In this Marketing Over Coffee:
Learn about n8n, Vibe Marketing, PS5 as 4k BluRay Player and more!
Brought to you by our sponsor: NetSuite
Voice of the Customer with Generative AI
n8n – zapier on steroids
Trust Insights latest course: Generative AI Use Cases for Marketers Course
Vibe Marketing
I’ve been invited to the World Police Summit in Dubai
NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth.
MAICON and Spark Together are on the same days
PS5 – dodging the tariffs to get a 4k BluRay player
More Blu-Ray experiments – Ron Ploof on why 90’s movies look so good
Coros running watch adds Strava integration. Don’t take Carrot as the default and friend John on Strava
TikTok showing you how to save big by buying direct
Sign up for the text line: 1-617-812-5494
Join John, Chris and Katie on threads, or on LinkedIn: Chris, John, and Katie
Sign up for the Marketing Over Coffee Newsletter to get early access!
Our theme song is Mellow G by Fonkmasters
Speaker 1 – 00:00
Foreign.
Speaker 2 – 00:06
This is Marketing Over Coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.
Speaker 1 – 00:14
Good morning. Welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I’m John Wall. I’m Christopher Penn and you are live from Miami.
This is. You’re down there for, I was going to say celerant, but it’s Trace one. When we began, they were celerant.
Years later, they are now Trace one and you’re down there. What’s going on? Normal AI pitch for them or no.
Speaker 3 – 00:34
So this is a different version of the talk I’m doing. I’m doing a talk on using the voice of the customer with generative
AI to improve product market fit. They actually initially asked forecasting, but I actually have a whole section of
slides now that says forecasting requires data from the past that is reliable and predictable so that you can forecast
forward. Right. And that’s been predictive analytics for years. Since we’re doing things like playing Wheel of Tariffs,
there is no predictable data that you can use to accurately forecast for a lot of things now. And really that’s been true
since 2020. The last five years have been a hot mess of good luck predicting anything because nothing makes
sense anymore.
Speaker 3 – 01:19
And so I’ve pivoted this talk to be using the voice of the customer and the real data that you’re getting from
customers, qualitative data especially to say, here’s what you can do. So examples, how do you find product
innovations? Well, customers are saying, hey, I want your product to have X. Why doesn’t it? A lot of the time, sales
and customer service and stuff is collecting all this data, but nobody does anything with it. And so what we’re going
to be talking about is how you can do stuff using generative AI models, language models, to process that language
and find innovations that are customer led and will make at least some more of your customers happier. While we
acknowledge you can’t predict squat.
Speaker 1 – 02:05
Yeah, it’s been another interesting macroeconomic couple of weeks here. Yeah, it’s like I don’t want to get into it, but
still, it’s just fascinating to me on a couple of fronts. One is the whipsawing of tariffs. Scott Galloway was just all
over it. When you look at the trading, there’s this huge surge in trading like three or four days before the tariffs got
rolled back. So obviously all these people were shorting everything. And then there’s a whole other set of stories
about the rest of the world unloading US Bonds to push back. But yeah, this is not an economics podcast. I don’t
wanna get wrapped up in all that. But since I have taken my shot and at least squeezed that in there, is there any
other comments you wanna make on that?
Speaker 3 – 02:46
What I would say from a marketing and AI perspective is that you have to go from a, trying to be like a predictive
enterprise. That because yes, some things probably won’t change a lot. Like people will still search for holiday gift
guides beginning in September, that core behavior is probably not going to change a whole lot. But you have to move
to a much more agile framework of saying, what data can we get from all the systems we have now? How can we
process that data very quickly and what near real time insights can we derive from our data on a very short rolling
window, perhaps even daily, to say, okay, this is what we need to do to deal with this.
Speaker 3 – 03:26
So if you were to think about things through on a tariff basis and say, okay, we know that the price of our supply
chain’s gone up by 52% or 104% or whatever the number is today, we know that it will show up as a price we have to
pass on by this date. You knowing how your supply chain works, and I hope you do, and if you don’t, this is a good
time to do that analysis. How can we change our product market fit? Can we make a cheaper version that’s, you
know, 40% cheaper, or a smaller version of the product or some way to add or change the value equation so that
when we run into these costs, these cost changes, we can adapt, we can pivot and the customer will get something
so we can preserve at least some of the demand.
