Transcript

Bennie F. Johnson 

Hello, and thank you for joining us for this episode of AMA’s Marketing And. I’m your host, Bennie F. Johnson, AMA CEO. In our episodes, we explore life through the lens of marketing, delving into conversations with individuals that flourish at this intersection of marketing and the unexpected. We’ll introduce you to visionaries whose stories you might not yet have heard of, but are exactly the ones you should know. Thought -provoking conversation.

The challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. Today, my guest is really special. It’s Zontee Ho. Zontee is the digital marketing consultant, speaker, and author whose new book is actually coming out this spring, Data-Driven Personalization. She’s the founder of the Brooklyn -based digital marketing agency, MediaVolary, and managing director for Convince and Convert, the respected consultancy.

Her nearly 20 years of marketing industry experience includes work for the IMF, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Caesars Entertainment, Fidelity, and many universities across the US. In 2021, she was actually named one of LinkedIn’s top 16 marketers to follow. She’s also been named one of top ranked most influential content marketers and most influential B2B marketers for the last five years.

Her work has garnered multiple awards, including several PR news platinum awards and the Forester Groundswell Award. Zanti has also been a lecturer at Columbia University and the City College of New York, where she continues to be a board member for the graduate program in communications and speaking at events globally. So I like to welcome noted expert, content influencer, and my friend Zontee to our podcast today.

Welcome. It is so great to have you. I’m going through the bio and you know, these are things that I know of you, but it’s always interesting to read the words, right? To kind of walk through. The first thing I’m going to start to just glue me away is, so 20 years of marketing experience, how is it that you have 20 years of marketing experience? I’ve…

Zontee Hou 

Benny, I’m so happy to be here.

Bennie 

That’s just, that’s for our podcast listeners. That’s just a personal thing with me and Zontee that we can’t believe that we have 20 years of experience.

Zontee 

I mean, seriously, also just thinking about it, Bennie, you and I have now known each other for what, at least 10 years? It seems like just yesterday we were hanging out at Columbia and now it’s been at least 10 years, so time flies.

Bennie 

At least. Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about yourself and your journey. I know that would be really helpful for our audience. What brought you to this point as a marketing entrepreneur, as a consultant? How did you start and find your way into marketing?

Zontee 

I always love this question because unlike many marketers, and I know there are marketers from so many different paths, I actually chose my path into marketing very early on. My sophomore year at NYU Stern, I decided in terms of my majors that I would choose marketing. And from there on in, I took many different internships. And then I dove right into my marketing career. I’ve been on the brand side of marketing at the very early part of my career. And then when you and I met, I went back to school, grad school at Columbia to get my degree in strategic communications, because I decided I wanted to pivot. I had been on the brand side for about seven years at that point. And I thought that it would be helpful for me to understand a more strategic approach to marketing. And at that point, I spoke to Jay Baer, who’s the founder of Convince and Convert. He was a friend of a friend at the time, but he became a very close friend of mine and a mentor to me. And he said, you know, why not join my consultancy at Convince and Convert? And at the same time, you know, I had been doing some consulting for small and medium business clients. And one of the things that they kept asking is the advice that you’re giving us and the strategy and the recommendations make a lot of sense. But what we need is help to actually bring those to fruition when you smoke.

Bennie 

Right.

Zontee 

Speech a lot of small medium business owners, right? They wear a lot of hats. I know that certainly as a small business owner. And because of that, oftentimes you don’t have the bandwidth to run a marketing program on your own. And so I ended up building an agency that actually fulfills that particular niche. So MediaVolery is a broken base agency, as you mentioned, we’re very small, but it’s an agency that really reflects my value system, but also my approach to marketing.

Bennie

Mm -hmm. Right.

