Thinking About You Mike Taylor

[Vinnie Frevert]

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Hi it's Robin here, the host of the Learning While Working podcast and the founder of Sprout Labs. In this podcast I'm talking with Mike Taylor about what learning and training areas can learn from Marketing.

This is becoming a common theme at Sprout Labs in terms of webinars and past podcasts. This is in part because Glasshouse - our platform for doing elearning content development and learning experiences - has some really powerful tools for building learning campaigns.

Mike has a background in training and learning but now works at Mindset Digital, which is a digital marketing company. He looks after the learning and training aspects of what they do. This means that he has a real in-depth knowledge of what is happening in digital marketing at the moment, and marketing generally, and gives some really nice examples around using emotion in marketing during this podcast.

We explore learning campaigns in depth, and then we go off on a bit of a tangent about Learning and Development budgets. I introduce a question which is around how L&D can become a profit centre instead of being a cost centre. This is something that is still just an early thought for me and I will explore it over a period of time.

Mike, you've got a really deep interest in what L&D can learn from marketing and you've put together some thoughts and a bit of a framework about what L&D can learn from marketing. What are those things?

I think there's three big categories. The first is marketers are really great at capturing attention and usually that's through tapping into some sort of emotion, whether it's humour or powerful emotions and that kind of stuff, and then the third thing is they're really good at getting beyond just events and one-time exposures and looking at the world in terms of campaigns.

So it's the campaigns that I really want to pick up and really dive into more deeply. It's a really interesting thing because essentially I think of learning as a really wicked complicated problem and quite often in organisations we look for really simple solutions, whereas marketing sort of accepts that it's actually hard to get people to buy and this is where they actually have a different set of tools available to be able to work with.

Well, I think you're absolutely right, and it is challenging and difficult and there are a lot of similarities between what marketing is trying to do and what us as learning professionals are trying to do. I think far too often people are trying to check the box and we've done our piece and you never really get to what the results are. If we contrast that to what marketing people - they've got a really clear through-line to hey, sales are going up, sales are going down, and so it's much more results focused. Those folks are pretty quick I think to get fired when the results don't come. So campaigns, like you said, they are complex and they take some more serious thinking. Any time you see a McDonald's campaign or pick a brand, there's multiple channels, there are stories involved, there's all these things that fit into a campaign to make it successful, and it's not always a simple slam dunk no brainer kind of thing.

There is. There are insurance companies here in the United States, there's a couple that have really good character development, so it's over time you recognise the character and you know the brand. That doesn't even involve - there's no logo involved with that. When I see the Progressive girl with her scanner, I know that that's Progressive Insurance and they do a really nice job. It's typically humorous is the emotion that they tap into but everybody here, 98% of the people in the United States probably see that and they instantly identify with it. That's a good example of a successful campaign.

So it's not always a logo or that type of consistency, but there's character development, there's a lot of other things that television shows and those sort of things that marketers tap into to raise awareness and lead to successful campaigns.

It also - this is an interesting thing because we see so much advertising that we tune out to it, so repetition becomes really important. But there's a little bit of me that sits there and does a whole - is that about humans? Where we do need repetition to remember and perceive and take in things especially if they have no emotion. Or is it just to do with the media? What's your thoughts about the nature of the repetition in campaigns?

Yes, for sure, I think there's a really good correlation to some learning theory concepts, space learning and retrieval practise and small pieces spaced out over time, so that's a campaign in a learning context. You think of that as a marketing campaign where it's small advertisements spaced out over time. I think there's some really nice parallels there that fit together, that is a basis for me that makes sense that hey, we should look at what the marketing people do because there seems to be some research that ties those two things together as being successful.

Yes. This is interesting hearing and thinking this through as well with you, because essentially a thing that you started with was that sense that a campaign actually has an emotional driver, which possibly is sometimes a story and we in learning - there's been a huge uptake in story based elearning but still it's one of those things that people don't think about first, they have to come second to it quite often. Even a little bit of some of the work that happens around retrieval practise in space learning I just go, "Oh, really? Does someone need to know that quiz? Is that really helping that much?" Whereas I sit there and go, "Actually, if you're weaving an interactive story over time, that's maybe more likely to get actual learning activation and learning transfer happening.

Yes, for sure. The other thing that I want to come back to before it gets away, you talked about tapping into emotions. I've had a lot of conversation around this and one of the first questions that I always ask people is, "What are some of the things that you wish you could steal from the marketing department?" I always get, "Budget," that's always one of the top ones, but I think there's a reason why they have a budget and we don't sometimes. They talk about graphic design and visual assets is a big one, and then the other one which I think is one of my favourites is somebody once said, "I wish I had their efficiency of communicating messages." And I think that that's a really really important one.

Yes, that's a really interesting one isn't it. Because essentially marketing messages are down to a sentence and very short - a banner ad on the google banner display ad, just has to be a really sweet, to the point, sentence and visual.

Yes, for sure. I think my favourite example, if you contrast what some marketers do in some of your favourite commercials with, we've all seen bad compliance courses and walls and walls of text and just mind numbing stuff. My favourite example to illustrate how powerful this marketing concept can be, there's a Subaru commercial and it shows one of their cars that's been just totally demolished. Smashed completely. And it's a 30 second commercial. And until the very end there's only two words, so the car is moving from when they're picking it up from the road and they're taking it to the junk yard and it's going from person to person, and every time there's a pass off it says, "They lived." And they do that three or four times, and then it finishes with the family who was in the car, and it says, "We lived." And it's super powerful. And there's only two words in the entire thing, it's a great example of what we're talking about.

Yes, it's a really nice example of storytelling, emotion, visual - yes it's just a really different set of things. This is also interesting because essentially marketing's quite often built by a team of people and this is where quite often - so you made a comment about the visual - there'll be specialists in visual design in a marketing team, and there'll be copywriters, and then there's the strategy people as well. Whereas in learning we quite often have what I call this elearning superhuman, the person that has to do it all. Maybe is to do with budget, but I think it's also to do with a culture that's developed around the notion that the software does it all for us.

Yes that's true, I think there's also a piece where most organisations see marketing as sort of a core asset to help them generate sales and to be successful, and I think in contrast there are too many training departments or Learning and Development departments, whatever you want to call them who are off in the corner, they're not really central to what's going on at all, they're more - whether it's compliance based or whatever the case may be they just don't seem to be as central to the overall organisation as marketing and some others.

Yes, and I think that's one of those things that needs to really change in the way we position learning as an activity. I'm only starting to form this thinking and it's actually based on reading a book on content marketing at the moment, Mike, that's about turning content marketing into a profit centre for businesses, about whether or not learning could be seen as a profit centre for a business rather than an overhead. It's just a really interesting thought experiment.

Yes, I love that idea. I may be slightly biased, but I don't think I'm too biased, I think learning is really central. If you look at every or any successful organisation who's doing really well, there's a lot of learning that's going on to adapt and talk about the speed of business and all those kind of things. There is an incredible amount of learning that has to happen for that to be able to take place. And I think the difference is, in a lot of those leading type of organisations it's happening either much more in conjunction with the learning people, or it's much broader and it's going beyond, and people are learning with each other and they don't need somebody mediating that in the middle.

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