Spider-Man, BMW & the Marketing Mistake Almost Every Business Makes | Episode 8

0:00 I ask because I believe it's the wrong question that most businesses are asking today. The question isn't, "How do I get more attention?" The better question is, "How do I become worth paying attention to?" Every result has a price. Every goal requires a choice. Comfort keeps you where you are. Discipline takes you where you want to go. Welcome to Discipline Over Comfort with Bob Terrio. Real world conversations on leadership, business, marketing, and execution. Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Discipline Over Comfort podcast.

0:35 I'm Bob Terrio, and if this is your first time here, welcome. Every week we explore leadership, business, marketing, artificial intelligence, and the discipline mindset required to build something meaningful. Today, I wanna start with a headline that caught my attention, not because I drive the product, not because I was interested in the movie, although I saw it and it was really good, but because I immediately recognized the lesson hiding behind it. BMW recently found itself receiving criticism after displaying a Spider-Man promotion inside some of its customers' vehicles.

1:09 Now, before we go any further, this episode is not about criticizing BMW. I wasn't in that room. I don't know the objective. I don't know what research they reviewed. Every great company experiments. Some ideas work, some don't. That's not what interested me. What interested me was the reaction. Because the moment I saw the headline, I stopped thinking about cars, I stopped thinking about Spider-Man, and I started thinking about every business owner I've ever worked with over the last thirty years.

1:40 Because the story reminded me of something that I believe has become one of the biggest marketing mistake businesses can make. We've become obsessed with getting attention instead of becoming worthy of attention. Those are two completely different things. Think about your own day. Before you even arrived at work this morning, how many emails did you delete? How many notifications did you swipe away? How many advertisements did you ignore? How many social media posts did you scroll past? Probably more than you can remember.

2:14 So here's the uncomfortable question: Why should anyone pay attention to your marketing? I don't ask you to s-- I don't ask you this to discourage you. I ask because I believe it's the wrong question that most businesses are asking today. The question isn't, "How do I get more attention?" The better question is, "How do I become worth paying attention to?" There's a huge difference because attention can be interrupted. Trust, now that has to be earned. One of the biggest misconceptions in marketing today is that success comes from shouting louder, posting more, sending more emails, running more ads, creating more videos, buying more software.

2:55 How big is your tech stack? Just doing more. But after more than three decades in marketing, I've learned something. People don't wake up in the morning hoping to see your advertisement. They wake up trying to solve a problem. Think about that. Nobody opens Instagram hoping to see your ad. Nobody checks their email hoping another sales pitch arrives. Nobody opens YouTube hoping to watch another commercial. People are looking for solutions, answers, ideas, inspiration, entertainment, hope. And when your marketing helps someone solve a problem, something interesting happens.

3:32 It no longer feels like marketing. It feels like value, and value earns attention. That brings me to something I want you to write down. This may be mo- the most important sentence in today's episode. The goal of marking- marketing isn't to get attention. The goal of marketing is to become worth paying attention to. They would completely change the way they would communicate with their customers. Instead of asking, "How can I get more clicks?" They'd ask, "How can I be more helpful?" Instead of asking, "How do I sell more?"

4:03 They would ask, "How do I create more value?" And that's where great marketing begins. Not with technology, not with AI, not with advertising. It begins with understanding people. And that reminds me of a conversation that I've never forgotten. Several, several years ago, I was talking with a senior executive in a retail business. We were discussing growth, and he asked me a question that I've heard many times throughout my career. He said, "How do we get more market share?" That's a perfectly legitimate question.

4:35 Every business wants to grow. But as the conversation continued, I realized something. We weren't really talking about the same thing. In his mind, the solution was pretty straightforward. We need more people walking through the front door, more traffic, more customers. He was doing the numbers in his head. If we can get X number of additional people through the door, and X percentage of those people bought something, then we'd grow. Mathematically, I understood what he was saying, but I told him, I said, "I don't think that's our biggest opportunity right now, because sometimes the answer isn't getting more people through the front door.