Zontee 

Obviously, women-owned, minority-owned, we’re 100 % women currently. We’ve always been majority minority. And we are an organization that really helps small medium businesses to take a really strategic approach to marketing and really be a partner to them and really embedded in their day to day work. So we have clients, everything from professional services to travel and hospitality, we’ve done work with even organizations like ARP research, the Norman Rockwell Museum. So, you know, we work with a variety of different kinds of organizations, but I think it’s all about taking my approach to marketing and bringing it to life. And then, as you mentioned, you know, with the work with Convince and Convert, we work with enterprise organizations, really helping them up level their strategic approach. So organizations like Fidelity, like Caesar’s Entertainment, etc. I think my marketing journey is just one of always saying yes.

Bennie  

Right.

Zontee 

And being really interested in helping people to solve their problems and to think really strategically and thoughtfully about how to get the most out of their marketing.

Bennie 

Right. Well, I love this continuum that you have where you’re constantly working, you know, taking high -end marketing strategy, really thoughtful strategy and execution, but making it accessible to both enterprise clients and then the small businesses. I know when we have conversations and we bring the panels together and there’s a natural tendency to have the larger organizations and concerns. And I often get texts and notes from smaller businesses like this is incredible. I have no idea where to start.

I don’t think I can deliver against that. I can’t continually do this. But showing that there is a possibility for small and medium businesses to have the best practices, but have them in a way that is bite -sizable and impactful for the type and scope of businesses that they are.

Zontee 

Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s important to recognize that every organization has different levels of marketing resources, right? I even work with enterprise organizations that actually have really scrappy marketing teams, right? It’s not really mutually exclusive, right? You can have a very small organization that has done deep investment in marketing. In both cases, I think what you need is an understanding of right sizing your marketing strategy. What are the things that we need to prioritize? What are the things that we think are really worth going after?

Bennie 

Mm.

Zontee 

And what are the things that we can let go of in this moment? What are the things that are going to be most impactful? Let’s put more investment and time and energy into those areas. But we can’t do everything all at once. I get questions from, let’s say, financial services organizations that will say, should we be on TikTok? And I’m like, well, let’s talk a little bit about what your goals are if you are going after Gen Z and you are a commercial or a retail bank and that’s your demographic, then yeah, maybe you do want to be on a channel like that. But you know, if you’re talking to investors who are at institutions, is that really the best channel? No, we don’t have to go after everything just because we can. We really have to be thoughtful about where’s our marketing going to make the biggest impact. And the thing that I always tell my clients is I’m giving you permission to not do everything.

Bennie 

Right. And I think that’s really important advice there, right? Because you feel like you’re coming in. I should be keeping up with everything that is a trend in a conversation. And if I’m not in those trends, you know, as a marketing leader, we often get other executives coming to us because they read a popular business press article about a new platform or a new trend and having that kind of self-awareness of your business to be comfortable enough with your strategy to say, yes, we’re not going to do that.

Zontee 

100%. Exactly, exactly. I think you have to also identify what are the places where your team has the capabilities and what are the places where your team needs additional support or investment in order to make the most of the channel, right? So I have some clients who recognize, hey, we’ve been having some success in video channels and Instagram reels and TikTok and YouTube, but organizationally, they’ve never made any kind of investment into that space. And so they’re being scrappy. They’ve

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Zontee 

Found some success, but in the longer term, you know, the organization has to make some pivots in terms of where they put time and energy to help this team be effective. So I think there’s a balance of what we can do as practitioners of marketing and also what we have to do as leaders of marketing to make the work more effective.

Bennie 

So, you know, I’m going to say 20 years again, because it just makes me shake my head. But over the last 20 years, what have been some of the through lines that you’ve seen that have been hallmarks of successful organizations and successful marketing approaches? What are some of the things that you’ve seen that have really, you know, regardless of the size and scope, but are kind of the truisms?

Zontee 

Hehehe. Yeah. I think it’s really about consistency and knowing your audience. And when I say knowing your audience, I don’t mean from a gut feeling, right? I mean from an actual tactical measured approach. And that’s actually why I wrote my book, Data-Driven Personalization, because I think that there’s this opportunity for, again, organizations of all sizes to really think about what information they’re collecting in a concerted way that allows them to know their…

Bennie 

Okay.

