Speaker 1: Welcome back to CEO Money. I'm Michael Yorba, your host. Thanks for joining us. Lonnie Cocina, CEO Media Relations Agency. Publicity.com is the website. Lonnie, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here. Yeah, thanks. Good to be here. I just got your book today and I absolutely love it. I haven't had a chance to read it, but The CEO's Guide to Marketing. The way you laid this out is just brilliant. It's simple, it's easy to follow, yet it's impactful. It really walks us through this. Before we get into the book, please let me back up for a second, give our audience a well-rounded view of who Lonnie is and then, yeah really, who are you? I want to dive into the topics that I've got set up to talk to you about

Speaker 2: first. Please, you. Sure, sure. Okay, a little background on me. First of all, I'm 62 years old, getting to be an old man here, and I spent my life in marketing, starting out in a direct market advertising company many years ago when you could smoke and drink in the office and it was a little bit crazy. Then 30 years ago, I started an ad agency called Media Relations Agency and I've run that for 30 years now and we have hundreds of clients. So, I get in the kitchens of a lot of clients out there and get to watch their marketing

Speaker 1: companies, big and small. Okay, so you were an original madman. That's right. Oh my gosh, it's changed so much. All right, you also have a book bestseller, you know, Three Cats on Amazon. What's that one about?

Speaker 2: Well, you mean the CEO's Guide to Marketing? Yeah. Well, it's a bestseller in three categories and it's also an Axiom Award winner, which is for business book marketing, which is really cool. I'm really pleased with it because I wanted to kind of write what I felt was a really practical book for marketers, kind of at the end of my career, just kind of put it all together. And I've seen so many marketers that really don't know much about marketing and I don't know if you're familiar or your listeners are with this CEO peer group called Vistage and I was in that for about 15 years and you're exposed to a lot of CEO friends and what have you. And I just felt like these folks don't know much about marketing and not only did the CEOs not know, their marketing team doesn't know much about marketing. It's really shocking. You don't find that in other industries. Tell me about you being the

Speaker 1: expert in marketing. What makes you away from the pack and leading in

Speaker 2: this category? Well, I don't know how, I don't know exactly how to answer that. I'll just say this, that I've always been a really practical guy and the way I've made sense out of life is by making it simple. And so that's where I think my expertise comes in for marketing. I've taught principles of marketing at the college level for fun and run my ad agency and so I'm just, I'm really in the thick of it. And what I find is that most marketers know a lot less about marketing than they let on. It's just, it's shocking. You just don't find that. Like most accountants know about accounting, right? They know GAAP accounting principles and they follow a process and architects know architecture and marketers are just like a bunch of creative folks just kind of going here and there and the CEOs look at it as, they look at marketers kind of like engineers. Better to just slide the food under the door and not go in there because we probably aren't going to like what we see or hear when we go in there because they feel like they don't understand it. But that's not a good way to run marketing. Marketing is too important for that and it needs to be run by a process. So that's what I've done. The book outlines what I call the SAM 6 process. It's strategically aimed marketing and it's a simple six-step process that starts out. The first step is just getting people up to speed on 31 marketing terms that they should know. And so what I tell CEOs is buy the book, use it as an assessment. You don't have to read it like you said, hey I got the book, it looks nice, what have you. Just look through it a little bit, grab a few things out of there, bring your marketing team in and quiz them on it. And I think you're going to be shocked at what your staff doesn't know. And that's obviously not a good thing. Now let me let me ask you a few

Speaker 1: questions here because it starts off competence and it goes code, channels, calendar, control, and creative. The last one. Usually people start with the creative and then they try to reverse engineer it. Walk me through this. That's

Speaker 2: right. Walk you through it? Okay. Yeah. You're exactly right. They put the cart ahead of the horse or the tail wags the dog, however you want to say it. But they start with the creative process first and they shouldn't. The creativity should be layered over the rest of your process. So like I said, the first step is competence, just learning 31 terms so that we all talk the same language. And the second step I call code. That's you know, the communication process is you have the sender that encodes a message that's decoded by the receiver, right? I say something to you and I try to get you to understand what I'm saying and then I hope that you do. Okay, well you'll be shocked at the number of companies out there that really haven't narrowed down their message, who their market is, why their customer buys, and why they buy from them rather than their competition. So the second step is to put together what we call a brand playbook. And a brand playbook just outlines that and gets everybody on point. And so, you know, step one and two is, you know, get familiar with your terms and then get on point with your message. And this sounds kind of simple and you think, well there most people are doing that. Well, they kind of are, but they're shooting from the hip. You know, the best way to think of this, the SAMHSA process is like building a racetrack for horses that love to run. The step six is with your creative people, right? And they're your thoroughbreds. But we don't just put them out in the pasture and say, hey you guys, go crazy. You know, show us what you can do. That's not the way it works. You got to have it, you got to give them clear direction and build this process for them. And they're not process people. These creative people are not process people. So in the CEO's Guide to Marketing, that's what I do. I say just out there, steps one through five, outline the process, and step six connects the creative team to it. All right. Channels. I

Speaker 1: want to hear about this. Step three. Say that again? Channels. We have about a minute left, so we don't have to go too in-depth, but you can at least just touch

Speaker 2: on channels. It's step number three. Sure. Yeah, okay. Step number three is the promotional mix channels. And a lot of marketers wouldn't know the difference between the marketing mix and the promotional mix. Well, the promotional mix is the channels that you push your message out through. And out of the bazillion ways that you can deliver a message today, you can categorize them into five channels. You have publicity, advertising, social media, website, and personal selling. And so I know it sounds simple, but if you were to bring in a group of marketers and you'd say, can you tell me what the promotional mix is? Most of them have a really tough time doing that. And this stuff should be like second nature to your team. So what I talk about in that step is really understanding the promotional mix channels, how they work together, and how you group them together, and you know, which ones are going to give you the

