Episode 104: WFH, RTO and talent trends

Speaker 1  00:00
You welcome to the CIM Marketing podcast. The contents and views expressed by individuals in the CIM Marketing Podcast are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the companies they work for. We hope you enjoy the episode.

Speaker 2  00:16
Hello everybody, and welcome to the CIM marketing podcast, and today, we are going to be looking at industry trends in marketing. We're going to be looking at workplace trends, recruitment trends and evolving trends in the sector. Who better to go through these with us is Mr. Lee Shapcott. And Lee is lead consultant at LSPs 23 consulting. He was previously Chief Marketing Officer at PGM multi asset solutions and PGM quantitative solutions, both of which are based in Newark, New Jersey. But shock, he's an Englishman who has been stateside for some 15 years, going through the school of hard knocks as he migrated during the global financial crisis, when a head of client group marketing at Alliance Bernstein, before that, on terra firma in England, he was Chief Production editor of the Financial Times, no less, Mr. Shapcott, how are you?

Speaker 3  01:15
Hey, it's good to be here. Thanks for the introduction.

Speaker 2  01:19
It's great to have you on the show gonna start, I think, with the terra firma itself, the workplace, the place that we work as marketers. And, you know, there's been lots of talk, not just in marketing and generally, about hybrid return to office. It's still quite a touchstone issue. You know, the number three or four years since the pandemic, it's still something that is up for debate. What's happening?

Speaker 3  01:44
Yeah, it's interesting, right? That I thought that once we've got through a lifetime change in COVID, that the debate was over, but it seems like it's just the end of the first chapter. So having been in this industry in nearly 20 years, it was largely office based. Then COVID comes along. We all go remote. We're very, very well prepared. We have all the stuff in the cloud. So there we are. We think that the model has changed forever. And then, like you said, all the headlines now, both in the US and the UK, are everybody needs to go back into the office. And it seems to, at first, have become a debate about where we're physically located, but I would have thought, given there's the whole industry around talent and how you build your brand and culture, that the real conversation should be about how we preserve and build and balance culture, and part of that is where you're physically located. So it's interesting that this has become a whole discussion right now about location, when really most of what the effort we put into is about brand and culture and how we preserve

Speaker 2  02:53
that. It's interesting how you say because there's a sort of Post recently on this by WPP about their decision to go back, I think four days a week, not five. And that was focused on culture and made a, you know, a fairly cogent case for it, but I think the danger is, and this is, this certainly isn't the case with WPP post, is that culture is seen as a cause of location rather than the symptom of location, or vice versa. And actually, what we're trying to do is create a strong agency culture, a strong marketing department. Culture and location is what you're saying. Is part of that. It's one factor. It's not everything.

Speaker 3  03:30
If you look on global teams, and they're almost permanently remote, so you can travel to people's offices, but they're remote, so you have to develop ways that work, both in person and remotely. Anyway, I think that, although recently, it seems to have been that a lot of the people that are right the CEOs of C suite, so there's four or five days or nothing. You know, it was over 10 years ago that Adam grow, obviously, everybody's really respects in terms of this, this area Italy, survey across the US, and about two days max, is what we need to avoid. Sort of culture decline in a firm. So, you know, there's a difference of opinion there. And also that, like I said, a lot of the people that were working with a client facing so they have to be on the road a lot. So those challenges aren't new. You know, COVID made things like it did everything else. It focused attention. But the fact is, we've always had these challenges, and it is really interesting to me to see how far this debate is going. It was just 2022, it seems like yesterday, but sometimes a million years ago, there was a book written by Gustavo Rossetti, and he talked about post pandemic, it was an opportunity for firms to reset their workplace culture, optimize their remote working environments, which is all true, but now that seems to be like something from a hippie from the 16th talking I don't believe this is the kind of end of the discussion by saying that everybody has to go in the office. I think this is a new chapter where management and the rest of the staff need to have another discussion about, okay, so what works if management feels uncomfortable with people working out of the office permanently and it's difficult to come into the office five days a week, let's say then, can we not have a discussion about, you know, where is the right balance, you know? So this one thing, I think this is the first start of a second chapter, rather than it being the closure of the conversation. It's

Speaker 2  05:29
interesting, isn't it? What you're saying is maybe worth rewinding a little bit and reminding ourselves that, you know, prior to the pandemic, most marketing happened voluntarily or otherwise, five days or near enough, in in the office or on client sites. So if you like five days in person, COVID forced things you say the exact opposite. It forced five days remote for obvious reasons that we weren't able to mingle and fraternize in person during that period. Now there seems to be debate about the number. The best number, as you say, how many days is it? You know, you can go back to Adam Grant a decade ago. Two days maximum per week is enough to prevent cultural decline. But actually, some organizations, WPP have gone four days. Marks and Spencers do three boots. I've just heard have gone back to five and where we did have a or we still have a initialism, that means work from home, W, F, H. We now have an initialism, which means return to the office, RTO, which I encountered the other day. That RTO, as you say, has seemed to be come to mean five, or at the least four days. It seems quite an extreme response.

