do is they need to find people that are genuine fans, and so what would happen into here is your customers, your users, the people who love the brand, some of whom are also creating content, and it's that Venn diagram that you want to sort of track into. The most important thing is that they love the brand. The fact that they can create content is the next piece. The fact they have an audience is like third, you know, it doesn't matter how big that audience is, because even if it's a few hundred people, it's still a few hundred people that are going to hear about your brand and maybe buy from your brand, and that's quite meaningful.

Paul Archer: 6:56

So it's sort of turned its head over the past year or so. What brands are expecting. They're kind of abandoning a lot of the old practices of influencer marketing and they're adapting to this more brand advocacy approach of like, how do I create community? How do I activate my existing fans and turn them into social sellers and to advocate for my brand? How do I engage with them in a way that they feel connected? So they do it again and again and again. So actually this can become a meaningful, predictable channel, just like the other really predictable channels, which is, you know, social ads and performance buy. They are quite kind of money goes in the top, money comes out of the bottom. You know, working with humans is never quite like that, but actually it's steering towards this direction, when you can start to get some predictability around it, and that's the, you know, the holy grail for marketers.

Chris Norton: 7:42

So can you give us like an example of how a brand would use it, because you talked about working across different regions and countries. So if I'm I don't know, there's a couple of fashion brands you work with aren't there, like Abercrombie Fitch. So let's say they've got a new product out. Do they come to you with oh, we've got this new, I don't know this new SKU. Can you help us promote that? Or how does the process work with customers that are already out there talking, because every marketer listening to this will already probably be, if they're worth their salt, already listening to their social media channels and looking out for when people talk about their brand anyway. So how does your product help with that side of things?

Paul Archer: 8:24

Yeah. So I think the whole idea here is about building an advocacy program, a community of people, brand ambassadors, that will get out and talk to you for that, and that's what the dual platform powers at its heart. So most of our brands are building programs that their customers can sign up to, they can apply to be a part of and then, when they're accepted on, they get a fully kind of gamified experience where they get tasks and challenges and missions, they can create content, they get an affiliate link, their own personal storefront of their picks for their content that they can share with their audiences. And it's able to track all of that, gets the rights to the content to be used by the brand. It's able to track all the revenue, incentivize them either with payments or make sure they get free product. They get the right product in their hands. So what brands are building is an evergreen community of ambassadors and advocates that can be used across all of their brand calendars. So, yes, there might be a product launch that's coming up and then they can align 300 people to get that product a month before so that they create content and drop it all at midday on the April 1st, whatever it is, or it might be that you know they're coming up for Black Friday and they want people to start talking about various campaigns they've got, or they've got, a store opening. They want all the people that are in Tampa Florida to turn within 100 mile radius, turn up for it. It just like they have a social media channel which is owned by Zuckerberg or or whoever, and just they have their own. They have a crm which is owned by them. You know an advocacy program is something which they own and dual is an arm. You know it's an advocate relationship platform that they use to own and own that relationship nurture with them, but different to a crm, which is all about driving sales and segmenting people to target. It's about driving advocacy and segmenting people so you can target the right advocate with the right message, with the right incentive for them.

Paul Archer: 10:11

Some people have very large audiences, which means that they are going to require a higher incentive than others. Some people just really love the brand, but maybe they're not quite on the brand aesthetic and they're more valuable as a revenue driver than a content creator. These are all huge opportunities and actually building this asset and if they build it well, it's something that only grows over time and becomes more and more valuable over the years that come through it. And so we at Dual Power this for about 60 of the biggest brands in the world. You sort of mentioned there Abercrombie we work with Charlotte Tilbury, we do Elemis, some of the very large beauty groups as well, victoria's Secret Most of our work is stateside and most of the work is with these massive brands and they're buying into this vision that we have that all of your advocates and all of our activities could be centralized with one platform so you can get a single view of advocacy and that you can scale this so it becomes not only a really big channel but a really really profitable channel as well.

Paul Archer: 11:11

Um, and and I think that's the, that's the key to it because these people because they're not mercenaries, being paid to pretend to like your product, like I was talking about earlier they are doing it for the love of the brand. That means they'll do it for a lot less. They'll often do it for a VIP experience or they'll do it for a product that no one else can get. And this sort of nurturing of that magic, that fandom to drive word of mouth, to drive content creation in social, and the outcome of this is social commerce and, in whatever form it is, is something which brands are really really buying into, and I think we kind of just we help them bring that to life.

Will Ockenden: 11:47

Interesting to hear you. I mean, you mentioned authenticity earlier. Now I get it that you know this isn't a case of paying influencers that are disengaged cold hard cash and just getting them to shout about our product. You know, the people you work with do have brand love already, but to a degree you're still giving them payment in kind. Either you know a small cash payment or free product. In that context, how do you ensure this is genuinely authentic, or is it just a case of it being more authentic than you know? Traditional influencer marketing?

