SPEAKER_01: 2:07

He spent 15 years worshipping NPS scores and loyalty schemes, only to realise his loyal customers were just trapped by points, discounts, and habit. Then, a 30-foot fall from his own roof shattered 26 bones, and his sense of invincibility forcing him to rethink about risk, fear, and what real loyalty looks like. If you're drowning in dashboards, under pressure to prove ROI on every single campaign, yet you still feel your brand is forgettable, you'll want to hear how Ken linked customer desire, emotion, and intimacy to true brand loyalty. His story of ignoring the obvious warning signs on that roof is a brutal metaphor for marketers who override their instinct because a target or deadline says so. I'm Chris Norton, and this is Embracing Marketing Mistakes, where senior marketeers turned hard lessons into real growth. Today I'm joined by Ken Hughes, a leading consumer behaviouralist and the king of customer experience, who admits he built his early career on the wrong metrics and stock keynotes before shifting to a social science-led approach that puts emotion, humour, and agentic AI at the centre of modern marketing. His near fatal fall forced him to reevaluate how we respond to fear, pressure, and risk. And we will break down how to move from transactional loyalty and lazy data worship to true heart space so your brand still matters when the machines start making the buying decisions. From broken bones to broken loyalty points, let us unpack where it all went wrong and how you can avoid making the same mistakes. Enjoy. Ken Hughes, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. It's an honor to be here. So I just want to ask you a bit about what you actually do, Ken, because you called the King of CX, and um that that fascinates me straight off the bat. I mean for for marketers, we love a we love a bit of an acronym or we love some sort of jargon. Do you want to explain what um CX is? Because I know you're also a consumer behavioralist.

SPEAKER_00: 4:11

Yes. Um it was wonderful. I was speaking at an event last week in uh in Eastern Europe and I was introduced as the king of sex, which you know, you know, I'll take that crown, why not? Um so uh CX customer experience. Uh I've lived in that world for a good 20 years. I ran an agency for about 15 of those uh looking at NPS and customer experience and tracking, and I got very disillusioned with the data side of it. And I think there is a marketing people tend to fall down a well of date and insight and forget that it's about connection and empathy and emotion, and that's the root of brand loyalty. And so I became more fascinated in the social science side. I've always been a social scientist, which is where the behavioralist customer, consumer behaviorist bit comes in. Um, most of my career has been spent with big global brands looking at how we connect with the consumer in an emotional space, uh, how we build some kind of emotional loyalty as opposed to transactional loyalty. So I like I'm a social scientist, uh, I kind of sometimes describe myself as a Frankenstein of sorts and kind of part fascinated by anthropology, sociology, psychology, cyber behaviorism, behavior economics. So the center kind of the of all those really overlap is where I live. Um yeah, just fascinated by the human mind and certainly where we're going in marketing from a consumer decision-making process is agentic AI rises uh as the consumer steps out of the consumer decision-making process. Marketing and branding will never be the same again. And so, yeah, it's an exciting time.

SPEAKER_01: 5:34

Yeah, because everything that I see, or we talk quite a bit about this, is like we've the last 20 years, we've been a bit spoilt as marketers. We've sort of like we've gone into the world of performance marketing, and everything's what's the ROI of this, what's the ROI of that? And brand marketing sort of took a step to the side, and we've all been obsessed with and I'll know this because uh we're in a PR agency, we get in and it's like, okay, if we hire you, what impact are you gonna make to our business, which is fine? We we can do, we can demonstrate that, and we can say you're gonna get this amount of coverage, this amount of reach, this amount of impressions, this amount of engagement. But what you're talking about is like having an emotional impact. That's that fascinates me because that feels more brand than performance. Is that fair to say?

SPEAKER_00: 6:18

Yeah, I think it is. I think to go back to one of your points there about marketing, has it had it easy, perhaps. I think it it there's quite a laziness apparent in marketing, I'll be honest. Um, and if you think about the whole brand consumer connection as a relationship, as a human relationship, and so think about your partner and the things we do for our partner to show them we love them. Like we have to I I had a keynote a couple of years ago called Love is a Verb. This idea that love isn't a thing you just say and then it comes true, it's a thing that you have to do, it's an action-based. So every day you you show your partner that you love them, little things, acts of service and gift giving and words of affirmation, you know, all the usual love languages. Whereas when we look at the customer relationship, brands are all about the love in the beginning when the acquisition bit's happening. Uh, but the moment they have you as a customer, think about your broadband deal or your bank, whatever, and the insurance, they they don't care anymore until the next year. Uh it's a bit like politicians every time there's a voting cycle. They care then, but they don't seem to care in between. Uh, and so it's a very toxic relationship we find ourselves in uh from a brand consumer point of view. So you're looking for their loyalty, and we we actually, you know, we want that, we want brand loyalty. But then when we look at it the other direction, what do we give the customer other than the parlton service? And even the loyalty systems that we have, the programs, you know, buying nine cups of coffee, get a tenth coffee free, that's not loyalty, that's entrapment. You know, it's like if that was dating, it would be like, does this hanky smell like chloroform to you? You're trying to like hold the customer in place against their will. And so, from a marketing point of view, all my work is about relationship. And you you use the word ROI there, which is a great word that comes up in every marketing and brand boardroom discussion. And I really try and encourage people to move away from ROI to a DTI model, a desire to invest, not a return on investment, a desire to invest. And again, if you go back to human relationship, like we don't keep a ledger of all the nice and nasty things our partner does in a book, and then every single day decide based on that book whether we'll be attentive to them or not. I mean, if you found that ledger under your partner's bed, you think, oh my god, my partner's a psychopath. Um, and you'd be right. Uh whereas in business, that's what we do. We take a what is the spend, what are we going to get back for it? Now, if you entered a human relationship, whether it's with your sibling or a colleague or your partner romantically, and you have an attitude of I'm only going to give if I get, that's not going to be quite an unhealthy relationship. And so it's about we're moving into an era of empathy, of emotion, of emotional intelligence, of recruiting people into marketing and branding with EQ over IQ, as AI commoditizes the whole product and service interaction anyway, everyone's going to have the same level of service and it's going to be excellent, the mom and pop launder on the corner, as is the global business. And so all you're left with actually is the connection, the connection that you have as a brand. And I mentioned earlier on the consumer stepping out of the consumer decision-making process. That's the most fascinating thing that's happening. So, you know, looking at the work that Google and Microsoft and others are doing on Agentic AI at the moment that we're about to see in the next 12, 18 months on the market, like we'll all have our personal virtual assistant in our pockets, and they will be booking your skiing holiday, they will be, you know, curating your broadband deals and your insurance deals behind the scenes all the time. Because humans don't like making decisions. This is the big fallacy. We're led to believe that in marketing, you know, every consumer wakes up every morning and thinks, oh great, what coffee will I buy today in the supermarket or what car will I buy? Actually, humans, we hate making decisions. It's complicated. There's too much choice. The paradox of choice. You know, Schwartz's book, great book. Um and so the easier we make it to make a decision, that's the route we'll go. Um, it's why when you sit down to watch Netflix, it's can be so frustrating because the first 10 minutes is 15 minutes is spent looking at too much choice. If there were just three movies, you'd have been watching a movie by now. Um and so Agentic AI takes all that away for us. It'll just basically give you the options, it'll already buy for you because it knows you so well. So when the consumer steps out of that consumer decision-making process that we've been teaching in MBAs and marketing courses for 50 years, what then? What then for marketing and branding when it's B2M, business to machine, not B2B, not B2C, and all the psychology and the tricks and marketing that we use and the clever sponsorships and the you know, all the stuff that Edward Bernays, I mean, if you look back at the history of marketing, which is he's quite an interesting thing to do sometimes, like Edward Bernays ran the first PR company in New York, and he traveled from Austria. His uncle was Sigmund Freud. And so he took Freud's work and understanding of the human mind and brought it to the States, and he formed the first what we would call a marketing agency, the madman series, etc. And he based it all on his uncle's work around hang on, don't sell the functional, don't sell the vehicle that does this, the refrigerator that does this, sell the fear and the jealousy and the love and the lust and the you know all that stuff. And we've used that in marketing since then. But that's because there's a human involved, and humans are inherently irrational. You know, Dan Arley's work is fantastic on that. Um, and if we're irrational, we can be influenced. But you know who can't be influenced? An agency AI who is looking at things from a functional perspective when it's running running its its algorithm based on your spend and what you are and who you are and what you might want. It's it's a whole new world for marketing, you know. It's fascinating.