Zontee 

Customers. Data isn’t necessarily something really complex, which I think it can sound like to a lot of organizations, but think about all of the different data points that we collect every day with our clients. It’s not just about how often they engage with us or purchase from us or how long our relationship with them is. It’s also asking them specific questions that we actually keep track of so that we know them better, right?

So whether you’re a shoe retailer and you’re asking somebody what’s their size or their preference of style so that again, you can serve them better examples in the future. But it’s also, you know, from an enterprise B2B business where you’re focusing on an education component, what are the things that are your audience’s goals? What do they wanna learn about? And then making sure to serve them the best content. I think it’s really consistency because…

I think that it is easy to chase after the shiny object in marketing and really go after that next time. Like you said, lots of executives will read an article and go, hey, we should be doing this next thing. And obviously right now I’m having a lot of conversations with people about AI, right? Because it’s the next shiny thing. But whether or not you go after the shiny thing, you have to be consistent in what it is that you are delivering to your customers, to your audience every day. You have to keep showing up because it’s not about, and you’ve

Bennie 

Right, right.

Zontee 

Probably remember this from our grad studies. It’s not about building brand awareness, it’s about building brand affinity, right? It’s about making sure that people feel like you are the go-to. And that’s about trust, and trust is about relationship building. And relationship building is about showing up. And that’s what consistency is all about.

Bennie 

Right. Right. It really is. And to that point, it’s about going from an emptiness to a fullness. And when I think about the awareness space in there, because that’s the buzzword that everyone would love, but to our conversations, often if that’s your space, it’s really empty and shallow, but it’s that loyalty. I love the subline of your book. It really is consumer insights to generate customer loyalty. So that kind of arc from knowing…

Zontee 

Hmm.

Bennie

And having the insights drive loyalty. I think that is something that I would recommend as we’re listeners to our podcast in this space, I recommend this spring that they dive into your book and pick it up because that’s something that continually comes back for us that data gives you this superpower if you choose to use it, to move from insights to customer loyalty. And you speak a bit about, you know, what prompted you to put together this text at this moment?

Zontee 

Yeah, absolutely. I think that some of these ideas have been percolating in my head for a long time. In fact, many of the frameworks that you’ll see in the book are frameworks that I taught for many years at the City College of New York and at Columbia University. I think that the reason that I felt compelled to write it now is actually the access that businesses of all sizes have to data and to make it as usable as possible, more usable than ever before.

Bennie 

Mm -hmm.

Zontee 

What I mean by that is that you have tools like AI that are allowing you to analyze data more effectively, more cheaply. You also have more systems that plug into each other and have smart, let’s say triggers and automations and capabilities to allow you to personalize the experience for your customers in a way that’s very powerful that you, even as somebody who doesn’t have very technical skills, can execute upon.

Bennie 

Right.

Zontee

And I think that’s so powerful. We have access to all the tools we need right now as marketers to allow somebody to hit our website, be suggested content to them or offers to them in the language that’s most compelling to them. There are currently companies out there that are using AI tied to psychographic data to change the headlines on your website. And that’s currently available right now.

Bennie 

Mm -hmm.

Zontee 

You have, of course, services like MailChimp that are allowing even small businesses to make product recommendations based on buying history in a very accurate and compelling way. There are more tools than ever before, but like I said, it’s also honestly cheaper than ever before. And I think that for me, that means that we’re reaching this place where there’s an egalitarian access to data. And I think that’s why it was important to me to write this book now.

Bennie

Right. Yeah, I think you’re spot on if you talk about it. The access to the tools, the understanding and the moment, right? Because you also have broader team set where the knowledge of how to use these tools is not limited just to two people on your team. Like we can understand, we went through a similar kind of moment with social a few years ago where it wasn’t just the social team that could be active in your social strategy. That other people could have access.

Zontee 

Right. Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s actually one of the reasons why in the book I talk a lot about not just using the data, but actually building a culture of curiosity to better use the data because I think that there is such a human level to this. If you treat the access to this information as something that’s completely siloed off and belonging to the data analysts on your team or the strategist on your team.