Paul Archer: 12:19

It's a great question. I think the whole idea around trying to ensure that you're getting advocates who authentically love the brand to talk about you is is the secret to getting this right. And so it really comes down to where are you finding them? You know, if you, if you go out to a, to a network of people who are trying to make money from it, from being an influencer, you're probably not going to find your authentic fans. But that is where the vast majority of people spend their time and money. But we sort of talked to brownie. We're like well, they come and say, well, do you have a database that we could use? I said I don't, but you do, and they're like do we? Oh, where's that? It's like yes, do you have a crm? Yes, do you have social following? How big is it? It's two million. Great, okay, that is your fandom. And within there, about one in four of those people are actively creating content for an audience. Most people aren't right. Most people are creating content for um, for their friends and family.

Paul Archer: 13:08

But just like you guys, just like I've got my podcast building brand advocacy, I'm pushing out content for a wider audience and and basically these are the people you're trying to tap into and the fact is that they were there anyway because they're your customers and then also don't necessarily pay them. I think that's another secret which is well worth it, because you'd be like you want to get some free, free stuff. You only want free stuff if you like the brand. If you're not interested in the brand, and then it's not really as as engaging as an enticing way of bringing someone in. And so recruitment, coming through your customer base, is crucial to finding them and then creating the right sort of hurdles that proves that they like the brands, that proves that they're talking authentic, authentically, and allowing them to emerge like the great advocates will just float to the top and you'll see them and you want to kind of give them special love and you want to work with them.

Paul Archer: 13:57

Um, and this whole idea of of advocacy and running an advocacy program is is not something you just you need a very expensive piece of software, like like jewel, to do, which, yes, that's if you're massive and you have very, very complex needs. Any brand can buy into this model. They can build their own programs on a spreadsheet, they can pick up the phone, they can create a whatsapp group. They can find that, they can give the opportunity. Are you a creator? Do you want to be a brand ambassador for my brand? And the right people will put their hands up and say yes, and then you can manually sort it out build, find a 50, then get 100. Once you've got a thousand, then yeah great. You're going to need to invest in some technology to try and do that, but if you've got a thousand advocates, then this is a channel which is worth, you know, multiple seven figures for you.

Chris Norton: 14:39

This, this does feel like what influencer marketing was in 2012,. Something like that, where it started out. I mean, you said when you were talking there, paul, you were saying you know, if you're going out to influencers, you'll be paying them. Well, that's not the case. It wasn't the case when influencer marketing set out. Influencer marketing was all about exactly what we're talking about identifying people that were creating content. Identifying people that were already interested in your brand, that were authentic, that you could engage with. I think what's happened is that market became saturated with people selling influencer marketing agencies or whatever. That is because that does feel like a whole separate sector now whereby you pay this amount, now whereby you pay this amount and there's tools out there isn't there where you can pay.

Chris Norton: 15:55

Um, you can have a certain amount of products you can have people pitch to to be a part of it, um, but originally it wasn't like that. Originally it was authentic people that were exactly the people you're talking about. They were brand advocates. They were, they were on a spreadsheet. They were. You know, if we had a client, they'd say, oh, I've got these hundred people that have all been to. You know, if it's a leisure I'm thinking of one of our leisure clients they've got a theme park or whatever. We've got 150 people that have been there like talking about. You know, here they are. They're brand advocates rather than an influencer marketing program where you go, right, we want you to do this and this and this, this. So it's quite, it's quite interesting to see that now the average not the average joe, but the normal person now is is it can can get something for being a big brand fan. It's what's your take on the um, the platforms, like patron then? Because they're, they're sort of the other side of it, aren't they?

Paul Archer: 16:48

yeah, and I love the existence of something like Patreon that allows creators to make a living from this. So the big shift that's happened since you know, the early days of influencer marketing, when you had, you know, the Zoellas and the KSI sort of era doing YouTube videos in their bedrooms playing games or doing makeup tutorials, is that there weren't very many of them, they were niche.

Paul Archer: 17:11

There were a small number of people who were like nerding out on this weird YouTube thing and they had a small audience and then suddenly that became quite a large audience and suddenly they become quite valuable for you to tap into that as a channel. And, as you were saying there, that then got very muddied, particularly by the technology players but also the agencies that were trying to come in and push people in different direction. But what's happened over the past few years is just the number of people who are creating has exploded. In the US, it's over 15 million people that you know make a living from creating. You know, maybe that's not their full time living, but it's certainly something which is meaningful. So if you imagine that, like the percentages of individuals in your customer base that didn't create but now create, now that's so much higher, which means that this, this wasn't an opportunity in 2012, but it is in 2025 and it's only going up, and so like it just means that brands that get this, then you know and this is just like night and day in the brands that we talk to and you'll probably see it as well Like there are brands that we look at and we see how advocacy ready they are. You see how willing they are to allow other people to tell their story.

Paul Archer: 18:18

You know, the VP of brands is that killer of brands in 2025. Because what they're doing is all that's not on brand or that's all that's not the right aesthetic. You know, that doesn't look good there. And actually what you find is those are the brands that are topping out because, oh, we've got this look we need to get, we've got to get it right.