SPEAKER_01: 12:15

Yeah, it is, but I do think that because it it's that's why I find fascinating talking to behavioral scientists and people like yourself, like how the the non-tangible things affect humans because we're not rational. We think we're we think we're thinking with the rational side of our brain, but it is about the emotional impact. Like you you you just used a great example there. So I I'm I've got here actually, look at that. I've got Cafe Nero and I I get a stamp every time I uh a digital stamp, and if I take my own cup, I get an extra stamp, so I get two. Um but you're right, the emotional connection, I do that because I get a free coffee every five, six that I buy, every five coffees that I buy. But I've become also the the the bit that actually affects me is when we've got a great person working in the local uh cafeteria to give you a a drink, that's the actual magic behind the brand. When they're really good at their job, the untangible. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00: 13:13

And and that so what brands continuously mistake is transactional loyalty for emotive loyalty. So, Nero, for instance, if you ask, they will assume based on the data, if they're looking at the data, that Chris is a really loyal customer, is there regularly, but actually all Chris is doing is you know getting a free coffee every now and then. Maybe the store is pretty close to your apartment or your workplace. And and so what we look for is loyalty is based on emotion first. It's it's a behavior second, it's based on emotion first. And so the emotional link is what we're looking for, not the transactional. And too many brands are tracking NPS and sales data and thinking that, oh, I mean, banking is one of the best examples or insurance. They will look at the data and they'll say Chris is insured as carburetors for the last 20 years, Chris is a loyal customer. No, Chris is just a convenient customer or too lazy to switch, and and so emotional space in in terms of heart space, and Eita Roddick wrote a very good book years ago, uh the Body Shop founder, and she was talking about mind space and brand and heart space. And so in branding, we tend to measure mind space, you know, recall and and you know, do you remember our brand? And and that's all wonderful, it's important to do, obviously, but actually it's heart space that wins the battle. And now, do you have a connection with a brand that goes beyond the transaction? Goes beyond, and if you think about some brands, like one of my favorite examples recently was Red Bull. I was skiing with my my teenage kids a couple of years ago, and I was taking a break for lunch, we're sitting at a cafe, and this snowboarder dude joined us at the table. And you you you know the type, right? The 25-year-old guy dreads, takes the helmet off, and the other dreads spill out, and he's got the super cool snowboarder kind of vibe going on. And on his neck, across the entire front of his neck was a red bull tattoo. And I looked at it and I thought, wow. Like that guy either really loves soft drinks, or like but it's not a sprite tattoo, is it, or a Coca-Cola tattoo. It's a red bull tattoo. And he sat in a chair for it was a colour tattoo, so he sat in a chair for about six to ten hours over a few sessions to get this done. And it was painful because the neck is very thin skinned. And he did that, he branded himself with a commercial brand. When you think about the definition of branding, you know, it comes from the cattle days of like branding ownership. Like, you know, people branded things to say that they owned them. And here was Red Bull, his choice, by the way, branding himself to his tribe. I talk about tribal belonging, the the tailor-making book I have out at the moment about Taylor Swift and the tribal belonging that she's built for her brand, is all based on this. When you achieve tribal belonging, you have an empowered customer. So for him, Red Bull isn't a syrupy liquid in the can. For him, Red Bull is his tribe, his community, his way of life. It signals adventure, it signals risk, an attitude to fear. So it's much more so it's it's the utopia for brand to reach that point where your customer would ink up their skin. Like Harley Davidson is another great example. You know, a lot of Harley riders have a tattoo. And Harley Davidson talk about the numbers of sales reps they have on the road every weekend selling bikes. Because every single customer riding a Harley is a sales rep for the brand. This idea that like if you get branding right and ownership right and community right, then people sell the brand for you. The Swifty community is another one. Um, you know, and there was a very funny one in Russia years ago, Domino's, when they launched in Russia, launched a campaign that said they would give a hundred years of free pizza to anyone who got a Domino's tattoo. They shut that down in two days after a campaign went mild because every student, every student and young person in Russia thought, well, it's fine, I'll do that. Um, but the idea is really interesting. Like if you get to the point where you have a customer that tribally belongs to what you're doing, then you have heart space. So you I doubt you have a Nero's tattoo on your ass, you know. Um maybe you do, who knows? Um, but the idea is like, how do we get to that point? How do we get to the point where the customer feels a belonging, a collaborative space, co-creation? It's not just producer and consumer. Because that's the again one of the biggest fallacies in marketing, too, that there's a separation between producer and consumer. I produce, I put it into a distribution channel, you consume, that's it, we're done. It's very one-dimensional. Whereas when you create the circle and when you create the ownership and the co-creation of the brand, and I talk about it in in the book with Taylor, that like the Swifties don't just consume the brand, they own the brand. And there was a really interesting moment in Vienna when she cancelled her Vienna tour. She was on her era's tour, a global, you know, two billion dollar tour, biggest live performance event of our lives. And there was a terrorist attack, a potential terrorist attack that was spoiled in Vienna. Fantastic that it was. There would have been people killed, and they they got the people, and so, but they didn't know, like all sleeper cells, how many how many guys were going to be involved. We have two of them, maybe there's more. So the wise thing to do is to cancel the three events happening that. But of course, 200,000 people are in the city. This is the biggest thing that's happening in the year, they've got all their costumes, they've got, you know. And what was really interesting is once the promoter and Taylor herself cancel the event, there's now no product, right? You've taken the product away. But that evening, and for for the bulk of the weekend, but certainly the first evening, you know, 70,000 Swifties on the streets all gathered in one place and had their own private concert, they had their own private three-hour sing-along, and there's amazing footage online about it, much to the annoyance of the police, obviously, who were trying to try to keep this not from happening in case there was more. Um terrorist potential. But I was always fascinated by that because if if you get to the point where you're a brand and you can actually take your product away and still your community are left standing. It's like it's like having a three-legged stool and taking one leg away and still stands magically. It's because you've in you've inherently built a tribal belonging where the community owned the brand more than you, the product owner, owned the brand. And so you could take you could remove the tailor and still does a Taylor Swift concert.