Bennie 

Right. Mm -hmm.

Zontee 

Then you’re not actually encouraging everybody else to think in that critical way that helps you connect data to your customer, right? But if you say everybody has ownership of this information, everybody has the right to ask questions that the data that we have helps inform, everybody has the right to be coming up with new data points that we should be collecting from our customers, then you engage your entire team in this idea that there’s an opportunity for all of us to be more effective.

Bennie 

Right, right.

Zontee

And I think it’s, like you said, this kind of shift in the mindset that we’ve seen in other areas of marketing and I think is becoming more important in this particular situation.

Bennie 

I think you’re so right. It’s so true in terms of data and what we can deliver and looking at challenging what we know to continue to want to learn, right? Because how many times have we come in organizations and we know our customer, we know our space, because you have a robust approach and we have good profiles and personas and everything we can imagine. But it doesn’t give us space for the fact that our customers evolve.

Zontee 

100%

Bennie 

Our world evolves, our needs evolve. I’ve talked to some companies and I’ve had these conversations about, you know, being always open to learning and asking them if they’ve talked about their customers. And many of them have come in with the knowledge they had of their customer pre -March 2020 and are still applying that. And it’s kind of this moment of reflection going, so nothing’s changed since 2020. And kind of doing it in a friendly way to kind of bring us into.

Zontee 

Absolutely.

Bennie 

You know, that everything has changed. But the fact that your customers are going to be evolving is the constant.

Zontee 

You’re absolutely correct. I actually talk about that specifically, the idea that we not only have to be open to change, but we have to be constantly thinking about how our customer is evolving because of the world around them. I’ve talked to so many organizations and some very well known, you know, household brand names where they will say, well, we did an exercise a couple of years ago, like you were saying, and we’ve got personas.

Bennie 

Right.

Zontee 

But then they don’t continue to think about the updating of that information as a consistent part of their marketing practice. And what I believe is again, because marketers, we are closest to the customer. We are interfacing with them most directly. We need to be the ones who consistently push forward the conversation by saying, we need to make the discovery of new things about our customers part of our working process.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Zontee 

And the world is evolving around them, right? A couple of years ago, nobody was thinking about short form video until TikTok was crazy and explosive in the space. You know, a couple of years before that, we didn’t imagine that everybody was going to be doing more one to one peer messaging rather than posting on social media feeds, right? There are a lot of things that are constantly shifting and the culture is changing in terms of what we.

Bennie 

Right.

Zontee 

Do what we engage with, what we think matters to us. And so we have to consistently be looking for feedback and honestly being one step ahead of our customers expectations within our industry. Because the thing that I hear a lot, especially from healthcare, from financial services, from insurance, regulated industries is, well, everybody is bad at this in our industry. So it doesn’t matter. And you want to know something that does matter to your customer because they’re not comparing you to another insurance company, they’re comparing you to the convenience of the McDonald’s app, they’re comparing you to the experience of having a Nike community in their hands. I mean, that’s a completely different set of expectations that you don’t think matters to your customer, but does.

Bennie 

Right. Right, because our expectations are not built in the brand silos that we run, right? They’re not. Having a good shopping cart experience is what you expect. So for better or worse, you know, Amazon’s rigor and growth and expertise in creating a shopping cart impacts everybody else. Because if you use that and that’s your expectation, then that’s what your customer wants from you, right? You said Nike’s ability to build a community around identity, product and performance impacts organizations for what they want out of community for customers in space, right? We’re not immune to our customers’ expectations.

Zontee 

Absolutely. That’s right. That’s exactly right.

Bennie 

So we talk a bit about the power of this personalization. And I know it’s a thorny topic that we continue to evolve around, but would love to hear your thoughts on this intersection of privacy and personalization. Larger concerns are always at the crosshairs of privacy regimes and conversations. But many times, smaller companies, it’s there kind of reflecting what’s happening in the industry. They’re in.