Paul Archer: 18:36

And then you've got those brands that are just just flying and you look on their social channels and you know there's no models, there's no product pictures with a boring background or or someone on a beach. You know, like none of that crap. You've got real people talking about them in a real way and they're just platforming them and allowing, like thousands, tens of thousands of people to tell that brand story. And and that is how brands grow today. And actually what you'll find by 2030, when social commerce is set to be about 40 percent of all brands, online revenue, is that there'll be those brands that adapted and understood that this is the way the world is and those brands that didn't and stuck to this brand aesthetic idea, and they'll all be dead. We've only five years, five years and they'll be dead.

Will Ockenden: 19:21

So I'm quite interested in. You know you keep talking about revenue and that's really getting my attention. So a minute ago you said you know this channel could be worth multiple seven figures if you get it right. So do you quantify that? You know how, how you know, let's say you've got an established ambassador program, how do you demonstrate value from, from that investment?

Paul Archer: 19:40

well, this is relatively well. There's lots of different value metrics that you can look at. I mean the most obvious one is revenue. So you have affiliate tracking technology in most brands, have some variety of affiliate tracking technology, um, or you can be doing it direct through things like tiktok shop if you want to track it in that way there. But, um, what we're what that's like? Obviously that's your number one. But then you have these proxies, um, things like earned media value is a great way. You know. This is the value of what that amount of reach would have cost you had you bought ads for that. You know we've reached 100 million people. Well, if I were to buy those ads through meta on instagram, it would have cost x, for example, and you can use that as a great proxy, um, obviously not quite as reliable as revenue, because obviously that's the best.

Chris Norton: 20:23

But I love. I love the reference to earned media value, because in pr um from the pr background, we were told to stop doing that um in in award submissions 20 years ago, like pr value, earned media value. We can't use that anymore. But the metric is now coming into the digital sphere, which is interesting because it is. It is a thing like, like you say, if you had to pay a pay for advertising, you can earn it. Why? Why is that? It's still eyeballs on content, isn't it?

Paul Archer: 20:50

exactly, and I think kind of back in the day it was like yeah, we think that this had a readership of this and this many people saw it, we hope. And you know, pr people got very, very good at talking about how great pr was. Um, and then it is great.

Will Ockenden: 21:04

It is great, by the way.

Paul Archer: 21:05

It's great it is great. But then suddenly performance marketing came along and people could measure some stuff and you have this entire generation of marketers that like are like, well, if it can't be measured, it it didn't happen. You know, like I I did. And then suddenly you have these like d2c 1.0 brands that like were coming up selling mattresses in like 2015 and they were like, yeah, yeah, we've got this kind of arbitrage, we can buy facebook ads, we can sell a mattress online, we can do that and, and you know that that was fine. And then covid happened and everyone stopped advertising their performance advertising and then, like one of two things happened to a brand like their revenue either went up or it went down and most of them died. You know how many online mattresses companies are they around? Because actually, what they hadn't built was a brand. They hadn't built a community. They hadn't built this brand love this. They hadn't built a community. They hadn't built this brand, love this connectivity with their customers, who would then tell other customers they had built an incredibly efficient sales machine and that's great, but it's not a brand. And so what you then find the other brands that went up is that they had built this community and at a time when people were searching for something, some sense of belonging, someone, to try and make sense of the crazy world that they'd never experienced before, they were turning to these brands that had become super personified. These were generally brands that were founder-led. The founder was on their, their social channels, talking about it, being honest, being vulnerable, being authentic, and they connected with it, and they connected with other people and community fans and they bought a lot more stuff as well.

Paul Archer: 22:34

And so what I think that what's happened is we're now in this sort of post-performance marketing phase where marketers are realizing oh, business school for the past 30 years has been talking about a marketing mix. I guess maybe there is a mix. Maybe performance is a part of it and brand is a part of it, and community is a part of it. Social commerce is a part of it and advocacy is a part of it. There's a part of it, and, yes, you will turn your needles in different directions to try and amplify it, but it's all part of the same thing At the heart of engagement, where you're going to be trying to engage with people from a top of funnel like a brand marketing. This is us, this is a brand. This is what we stand for and that's amazing for high level brand ambassadors with great content talking about you and PR is phenomenal for that. But then, as you go through through that funnel, you want much grimier product related content and that's actually more like for your social affiliates.

Paul Archer: 23:32

So brand ambassadors that aren't necessarily on brand they didn't meet your brand aesthetic, but they're talking about I like this jumper, I style it with this, these jeans here, like this product does this for me and it's the content would never pass muster with a vp of brand because it's not onto the brand aesthetic but it works and it converts super high and this is the same thing as a performance buy as well. Right Now you're like, yeah, I need to buy that brand. It sounds really, really cool. And you're scrolling through Instagram and then an ad pops up and you go, yeah, right, I'm going to buy it.