Speaker 3 – 04:13
Because the biggest thing that marketing’s been focused on for 20 years is demand generation. How do we get
more demand now? We are almost having to deal with substantial disruptions on supply side while we’ve created all
this demand that we now can’t fulfill at the price point we do, we generated at. So from a sales perspective, that’s a
big challenge. And I would encourage people to be using the, all the generative AI tools that you have at your
disposal to do that analysis, to process your customer data in near real time and to adapt very quickly so that you
can say like, yeah, you know what, you know, we make oatmeal. As an example, our customers have been begging
us for a bacon oatmeal flavor.
Speaker 3 – 04:53
While bacon we can source domestically our oats, we’re going to have to pass the tariff price on, but could we roll
out an oatmeal product at, you know, 2x the normal price, but customers would pay for it because they want the
bacon flavor and thus it kind of mitigates the impact of the tariff.
Speaker 1 – 05:09
Yeah, that’s a great point. Right? It’s, it’s a great time for innovation if you can use that to get people to open the
pocketbook a little bit more to get around the extra cost. On your side. Okay. On the tool side, N8N I have seen as a
workflow piece of software, now on paper, it looks great to me as marketing automation tool, but you’ve played
around with it. You know, what do you think about this? Is it everything that appears on the surface or is there more
smoke and mirrors than. Than average? I’d say, I would say it’s the reverse.
Speaker 3 – 05:41
So it appears very simple. It is an, it can be an extremely complex, powerful, almost wireframing tool for automation
where you can sit down and say, okay, here’s what I want to automate. For example, you can, with the right
credentials, connect it to your HubSpot instance and say, I want to extract all the leads named john from my
HubSpot instance. And it will pass it into an array and could pass all the customer record data with that. And then
you can say, okay, I want to amend my lead score. Maybe I want to have an AI based lead score. And you have an
ideal customer profile somewhere on your computer or in your cloud.
Speaker 3 – 06:21
And you could take the customer record of every person named John, score it against your ICP and return that as an,
you know, a product market fit, score it, push that right back into HubSpot. So if you think about all the innovations
that you might want to add to your existing Martech stack, chances are there’s a connector or an API somewhere in
this path that you can bring into N8N. Combine it with all these other sources, connect it to generative AI and then
pass the data back to where you got it from. So here, you know, in Miami, one of the things I’m talking about is
TraceOne has a product lifecycle management software. It’s called DevExplm. It’s got an API.
Speaker 3 – 07:02
So I could take my product data, maybe even my ingredient data out of the system, put into a generative AI system
with what the customers are saying like, hey, your chicken flavored oatmeal is really mushy. Okay, well, we have the
ingredient data. We know what the ratio of water is to the manufacturer or the instructions, or maybe it’s too salty.
Okay, we know how much sodium is being used from the ingredient system in this thing and then pass that back and
say, okay, we need to choose, change our formulation or we have this regulatory rule we need to implement. Here’s
the new regulatory rule. Bring in a generative AI, bring our PLM data in and say, now how do we adjust this product to
fit the new regulations?
Speaker 3 – 07:39
So in a tool like N8N is super valuable for being able to automate that quickly, particularly in a. In a lower code
environment. There’s still. You will still probably at some point when you get to advanced use cases need to put like
Python code in your own custom modules. But it is an incredibly flexible system. It’s like Zapier on steroids, where
you can be connecting it and doing all sorts of crazy stuff. It’s AI native and depending on your level of technical skill
and resources, it can be running on your laptop. So you can run it privately and pay nothing for it. It’s open source
software, it’s free, so if you’re skilled you can have it for zero cost and create incredible automation.
Speaker 3 – 08:21
So for my weekly newsletter and podcast, I now have an N8N workflow that passes my WordPress post into deep
seq and translates it like five different languages. And I’m doing it with Deep Seq because Deep Seq’s API is dirt
cheap and this is not private data. And then gives me those language translations that can then Send back to
WordPress. I mean, that saved. That saved me 20 minutes a week. An automated process that really a human
doesn’t need to do.