5:11 Sometimes the answer is taking better care of the people who are already walking through the front door." I told him that I thought we needed to focus on the customer experience. We needed to give our existing customers more reasons to come back. Not once, not twice, but more frequently. Because we already had customers who knew us. They already trusted us. They were already choosing to spend money with us. So before we spent all of our energy trying to find the next customer, why wouldn't we ask ourselves, "How to become more valuable to the customers that we already have?"

5:44 That's when I try to explain to him using a pretty simple analogy, I thought anyways. The pie is only so big. There are only so many potential customers in a particular market. There are only so many people who need what you need to sell. There are only so many dollars being spent in your category. That's the pie. And if you want more market share, you need to earn a bigger slice of that pie. Pretty straightforward, I think. At least, I thought it was. Because he looked at me and said, "Then you need to bake more pies."

6:16 I remember thinking, "Well, that's not exactly how this works," because I wasn't saying our company needed another pie. The market was the pie. You can't just decide there are suddenly twice as many customers in the same market because you need to hit a revenue number. You can't manufacture market share on a spreadsheet, but you can earn a larger percentage of the market that already exists. And one of the best ways to do that isn't always finding more customers. Sometimes it's becoming more valuable to the customers that you already have.

6:48 That conversation stayed with me because it illustrates something I still see in businesses today. Whenever growth slows down, the immediate reaction is, "We need more leads. We need more traffic. We need more advertising. We need more followers. We need more customers." More, more, more. [chuckles] But I think leaders need to ask a different question first. What are we doing with the customers that we already have? Are they coming back? Are they buying from us more frequently? Are they telling other people about us?

7:18 Are they having an experience worth talking about? Do they feel appreciated after they make the purchase, or do we immediately start chasing the next person? Because here's something I believe strongly. Too many businesses are obsessed with acquiring customers. Great businesses become obsessed with keeping them, [chuckles] and that's just not a customer service lesson. That's marketing. Somewhere along the way, we've separated marketing from customer experience as though they're two completely different things.

7:46 I don't believe that they are. Your advertising is marketing. Your social media is marketing. Your website is marketing. But do you know what else is really marketing? How somebody answers your phone, how quickly you respond to an email, what happens when there's a problem, how clean is your business, whether your employees make customers feel welcome or not, whether, whether you do what you promised you were gonna do, whether somebody walks away thinking, "I wanna do business with those people again."

8:15 That's marketing, too. In fact, I'd argue that that may be some of the most powerful marketing you have, because advertising can get somebody through the door once. The customer experience gives them a reason to come back. Think about a business that you absolutely love. Maybe it's a restaurant. Maybe it's a barber. Maybe it's a hotel. Maybe it's a local store. Why do you keep going back? Is it because you saw another Facebook ad? Probably not. You go back because of what happened the last time you were there.

8:43 The experience delivered on the promise, and eventually something even more powerful happens. You start telling other people about it. Nobody has to pay you. Nobody has to give you a referral code. You just say, "You've gotta try this place." Now, that's powerful, because now your customer has become part of your marketing department and they're working for free. That's what great customer... That's what a great customer experience can do, and it leads to a principle that I think every business owner needs to understand.

9:14 Marketing makes the promise. The customer experience keeps that promise. If those two things don't match, you have a problem. You can create the greatest advertisement in the world. You can have a beautiful website. You can create incredible videos. You can have thousands of followers. But if I respond to the marketing, become a customer, and the experience doesn't match that promise, none of it matters. In fact, your marketing may actually make the problem worse, because now you've created an expectation that your business can't deliver on, and that's where this connects back to the BMW and Spider-Man story.

9:50 Again, I'm not interested in deciding whether BMW's campaign was brilliant or terrible. That's not the lesson. What interests me is the question the story forces leaders and marketers to ask. Does this strengthen the relationship with the customer, or does it weaken it? That's a very different way to evaluate marketing, because instead of looking only at impressions, clicks, views, reach, and engagement, you're looking at the relationship. You're asking, "How will the customer feel? Will this make them trust you more?