Zontee 

Yeah.

Bennie 

They’re seeing what’s happening around them. And what are your thoughts on how, if I put a little point in there, how privacy and personalization can work together for the good of customers and organizations?

Zontee 

Yeah, absolutely. We actually did some research within the, before the book that was surveying US adults about their attitudes towards privacy, personalization and other questions. And one of the things that we found was that what people want is convenience and relevance. And they are willing to make a bit of a trade -off.

Bennie 

Okay.

Zontee 

in terms of privacy to get that personalization and relevance because they understand that for a business to know you and to give you more relevant content, there will be a little bit of privacy given up. But what customers also want is both transparency and quite frankly, good stewardship of their data. Right. So I think it is incumbent on us as business.

Bennie

Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Right.

Zontee 

Leaders and as marketers to think about what data we need to collect and for what reason. Right. So my recommendation in the book and my recommendation in life is to collect the data that helps you and your customers get the most out of their experience without going too far. I share a very concerning experience in the book where a gentleman received a piece of direct mail, a postcard.

And some of the fields from the data broker who clearly had sold his information to this company were actually accidentally printed on the card. They must have just selected the wrong fields for printing. And one of the fields was unfortunately that he had a deceased daughter. And that’s a very traumatic experience to receive a piece of direct mail that says you have a deceased daughter on it, right? He knows that it’s horrible. And that’s really about data that

Bennie 

Mm -hmm. Oh wow.

Zontee 

This company did not need to have and did not need to share in order for them to do good marketing to this person. And I think it is very important for us to think about what is the data that helps our customers? What is the data that would hurt our customers? And also how do we ensure that data security and good data practices and governance is part of the approach that we actually build into our systems? In my book, I tell you, on one hand, I want you to collect more data, but on the other hand, I don’t want you to collect data willy -nilly. It doesn’t make sense for us to have more information that we need. And again, to really think through what are the security practices that we can have. Most of the issues that happen when it comes to data privacy and data security, quite frankly, involve human errors. So we really have to be very thoughtful about that component of it.

I also think that the balance between personalization and privacy is about storytelling to your customers so that they understand what is it for, right? If a shoe company tells you, hey, we’d love to have your shoe size, your preferences, your color preferences, all of this helps us to deliver you more relevant product suggestions, you know, throughout our channels and to build a profile that makes it easier for you to shop the next time. That sounds pretty reasonable, right? My husband, he has a favorite shoe shop.

Bennie 

Right.

Zontee 

in London where they’ve been around for 200 years, but they have an individual shoe lathe for each person so that they can make the shoe the exact shape for your foot. Now, that’s a data that this company has had for 200 years, but it’s highly, highly relevant and it’s highly personal. It really makes your experience better as a customer to that store. So people love that. They like knowing that they have that really…

Bennie 

Right.

Zontee 

Highly personalized profile. That’s valuable. Think about how you can deliver that kind of level of trust to your customer where they feel like the thing that this company has is really about me and making me have the best experience. If it’s that kind of information, then the customer wants it. If it’s not, and you’re not clear about what it’s used for, your customer doesn’t want it. What I think is very uncomfortable for customers is feeling like there’s a…

Bennie

All right.

Zontee 

A digital version of you that’s floating around that people are making assumptions about what you do and don’t want, right? That’s uncomfortable. So the clearer it is and the more obvious it is to the customer, what’s the value proposition?

Bennie 

Right. And those uncomfortable moments where you get the amalgamation of your family experience. So I have my son and daughters and my wife’s preferences that are all blended in my preferences. Right. You end up in this weird space where, you know, you see people marketing against for you and they’ve missed all of these other cues that are part of your, your experience.

Zontee 

Sure. Yes. Absolutely.

Bennie 

So I’m going to ask this question because when I listen to you talk about working with companies and working with data, it is incredibly compelling to space in there. And I imagine what company executive is going to say no. But I know in our world, sometimes company executives say no. How do you best objection handle when people aren’t willing to adopt the power of data and personalization or these new approaches to content? How do you work with those executives who kind of missed that moment?