Speaker 1 – 08:49
Yeah, the first thing I saw that was like, wow, this is a shot at Zapier. You know, this is Zapier being able to do more
and take data, put it into different formats, all kinds of additional functionality that you can’t get over there. And I did
not realize it would run free local too. So it’s open source. Yeah, I’ll have to. Maybe I can find somebody from Nadin
and get a little bit more of their story because it is amazing. It’s one of the more disruptive things I’ve seen in the
past couple weeks, which is saying a lot given the past couple of weeks. We just have to take a second. This episode
is brought to you by Trust Insights. The generative AI use case for marketers course is now available. Just dropped
this week. Tell us about that. Because it’s all new prompts.
Speaker 1 – 09:30
You’ve got everything in there has been updated from the last round yet again.
Speaker 3 – 09:33
Yeah, so this is a different course. I’m really happy with this one. It is. We cover the seven major use cases of gender
of AI generation, summarization, extraction, rewriting, classification, question answering and synthesis. Each one
has three examples and every example has all the data and the prompts and the explanation. So that you do the
examples and it’s all self contained and you can use it with chat, GPT or Gemini or whoever, whatever you want. But I
really like this because it’s not theory, it is. You do the examples, you try it out, you see what the outputs are and you,
you play around with it, you make it work. And in doing so, you’re going to see how these things would work in your
company or in your team or just for you personally. You can even take the prompts and adapt them.
Speaker 3 – 10:25
So I had one. Where is Google Ads best practices? Right, so you get the consolidated Google Ads for best practices
guide, but you learn how to build these guides for yourself. And so it will immediately dramatically improve all of
your marketing because you’ll be able to build this stuff yourself.
Speaker 1 – 10:42
That’s cool. I have some marketing over coffee airtag keychains. So if you buy the course, go ahead and forward the
order receipt to me and I can send you out a keychain. And I don’t know, for any diehard fans, if you can make a good
case as to why you want one of these keychains, feel free to throw it over to me because I’m happy to get those
things out in the world. Okay. We don’t have Katie with us because she would definitely put on the ranty pants and
talk about vibe marketing. But I wanted to make sure we got that in the buzzword. You know, there’s certain SEO
keywords we want to have in the show notes and in the titles now and then. And vibe marketing is the one for this
month.
Speaker 1 – 11:16
Basic, you know, the promise of vibe marketing is just like, hey, I will do everything for you. But what’s the reality of
that? Is this just buzzword or, you know, is there some meat in here somewhere?
Speaker 3 – 11:27
No, it’s coding. It’s just coding, right? It’s using coding tools and generative AI to build stuff with marketing. So there’s
an example I have. I did a recent issue of my newsletter on it and you can watch the video of it doing the thing. And
tools like N8N can be controlled by language models. So you can build workflows just by describing it and it will, you
can construct them that way. I’m in doing that myself right now. Vibe marketing is about leveraging all the
knowledge and information You’ve already created to have these tools answer questions. And so again, going back
to the use cases course, if you invest the time to build out who your company is.
Speaker 3 – 12:15
So imagine a marketing over Coffee podcast about the show and top guests and who the target audience is and all
this stuff and you had all these pieces laying around. You could then put that into one of these AI generative AI agent
systems like Cursor or Klein or any of them and say, build me a Q4 strategy for marketing over Coffee to attract new
sponsors based on all of the information I’ve provided you and the models understand that, especially today’s
reasoning models. But you got to have the pieces first. If you just kind of wing it, that’s where things go really off the
rails to say like, hey, just build your marketing strategy. It’s like, sure, here’s a marketing strategy for an oatmeal
company. Like, but I’m an accounting solver.
Speaker 1 – 13:01
Okay. So we’ll keep an eye on that. I’ve got again, I would definitely spend my time on N8N before going deep on the
Vibe side, but it’s something to go with. I have been invited to the World Police Summit in Dubai. I don’t know why
they did and I don’t think I’m going to be going, but I thought that was an interesting point on event stuff. One
interesting thing though, I had just realized this week both Mekon and Spark Together are running on the same days
and so we are all in on Mekon unfortunately. So we’re not going to be able to do the Spark Together event. How
about you’ve got other events going on too right now because you still have got stuff before the end of the month to
hit. Yeah.