SPEAKER_01: 19:02

And that that's But don't they say don't don't they say like um what brand is is what people say about you when you're not in the room? Yeah. That's that was like the original one of the original definitions.

SPEAKER_00: 19:12

That's it. I mean the novelist Terry Pratchett has a wonderful quote that says, Um, do you not know that a man is still alive as long as his name is still spoken? So this idea that you and I will be dead one day and we'll have a headstone, and hopefully people will remember what we did, maybe our children or grandchildren, but there does come a point where maybe three generations later nobody ever says your name again in this whole world, and that's the real moment you die. You know, so when people stop saying your name, when they stopped talking about you, you don't exist anymore, do you? And for branding, it's the same. Unless people are telling your brand story in their day-to-day worlds, be it social media, be it in real life, you don't exist. You think you exist as a brand because you see your product on the shelf. But that's just again going back to the transactional product nature of it. Brand is ephemeral, brand doesn't even exist anyway. Brand is just a concept, it's it's a here, brand is here. And so if it's in your heart, you have to have people expressing how the brand impacted their lives, what the brand did for them. That's how you bring your brand's story to life. Let me tell you a quick story, if you may. Um, there was a guy called Kerry Drake, regular customer. Uh, and he had this well, look, it happens everybody. Maybe it happened to you before, and it'll certainly happen to you someday if it hasn't. His mom was thermally ill and he got the call. Hospice staff are actually magnificent about kind of knowing when the day is. You know, they they they watch patients and they know. So she was gonna pass and he got this call from his siblings and the staff and in the hospice care to say, look, come home. Tonight's gonna be the night. Now, the problem with this is that he lived in San Francisco and she was in Lowbook, Texas. So, of course, he jumps on the United Airlines website, gets a flight home, quick connection in Houston. So he needs two flights to get home. The Houston connection is only an hour. So he runs to the airport, he's waiting for his first flight, gets in the first flight, and while he's on the tarmac, the pilot comes on and says, I'm sorry, we have an air traffic control restriction, we're not gonna get out of here for another 35-40 minutes, and he immediately knows that that's that's his connection gone. There's no way he's gonna connect in Houston in time to get the second flight, and so he's going to miss the moment of holding his mum's hand as she passes. And understandably, he gets quite upset, you know, because we all would like to be there obviously for that moment. And he's softly crying on the plane, and the heirist notices him crying and brings some some tissues to dry his tears, and she gets the story as to what's happening, and she thinks, Oh my god, that sucks. Because it does. And so she kind of drifts back up to the top with the cockpit and is chatting to the pilot as they're waiting for this delay to clear. And he gets the story as well, and he thinks, Yeah, that does that does suck. So he picks up the radio and he radios ahead to control in Houston, and he gets patched through to the pilot of the second plane. And everyone who knows anyone who flies and anyone who works in aviation knows that you know planes make money in the sky, they don't make money on the ground, and so pilots and the crew are are bonused and quick turnarounds and avoiding delays. But sometimes doing what's right is better than doing what's profitable. And again, this goes back to a desire to invest, a desire to connect. And and so these two pilots outside the whole system, the scheduling system, collude to hold the second plane on the ground. So the the pilot of the second plane makes up some random, you know. Now now you're all worried. Anyone listening now is wondering about all those delays you've had all the years. Yeah, the cargo door is a bit sticky. We're looking at that now for a while. So anyway, he makes up some reason. So Kerry Drake lands into Houston, does the airport Olympics thing that we all do, running from gate to gate, bags flying, comes around the corner to the second plane, to find the pilot of that second plane standing at the top of the ramp with his hand outstretched saying, Mr. Drake, please, please stop running. This this plane goes nowhere without you on board, sir. And so he gets on board and he makes the connection and he makes the moment with his mum, and he does get to say his goodbyes and watch her and hold her hand as she passes. Now, in all that story, think about who Mr. Drake will fly with for the rest of his life. And so, you know, he will fly United. And it doesn't matter if United don't even fly to his destination, I'd imagine. He'd probably get as close as he can with United and take a bicycle for the rest of the way. These these are the moments, and I call it customer intimacy. So not about customer experience. Experience can be quite two-dimensional, actually, as well. Experience is lovely, but it can just be a short-term thing. It can be transactional, even a bit like romantic relationships again, a one-night stand, it can be a great thing, but it can be transactional. What we're looking for is depth of relationship and customer. So I've started using the word customer intimacy with my clients more than customer experience. Because the definition of intimacy is fostering a sense of closeness. That's what you're looking to do. And so in moments that matter for customers, in moments that they feel seen, heard, valued, they feel cared for, that's when you have the foundation of customer lifetime value. That's when loyalty is built. So if you ask Mr. Drake who is loyal to now as an airline, he'd only have one answer. Because that one moment that happened to him. Now the question is how do you scale that? How do you have that attitude to everybody? How do you create staff? You know, and if every single plane was held every single day for someone, you know, it doesn't work. But the the point is having the attitude and understanding that the stories that come out of those moments are your best marketing asset ever. So that story gets told and retold and retold. And I have hundreds of those stories from all the companies I work with all over the world. You know, there are people doing magical things every day with their customers, and it's spreading those stories. Those stories have more power in terms of brand building than anything you can do for your Black Friday sale or for a clever commercial on Insta or whatever. You know, those stories have emotional connection, and that one makes it powerful.