Speaker 1: most bang for the buck. Right, and the process of what you should do first before last. Got it. Let's, Lonnie, let's take a break for a minute and then on the other side, I want to hear about the rest of it and anything else. And where do you see the world of marketing going? How do you see it evolving? Because you've been around long enough to get a pretty good idea, especially at this stage of your career, of where this thing might be headed as we go forward. Okay? Good. All right, we'll be right back with Lonnie Kosina, CEO, Media Relations Agency. Website is publicity.com and the book he just wrote, which I can't wait to get my hands all the way through the pages, The CEO's Guide to Marketing. You've been listening to CEO Money with Michael Yorba. We'll be right back on the other side of this break. Welcome back to CEO Money. I'm Michael Yorba, your host. All right, we're talking with Lonnie Kosina, CEO, Media Relations Agency. Website publicity.com. All right, Lonnie, I'm so enthused with this book and being able to talk to you about this because I wrestle with this stuff every day and you made it clear, concise. It's better than a cookbook. Actually, it is a cookbook. I love it. Okay, when we left off, we finished with channels. This calendar that you have for Step 4 is amazing. You even broke it down in the calendar to Facebook, emails, things of that nature. I'm just enthused. Walk me through that part. Sure. Well, if you

Speaker 2: think, once again, we talked earlier about, you know, oftentimes they put the creativity ahead of the process and if you think about marketing like a class, like you're teaching the folks out there, right? You've got it. The calendar is kind of like your syllabus for the semester. You take what you learned in your brand by putting together your brand playbook, your key messages and positioning and things like that and then you schedule them out over time. What most companies find is that they have a lot less money and a lot less manpower than they're actually going to need to really make their product famous and create that brand. So I talk about scheduling this and calendarizing the different, I call them plays, that are going to be run and each time you run a play, you're going to, like if you write a direct mail piece, you're automatically going to turn that into blogs and you're going to turn it into Facebook posts and tweets and just kind of cycle through them. And so when you start to look at the number of products that you or services that you have and the things that you need to say and the number of times you need to say them and you start to schedule this out for a quarter or six months, you'll see it takes so much work to cycle through all this stuff and so that's kind of what that chapter or that step is showing. It's really a radically different way to look at your marketing plan. We're not going to start with campaigns or creative concepts or what have you. We're just going to go back to the basics and schedule this stuff out and then we'll layer the creativity over it. Well not

Speaker 1: only that, you've got a budget in place and here's how you spend the money, here's where you spend the money. Keywords for advertising under AdWords, display, product placement, so on. It's actually, most people when they come to this part of their business, it's chaos and you've made it in an orderly, mapped out fashion that it's, like I said, it's a recipe book. It's

Speaker 2: perfect. Yeah and you know it's going to get more complex too. The direction that marketing is going is towards complexity and that makes it, I longed for the days 30 years ago when you did some direct mail and you put some salespeople on the phone and ran a few ads and it was so straightforward but today it's getting really complicated. I would say within my agency, we're spending 20% of our day just learning, continual, ongoing learning about whatever's coming up and everything that's changing. It's really a lot of shifting sands but the one thing that doesn't change is every company is out there trying to make their product famous and so it really doesn't matter what promotional mix is, those tools can can come and go but it can be easy to lose sight of some of the good marketing basics when you have access to all this data and another kind of problem into the future is, I think people are putting too much of marketing in the hands of people that deal with data. It's like turning over your marketing to your accounting department. Probably not a good idea. Do you want the information? Yes. Is it valuable? Absolutely. Is it the only thing? No, not at all. There's a whole bunch of persuasion and emotional stuff that you got to connect that to and I think in the future that might be

Speaker 1: missing a little bit. Let me know if I'm on the right path here. My thinking is that the old way was you could sell somebody something. Now you have to understand how they want to buy something and make them think it's their idea and allow them to buy it through all of these different processes that we have to go through with the social media and rather than just get some a bunch of

Speaker 2: salesmen in a boiler room on the phone. Yeah, yeah. You have access to a lot more tools that will help you understand who you're selling to and that's a good thing but you know keep in mind marketing. I tell individual sales people you can throw my book out the window. You don't need it. You're going to be doing a lot of listening and trying to sell to whatever pain point they have no matter how obscure it is. In marketing, we don't do that. We cast a wide net so all of our stuff has to be just these general reasons that people buy. We don't have enough to get into all of these secondary little nuanced reasons people buy. There just isn't enough money and manpower to do that. So we have to focus on these main reasons and we have to be persuasive on those reasons and then we use the data to help us help us do that. I think it all tangled up in data today. You know I just I see it all the time and I think it can be I think it can derail some marketing campaigns too much you know the old you

Speaker 1: know paralysis by analysis. You know I'd like to have you we're going to close the segment now but I'd like to have you back for some case studies about where people went wrong and then when they got the right direction how they turned it around you know with your guidance. Would you mind that? Sure love to do that. All right Lonnie we got to go but I want to I'll talk to you probably I'll give you a call tomorrow we'll see if we can schedule something because I think you bring a lot to the table and there's a lot that people can learn from what you've what you've done here with this book and and your life. Well thank you. You're welcome. All right Lonnie I'll talk to you soon. All right take care. Lonnie Kosina and he is the CEO of media relations agency publicity.com. Definitely if I can recommend a book I would definitely recommend the CEO's guide to marketing. We all have to have it otherwise guess what the other guy's gonna get it and we're gonna lose.