Speaker 3 – 13:40
So I am on the road. I headed next to Content Jam in Chicago, Andy Crested in this wonderful event. I’m looking
forward to doing my Add a Second Brain talk there. Following that, I will be headed to Washington D.C. SMPs to do a
two day workshop for the architecture and engineering construction industry. After that I will be headed to a
customer event in Buffalo and then on toronto to do an SMPS event for the Canadian chapter of sm and then after
that headed to Phoenix, Arizona for the Marketing Analytics Summit doing a half day workshop on analytics and AI
how to use gender of AI to do analytics stuff. So I have a very, very full schedule for the next few weeks.
Speaker 1 – 14:25
All right, that sounds good. For events on the Gear Watch, I had a bunch of things. I actually picked up a Sony PS5
this week it took me too long to realize, you know, I’ve planned on buying one of these in the next couple of weeks.
The big deal is because they can play Ultra HD, you know, 4K Blu Ray, the next generation of Blu ray. And at the price,
it’s a steal compared to other players. But then I finally the light bulb went out, I was like, oh, I better run to buy one of
these because if the tariffs hit the way they may, this thing could cost twice as much. And I’ve actually seen they did
announce yesterday that there will be a price increase.
Speaker 1 – 14:58
Even though this is a five year old platform, this’ll be one of the first times where the price is going up over time on it.
So I have picked that up. And yet the initial reviews, I need to test more 4K HD stuff because so far I’ve watched a
few 90s movies and they don’t look much better in 4K because I think it’s maxed out the, it’s reached 90s technology.
So the big question is, like anything in the past 10 years, how will that look? But I had another really interesting thing
and Ron Plouffe, I was talking with him about Blu Ray and what’s going on and he said, yeah, did you notice that a lot
of the 90s movies look better than current movies in high def?
Speaker 1 – 15:36
And the reasoning behind that is because in the 90s they spent so much time on lighting that, you know, they really
went out of the way to make sure that the lighting was perfect. Whereas now you can go and, you know, correct that
in post production or the cameras can do that on board and basically work around and change the lighting. But it
really doesn’t look as, it doesn’t create that natural 3D effect as having the lighting just dead perfect. So I thought
that was good because it was amazing. Like I watched you’ve Got Mail and Home Alone, I was watching some
scenes from and it’s just amazing how rich those images are. But yeah, once I test something from the past two or
three years in 4K, we’ll see how much better, you know, that looks or where it goes.
Speaker 1 – 16:18
The other thing that I had, this is kind of, it was funny. As far as running, I have a Coros running watch, which it’s
basically a Garmin, but cheaper. You know, it’s like for 200 bucks you can get this watch. And I’ve told the story about
how this summer the latest multiband GPS is the big thing. You want a GPS that can do more than one band so that
you Just have more possible signals to get a more accurate reading. Well, the cool thing is they have been adding
features as they go and the latest one about a month and a half ago was a Strava integration. And if you’re not on
Strava, in fact, friend me up on Strava, you’re over there. It’s basically the Facebook for, you know, running, biking,
fitness stuff.
Speaker 1 – 16:55
The feed is here’s my last couple workouts and so you can, you know, cheer people on and compare things. But the
interesting they have are these segments where there’s places on the map where everybody is competing against
each other. So like I have a 1 mile path on the bike path near me that there’s a leaderboard. Well, so they’ve added
the functionality where as I’m running, the watch will actually say, oh, okay, you’re starting a segment here, you’ve got
15 seconds to go and it has a pacer for you. And of course I presume that the pacer would be my personal best. You
know, it would show like, okay, here’s you the best time you’ve run this. Go ahead and you know, go race yourself
virtually.
Speaker 1 – 17:31
And you can see, you know, I’m ahead of, you know, one second ahead, two seconds ahead, two seconds behind.
Well, I’m going and I’m doing these segments around town and just getting my butt kicked up and down the road.
You know, I’m like, you know, on a half mile segment I’m like two minutes behind and I’m just, and I’m like, the winter
wasn’t that bad. I mean I did eat a lot of Christmas cookies, but I’m not, you know, that pathetically out of shape as I
was last year. Well, so then digging into the settings, you know, of course this is classic tech too. I’m like, well first I’ll
just go use it. And now I’m like, oh, maybe I better go read the manual. So I go back and read the instructions and
there’s different modes you can run it in.
Speaker 1 – 18:07
And the mode by default is called carrot. So you have to chase the carrot. But the carrot is not your personal best.