Zontee 

Well, let’s talk a little bit about the challenges that they think they have that get them to say no, right? So oftentimes I hear from companies, you know, we’ve been doing things this way for a long time. We know our customers, we have a gut feeling about them. We think we’re doing fine. But I often remind them, the reason you’ve come to me is because you want your marketing to perform better, right? You’ve clearly seen that there’s room for performance. If we cannot keep going on the same track,

Bennie 

Mm -hmm. Right. Right.

Zontee 

if you want to improve your marketing. And the truth is that all of us have limited resources. We don’t have all the time in the world to make every version of content, have every kind of sales person, to have every kind of ad campaign. Good data about your customers makes it easier for you to be highly targeted towards the right customers, to understand the right triggers and behaviors that make them want to come to you, and to understand the right messaging.

And to understand what are the gaps, right? Your customers, you knowing your customers is only the people who said yes to you. You don’t know much about all the people who said no to you and went with someone else or went in an entirely different direction. And there is opportunity in those people too. So I think that we as organizations have to look at data and research as part of building towards efficiency. That’s one challenge that I see oftentimes is the…

We don’t have enough resources, et cetera. The second challenge that I hear a lot is marketing doesn’t own the data. If I come to the table, I often will speak to folks who say, well, we have a market research team. And I say, well, who exactly did they report to? And they’re like, well, they’re kind of their own thing. They just produce reports and they give it to product marketing and they give it to sales and they give it to us. But they’re not really responsible to us at all. We don’t know what they’re doing.

Bennie 

Right.

Zontee 

And again, this might be the status quo, but it does not mean it should be the case, right? If that is the situation that you are in, you need to be having conversations with your executives about why marketing needs to be a stakeholder, a seat at the table from a strategic point of view in terms of researching your customers. Because again, marketing is the closest to the customer in terms of touching them on a regular basis until they might be again in your

Bennie 

Right, right.

Zontee 

Sales funnel, then they have an account manager or a customer service agent, etc. So again, lots of other people involved who should also have a seat at the table. But when it comes to the marketing piece of it, I think that oftentimes we get stymied because we say it’s too hard, we don’t own the data, we’re just going to leave it be. And this is my exhortation to say, let’s build a case for why there is a real business proposition for us to have a seat at the table. I dedicate a whole section of the book.

Bennie  

Right. Mm -hmm. Right.

Zontee 

To building that business case because I recognize that it’s a hard conversation to have. It requires your organization to change how it treats this information, but it will make the entire organization more strategic. I very luckily just had a conversation with that client yesterday where one of their sister brands, two of their sister brands have already worked with us at Convince and Convert on research about their customer bases and now we’re talking about a third brand. And one of the things that they recognize is, we have been effective, but we know that there is a lot of opportunity that we have not yet tapped into. We want to get more targeted with our messaging. We want to get more targeted with who we go after. And we want to make sure that we understand not only why do they choose us, but why do they choose the competition? Because they recognize that there are many different places where we can increase our customer lifetime value, right?

This is not just about, you know, saving in terms of efficiency. It’s also about increasing the lifetime of your customer and increasing the value of your customer as an ambassador or referral source for your brand. Each of those things makes your company more profitable because it increases the business that you are doing while reducing the costs. But if you don’t work towards that knowledge, you can’t improve in these ways.

Bennie  

Right. You can’t, you can’t build on it. And I’ve seen lots of organizations and had to fight through itself where you end up with your research apparatus is providing all the right answers to all the wrong business questions. Right. And it’s really easy to get yourself lulled into to your point. If the research agenda is not shaped in kind of these insights for the business or show you a place, you can follow a space and get answers that are really good, solid answers and have nothing to do with your strategic opportunity, imperatives of what you need to find in the business. And you’re into this space.