SPEAKER_01: 24:37

I think, Ken, that's an amazing story because I've I I've United Airlines, all I can think of is United, they broke my pain, it's out of it.

SPEAKER_00: 24:47

It goes both ways. Brand storytelling goes that way as well, you know, like it's negative, and the power of the negative stories is strong, you know, it is strong. And that's look, and Dave, I've seen his keynote, and it's it's a hilarious story. It's very, very funny. Um, and so unfortunately, brand storytelling is as as powerful negatively as it is positively. That's the point. Like if anything goes wrong today with your brand, people will tell that story too. And those stories carry. And if you inject humor, and and because of AI today, anyone can create now such good video content that they can have a negative commentary about a brand instead of just having a tweet about it that used to happen 10 years ago, they can now create a 30-second uh faux commercial with a very funny angle on it and put it out there, and I can destroy a brand within within one day. And so yeah, we're we're in a place where because the consumer can create commercial marketing content now, it's difficult to know, well, hang on, was that made by the brand or was that made by a customer? And there's no law that you uh there's no law stopping me making a brand, you know, a video for Porsche tomorrow and putting it out up on my socials. Which is weird.

SPEAKER_01: 25:50

I think the problem is that working in PR and crisis management is that we've we are always what we've used as the area to to confirm that something's real is video a lot of the time. And we've been in an era of the last 20, 30 years, uh we watch a video and we believe what we see. And now we're entering in it a period now where we don't we're not gonna believe anything that we see, and we can't believe anything we see, which is gonna be fascinating for all brands everywhere.

SPEAKER_00: 26:18

It really is, and and actually uh one of the biggest questions I'm asked all the time is like what are the values of the future consumer? Because that's where all brands are trying to get to. You know, linking your brand to a value that means something to customers is the easiest way to connect. And so values keep shifting, of course, right? So consumer values will always shift. So we had convenience in the in the kind of late 90s, 2000s, one click, one swipe, get it to me now, that's great. But we're looking at authenticity at the moment now. Like authenticity has become a really core value for the Gen Z, Gen Alpha generation because they are going up in a world of instant and and fidgetal and fake. And so what is real matters now. And so brands that are real, brands that have purpose. So I've noticed language changing, and I was I was doing some research recently, and the customer said something, and I thought, oh, that's a wonderful phrase. She said, you know, when I invite a brand into my life, and I went on to talk about the thing she was buying. And I went back and I thought, ooh, I invite a brand into my life. So like she doesn't transact with a brand or buy a brand, she's inviting you into her inner sanctum, her inner space. She's chosen you. So you better respect that invitation. So they want to do that with brands that align with their values, and those values may be about ethical sourcing and diversity and all sorts of things, but they have to, you have to stand for something, you know. They have this sheen teamu generation, and they think, oh, fine, that there's times when that's useful. But actually, if I'm choosing a brand, uh, a banking brand or a retail brand or a brand that I want, you know, they want to project their sense of self through branding as we always have done. So authenticity is really important. It is. And if you look at the food industry, it's quite interesting. Like KFC and McDonald's and Burger King, these giants, no one really is having an experiential, intimate moment there anymore because there's no authenticity. Whereas the street food movement is booming all over the world because people love the idea of going up to the food truck and the guy gave up his job and Deloitte Touche grew a beard and now sells falafels from a van. You know, they love the realness of that, the authenticity of that, the dream. And he doesn't own 40 vans, that's the point. He owns one. And so this this this realness, you know, I can see the production process, I can, I can understand. And again, going back to Taylor Swift, she did a she built her brand for 20 years based on behind the scenes. She invited her customer always behind the scenes, see how the song is written, see how the videos are made, see me in my bedroom after 16 writing songs, see all my romantic breakups all played out online. That that tearing away the line again between us and them means that it's authentic. It's she's an authentic person. And the parasocial relationship that every one of her fans has with her is fascinating from a psychology point of view. They all genuinely feel she is their older sister, their cool aunt, their best friend, as opposed to Madonna Rihanna, Lady Gaga, who you just look at as an entertainer, as a product. They do not see Taylor as a product, they see her as a friend. And that is the ultimate, again, arrival point where you understand that you've actually built a relationship, not a product.

SPEAKER_01: 29:02

And I suppose that's the difficult thing because you talk, we talk about Taylor Swift with your book, but we're talking about big brands here. If I'm a marketing, say marketing director of a company that's, I don't know, 20 million, um, and we're not we're not really established. I mean 20 million, you are quite established, but you know, like you're not you're not a household name, and you maybe you're in B2B or whatever. What's your advice for for creating that um that emotional connection and authenticity that you're talking about? How do you how do you stand out in your market when you're not a massive Pizza Hut Taylor Swift brand that everybody to be Pizza Hut's a bad example after a few weeks ago, but you know what I mean? Uh that that sort of household brand that we all know and love.