Paul Archer: 24:01

Like, you probably bought that because someone you saw like was wearing or using it, or someone told you you should try and do it, but you bought it. The last sort of trigger was yeah, the reminder was that ad. That kind of caught your attention there. The problem is what marketers were doing and I think they started to move. It is to realize that that isn't the journey. You don't attribute that to the ad. You attribute the final nudge over the line at the bottom of the funnel to the ad, but there was an entire funnel that came before.

Chris Norton: 24:28

That is the marketing mix that people have to understand today oh, I love that, because we talk here about brand like brand and brand pr and performance pr there's.

Chris Norton: 24:37

Yeah, you're right, performance is the last click, it's the, it's the thing that everybody's tracking.

Chris Norton: 24:42

But actually, you're right, like thought leadership stuff that we do in the b2b world, often it's the, the pr stories that we get them.

Chris Norton: 24:49

You know, if we get a client on the bbc breakfast sofa talking about an issue, that that's has more effect on the brand than than something that is just a little ad selling a product, like you, I completely and I totally agree with you, and one of the examples you gave there as well, talking about covid and when performance ads turned off, you just reminded me one of the brands that literally flipped its marketing spend on its head was Airbnb, and you couldn't get an Airbnb anywhere because the world had shut, they swapped to an entirely brand program and you couldn't buy from them. It was just about Airbnb being supportive and there for you, which was brilliant, brilliant, and it does show you that the power of, because, after that, airbnb got even bigger, when everyone was like I would. You would also argue, though, that everybody just wanted to go on bloody holiday straight off to be locked down um see if you've told us what you were saying there.

Paul Archer: 25:41

So just what you're saying about airbnb and like actually what they are is like it's same with uber, right, they also. They also did a load of performance ads and things like that. But if you think back, why did you get Airbnb in the first place? It wasn't because of an ad, it was because of someone else who said you should guarantee. Think about the time you've done it.

Will Ockenden: 26:03

I agree.

Paul Archer: 26:04

Same with Uber. It's like what? So it's like a car. You just press a button and a car comes, sweet, right. And then, oh, hey, take my code, take my code, Use this. It became this $100 billion referral mechanism, which is just phenomenal, one of the greatest examples of advocacy well-attributed ever. It's not as easy as that anymore, but this is still word of mouth, no-transcript.

Paul Archer: 26:54

But if your best mate says, yeah, this is the only brand I use, or yeah, I use airbnb all the time, it's super safe, what giving up? You want to go to some random person's house which were like 10, 20 years ago, 20 years ago, for sure, completely ridiculous, for sure, completely ridiculous idea. But he's like, yeah, I do it, I live in it, it's amazing, I use it, it's so cheap, it's better than hotels and I get these magical experiences. You're like, yeah, right, you skip all that kind of like trust building phase and you go and sign up to an Airbnb account. And that's the power of advocacy.

Paul Archer: 27:29

And I, every organization, needs to understand that and and really understand how people find out about their, what they do. They need to find out about the value of the proposition they've got to do and actually understand why their customers bought it in the first place and it's it's probably not going to be something you're going to see in a on a on a on a metrics dashboard but what I love about this, paul, is that you're talking about something that I think we all agree on, but you're right in the last and it might be back to 2012, like that sort of time.

Chris Norton: 27:54

when did performance marketing suddenly become the thing that everybody? Because, like, we'll go into pitches sometimes and we'll be like you're going to receive this, this increase in thought, leadership, increase in, you know, and we actually measure all the performance stuff as well but some clients will literally not be interested unless they can see. How many clicks am I going to get to a website? How many, how many of them? They're comparing like apples and motor cars, do you know? I mean, they're not comparing the two things. It's like, rep, we always say things like reputation is everything, because if you haven't got a reputation, if you lose trust, you are fucked, you're finished, your brand is finished overnight. That's the way it works. And then people go oh, yeah, yeah. And if there's a crisis, who are you going to call first? It's usually your.

Will Ockenden: 28:37

PR team. It's the inability to measure, though, isn't it? And immediately, because you can't easily measure it. People just focus on what you can measure.

Chris Norton: 28:46

But I like the fact that it's the authenticity, it's the individual, and it feels like I don't know how old you are, paul, but it feels like there's been a gap in. But this is what I was trained when I was doing my university degree and everything. Then it went away and then it seems to have come back. It sounds like we're saying something completely revolutionary, doesn't it?

Will Ockenden: 29:05

There's a whole generation discovering integrated marketing as if it's this incredible new discipline, and talking about brand, yeah, the importance of brand building. Just quickly, before we move on, I think people will be listening to this, thinking look, I'm sold. You know, I'm either going to speak to you or I'm going to start an advocacy program. How can we activate the advocates? You know, practically speaking, I, the advocates you know what, practically speaking, I think you know, with influencers, obviously get products in their hands, get them to use it in some capacity. But is there different ways? We, you, would typically get advocates to kind of activate a brand. That might be quite a big question, but it'd be good to to hear you talk through.