Zontee 

That’s exactly right. It’s interesting because one of my friends, Andy Christadina, he shares this concept about the missing stat, which is yet another different way to think about data, which is data for marketers that helps the customer make the case. Right. So if you’re a B2B organization, or quite frankly, if you are just making a big purchase, right, maybe a house, maybe a car, a lot of times customers are actually looking for information that helps them to feel.

Like they can trust the brand that they’ve ultimately chosen as one on their shortlist, right? And they’re looking for information data points. And sometimes you are also providing them information that doesn’t help them make that case. You know, think about the last time you purchased a vehicle with your spouse, you know, they probably had some specific questions that they had on their mind. But if the company is providing you different data points that don’t matter to you the way you live, you know, they don’t think about a family with kids, they don’t think about a family in an urban environment where the parking situation is very different than from a suburban situation. You know, they might be providing you with information that you’re like, it’s nice to have, but doesn’t actually help me make my purchase decision. So data isn’t just about understanding the customers for the company’s sake, it’s also about understanding the customer’s behaviors for the customer’s sake in their research process. And I think, again, on both sides of the equation of we as marketers,

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Zontee 

Aan help our organizations to find better questions, do better research, and be more thoughtful about what is the output of that research? How do we make that useful to our organization and our customers?

Bennie 

So I’m going to pivot a little bit because one of the things we’re talking about, these approaches and growing of the marketing space, it naturally lets me think about what advice and what training should we offer for our next generation of marketers? You’ve spent time teaching and space and over our 20 -year mark again, a lot has changed. And over the next 20 years,

Zontee 

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Bennie 

I’m going to hazard to guess a lot more will change, right? Over the next 20 years, what advice do you have or what thoughts do you have to help us nurture the next generation of marketers?

Zontee 

Yeah, I love this question because having worked at the City College of New York for many years, which is this incredibly diverse and robust program, as well as at Columbia University, which of course is an extremely prestigious organization and attracts some of the best and brightest across the US and the globe, I get to see a lot of different perspectives. One thing that I think is really important in both spaces is that the way they partnered with organizations to really think about promoting diversity and increasing the number of different pathways to this career, right? You don’t have to be a person like me who took marketing from their second year of undergrad to feel passionate about communications, to feel passionate about marketing, to feel passionate about the customer. We have to encourage many different people from many different backgrounds to come into this field to share their expertise in different ways. You know, you and I had some classmates who came from

Bennie 

Right.

Zontee 

Real estate who came from military backgrounds who came from many different spaces and they decided this is something that I want to pursue. And I love that. But I think that’s really about encouraging different people to see the value of marketing as a pathway to help better connect with customers better serve businesses and to quite frankly become better business leaders. And we’re the people who are communicating with customers most closely, I think that’s why you’re seeing more pathways from CMOs to CEOs now than ever before. There’s a need for that. I think the second thing is to think about what is the education that we’re actually providing within these programs? And to me, you know, I’ve seen so many programs offer things like a certificate in social media, a course in SEO, a course in AI. The truth is when we think about it from that very tactical perspective,

Bennie 

All right.

Zontee 

It can be limiting because like you said, the space is constantly evolving, the technology is constantly evolving. I we almost need more coursework that is about how to adapt to those changing technologies and that actually give students not, this is how you place an ad, but this is how you think fundamentally about digital ads as an ecosystem and what are the questions you should be asking of any platform so that you can be thoughtful about how to run great ad campaigns.

Bennie 

Mm -hmm. Right.

Zontee 

Across platforms. Today, maybe you’re running ads on Meta, but if you are suddenly asked to run Reddit ads or to run YouTube ads, all of those technologies are going to look different. They’re going to have different features, but they’re going to fundamentally have similar kinds of capabilities or at least should have the same capabilities in terms of how you think about your audience. Are we giving people the ability to connect the dots across all these different technologies?

Bennie 

Hmm.

Zontee 

That’s something that I think we don’t necessarily think about because I think it’s easier for programs to merchandise the advertising on meta class than the thinking critically about what digital advertising should look like class. But I do think that that is going to be more valuable long term. And I would also love to see more programs really think about how to help our students and our future marketers.