SPEAKER_00: 29:47

I think I think hiding behind that question is is a is again that there's a laziness sometimes because I get that question a lot too. But the reality is every one of the big brands that we have started along the way, and there was consistency. I mean, Taylor Shift could squat her, it's consistent messaging, consistent emotional connection that got her to where she is. If you go back to when she was 16, 18, 20, she was doing the same things as she does today, gamification and curiosity and mischief and play, and and there's there's not enough use actually of the human so humour is one of the easiest ways to connect. David Attenborough tells a wonderful story when he was a very young man in, I think, in his thirties, in the middle of an Amazon tribe, and there came a point, this is back in like in the 60s, 70s, when there were still tribes that were undiscovered, and you know, and he was pushing the boundaries of nature documentary and he was wandering into places he really shouldn't have wandered. And there was one moment where it was just him and a cameraman, and they were, you know, they wandered into a clearing and there was a tribe and they were in trouble. Like they was, there was this was the moment where it was all gonna end, you know. Um, and there was no language interpreter, there was no way of explaining that they were, and the spears were out, and there was and and David tells the story of using mime and a penis joke as the ultimate conversational starter, no matter no matter where you are in the culture, no matter where you are in the world, every man will laugh. And and so the idea of humor being the thing that dissolves conflict, humor is the way in always, and we do it all the time. Every dating app you'll ever go on, every profile you'll ever read, it'll always have like, you know, looking for someone with a good sense of humor, or I said because humor is how we connect immediately with people. And what I do for a living, I stand on stuff, I perform on stage every week. And you know, when I teach coach and coaching about presenting, I always say in the first minute, you have to make your audience laugh. Um, because laughter releases oxytocin and dopamine, it's a bonding hormone, and the moment you've got a bond with your audience, then you can take them where you want to go. Laughter is really important. And so a lot of brands don't use mischief and play and humor enough. And unfortunately, we all sit down at night now and scroll our feeds and Instagram and TikTok, and you tend to stop on the humor stuff. We all like a bit of humor. And so brands sometimes are terrified about, oh, where's the line and what can I do? And but actually, that's the best way to connect. And if you don't have global status these days with virals and things, you can actually achieve significant reach if you get a little bit more creative. And so, going back to one of my opening points with you today, there's a laziness in marketing, you know? We do the same things again and again, and actually being creative about well, what can we say? How can we say it? And God, with AI today, you have no excuse. Like no excuse. There was a time when you handed all that over to agency and there was a you know a three-month process. And but today, you can get creative yourself as a brand owner, and you can be, you know, and that's what I love about at the moment. I like I love looking at small business who never had the opportunity and the budgets to be hiring PR agencies and market agents. And we get usually you see it's coffee shops often. The amount of creative marketing that your local coffee shop or your local pizza shop are doing on a single store, you know, and they are having global reach with their marketing because they've cracked the humor piece or they've cracked the curiosity piece, and and and they've made a really funny video. Maybe it's AI, maybe it's not, doesn't matter, maybe it's with their employees. You know, it's just amazing. And so there's no excuse, and particularly in B2B as well, we get that, oh, well, B2B is more serious. No, no, I think you still find you're selling to humans who also are have a sense of humor. And particularly in B2B, we've seen a nice shift in the last 10 years as that as that millennial manager takes the C-level suite, you know, they have carried their emotional intelligence and empathy in with them. The generations before the Gen X, the boomers, it was all very serious, it was the tie, and it was this is the way it's done. Whereas today, that millennial Gen Z attitude, which is just more human and more empathetic, more curious, mischief and play are allowed. Absolutely. So I think there is an ability for smaller brands, and certainly in B2B often, smaller uh customer bases allow you to have better relationships because you're not trying to reach 10 million customers. You may only have a thousand customers in a B2B situation.

SPEAKER_01: 33:40

Well, all the T V ads that you remember, like um all the TV ads you remember are like Hamlet cigars, funny. Um they're always the they're either the really, really annoying ones, such as you know, the Go Compare guy or Priscina, or the or the Meercats, because they're a Meerkat market, and they're they've got obviously got characters, but back in the day they were all a lot of the TV ads were you know, whether the the alcohol ads as well, they all always had some sort of jokey joke in them. And they're the ones that you you kind of remember, I know you mean or the iconic ones as well that sort of create an emotional uh impact as well. I completely agree with you. I think there's not enough humour. There's not enough humour in B2B. Yeah. B2B needs to sort itself out. If we've got one message for B2B marketers, get funny.

SPEAKER_00: 34:26

Yeah, it is going on. It is, absolutely, I agree. Uh, and because often B2B ends up being so product-centered and all about the rate card and all about the quality and the efficiency and spreadsheets, and really that's not the way to sell anything. Again, let's go back to Edward Brunet's, you know, that's not the way to sell. Like you we assume it from a hygiene perspective that the product is good, the service levels will be good, and and you're there, and you're there's three options on the table because there has to be three options, you know. And so the only thing that's going to make you rise up is some kind of emotional connection. I mean, I work at the B2B industry. So, I mean, I'm a I'm a professional keynote speaker, and so the people that are buying me are the large event producers and brands all over the world. And so I'm aware that on the table, every time they're choosing a speaker, there'll be three options. It's a standard thing, you know. And so I'm one of three options. So uh all speakers are good, by the way. They've all got good story, good experience. And so what makes you different is your brand, then. So my brand, yeah, it's a lot of play, a lot of customer journey stuff goes on, a lot of gifting, a lot of crazy things arrive on people's desks that make them smile, and that's all it's about. It's about like, oh Ken, he's that guy, you know. Um, and so uh you have to look for ways, just because it's B2B and just because the pricing is high or complicated or whatever, doesn't mean that the product itself, uh, that the way you interact with your customers, the way you market the brand has to be serious and uh absolutely not. Absolutely not.

SPEAKER_01: 35:44

Well the theme the theme of our show, um Ken is all about screwing up and making mistakes. So, what what have you done in your career where you've really learned from it that you know you you've made a mistake and you've learned from it that you can give to our our listeners so they don't make the same mistake you did?

SPEAKER_00: 36:00

Okay, yeah, good. Um okay, let me think. Well, it was on that actually. So when I started speaking about 12 years ago, uh every speaker and the conference industry is interesting, and so every speaker's got a story, right? So some people have climbed every, you know, the peak of every seven continents mountains, and they've got their an adventure and they're gonna talk about leadership and they're gonna talk. So a lot of people arrive, as I did in the beginning, too, with a stock speech. So you say, here's what my speech is about, here's the things that the audience is gonna learn, and you try and sell it in to the event or the the conference. And what I learned, and again, it's it look to say this out loud, it's a bit ridiculous, it's it's marketing 101. But like, you know, instead of having your center being your product, your center needs to be your customer. And so you flip that around and you say, Well, what is the business challenge that the audience are facing this year? What is the biggest audience? And and then you take that back into your story. You're still gonna have your story. You're you know, I'm a customer experienced strategist, and some other person will be an entrepreneur, some other person will be an retired athlete, whatever they are speaking from. But you take the business challenge first and you address that in your product. So instead of selling in your product to the client and saying, here's my speech, here's what it's gonna be about, you start with the question and you say, Well, what is the biggest business challenge that the audience are facing? Here it is, okay, and then you design a speech to fit that. And now you've addressed the business challenge of the client who's buying you. They're going to sort of so from a marketing point of view, again, we're so product-centered, we're so, this is what I'm selling, sell, sell, sell, as opposed to the definition of marketing. If you look at it as you know, satisfying the customer's needs at a profit. So, what is the what are their needs? And so let's start there. So I've I have a uh metaphor about the blue dot consumer. And so I I write a blog called the blue dot. And this is about old maps. Remember, we used to use these old fold-out maps to get around the world, right? And so the interesting thing about that old technology was that assuming you had it the right way up, you had to know where you are on the map to work it, you had to know where you're going on the map, like you had to know the navigation points as to where the thing was and where it is. And then between those two points, there was hundreds of potential routes. So you had to kind of choose the route that looked best for you. Um, you had to continuously refer to the map as you went all the time. There's a lot of work that will lay on you, the user. And you understood that the world is a big place. Look at the size of the map, and you're kind of a small, insignificant part of it. If you look now at how we use mobility navigation, we are the blue dot. The blue dot stays at the center of the screen at all times, and the world moves. You don't move anymore, and it's updated at all times, it's instant, and you don't even know, you know, you only need to know where the destination is, you just type it in and it'll tell you where it is. And so that as a metaphor for business is fascinating because we used to see the customer as an end point of a customer journey and we used to make them do all the work. Whereas today the customer sits at home, presses the button, they expect the brand to come. I mean, like Uber is a great example, or Lyft, or you know, like the car comes to you. Why would you go to the restaurant when Uber Eats or Delivery can deliver to you? Why would you go to the dentist to whiten your teeth when you can get a kit in the moat post and do it at home? And you know, all these direct-to-consumer ideas, and and the idea of the least work I can do as a customer, the easier it's going to be. And so that blue dot is about moving to a customer-centric model and not a product-centric model. And that was the mistake I made earlier on in my career, too, speaking.