Paul Archer: 29:43

Talk that through well, if you're trying to get an advocate to activate your brand and to talk about the you and what you do, you've got to think about where do they sort of sit in that funnel? And I think there's sort of like five, five stages of brand advocacy that's worth tapping into. Um one. That sort of sits above that, because if you're halfway through the journey, you need to understand why people buy you in the first place. And like the number of founders and ceos I talked to, and so when was the last time you called a customer? What called a customer? So I have this automated machine where I can engage with thousands of people at once doing all these things. Why would I ever want to talk to just one of them? It's like all right, well, why don't you? Why don't you call one up and ask them why they bought it and then then push them like hard like five whys, whatever. It is Just like why did you buy this product?

Paul Archer: 30:29

Yeah, okay, cool. How did you find it? Oh, I don't know. I was searching. All right, cool. What were you searching for? Can't remember? Like, what were you doing at the time? Oh, I was here and I was chatting to my mate, rob that had theirs.

Paul Archer: 30:48

Oh, sarah uses this all the time, she talks about it, or I saw you guys on that bbc article and you can really start to understand what this is. And if you do this regularly enough and it's not many, it's like 7, 10, 15 max calls you will triangulate a narrative. That seems to be why your people buy who you are and this is particularly important if you're, you know, sub 10 million in revenue. Um, and because you understanding it, getting in at hustling as a, as a founder, hustling as a ceo or as a cmo, to really get that, that, that story right. That's the stage stage that you you really have to get initially.

Paul Archer: 31:18

But for everyone to hit advocacy like, we've looked at hundreds of brands, we've worked with with quite a lot of them and, and obviously we sort of skew towards the high end there, but we we have, and advise, many, many more from that. And the brands that grow really, really quickly all share the same traits that top one percent. They all share this in, like the first pieces that they always, always, always start with, why you know they have this clear purpose and a meaning and a reason for being that gets them out of bed in the morning gets their employees out of bed and then the customers just like buy into that, right? They're like this is my reason too. I want you, and the more narrow the better. You know like it's like, because actually everyone's like oh, we're everything to everyone.

Paul Archer: 32:00

That is not going to get people excited. It's got to be a really core reason for being the next thing that they then do after that and they bake that into everything they do. It's very obvious. It's in the first conversation that they do and it would have said at the top of the podcast similarly, I'm trying to replicate it why do we exist? It's just like we started Duel because we think that companies that are built through advocacy could change the world.

Paul Archer: 32:24

Because instead of optimizing towards short-term sales, which change the world, because instead of optimizing towards short term sales, which in companies responsible for fucking up most of the things in the world whether you're looking at global warming or politics or these things generally there's a company, the psychopathic entity that is a company at the heart of it. But if they were optimized towards actually getting people to talk about them, not about getting to buy from them, they would do everything differently. They would then treat the humans in a different way and you'll start to see that in these kind of traits of the brands that do it really well, because they start with, why the next step they have is they create a remarkable experience. Remarkable meaning literally, you remark upon it.

Chris Norton: 32:57

Tony's chocolate.

Paul Archer: 32:59

Oh, remarkable Packaging, remarkable the story, the purpose. Yeah, you'll start to see we can probably use that as a great case study. Throughout it like remarkable experience, and then they can care about all the different stages of that. So, from the very first touch point to the last, it's designed to make you love them and tell other people about it. The next thing they then do and this is a niche one but super important is that their employees are their number one advocates and they invest in them. They make sure they have unlimited free product and they talk about them and the best brands in the world, and you'll you'll know it's. How do you know that someone works for them? Is because they've already told you, because they feel so passionately that the, the company represents them. They connect to that. Why that they then tell everyone? Because your employees are always your touch, first touch, even for a completely online brand, they're still writing the copy, they're still showing up, they're still doing the Instagram posts. But for a larger retail brand, we work with brands that have tens and tens of thousands of individuals that are on the floor, hyper-local, in these stores. And if they as bought into the all, why, as everyone else and you cannot help but engage with them and they just get bought into it.

Paul Archer: 34:12

The piece that comes after that is building customer community. You know, that is that's just no. Not just about sales, not just about loyalty points, win prizes and crm. To try and buy my thing, go on, buy my thing, god. Here's a bigger discount. Buy my thing. That crm customer engagement done badly, done well is give here's a bigger discount. Buy my thing. That's crm customer engagement done badly, done well is give here's some opportunity, engage with this. Here's the thing. Here's some education, here's some value like here's a way of connecting with you. Here's a way of bringing you closer to the brand. That is how you build community.

Paul Archer: 34:39

And then the final piece and the piece that everyone sort of jumps towards last but uh, like they jump towards first, but it should only come once you've got all those previous steps sorted out is amplifying it through your influencers and and your ambassadors and your creators, those who are influential that have an audience. Now audience can be 500 people. It could be 500 000 people. They could be industry professionals like makeup artists and hairdressers. They could be social media creators, um, all of the above, anyone who can have a lit, an outsized leveraged effect. That is the amplification tool that you've got to put all that hard work you've got and start actually throw oil in that fire and if you can do all of those, you will have a very, very successful brand and I guarantee you. You look at very, very successful brands that have come up over the past five years. They all share those five steps fascinating, absolutely fascinating I watched a video on TikTok yesterday.