10:21 Will this make their experience better? Will this make them wanna come back? Or are we simply interrupting them because we found another place where we can put an advertisement?" Just because you can get someone's attention doesn't mean you, that you should. And that brings us to another mistake I see businesses make all of the time. They confuse marketing activity with marketing strategy, and those are not the same thing, okay? I, I, I'm, I want that to sink in. [chuckles] Okay? When you confuse marketing activity with marketing strategy, those are not the same thing.

10:54 I'm gonna say it again. I've walked into businesses where the marketing department looked incredibly busy. Social media posts were going out. Emails were being sent. Ads were running. Videos were being created. Meetings were happening. Reports were being generated. Everybody was doing something, and from the outside, it looked like a lot of marketing was happening. But then I'd ask a very simple question, "What's actually working today?" And sometimes the room would get pretty quiet, not because the people weren't talented, not because they weren't working hard, but because nobody had stopped long enough to separate activity from impact, and that's super dangerous.

11:31 That's a, a dangerous place for a business to be, because activity feels productive. You can point to it. You can put it on a calendar. You can put it on a report. We posted 25 times this week. We sent six emails. We produced four videos. We generated 100,000 impressions. Okay, but what happened? Did more people walk through the door? Did customers come back more frequently? Did you generate qualified leads? Did those leads turn into customers? Did the revenue move? Did customers' retention improve?

12:00 Did anybody actually do anything differently because of the marketing? Those are much harder questions, but those are the questions leaders have to ask, because busy doesn't automatically mean effective. And this just isn't a big business problem, okay? I see the same thing with small business owners. They tell me, "Bob, I'm posting every day." Okay, but why? "I'm supposed to." According to who? I've said that before. What are you trying to accomplish? Who are you trying to reach? What do you want that person to do?

12:29 And most importantly, what value are you giving them in exchange for their attention? If we can't answer those questions, posting more probably isn't the answer. You may just be creating more noise. And I think that's one of the hardest things for marketers to admit. Sometimes less marketing is actually better marketing. It's more focused, more relevant, more useful, more intentional. Here's another line I want you to remember. Marketing without strategy is just expensive noise, and noise is everywhere right now, especially because creating content has never been easier.

13:03 You can create an ad in minutes. You can create a video from your phone. You can send an email to thousands of people with just one click. You can publish something across multiple social platforms almost instantly. That's incredible. But easier creation doesn't automatically mean better marketing. Sometimes it just means we can create bad marketing faster. Which brings me to social media. I love social media. I use it. I've built relationships through it. I've generated business through it all over the world.

13:34 I've seen companies completely transform their reach because of it. But social media is not your marketing strategy. It's a channel. Facebook is a channel. Instagram is a channel. LinkedIn is a channel. TikTok is a channel. YouTube is a channel. They're places where you distribute your message, but the platform isn't the strategy. Your customer is the strategy. That's worth repeating. Your customer is the strategy. I'm repeating myself a lot today. And the reason it's your strategy, because a platforms, uh, the, because platforms, they change.

14:06 Algorithms change, organic reach changes, advertising costs change. What's popular today may not be popular five years from now. I've been doing marketing long enough to remember when some of the platforms businesses supposedly couldn't live without today didn't... They didn't even exist, and somehow businesses still grew. So let me give you a little test. Imagine that tonight every social media account connected to your business just vanished. It disappeared. Boom. Facebook is gone. Instagram is gone.

14:35 TikTok is gone. LinkedIn is gone. YouTube is gone. And tomorrow morning, would you still know how to market your business? Would you still know who your customer is? Would you still know what problem you solve? Would you still understand why somebody should choose you? Would you still have relationships with your existing customers? Would people still recommend you? Would you still know how to reach the marketplace? If the answer is no, then I would challenge you to consider something. You may not have a marketing strategy.

15:07 You may have social media accounts, and those are two very different things. Great marketing existed before social media. It will exist after whatever today's most popular platform eventually becomes. Because the fundamentals haven't changed. Know your customer, understand their problem, communicate clearly, create value, deliver on your promise. Earn the trust, then do it again. That's marketing. And when you understand those fundamentals, the platforms become incredibly powerful tools. But they're just tools.