Speaker 3  06:45
It does and and, you know, again, without digressing too much, so there's obviously a whole discussion last couple of years about whether this is returned to Office, which seems like a sort of Tombstone to some, some people, you know, it's really an excuse to drive people out. So it's more about managing numbers than it is about all the other things we've been discussing, but and we'll see whether that's the case. But again, where the focus needs to be, and you're right, it almost 90% of conversations needs to do about RTO, but it's really about, okay, so what skills do I need in a team going forward, and how what kind of culture do I need? And that hasn't really changed. You know, what changes is the industry you're in, where the trends, what the demands are for your film, what your three year plan is. Those things are the things that really drive your your needs, not really, whether you're in the office or not, but that's become the focus of the debate. So it would be great if we could kind of move beyond that and go back to okay, if talent is the most important part of your brand, how am I investing in my talents and how far am I willing to go and that that will really either help with recruitment, which will, hopefully will come to in a minute, or also building the team up and keeping the talent the top talent that you

Speaker 2  08:02
have. It's interesting, isn't it, if you look at it from a talent perspective, because if you're using RTO, as it's now known, to shake up your headcount, it's a rather mean way of doing it. But let's say, for example, you want to drive some people out of your organization, and you therefore insist on RTO, so some of the people no longer find it tenable to work for you. That's going to backfire potentially on you in the future when you want to hire someone who isn't able to or willing to work in the office five days. So, you know, even the most Machiavellian leaders have to be careful with this stuff, don't

Speaker 3  08:39
they? Yeah. I mean, again, it comes back to what is the real problem here. You know, I can't name names, but there was something I knew was a superstar that worked in Texas, right there isn't much Asset Management going on in Texas. It's growing. But at the time, 10 years ago, was very little. They were still hired because they were a fantastic manager in terms of investments, etc. And we worked around how to build a team around them, virtually, etc, to make that work. There was no question at the end of the day about the five days a week because they wanted to be based somewhere else. Okay, so it's not a new problem. The real issue right here is it can get a bit messy, right? Yeah, what we learned in COVID was that people, I found people, were really amazingly flexible. So, you know, particularly, a lot of the my managers are working moms, and they found a way of doing even more work, rearranging their lives so that there were the children more or they could care, or they could, you know, do things that they couldn't do before, and they would be flexible with their working hours. Now, okay, sometimes that gets a little bit messy that that person might not be available at four because they've just popped out to get their kids from school, but whose problem is that it's not a problem at all, because if you're flexible enough, and you can work around it, you have a superstar work. Think, frankly, all hours, it's just it's a little bit more messy than it was when it was, let's call it nine to five.

Speaker 2  10:07
Yeah, so you're making a trade, aren't you, as a leader or as an organization? You're making a clear trade between enhancing and expanding your talent pool and expanding the availability of labor with having a very linear day structure as used nine to five, which argument agencies never had in the first place anyway, but nevertheless, let's maintain the fiction that they work nine to five before the pandemic. You're making that trade to some degree. And actually what leaders seem to be doing now some leaders, let's not generalize too much. Let's be honest. The headlines obviously go to those with the most extreme pronouncements seem to be, as you say, thinking about returning the structure of the office first, and perhaps forgetting about some of the benefits of having the labor pool flexibility.