Chris Norton: 35:32

It was hilarious and it said how to come up with your brand values and it was a piss take and it was like the first way to create your brand values is get an external person in to come in and tell you. And then it said the second step to identify your core brand values are pick one of the following words excellence, customer excellence, authenticity, commitment. Yeah. And then it said put all those words in a bag and pick them out one at a time and stick them on your wall and then never review them ever again. But your way sounds much better.

Paul Archer: 36:08

That's the thing you've got to remember, right. And you look around and people always say, oh, what about this, what about this? You can remember most companies are shit. Most companies do a bad job of being a company. You know they've often you know they've got to a place where they've grown very successfully, generally like one person, often a founder, who's able to just like break down those barriers. They like they have those values. They just create this incredible being and then they then spend the next 5, 10, 20 years dying very and and what people are spending most of their days is trying to like reduce the rate of death before they find who they are and like such a bleak outlet it's such a bleak outlet, but it's true.

Paul Archer: 36:49

And then it's what I'm trying to do what do I do?

Paul Archer: 36:52

I work for this brand and they don't have a purpose. And how do I get them? I'm like a mid-level marketer or whatever. Like I need this purpose. The values I don't really get them and they're like, how do I get the ceo change it? Like you can't get another job. Find a company like that you love and go and work for that company, like if you're working in marketing another company, there's a good chance you'll get another job. There's one that you really feel connected to. And I think that that is one of the core reasons is great brands are able to attract great talent because they will only be able because people want to be there and it's just so clear that's a great organization to be a part of and you love going to work and I think that's spend most of our time at work. So we should love what we do and we should work with companies we love and talking about being at work.

Chris Norton: 37:33

Um, this show is all about um embracing marketing mistakes. How long have you been doing what you're doing now and have you made any interesting mistakes along the way, paul, that you'd like to share with our marketing audience?

Paul Archer: 37:47

I mean, we launched duel in 2020, um in out of beta um. Previous to that, I had a, a gaming studio, so kind of gamification is very much the dna of what we do. Um and like like countless mistakes obviously, like there's so many to kind of count. I think what's been really interesting is sort of for me is mapping this journey of running a business, and I think that maybe this might be a software type thing and trying to find it is like the key. The key piece when you're early on is trying to find product market fit, and actually that is the only thing that matters, and I think it's the same for brands as well. Like um, there is this tempting thing you've got when you're like a first-time founder or whatever any founder, is that you're suddenly your job title says ceo. You might have no employees at that time, but you're the ceo of your brand, and then you get a few other people in and you're like, oh yeah, great, yeah great.

Chris Norton: 38:47

Well, I can get a lawyer.

Paul Archer: 38:48

Now I can get an accountant. I might even get an office. Oh, this is so grown up. It's very attractive to be sucked into this CEO trap and I've like, fell for this time after time after time after time, because it tickles the ego, it makes you feel big and important and all that kind of bollocks. But there was only one thing that matters at that stage is finding product market fit. Every single employee is just a distraction away from you finding product market fit, that you should only bring them on when you absolutely, absolutely need them there, and actually your job should be in all of these things. You need to be the chief marketing officer. You need to be chief sales officer. You need to be the chief product officer figuring out all these various things.

Paul Archer: 39:29

Sometimes you probably, if it's tech, you're going to maybe want a couple of someone who's an engineer or a designer. There's probably this great. That's why co-founders work so well. So one person can really sort out product market fit and another person can take what they say and build it and make it a reality. But all this other stuff you do and like, oh, let's do a marketing campaign, let's do these sort of things. There's that distraction.

Paul Archer: 39:50

You want to know how you sell your first 5, 10, 20 customers. You pick up the phone and you sell to your first 5, 10, 20 customers. Whether you're selling an object to consumers or you're selling enterprise SaaS, it's the same thing. The founder does those first sales and once you've got through to that kind of product market fit is that thing of product plus market and it's fit. I mean, it's obvious, right. But actually if you really delve into it, you can change a product, you can change the market. Those are your variables and you change the bits where you talk about your product to the market. But every single conversation you have will help you understand how the product can be a better fit and every single conversation you have will help you understand which market is better fit for what you've kind of built or what you're building. And that journey there is all-encompassing. And actually until you've got, I thought the biggest mistake that I had is I thought I had product-market fit probably three times.

Paul Archer: 40:43

Two of those times that company went bankrupt, you know, like ran out of, because it was just ego. It was like, oh yeah, people kind of want it. I think we've got product market fit did not happen like when, with dual, we found product market fit and I knew that we've had product market fit because people just were pulling from us. They were like, yeah, we want to buy into it. They didn't even look at the product, they just were like, yeah, buy into this vision of what you guys are trying to build, um, and like. Then then like, yeah, let's make it work. The product may not be there, but I buy into the journey you're going on to get there and let's go because I buy in. And that was this inflection point.