15:39 They're not the foundation. Now, there's another tool changing marketing faster than anything I've ever seen in a very long time. AI, artificial intelligence. And I think we're making some of the exact same mistakes with AI that we've made with social media. Everybody wants to know, what's the newest tool? What's the newest platform? What's the newest feature? How can I create more content? How can I automate more? How can I do everything faster? And don't misunderstand me. I believe AI is gonna fundament- fundamentally change business.

16:10 I use it. I study it. I'm excited about it. I think the opportunities are enormous. But there's something leaders need to understand. AI won't fix a broken strategy. It will help you execute it faster. That's the danger. If your message is confusing, AI can help you create more confusing messages. If you don't understand your customer, AI can help you market to the wrong customer at scale. If your business doesn't have a clear strategy, AI can help you execute that unclear strategy faster than ever before.

16:42 That's not transformation. That's acceleration without direction. And speed is only valuable if you're going in the right direction. That's why I don't believe AI eliminates the need for marketing leadership. I think it makes marketing leadership more important. Someone still has to ask, "Who are we trying to reach? What do we actually need? What's the problem we're solving? What's our message? What, what does success look like?" And most importantly, does what we're creating actually help the customer?

17:11 AI can help you execute, but leadership still has to decide what deserves to be executed. Technology changes. Human behavior doesn't change nearly as fast. People still wanna feel understood. They still wanna be treated fairly. They still want businesses to keep their promises. They still want value, and they still buy from people and companies they trust. That's why I keep coming back to the same word throughout this episode. Trust. You can buy impressions. You can buy clicks. You can buy research.

17:40 You can buy traffic. You cannot buy trust. You have to earn that. And once you've earned it, you better protect it, because that brings us right back to where we started. Spider-Man, BMW, and a marketing decision that made me stop and think. The real lesson isn't whether BMW was right or wrong. The real lesson is that every one of us who market something has to decide, are we simply looking for another place to put our message, or are we creating something worthy of the customer's attention? And that's the question I wanna turn into something practical, because I don't want you to finish this episode thinking- Hmm, that was interesting.

18:18 I want you to actually do something different. That's what discipline over comfort is really about. Ideas are easy. Execution is where things get uncomfortable. So here's this week's execution challenge. I want you to go back and look at the last five pieces of marketing you put into the world. Just five. Maybe they're social media posts, maybe they're emails, maybe they're advertisements, maybe they're videos, maybe they're text messages to customers. Maybe you're building a personal brand, and they're simply the last five things you posted.

18:48 Whatever marketing looks like for you right now, pull up the last five, and then I want you to ask yourself three questions. First, did they create value for the person receiving it? Not value for you, value for them. Did they learn something? Did you answer a question? Did you solve a problem? Did you entertain them, or did you inspire them? Did you make a decision easier? Did you give them something worth the time they spent paying attention to you? That's question number one. Question number two, did you give someone a reason to trust me or my business more?

19:20 That's a very dis- different measurement than likes or views or impressions. Because I've seen plenty of content get attention that didn't build an ounce of trust. And finally, question number three, this one's probably the hardest. If the marketing came from somebody else's business, would I actually pay attention to it? Now, be honest. Take your company logo off of it. Take your name off of it. Forget how long it took you to create it. Forget how much you paid somebody to design it. If you saw it while scrolling through your own phone, would you stop?

19:52 Would you read it? Would you watch it? Would you even care? If the answer is no, why should your customer? That's the discipline part. Because it's easy to publish something just because it's Tuesday and the content calendar says we need to post on Tuesday. It's easy to send another email because we haven't sent one this week. It's easy to run another promotion because sales are down. It's much harder to stop and say, "This isn't good enough yet. This isn't useful enough. This isn't clear enough.