SPEAKER_01: 39:11

Well, I what I think is we're so bloody lazy these days. You know, we want everything delivered to us, don't we? We want Amazon delivered in less than an hour now. Yeah. If anything, if anything's let more than 24 hours in the UK delivered, Mike, my kids don't want to entertain it. That's that's not going to be here for three days.

SPEAKER_00: 39:28

Yeah, all the work I do with supply chain and procurement around the world has this conversation as to like the the customer of today is super demanding. And and you know, even and we talk about generationally old Gen Alpha Gen Z, but actually, you know, if you talk to any older millennial or Gen X and you ask them, well, how long used to you wait for a taxi at an airport or a train station, we waited for 50 minutes and we didn't really think much about it. It was the way things were, no problem. Uh whereas we are the same people right now who open your phone and if the if the number is bigger than three or four waiting for an Uber, you get cranky. Seven minutes, and you immediately change drivers. Seven minutes. Now you happily waited 15, 20 years ago, but now seven. So it's happened everywhere. We've all naturalized to this you know digital native world. And so yeah, we don't wait. We don't, you know, that there was a very funny viral that went recently. They were showing some Gen Alpha uh and young Gen Z kids the buffering symbol and asking them what it was, and they had no idea because they've never seen because they've they've never seen it. Isn't that mad? They've never seen the buffering symbol, really. Uh you know, because connection these days is amazing, it's fiber and it's 5G everywhere. Uh and the idea that you'd have to wait, you know. When I was telling my I have a 19-year-old son, I was telling him how we used to load the Comet War 64 games on a cassette tape, and I can he was just like in stitches the idea that you'd be playing a cassette tape into your phone, into your tur your machine with little bibli bibli biblies, and and then it would eventually load the game. And you know, so everything is instant, everything has to work first time every time. There's no room for kind of the product not being available or out of stock, and those those you know, little shelf labels that retailers put up, this item's out of stock, or even online, this item's out of stock. The next generation is laugh at that, think, oh, why? Like, are you running a business and are you not? Like it it's it should be there, and if it's if I wanted, it should be there. And so, yeah, and they're right, of course, as the modern consumer. If you don't have it for me, I'll get it somewhere else. And so, you know, the pressure on same-day deliveries and yeah, we grew up in a world, you know, where we went from 28 28-day mail order catalogue delivery was the norm, to two-day delivery when when Jeff Bezos gave us that, then he gave us next day, then he gave us same day, then he gave us four hours. Uh, you know, next stop is the Star Trek feckin' machine that'll just press the button that'll appear in your house. I don't know. And so we we all are like um yeah, we're all like fruit of salt from uh from Charlie and the chocolate factory, you know. I want it, I want it now, Daddy. Uh like it's uh we're demanding budgets consumers today.

SPEAKER_01: 41:51

It's like 2026 is the year of it is gonna be the year of impatience. We're like so impatient compared to what we used to be. When I was when I was eight and nine, I was doing I I used to do um martial arts to like uh on almost national level. So I would buy um also I've got various belts in various levels and I'd competed in like martial arts tournaments and things. Um but the the point of the story is I used to buy everything from a magazine called what was it martial arts monthly, I think it was called. And I would buy like um wooden bows, sticks, and all sorts of things, and they would take 28 days to for to like you've just said there, mail order delivery, 28 days, which we nobody would put up with that now, would they?

SPEAKER_00: 42:34

No, but unfortunately, and if you get into the values of modern society and what gives us joy, obviously anticipation also gives us joy as customers. And so what we're what we're missing today, and this isn't nostalgia now, this isn't like, oh, we're better in my day, but you know, there was a beauty when if you missed the movie at Christmas time on the TV, you weren't going to have an opportunity to see that till next Christmas. So that's why the family all gathered and they were all in their seats ready for eight o'clock when the movie was starting, and they ran to the bathroom really fast during during the ads to not miss any of it. We've lost all that, of course, because if you missed the movie today, you'll just download it tomorrow somewhere else, uh, and you can pause the ads and you can, you know, and so so anticipation was a there was a beautiful beauty in that, in the in waiting and and in space and curiosity. And I have a a whole piece uh of a keynote of a blog on the importance of boredom, going back to our why our marketeers maybe a bit lazy in creativity, like you have to be bored to be able to create, right? So, as children, when we were pushed out the door, and this does sound like an old granddad talking about his youth, I apologize. But you know, the idea of sitting on the curb with your mate and thinking, what will we do today? What do we play? You know, at two two 10-year-olds or two 12-year-olds. And there was just space, there was a vacuum, and you had to make it up, you had to build a fort, you had to go out and wander and play tree, do a go walk up trees, and you know, you made up the game. My point, my point is the space of the nothingness bred the something. So you created something to fill the vacuum of nothing. These days there's a serious issue, and this is a behavioral point about the fact that screens exist and the fact that kids don't get bored today. Kids aren't allowed to get bored at any point. And so, because they're always filling the space with just noise of TikTok or Insta or whatever, that they never get curious. And without curiosity, you can't have creativity. And so we're breeding potentially an entire generation of less creative people, less problem-solving people. Um, and curiosity also, by the way, gave mischief. I'm sure you were a kid at I know I did at 10, 11, 12, you know, we're bored and you stole your parents' matches and you lit fires, you played with knives, you know. You got into all sorts of trouble as well. That's also healthy. Trouble teaches you boundaries and teaches you what is risk, and it allows you to understand risk and the payoffs and the rewards to risk. And if you don't go through all that risk and curiosity and play and mischief, then as an adult, you are only ever going to be an if-then executive. If this happens, you do this, if this happens, there's no creativity. And you have to have boredom to have curiosity and curiosity to have creativity. And so there is a big concern about the last 15 years in terms of the kids coming up. And we see it in in in you, I do some lecturing universities and I talk to the staff there who work full-time, and they're very curious, very worried about the the undergrads and postgrads that are coming through now because they see the difference. They don't have the critical thinking, they don't have the attention, and they don't have the creativity that 20 years ago those undergrads did have. And that is a direct, I think, uh and consequence of a lack of boredom.