Speaker 3  10:55
Yeah, exactly. And again, obviously, depending on which era you in. So there's supply and demand, right? So you account any companies in competition for the top talent. So if you're going to sort of say, well, I'm not going to do any of those things work from home, whatever it is, then you're ultimately going to lose some of that top talent, whether it's with you now or whether you're going to try and hire it. Why would any successful firm want to cut off certain avenues that doesn't make sense in any business, right? So I think again, we need to sort of reframe where we are in this conversation. And it was interesting. There was a piece by Professor Catherine Landis over here who talked about leadership and the need to build confidence in small doses. And she was referring to, like, the hybrid model. Now it's only really just begun in earnest for a mass of people. So how can you prove, right now, that it doesn't work? And we all need to go back to RTO, as you thought the third right? You don't. And so I think that there's sort of more, I hate to use this term, but more progressive firms will think, okay, how can I try this that keep trying different things and keep the conversation going between the different groups to see what actually works in the long term, no matter what your public pronouncement is, right now? Yeah, it's interesting,

Speaker 2  12:13
isn't it? And the course of industrial histories, we're still dealing with a very small sample size. You know this, the hybrid model has only been operational for, you know, two and a half, three years before that, we had five days a week, and during the pandemic, we had near as dammit, naught days a week. Do you think it's a bit of a blip, or there's a chance this is a blip? But you know, I'm reminded about those dark days of 2021 when I was sat lonely in at home and having no social contact, and having no chance of any social contact, that the office was dead, I read numerous articles claiming that the office was dead, and although I've always been an advocate of remote working, I remember hoping at the time that the office wasn't dead because I miss it. Is there a danger that we've gone the other way? And this is another sort of blip where people are suddenly saying, you know, work from home is dead, and, you know, we're all going back to the office five days a week, and as is so often the case in life, the long term, or even medium term, outcome will be somewhere in the middle.

Speaker 3  13:21
Yeah, exactly. And that's what I'm hoping for, is that we will see an ongoing discussion where we'll find a better path than before, not one that's necessary right now, or 2020, or before that. Again, if you can just get away from the location for a second. Again, I do understand, I'm not naive that there are certain, you know, fiscal factors. When it comes to, if you have a shiny office somewhere in New York, for instance, you know that you need to fill it to a certain extent. But it really comes down to what is your attitude towards, you know, leadership, investment in people. I give an example I keep thinking of right now is AI, right? So everybody wants to talk about AI, I don't think I go to it. In fact, I think we've done quite well going 15 minutes without talking

Speaker 2  14:07
about AI. We manage nearly 15 minutes. Lee nearly and

14:11
it was me that blew it.

Speaker 3  14:14
But, you know, the first year of conversation is all about, okay, what can ai do for the firm? It's like, I remember I had a was a really great two part meeting where there was an aspirational first part talking about Steve Jobs and the history of innovation. That was great. And the second was right, okay, what are we going to do for this firm now, to cut processes? It was like, Okay, so that's less aspirational. The question is, with AI is, what role does your talent play in that? What do you see your talent playing in and how can I invest in them to best get the most out of them? And the AI environment that's being built, which frankly, is to your point earlier about where we're at AI is at its infancy, and as we've just seen, and we see every day, something changes. So. Yeah, you know, we really need to get back to where does talent play a part in that? And if you're at a firm that is just basically saying, Well, get a free course and from Microsoft and off you go, then you know they're not investing in you. So that's your point about industrial relations. That hasn't changed. And we need to remember that the investment in people is really important,

Speaker 2  15:21
certainly as an investment in people, is our second theme of trends that Lee is going to talk to us about today, which is leadership trends and hiring leadership trends, particularly in marketing, you've noticed some interesting developments in that regard.

Speaker 3  15:34
Yeah, and financial services gone through a huge change in the last 15 to 20 years, particularly in asset management. You know, what we've seen over the last five to 10 years is that obviously the evolution of marketing, in fact, of this has speeded up rapidly, and there's a natural tendency to think, Okay, if I need to innovate quickly, then I need to hire people from outside in industries that are already further along the line, for example, about, well, I know 10 years ago, there was a lot of music executives that were being asked about whether they would join investment firms because they understood engagement, and they'd already worked with a lot of the tools that are now become familiar, right? But the fact is that some of them worked out, but a large majority of them didn't, because, obviously it's a huge difference between one industry, in this case, music and asset manager, and some people are able to handle the change, and some aren't. What I noticed is that there is a always a knee jerk reaction whenever something new comes up. You know, in this case, it was the, you know, how to engage better with the community. Now, I mentioned AI, how do I get much more out of the technology to create better marketing engagement with clients and prospects? And so people are looking around for job description, that's their 10 years experience in AI. Where are you getting that from? You know? Where is that coming from? Fact, is that it can often lead you missing out on the very people who can help you, like not just now, but build your brand coming up, and they're often hidden within your team. You know, we talked about global teams, for example, 510, years ago, WeChat was way in front of all other social tools, but only really used in Asia. So if you wanted to find people who are innovative, who are really doing marketing campaigns that are multi dimensional, using social as a base. You could find the best examples in your team in Taiwan or Hong Kong. But the question is, if your HQ is in the US, are you drawing on that experience, and are you as a leader, pulling that experience and that knowledge and that skill to the other regions to help them make a sizable jump. So I think that for those of us that are leading global groups, we need to always look around the teams to see who's innovating and who is persevering, who's