20:22 This doesn't deserve the customer's attention yet. Let's make it better." That's discipline, and I believe that's where some of the best marketing decisions are made. And when someone says, "Let's do more," when somebody has the courage to ask, "Should we be doing this at all?" Now, I wanna take the challenge one step further. The next time you're about to hit post or send or publish or approve the next advertisement, stop for 10 seconds and ask yourself one question. Am I asking for attention, or have I earned the right to ask for it?

20:53 That's it. 10 seconds, one question. But I think it can completely change the way you approach marketing because here's what happens when you start thinking this way. You stop creating content just to fill a calendar. You start creating content people can actually use. You stop asking, "What should we post today?" And you start asking, "What does our customer need from us today?" That's a much better question. You stop obsessing over how many people saw something, and you start thinking about what happened after they saw it.

21:23 Did they remember you? Do they trust you? Did they take action? Did they come back? Did they tell somebody else? Because ultimately, marketing isn't supposed to create activity. Marketing is supposed to create movement, and that movement doesn't always mean an immediate sale. Sometimes it's moving somebody from, "I've never heard of you," to, "I've seen them before." Then from, "I've seen them before," to, "I trust these people." Then from, "I trust these people," to, "I think I'm ready to buy."

21:51 And eventually, from the customer to loyal customer to advocate. That's a relationship, and a relationship takes time, which is another reason why I think so many businesses become frustrated with marketing. They want everything immediately. We ran an ad. Where are the sales? We posted a video. Why didn't it go viral? We sent an email. Why didn't everybody buy it? But marketing doesn't always work that way. Trust compounds, reputation compounds, relationships compound, and consistency compounds.

22:20 That's why I would much rather have someone trust my business for 10 years than get them to click one advertisement today. Think back to the pie story. The executive wanted more people through the door, and I understood why. We all want growth. But sometimes we're so focused on getting the next person through the door that we forget about the person who's already standing inside. What experience are we giving them? Are we earning another visit? Are we earning another purchase? Are we earning a recommendation?

22:50 Because if we're spending more and more money to bring customers in while giving, giving them fewer and fewer reasons to come back, we don't have a marketing problem. We have a business problem. And no amount of advertising fixes that. That's why marketing leadership matters. A great marketing leader can't live entirely inside the marketing department. You have to understand sales. You have to understand operations. You have to understand customer service. You have to understand the customer journey.

23:16 You have to understand what happens after the lead comes in. Because the customer doesn't care which department is responsible for what. Think about that. The customer doesn't say, "Well, marketing did a wonderful job. Operations just let me down." They don't care. They see one company, one brand, one experience, and that's why I believe marketing leadership ultimately becomes business leadership. Because the promises you're making to the marketplace has to match the experience the organization actually delivers.

23:46 And when I look back at the BMW and Spider-Man headline, that's what I see. Not just an advertisement, not just a promotion, not just a famous superhero and famous au- automotive brand. I see a reminder. A reminder that every time we communicate with a customer, we're making a decision about the relationship. Are we adding value? Are we creating trust? Are we respecting their time? Are we simply asking for one more piece of their attention? Because your customer's attention is valuable. Treat it like it is.

24:15 And before we wrap up today, there's one final thought I wanna leave with you. When I first saw the BMW and Spider-Man headline, I thought I was reading a story about a marketing campaign. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized this episode really isn't about BMW, it isn't about Spider-Man, and it isn't even about advertising. It's about respect. Respect for the customer, respect for their time, respect for their experience, and most importantly, respect for the relationship you're trying to build with them.

24:45 Because every time someone gives you their attention, they're giving you something they can never get back, their time. And I think sometimes as marketers, as business owners, as leaders, we forget that. We become so focused on the next campaign, the next post, the next email, the next lead, the next sale, that we forget there's a human being on the other side of it all. Someone with a limited amount of time, someone with choices, someone who is being marketed to all day long, and someone who absolutely does not have to choose us.

25:16 And that's why I believe great marketing begins with humility. You aren't entitled to someone's attention. You earn it. You aren't entitled to someone's business. You earn it. And you certainly aren't entitled to someone's loyalty. You have to earn that, too. One experience at a time, one promise at a time, one interaction at a time. And that's why I keep thinking about the conversation I told you about earlier, "Then bake more pies." It's funny now, and I'll probably remember that line for the rest of my life.