SPEAKER_01: 45:39

Yeah, I mean you need to yeah, yeah, I completely agree with you. You need to like have that sort of time to pontificate, think about a problem, and let your subconscious like make it percolate and pop up and oh, I've got an idea.

SPEAKER_00: 45:51

Yeah, and by the way, just to finish off that point, I don't want any marketing executives and branding executives listening to this thinking, oh, he's blaming me as I'm not being creative enough. One of the reasons that we don't have enough creativity in marketing also is that we don't resource the teams well enough to live to give people the space to think. So you have someone writing a brand plan, marketing plans, and the pressure on them to output something is so great that they have to copy paste last year's plan. Uh they don't you do we don't give people enough time to actually think about actually I'd love to do something different. I'd love to be a bit braver and do something different here. But you have to have you have to have time to do that. And space and in organizations today, under resource and deadline pressure is removing any ability to be curious and to ponder and to think, oh, what if we did this?

SPEAKER_01: 46:39

Well, that's where our magic AI will walk in and take away all the time and give us time to relax and unwind and think about let's look at this strategy, or will it just have us all sat there going, no, that's not what I meant. What I meant was, can you change this? And you seem to spend more time talking to something to get an answer than you could have just thought about it and done it yourself anyway.

SPEAKER_00: 47:01

Yeah, yeah. I think look, I'm a big fan of AI doing the heavy lifting, obviously, of the of the small stuff and freeing up the humans to do what humans do best, 100%. I heard a great story recently from Intermountain, a big hospital group in the US, and they've just installed an AI speech to charting system. One of the challenges with clinical conversations is that the patient comes in, uh, they're vulnerable, obviously, they have a rash, they have a lump, they're worried, and they start talking to the doctor, and the doctor has to chart and talk to you at the same time. So they're capturing all the information from you, but so they're breaking eye contact all the time, and they're turning their shoulder away from you to hit the laptop all the time. And so the body language and so you don't really feel that the doctor's really listening to you, and you're kind of and so what they did is they installed a very simple AI speech to chart system where the AI listens, charts, auto-populates the chart, uh, and the doctors checks that as you walk out to make sure it's all okay. What it means though is that for 15 minutes, the con the consultation now is the doctor's eyes square on you. So he or she is completely listening to you all the time. Uh, you feel their presence, and the patient satisfaction scores went through the roof because for the first time ever, the patients really felt, well, like the doctor was really listening. And what was the surprise was the employee experience stores also went through the roof because the connection that the medic was feeling, the clinician was feeling, was why they got into medicine in the first place. They weren't a bureaucrat or an admin person, they wanted to do this, and so the human empathy part. So, again, it's a great example AI doing the heavy lifting of the admin, the bureaucracy, allowing the human to do what the human does best, which is in this case, empathize and bring their professional experience to bear. And so for marketing, it's the same. There's so much admin and crap that we do on a day-to-day basis that I'll be honest, a 16-year-old at a school could do for us, probably. And it's not what we want to be doing. We want to be doing the creative stuff, the boundary stretching stuff. And so the more we can give AI of the basic marketing management everyday stuff, the stuff interns kind of do, great. Let's let's give it over and let's free ourselves up to do the stuff then that we as marketers should be doing, which is the social science part, the connection part, the emotion of connection. How do we make customers feel our brand in our hearts, not their minds, and all that good stuff?

SPEAKER_01: 49:03

So, I mean, uh, yeah, I completely agree with you. Um, I've seen a few amusing things about people saying things like, um, I want AI to I wanted AI to take what take away the dish it the dishwashing and the dish drying and the cooking and the cleaning and not the strategy and the creative writing and the you know all the good bits of what actually what marketing people want to uh and people in any way want to do. I'm sure that I'm sure Elon's robot will sort that out. Of course it will. Ken, I've got you've been on the show now, and um you know it's about mistakes. Um if you were us, who's the next person you'd invite on the show and why?

SPEAKER_00: 49:41

Oh, mistakes to talk about their mistakes.

SPEAKER_01: 49:44

Yeah, to talk about what they've learned in their career.

SPEAKER_00: 49:46

Yeah. That's very interesting. Um I think I'd have Rob and Williams, except I think you'll find it quite difficult to get him now. I think I think when I'm always putting my dinner parties together, you know, your fictional dinner parties. I always had Robin Williams at the table, you know, the dead or alive piece, because I think I think he was a fascinating man and he had a fascinating take on success as well. And one of the other I can't remember the actor's name. Can you remember the actor's name who was in Ghostbusters and Honey A Shrunk the Kids? And then he stepped out completely. Yeah, and he stepped out completely from fame. He made a choice to step away. Um in fact he's coming back into the industry now. Um but he stepped out for 20, 30 years. And I think it's quite interesting to talk about like the mistakes people make and and if they look back on it, would they do it again? Um but in a business point of view, who should you have? Um, from a marketing point of view, that's really interesting. I'd have to think about that.

SPEAKER_01: 50:40

Um like what I was just thinking about when you speak at your conferences, is it's not a great mistake that they've talked about.