Speaker 2  17:55
innovating and who's persevering, and a little bit a little bit of knowledge or relevant experience, rather than expecting someone to have a plethora of experience. I always use the example of the Apollo landing program for this point, which is that you know, when they NASA were launching this program, you can imagine a job billing saying only experienced moonwalkers need apply

Speaker 3  18:21
exactly. That's my point, you know. And sorry to keep going back to him. But like, you know, in thinking ahead that Adam Grant wrote, he made a really interesting point, which is why I mentioned persistence in that, you know, he said that determination to be curious and persistent, to stretch constantly into discomfort, is critical to a team success. And it's a really interesting point, because, like I said, we often go and try and recruit someone from the marketplace who has the sort of superstar in one particular new area, or some kind of Gill but the fact is that perseverance is a huge trait that in asset management or in financial services generally, is a very important part, because most projects, especially large ones that come in, usually it's transformational in nature, and you have to overcome 10 to 20 obstacles. So if you have the sort of star power but no perseverance, you're not going to get anywhere, forgive me, because I often use Gen Z examples, because they have two amazing 20 and 23 year old daughters who educate me the whole time. But there was a really great video on Tiktok that went round last year of Chapel Roan, and she was performing pink pony club, which obviously have now a huge hit and everybody knows, like an anthem. But she was playing it in front of 50 people in some car park somewhere, and giving it our absolute all. It was the same tune. It was the same lyric, that was the same person, but there was like a few people and a dog watching it now, fast forward, like 2024 so just three years different video. Chuck. Rowan playing in front of 100,000 people. They all know the words. They're all singing, they're all dancing, and she's got an anthem here. So what's the difference between the two? Her perseverance, yeah, her skill and a way to sort of tap into the right guys and all that good stuff, but her perseverance meant that she made it as she made a significant step forwards or a success. In her case, look around your team. Is if you've got a chapel Roman that's right there already, you're looking outside, but maybe chapel runs right there. You're just not looking hard enough right now, there's an

Speaker 2  20:33
important play here about looking at the internal market. Look at your internal labor market. And my sense in business is that companies aren't great at doing that because, for the simple reason is they have people sat on desks or at home or what have you doing a certain role, and in many ways, it's harder for them to imagine those people doing a different role than it is someone who's coming from outside. Yes, and how do you as a leader, change your mindset so you can actually take a step back and think, Well, hang on a second, all the people we've got just because we have this configuration doesn't mean that this is the perfect configuration. How could we reconfigure it to put people into different channels, different roles, and maybe bring out some of their talents that we haven't currently experienced?

Speaker 3  21:19
Yeah, and I think that, again, this is a long term discussion, right? There's time immemorial, I guess. Which is, you know, if you're sitting in the head courses, which department leaders tend to be, then there is an over emphasis on what's happening around you. But good leaders can sort of be wherever. So this is why I'm sort of saying that one of the most important things for a leader in marketing, for sure, is not just looking at kind of now or the next year, but where do you want to be in three years? And are there people that are contributing in other areas right now that may be able to contribute to that three year plan? And this sounds obvious, but it's hard to do with the day to day noise, right? You know, we've all got, whether it's monthly, weekly updates, quarterly updates, we've got changes to the company going on. We've got needs from the investment team, whatever it is. But it's an important part of a marketing leader now is to look beyond not just the locality, but your timeframe, and see who it is that will be, you know, the next person that can help you drive this forward,

Speaker 1  22:24
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22:33
forward slash content,

Speaker 2  22:35
no and don't always reach the external recruitment lever, or indeed, the outsourcing lever, which is sometimes bit of a hair trigger response for

Speaker 3  22:44
departments. Yeah, it's that's an interesting point, right? Is we often, I mean, talk about outsourcing, use it in two different ways. I believe one of them is the kind of like, be more efficient outside using an outside group, be more efficient outside using an external group. But also then the second part is, how can we use our agency partners to help us innovate? Right? So, you know, I don't know if I'm allowed to mention companies on here, but people that I've worked with, like code and theory and living group, they give you material people to work with that can help you reflect where you're at and then identify your gaps, like we said, you could fill them internally, but they really help you to innovate constantly. So if you can see innovation as an evolution rather than a revolution, then you know, these companies can really help you to see things differently, to use their experience and bring that in, whether it's visually, creatively organizationally, you know, whatever that is,