Paul Archer: 41:16

And then actually the role started to change, because the role of founder then becomes almost obsolete in my mind is that then you become the role of CEO.

Paul Archer: 41:25

At that point you are a manager of people. You are a manager of people. You are building an operation, a human powered machine, all these different cogs of different individuals that you've got to tune and work with and motivate and drive them, ensure they all go in the same direction. They're all motivated, they buy into your vision, the values and they are the right ones and figure out when they are not the right ones and compensating them and funding them. And that's the job of a CEO. That's a very, very different role to being a founder and I think that that kind of idea of CEO-ship distracts founders from getting there and they often never get to be a CEO because they forget that the job at hand of your very, very early stages is to find product market fit. And, like I have so many scars of thinking that I had that and realizing that I really should have just picked up the phone and done more sales calls and got immersed in the world of our customers to build a solution that they really, really needed.

Will Ockenden: 42:18

So those two companies that went bankrupt then. So was that a case of? You know? You thought you had product market fit. You then got an in-house legal team, in-house hr team and suddenly did it become unsustainable and and and, was that you know? Was that on you? You know were you, were you the guy in charge in those cases?

Paul Archer: 42:35

100 like it, and that's a another piece is just like often, you know, in earlier mistakes have been as oh, this is the person to blame for that and this is the person to blame for that. If you're the ceo, it's your fucking fault. Like, whatever happens, that's your fault, you know, and and like they're like what happened? You hide the wrong. Your wrong. Someone did a thing, they they did, made a mistake. You put them in there or you approve them coming. It's your fucking fault and so like. Of course, it was my fault with those things that that fell through.

Paul Archer: 43:04

But, yes, specifically, you know we had a, an app that we thought was going to take over the world. You know, we actually had this. It was like 2014. Everyone had an app. It was like totally the cool thing to do at the time, if you remember. And so I had an app. We were basically going to take down Snapchat or something, and then we were going to get featured by Apple. It was just going to be this global thing, right, it's going to like flip it, us feature all over the world, everyone's going to use it, and um, it was going to be huge. Now, we were waiting for this big launch, just sort of sat there. Champagnes and ice we've got the beers on the side.

Paul Archer: 43:37

We're like yeah, ready, this is gonna be so big and nothing happened. And nothing happened. And then we started seeing these like users popping up in turkey. Well, what's going on here? And true to their word, apple did feature us, they featured us in turkey, and so we got big into massive in turkey turkey for a bit, um and like and and again it was like, yeah, this is great, we're gonna do.

Paul Archer: 43:59

But actually part of the reason why I started jewel was was because we were able to see very, very quickly from the data that this was a product that had no virality, there was no advocacy, and we were saying, oh look, you can see users, they're downloading it. This is amazing, people can do this. And then it was like but we could track all the downloads back to the app store and there were no other downloads, because it's the absence of attribution which shows advocacy, shows word of mouth in cafes and conversations and calls and everything that happens. And we had no absence of attribution and that's a really concerning place to be. And we went back. You know, at the time we'd raised some money and we went back to them and said, look, we're not going to invest this capital in marketing because we don't have the product and we don't think we can get this product to a stage within the time frame that we have, and so we'll just spend it more on marketing. There's no advocacy. And it was just like they didn't understand it.

Paul Archer: 44:55

And I'd then also been working with a lot of brands and I realized the same kind of conversation of just how's, what is advocacy?

Paul Archer: 45:02

Also didn't understand it in the similar like whether it was performance mindset or whatever it was, and I realized that this, for me, from first principles, is the reason why everything happens, where every business even exists in the first place, is because of advocacy.

Paul Archer: 45:16

And this is something which nobody invests in, no one understands, no one can quantify or measure or scare. It's like that's a big fucking opportunity and like we're just like a bad, like that company was just doomed. We and we're like sat there going, ah, what are we going to do? And it was just like that that thing there, let's figure that out. And it was a. It was a big old task and it took like two years to figure out what a solution needed to look like, and then another hard pivot a year after that to get to where we, where we are right now. But, like it, it really kind of comes down to sniffing it out and constant conversations and getting distracted by the whole CEO stuff and hopefully not dying long enough to come back to the core role so you can then find that product market fit Amazing.

Chris Norton: 46:00

Turkey's loss is the United States and the UK's gain right, yeah, I mean, that's fascinating, fascinating. I've got one question. Actually, because you touched on it, it's mainly the big brands that you work with. So what sort of size do people decide to do a program with dual, and what? What sort of size do you have to be?

Paul Archer: 46:21

normally to work with dual. Typically we're brands that do 100 million plus in revenue. Um, like, each deployment we work with is know it's in the six figures. It's a very high touch, high end. We're very selective. We say no to four out of five brands that approach us and we don't advertise. We don't have big stands at shows, like, we just work off word of mouth and we work our absolute hardest to try and create a remarkable experience and so will talk about us.