SPEAKER_00: 50:46

Yeah, they I mean it's interesting actually because people don't talk about mistakes enough, which is why I like your podcast. Um there's a there's a very unhealthy attitude to success and failure in the corporate world, and we see it as a continuum. So we see success on one side and failure on the other side, and it's kind of like you must go from this to this. And obviously, everyone understands if you have any kind of bit of emotional intelligence, so it's it's just two sides of the same coin, you know, that any any success is built in all the failures. And if you look at you know, back at all the stories of you know, Oprah Winfrey cut from her first TV show, Michael Jordan cut from his high school basketball team, uh, you know, Tom Brady was like the 199th pick in the sixth round in the NFL, you know, the most famous quarterback of all time. Uh, how many publishers did um did the Harry Potter author have to hawk herself around to you know before the book is published? You have all these, even Traffo data, the first company that Bill Gates had, Paul Allen, was a monumental failure. But during that they they understood about how how maybe technology could work and you know it became Microsoft after. And so I think failure is a really important part of uh as a teaching tool. Now the trick is to understand, you know, so you have like an attitude around fear and risk. And so at what point is it courageous to kind of go this direction anyway, even though it feels a bit wrong? And in the corporate world, we have a very unhealthy attitude to that. Like we want kind of very calculated risk. We don't want uncalculated risk, but actually it's in the uncalculated risk that the discovery happens, you know. And so I think learning the space to say, okay, look, let's swim off in a different direction. I was on a beach a couple of years ago, um, and there was a lifeguard with a rip rip current sign, and he was talking to my kids about the rip currents, and he was extended explaining to them how to escape a rip current. So if you get carried out by a rip current, it's stronger than you. And what you must not do is swim against the current because you cannot return to the shore, it's going to be stronger. What you do is you swim sideways, and you swim sideways out of the current. And once you're out of the current, then because the current is traveling from the shore, then you can return back. Now, that's all well and good, but imagine you're kind of really struggling, gasping for air, you've taken on some water maybe, and you're you feel like you're drowning. Imagine the strength of character you have not to swim back to shore. Imagine the strength of character you have to have to swim in a completely different direction, knowing that that will save you. So the same is true for business, I think. Like we saw it in COVID. A lot of companies immediately try to swim back to the shore, swim, swim back to what they know. Whereas the ones that really made a difference are ones that thought, okay, we can't do what we used to do, let's go off in a completely new direction. And that's what you need to do. And that that's for courage and fear and risk and the relationship between all those things in the corporate marketing world are really important. Like, how do we encourage our people to have the permission to swim off in a new direction with our brand and to find new customers, new markets, new ways of doing things, and not just have the hysteria of swimming back to shore all the time. Oh, we know, you know, and the difference between feeling the fear and doing it anyway, and feeling the fear and listening to it is the trick. And you only learn that, I think, as you go through life. Like I had a horrendous accident about five years ago, I was up on my roof doing a small fix and I slipped. Why did I slip? I put my foot onto a roof ladder to do the fix, and I felt the roof ladder give a little bit under my foot, and I and I felt the fear rush through my body, and I thought, that doesn't feel great, but then I kind of tested it. Ah, it's okay because I'm under pressure, I need to get this thing fixed today, and I do other stuff to do. And male ego kicks in, I'm fine. I know why should why didn't I call the roofing guy? I'll do it myself. And and I moved forward again a little bit more body weight, and the roof ladder again didn't feel that secure. But my desire to finish the job, so I basically didn't listen to the fear, and the roof ladder then slipped and I fell 30 feet, broke, you know, 26 bones in my leg, broke four vertebrae in my back, uh, you know, had to learn to walk again, was briefly paralyzed, a whole lot of stuff happened, right? And really, if I go back to listening to the fear, the message was there. The message was there twice. It was given to me twice by my body. In every cell of my body, said, Don't do this, don't do this. And I overrode that fear and I paid the price. Now, there's times in business though when you get that fear and you have to override it because that's how we move forward. So the difference between when to listen and when to ignore those messages is the thing that you can never teach anybody. And get back to my point about being a young kid and climbing trees and falling off and breaking your arm and playing with knives and playing with fire. You have to do all that for decades and decades to really develop a skill. It's a soft skill. You can't be really taught of when you listen and when you ignore. Because if you listen to fear all the time, you'd never do anything. And so you have to have you have to find the space to say, okay, I think this is worth pushing past, and I think this is worth listening to. And it's a really, really fine line between those two things. But unfortunately, in the corporate world, we tend to be super safe and we take zero risks, and therefore you get the same results you get every year. Incremental tiny improvements in your market share or product, but nothing ever significant. When you look at all the people that have changed the world in branding and marketing, they're always people who thought, What if we do this? You know, like most something fragment. Yeah, most marketing directions or branding campaigns start with fuck it. You know, let's do it. Let's just try this, you know, as opposed to well now the data tells us this and the research tells us that. Ah, piss off. You know, and that's what Patty Power do, you know.

SPEAKER_01: 56:05

They just go, What's the biggest, what's the biggest disruptive, most like problem problematic thing that we can do? Right, fuck it, let's do it. Yeah, yeah. It's amazing.

SPEAKER_00: 56:13

I think I mean not every brand can do that, but the HR departments rise up, and the bigger the company, the more creative kind of stuff gets wrung out of the whole process. And so, yeah, sometimes you need a different way of thinking. And actually, from a recruitment point of view, it's interesting to see the neurodiversity space rise, and the conversation about that happened where we we keep recruiting the same type of people into marketing, the same type of people into branding. And if you keep recruiting the same type of people, you're going to get the same results. You know, at the interview, what happens is that there's a panel of three people, and and Jane, Jane or Tom walk out of the interview and they all turn to each other and they say, Well, do you think Tom suits our corporate culture and our marketing team? And we all think, Yes, we think it'd fit in perfectly. Yeah, but the problem is you're recruiting the same person as you then. So the answer should be actually no, Jane, she doesn't really fit in at all. Yeah, let's hire Jane then. Because, you know, and so people with ADHD and neurodiversity, neurospiciness, they think about things in different ways, they solve problems different ways. They can be a nightmare to manage, certainly, yeah, sure. But actually, they bring more to the table in terms of creative thinking. And so there's a whole change in terms of let's stop cookie-cutter recruiting. Let's stop taking the same type of person into the team again and again. Let's take people who are kind of way left afield and make us think differently and challenge how we do things. Brilliant, bring it on.

SPEAKER_01: 57:24

Well, I'm a I'm a classic case for your ADHD, and so is my son. So um I'm I've been I've been through, I mean, yeah, you can tell that when you the way I ask questions, and they ask two questions in one. Um, Ken, thanks. I mean, fascinating. Thanks, thanks. There's been I could have talked about your blooming falling off the ladder for 20 minutes, you know, half an hour. But um, we've we're running out of time. So I just want to say thanks for coming on the show. If people want to get hold of you, um, what's the best way that they can find you to book you for one of their, you know, where you can come and tell that story at length?

SPEAKER_00: 57:53

Yeah, sure. KenHughes.com is where you'll find all the work. So all the keynotes are there. There's a YouTube channel link off that, and the tailormaking.com websites off that too. So you can buy the book. Buy the book. I've got kids to put through college. Buy the book.

SPEAKER_01: 58:04

That's subliminal behavioral marketing, everybody. Not so subliminal. Uh yeah, thanks so much for coming on the show, uh, Ken. That was brilliant. You're very welcome, Just great to talk to you, pal.