Speaker 2  23:44
use them as a colleague in experimentation and trying new things. It's a little bit easier to do that than trying to do that stuff internally. In some

Speaker 3  23:51
cases, I found, especially when you're trying to convince feast week folk, it's always easier for them to lean into somebody from the outside. You know, they always say that when you use the phrase in a sentence, let's just take a step back. You're trying to sort of put an underline the conversation and lift it up in whichever way, I think, with a third party or particularly one that's had, let's say an agency has been working with other companies that can bring that experience into the conversation. It's a lot easier than for your colleagues stroke people you report to to kind of get the bigger picture.

Speaker 2  24:28
Indeed. So Nick, so what about marketing generally, the evolution as marketing as a role and you, in the early days of this podcast, we seem to have lots of shows in which was either directly or indirectly asked, what is marketing our podcast evolves such that that classic question was asked less often, but it's still sometimes worth an update and asking that again. So what you're finding is that actually it's evolving again, and there's still that question is still worth asking, and we often. Get different answers.

Speaker 3  25:01
Yeah, like any era, obviously, I'm just to say I'm completely biased being a CMO, right? But the joy of marketing is it could be anything. The bad side of marketing is it could be anything, right? So there are times when I, over the last 15 years in my role as a CMO, where I don't think I've gotten the other marketing that much, because you're actually helping with change management, for instance, which is a natural place for a CMO to be. And there are definitely trends over the last 15 years that have seen certain focuses, though. For example, content and engagement was a huge thing 15 years ago, so a lot of people came from the media were brought in. Then there was the whole focus on, how do we actually prove we're of any worse? So there was a whole load of people with data related that would come in. Again, a related topic is that they were often brought from Google, etc, and then blew their minds within a year because of all the controls and compliance that is in the asset management industry. And then, you know, fast forward to today. You know, again, we have a lot of CMOS that, and the teams that focus very much on the data, which is all good, but now we're looking at people that need to be able to bring other parts, including AI, into the equation. So there are trends that I think that we're all faced with, that we have to try and deal with, and not forgetting the demands and the evolution of sales, which, you know, obviously marketing in financial services very closely related, certainly in asset management, to the sales team, to the client relations teams. And so we have to evolve as their approach is evolving too. Do you

Speaker 2  26:37
think we need more generalists? Again? Are we going back to the era of generalists, where we try to sort of eschew silos and work across all kinds of channels and disciplines.

Speaker 3  26:49
Yeah, it looks like we're heading that way. I mean, so just give two different examples. A few years ago, social obviously became a more important block of marketing, and that became a sort of tussling ground between PR and marketing, like, who owns that? Who should lead a particular campaign, depending on where the weight of the execution was. But really, at the end of the day, it's all about brand that was just sort of silo in fight. In my opinion, the more important things how you lifting the brand up? So we've seen sort of little areas like that where social causes change and it caused struggles between us. Another interesting example in the UK is I've seen Google talking a lot about micro peaks. Yeah. So how does a integrated campaign across any of these disciplines, PR marketing, so how did you best capture micro peaks? Probably the people looking at those peaks, because you have to do it so quickly. You have to your point the right generalist that can understand what tools should be available to bring to the party quickly. And then somebody looking at those peaks and saying, Okay, we need to take advantage of it now, now and not in a week's time. You know, that's another example of how we have need to have specialists and generalists. And again, I said, like I said to you, with AI, there's an interesting thing developing right now. There are some really great innovators out there when it comes to content and AI, you know, is they still take up a huge amount of our time. And marketing is either regular content generation or, you know, thematic or campaign content generation. But the thing is that if you only have technical people who know how to program the tools or even make the templates, you're only going to get a certain amount of the way there. What we're all finding is, as we're, you know, a year, two years into this, is you also need creative people who understand the brand really well that can then feed into AI so that the AI can can follow the brand rules in the most accurate way. When you do all of that and all those skills, then actually you can get, you know, a really good step forward. Those two types of people haven't always been natural bedfellows. I think it's fair to say, how do you make them such? Yeah, so it's great question. Maybe you can tell me later The Wizard of Oz answer to that, because I don't actually know my experience, and I think that one of the most important things is up front. You know, I love integrated campaigns because it actually gives you excuse to say, okay, what are we doing first? What are we trying to do first? What's the aim? Not lose sight of what it is we're trying to achieve, rather than how we're achieving it. So, you know, a good example of this is, again, I'm going to use something way outside of asset management, Cynthia Rebo was obviously amazingly talented woman. For those who's been wicked, you know, alpha bar in Wicked and many years of excellence, you know she, she's known as a bit of a diva, right? But the way that she put it is, is the leader of the team that she's working with is. She sets down exact standards of what she's expecting upfront, and then obviously she believes that the output is much better as a result. So that's a good example for all of us. You know, you said about creative and non creative, sometimes not mixing very well, but she's a very creative person, a supreme talent. But she's given us a standard that I think all the lead us, like when you've got an integrated campaign. Yes, you have these different groups, but if you set up front the standard and the objective very clearly, then you will get better results.