Paul Archer: 46:51

And that's actually been the engine of growth for us, as we feel that if we can't do ourselves and who are we to tell other people how to, how to grow their brands? But? Um, so therefore we, we have found this niche because what we had built, um almost accidentally, was was designed for scale, because we kind of designed it for larger communities, but what we found was actually the biggest opportunity was those creators, those brand ambassadors within your larger customer community, and because we built the technology expecting hundreds of thousands in there. It meant that we were automatically able to then start scaling these programs where brands typically had a spreadsheet with a hundred people in and we sit down with them, we go. Well, why don't we? Why don't we go 10 000 people in there and they're like well, I'm making, you know, two thousand dollars per head for 100 people and I'm getting a bunch of content. I'm like, what does that look like? I times that by 100 and then you actually get, like this, this massive upside of sort of like channels that previously haven't existed.

Chris Norton: 47:48

Amazing If you've been on the show. If you could invite the next person to be on this show, who would it be and why?

Paul Archer: 47:56

I reckon Rebecca Kelly, venue scanner, she's going to tell a good story. She's been been through a lot of these various various things. Yeah, she'd she'd definitely be high on my list. Yeah, yeah, I, yeah she, she'd definitely be high on my list. Um, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna stick with that one there. I do have another marketing fuck up.

Chris Norton: 48:14

Well, it's just like a lot.

Paul Archer: 48:14

Oh, go for it, go for it, go for it so we I'm not gonna say the brand, because they kind of they they went defunct, but it was our first ever test that we did and it it was a children's wear brand.

Paul Archer: 48:28

And because you were saying there earlier about how PR was a crisis PR, they get the first person you call for it and actually your crisis PR playbook is probably the same. It's just like you're going to have to tell the truth, you're going to have to be honest and authentic and that's the only thing that's going to get you out of this, because you're probably in this scenario because you didn't align to like classic values and now you're in this shit and now you kind of have to do that Mia Cooper thing and just be honest about it. And so we had this kind of crisis moment when we had launched the technology and we had this editing function in it where people would create content, they'd upload it, they'd edit it and they'd upload it and then it would go into our platform and then the platform would then take that content and host it on a brand's website.

Chris Norton: 49:14

I probably shouldn't be telling you this actually, you've started that.

Paul Archer: 49:16

You haven't named the brand. This was many, many years ago. It was the first time we did anything. What we didn't realize is that the editing function then took the raw files into the platform and then hosted the raw files. So so these it was a children's wear brand and these these parents had like taken their pictures of their little darlings wearing these products, and then they very carefully edited out their faces and put like emojis over them and just cut it. And so we then took all this content and then we just put it live like 2 000 images of unedited images of children on their website, and there was just this uproar.

Paul Archer: 49:54

We like caught it within a few minutes and we had to pull it down. And then we spent the whole weekend just recoding, reengineering the entire platform to capture it and get that stuff up there. But there was this kind of moment. The first thing you do is what do we do here is just like this is our bad, like we fucked up. We need to actually go and actually kind of arrange it and and and find a solution to it. And you know, that was that kind of like experience of the bad side of it. We screwed up. But how you deal with that to create a remarkable experience can give you a liftoff point that was just like, okay, well, I'm not going to just sit there and say, oh well, that was the way it is, like you got to do something about it. But turning a negative experience into a positive one can often build brand love more than actually anything you did previously. Um, and you know, we ended up working with that brand for for for years afterwards and obviously your product got better.

Paul Archer: 50:44

Off the back of it, you improved the product yeah, exactly, just just sacrificed one weekend and we built a much better product.

Chris Norton: 50:51

One weekend of high-end stress. We had another guy on here that did something and he amended something. He worked at the bbc and he took out the entire bbc website it's the home page, the news homepage, the whole the whole bbc website went down, which is a great fuck up.

Will Ockenden: 51:05

Do you reckon there's just a switch at the bbc the website? Switch the whole the whole website's gone down. So, um, paul, if people want to get in touch with you, or, um, find out more about jewel, uh, do you want to give us some email addresses and contact details?

Paul Archer: 51:20

yeah, so, um, so so. So jewel is is jeweltech we're. You know, that's our technology side of things. If you're into brand advocacy, run a podcast called building brand advocacy. You can search that. Um all about advocacy and marketing. We interview the big, best brand builders in the world on both sides of the atlantic there. That's worth checking out and then you probably can can get in touch with me. My email is paul at jeweltech. It's pretty easy to find there and um would love to talk about brands um all day long if I can, um and uh, yeah, so. So anywhere you can get in touch, we would love to talk about brands all day long if I can, and yeah, so any way you can get in touch, we'd love to communicate and see how I can help you.

Chris Norton: 51:55

Yeah, thanks for coming on the show, Paul. That was brilliant. I really enjoyed it.

Will Ockenden: 51:59

It was great.