Bennie 

Right.

Zontee

Look at marketing in a strategic, holistic way that is quite frankly about the politics, the internal politics of organizations, right? Because we can say here’s how to build a great marketing strategy, but out in the field, it doesn’t work that way. It’s really about, okay, here’s the marketing strategy. Here’s all the different people that you might need to win over within an organization to move that forward.

Bennie 

Thank you. Right. Right.

Zontee 

How could you take your marketing strategy and actually break it down in such a way that’s palatable for different people? And maybe what I’m really describing is almost a storytelling about marketing for marketers kind of approach, right? How do we sell our marketing to other people? The thing that one of my early bosses, Alana Rabinowitz, used to say to us was that,

Bennie 

Right.

Zontee 

it was important to market the marketing, to make sure that other people within the organization knows just how much work is being done from marketing to impact the organization, the visibility and the awareness, the affinity of the organization and what benefit it’s actually having back. What are the actual results from the customer point of view, which comes back to the idea of data because that’s really about collecting that feedback, right? We’re not.

Zontee

connecting the dots and bringing this into a closed circle, then we’re not doing a good job internally of actually using the marketing to give us insights that then drives that customer loyalty that we were talking about before.

Bennie 

Right. Because to your point, you’re constantly having to prove relevance and credibility. And you do that with your customer journey, whether it’s an internal consumer or B2B, but also if it’s your executive team. Because they’re making a decision as to doing X with marketing means they may not be doing Y with something else, an approach that’s going into. And how do we build that credibility? I love your conversation about marketing, marketing in the field.

Zontee

Exactly.

Bennie 

You know, how many times if you’ve been in a federated model, you have an incredibly beautiful plan that originates from headquarters. And then you have conversations with your field team and realize that it’s minimal at best, right? Or, or you’re running up against some longstanding legacy tensions against what comes in there and trying to win over for this opportunity. When, when I think about you kind of mentorship and marketing, it really kind of speaks to the future.

And so I’d love to kind of close out our conversation with just a word or two on how do you feel about the future of marketing? What inspires you? What excites you? What, what gives you pause?

Zontee 

I am excited about the future of marketing, honestly. I think that I’m generally an optimistic person when it comes to the field. Like I said, I think that we are entering a time when marketing tools are becoming more affordable and more advanced than ever before. It makes it more accessible to people than ever before. I think the opportunity right now is for all of us to identify

Bennie 

Mm -hmm.

Zontee 

Ways that we can deliver on the high expectations of our customers, which will, quite frankly, continue to become even more, let’s say, robust in the next couple of years. And I think that that’s really about being willing to experiment, being willing to think more about the customer’s needs and about

Bennie 

Right.

Zontee 

Making marketing a holistic experience that really reflects the fact that we’re speaking to whole individuals, right? They are not fragmented parts. The person who is a mom and a cyclist and an executive and a mentor, that person is one person. How do we tell a story that actually speaks to her as a whole person? And I think that’s something that is more

Bennie 

Mm -hmm.

Zontee 

Able to come to life now in marketing and in the future in marketing. And that’s what I’m excited about. For all of us to move to a space where we’re treating our customers as whole people rather than as little parts and individual interests. I think that that’s where we’re actually going to find the most compelling messages, both as consumers and as marketers. And I’m excited for a day when, you know, all of us are getting just really great suggestions.

Zontee 

from every which way that makes our lives easier because they really understand what it is that we actually need.

Bennie 

I think that’s a great way to end our talk today. And I have one suggestion for our audience. This spring, you need to pick up data-driven personalization, how to use consumer insights to generate customer loyalty by our guest today, Zanti Ho. Zanti, thank you for your energy and wisdom and insights and friendship and leadership and marketing. Thank you all for joining us. This has been an episode of AMAs Marketing and I’m your host, Bennie Johnson. We invite you to check us out online. Check out the AMA at AMA.org and learn more about Zontee’s work and her upcoming book. Thank you.

Zontee

Thank you.