Speaker 2  30:34
There's a common theme amongst all of your themes here, isn't it? Is which is the the starting point, and it's always worth reminding ourselves as marketing leaders, is to decide what we want to achieve. So when you want to achieve a strong culture in the office, work out what you need to do to achieve that strong culture, rather than reverse engineering it and saying we're going to put everyone back in the office RTO for five days and hope the culture improves. Look at it through the right end of the microscope, not the wrong end of the microscope. Similarly with recruiting trends, look at what you want to achieve in terms of your talent and your skills in your agency or marketing department, and then think carefully about where you might find those skills don't immediately go and launch an external recruitment drive in the hope that your skills might improve in terms of evolution, think, how do we want our process to be more integrated? And then work out how you can collaborate, rather than saying we've got all of these things we need to do as an agency or department, we need to make sure we've got a department and a silo for each of them.

Speaker 3  31:42
Yeah, exactly. And to your point, perfectly, if you look on, let's say Tiktok at the moment. And this is related just to engagement that all of us in marketing are obsessed with. The people that do it aren't the ones that have got the most money. You know, it's often somebody in a bedroom or somebody who makes a snippet of a music video and does does a Tiktok dance to it or whatever, but they know how to engage. So to your point, those things haven't changed. Those things are more important than how much money you can throw at it, right? So you know, again, the important points that we're trying to get across when it comes to what is successful marketing and branding looking like are still the same as they were before. It's just the environments change, you know, define your ownership. Clearly, we've been talking about that no matter the different groups, everybody's got a different skill to bring So define that clearly, you know, encourage collaboration. Sometimes it is better. We've been talking a lot about, you know, the downfalls of RTO. But, you know, sometimes it's great to get in a room and just thrash it out, you know, whether it's in an office space, whether it's, you know, being English now, down the pub, having a drink together, whatever it is, sometimes in person is better. So the next bit is stay agile, right? I mean, is this new? Like? No, it's, it's always been the same. Stay agile. If you see something succeeding, go with it. If you see it failing, learn from it. Close it down and move on. And that's something that a lot of people are really bad at. You know? I mean, you've been doing this a long time too. So many times we do things for years when it didn't work. After the first year, it's okay, learn from it and move on. And then, like I said, that agility means embracing whatever the new thing is. In this case, right now, it's aI few years ago, it was content in between, it was data, and really try and leverage it to the best you can, but with the objective of your engagement and your client and your client and prospect in mind, that hasn't changed. It's just the tools we can get so obsessed with the technology, we forget why we're doing it in the first place. And like I said, for a marketing leader, I think still the most important thing is like focusing on what that objective is, and staying focused on it. And it may take three years to come to fruition. You know, if you're launching a product, you are not getting a track record for three years. That's of much use. So you know, learn, keep focusing on the objective, so that you can build the brand, build the interest in that period that hasn't changed.

Speaker 2  34:17
Trends have shifted. Trends are shifting at an incredible rate. But Lee shapcot is saying there are five evergreen principles that you should hold in mind, and they haven't changed. They're inert, define ownership clearly, encourage collaboration, stay agile, leverage AI and focused on unified objectives. The trends shift the way we get there shifts, but those great principles of great marketing remain, and that is Mr. Lee. Shapcott, Lee, thank you very much indeed for your time and insights today and some real insights actually into the way that the trends in the sector are changing. Lee has joined us here from stateside. So we thank him again for joining us from across the pond. I hope you've enjoyed it, Lee, we certainly have and hope you will come back on the show very soon. Thank you. It's an absolute pleasure.

Speaker 1  35:02
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