25:42 But there's a serious lesson behind it. Sometimes businesses become so focused on creating more customers that they overlook the opportunity sitting right in front of them. The customer who already chose them. The customer who already walked through the front door. The customer who already trusted them enough to spend their money. What are we doing to earn that person's next visit? What are we doing to earn that next purchase? What are we doing to make someone tell somebody else, "You need to do business with these people"?

26:11 Because that's where great marketing and great customer experience becomes the same thing. And maybe that's the biggest lesson I want you to take away from today's episode. Don't always look for another customer. First, look for another way to serve the customer you already have. And that's how you earn loyalty, and that's how you build a reputation, and that's how you build trust. And over time, that's how you earn a bigger slice of the pie. Not by pretending the market is bigger than it is, not by shouting louder than everybody else, not by in- interrupting people more often, but by becoming more valuable.

26:45 And that's why the statement I gave you earlier matters so much. The goal of marketing isn't to get attention. It's to become worth paying attention to. If you remember nothing else from this episode, remember that. Because the next decade of marketing is gonna become noisier than anything we've ever experienced before. AI is gonna make content easier to create. Advertising is gonna become more personalized. Automation is gonna become more sophisticated. Businesses are going to be able to communicate with customers at scale that would have been unimaginable when I started my career.

27:17 But that creates a problem, too, because when everybody can create more, more stops being an advantage. Think about that. When everyone can create content, content in itself isn't the advantage. When everybody can send emails, email isn't the advantage. When everybody can make videos, video isn't the advantage. When everybody has access to AI, AI itself won't be the advantage either. So what will be? Trust. Understanding your customer better than your competitors do. Creating an experience people want to repeat.

27:49 Having something meaningful to say instead of simply saying more. And having the discipline to protect the relationship with your customer, even when there's an opportunity to squeeze out one more impression, one more click, one more sale out of them. That's where I believe marketing is going. And frankly, that's where I think it always should have been. So the next time you're sitting in a meeting and somebody says, "We need more traffic. We need more followers. We need more leads. We need more market share."

28:16 Maybe ask one more question before you start baking those pies. Ask, "What can we do to become more valuable to the customers that we already have?" You might be surprised by the answer. If you've enjoyed this episode or if I've challenged you to think about marketing a little differently, make sure you su- subscribe to the Discipline Over Comfort YouTube channel. That helps you stay connected to the new episodes that come out every week. And we've got a lot more coming. We're gonna continue talking about leadership, business, marketing, artificial intelligence, and most importantly, how we actually execute on these things in the real world.

28:53 Not theory, not hype. Execution. I also want to invite you to subscribe to my free Discipline Over Comfort weekly brief. I publish it every Tuesday, and I want the newsletter and the podcast to work together. Think about it this way. The podcast is the conversation. The newsletter, that's the playbook. These are real ideas that we can explore more deeply in writing. There are things happening in leadership, business, marketing, and AI that we can't possibly cover in every episode. And the weekly brief gives me an opportunity to share those ideas with you, along with practical insights you can actually use.

29:29 So if you're watching on YouTube, you'll find the link to subscribe in the description below. It's completely free. I'll also give you a chance to see some of what we're working on before the next episode drops. And speaking of what's coming next, I want to leave you with a little preview. Today, we've talked about respecting your customer's attention. We've talked about the customer experience. We talked about strategy. But there's another marketing problem I see inside businesses all of the time.

29:54 They build campaigns when what they really need to build are systems. Because a great campaign can't create a great month. A great system can create repeatable growth. And that's where we're going next week. And I think if you're a business owner, a marketer, an executive, or simply someone trying to promote yourself, or you're gonna wanna hear that conversation. Until then, remember, you don't need to shout louder. You don't need to chase every platform, and you certainly don't need to bake another pie.

30:23 Create more value, respect your customer's attention, earn their trust, and as always, choose discipline over comfort. Until next time, bye-bye.