Welcome to Embracing Marketing Mistakes, the world’s leading irreverent podcast for senior marketers who are tired of the polished corporate b*llshit.
Join Chris Norton and Will Ockenden, founders of the award-winning Prohibition PR, as they sit down with industry leaders to dissect the career-ending f*ck-ups they’d rather forget. The show moves past any pretty vanity metrics to uncover the brutal, honest truths behind marketing disasters, from £30,000 SEO black holes and completely failed companies, to social media crises that went globally viral for all the wrong reasons.
We don't just celebrate the f*ck-ups; we extract the tactical blueprints you need to avoid them yourself. If you are a business owner, or a CMO looking for a competitive advantage that only comes from real-world experience, this is your weekly masterclass in resilience and strategy.
Listen for: Raw stories from top brands, ex-McKinsey strategists, and industry disruptors.
Learn from: The errors that cost thousands and the recoveries that saved careers.
Get ahead by: Turning other people's nasty disasters into your unfair market advantage.
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You Waited 15 Minutes for a Taxi. Now Seven Feels Rude
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We return to consumer behaviouralist and CX expert Ken Hughes, first featured in episode 92, to revisit the moment that transformed how he believes brands should approach the customer. Ken explains how he spent the early part of his speaking career delivering stock, product first keynotes before realising that audiences and clients were focused on their own business challenges, not his rehearsed narrative.
He introduces his blue dot consumer idea and shows how it reshapes everything, highlighting how customers now expect brands to move toward them in the same effortless way Uber and Lyft bring the car to you and Uber Eats or Deliveroo bring the restaurant to your door.
Ken also explores how impatience, high speed connectivity and a world far removed from Commodore 64 loading screens have reset expectations. If you want your brand to stay relevant in an age of Gen Alpha, Gen Z and one tap convenience, this conversation will sharpen how you think about customer centricity.
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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 learnt from it that you know you've you've made a mistake and you've learnt from it that you can give to our our listeners so they don't make the same mistake you did?
SPEAKER_01
Okay, yeah, good. Um okay, let me think. Well, it was on 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 want to 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's 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 metaphor about the blue dot consumer. And so 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 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 this 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 look refer to the map as you went all the time. There's a lot of work that will lay on you, the 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 and 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 deliver who 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-centred model. And then that was the mistake I made earlier on in my career, too.
SPEAKER_00
Speaking of 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, deliver it delivered, Mike, my kids don't want to entertain it. That's that's not going to be here for three days.
SPEAKER_01
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 a at an airport or a train station, we waited for 15 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 driver. Seven minutes.
Now you happily waited 15, 20 years ago, but now seven. So it's happened everyone. We've all naturalized to this you know digital native world. And so yeah, we don't wait. We don't, you know, 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, there's fiber and 5G everywhere. Uh and the idea that you have to wait, you know. And 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 bibblies, 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 is out of stock, or even online, this item's out of stock. The next generation just laugh at that, think, oh why? Like, are you running a business and are you not?