It’s whoever’s your first friend ahead of you on the list. Well, I have like some of my son’s classmates who run cross
country. And so the only friend on the list is 16 year old kid who weighs 100 pounds less than I do. So there is no
way I’m gonna, you know, get close to. And it’s not even that kid on his average day. It’s that kid on his best day. So,
yeah, all that to know. I got off of the carrot mode. I’ve switched it to pr, which sort of racing myself, so at least I have
a shot. But they had another funny one too. Another one you can select is Wolf, which is.
Speaker 1 – 18:46
The wolf is the closest person behind you. So you have to stay ahead of the wolf. You don’t want the wolf to catch
you. I thought that was funny, that was amusing. But yeah, I make my case for PR being the default as opposed to
the carrot so that you don’t feel like you’re just getting defeated on a regular basis. Yeah, that’s it. I don’t know any
gear stuff. You’re on the road testing all your stuff. Have you had anything else you’ve been playing with or has
helped you out?
Speaker 3 – 19:10
Nothing on the road front. But what I find interesting, there’s been a huge trend on TikTok in the last couple of weeks
of all the Chinese manufacturers and their influencers going on to TikTok and saying, hey, here’s this American
product that you Pay, you know, $1,000 for. You can order the exact same product but missing the logo because it’s
all the same fabrication line for, you know, $15. And they showed this like this one luxury purse breakdown, it was
$1,000 to actually build the thing. Soup to nuts, that is that the manufacturer that the end brand charges $38,000 for.
So it’s a 38x price increase. And so they’ve all gone to saying like, hey, you know that these prices are going up on all
these things.
Speaker 3 – 19:53
So I’m thinking I should start be looking at like things like Lava, you know, the wireless lavalier mics and stuff
because you obviously have, you know, rode has its things and these companies saying like, yeah, this is the exact
same board because it’s one manufacturing line. So you can get, if you don’t care about the logo, you just want the
thing to work, you can get this $200 piece of electronics for 15 and then yes, with the 145% tariff markup, you’re
going to pay 35 for it. 35 is still a lot less than the 200 that the brand is charging. So like there’s a business in here
somewhere of like, you know, here’s the logo list. Goods, you know, looks a lot like Lululemon. Exact same materials.
It just happens to not have that company’s logo on it.
Speaker 1 – 20:36
This is bound to happen. You know, so many of These things all come out of the same. But, yeah, like, I’m worried
about appliances. That’s just going to be so horrible. People don’t realize that you, like, you know, 90% of the
dishwashers and clothing washing machines all come out of the same factory. You know, there’s like 20 different
brands, but they’re all from the same place in China. So, yeah, 100% tariff on that stuff is going to be massive. But,
yeah, cut out the middleman and save yourself a ton of money. I can’t complain about that. That’s, you know, that’s if
you want.
Speaker 3 – 21:07
To get in on that. The portal I would suggest to the consumer is Alibaba’s AliExpress where you can order like one
item. You don’t have to order like a container’s worth. Like, I want to try this. This mouse up. I need to order 5,000.
But once you find a product that you like and you’re like, hey, you know what, even with the extra taxes, it’s worth it.
You might be like, you know, I’m going to have at the very least your company. If it’s something that would be aligned
with your brand, you might say like, yeah, we found a set of really killer wireless Bluetooth earbuds that have, you
know, they’re as good as this brand, but, you know, we can get them for $15 before extra taxes, $28 after, and you
slap your logo on them and you can off.
Speaker 3 – 21:51
You could be offering direct to your best customers as incentives and things like that. There’s a tremendous. We. I’ve
done incentive work, stuff like, you know, swag for directly from Chinese manufacturers and it’s been more than
good enough.
Speaker 1 – 22:05
For the trade show floor stays out of the landfill. That’s all that matters. Just make sure you’ve got enough lead time.
This is not the kind of thing you want to be placing your order two weeks out. You got to.
Speaker 3 – 22:16
Yeah, three months is more like it.
Speaker 1 – 22:18
Good luck with that. Keep us in the loop. If you run any campaigns, we’d love to hear about it. Otherwise, that’s going
to do it for this week. So until next week, enjoy the coffee.
Speaker 3 – 22:26
Enjoy the coffee.
Speaker 2 – 22:27
You’ve been listening to Marketing Over Coffee. Christopher Penn blogs at Christopher Pen Market overspenn.com
Read more from John J. Wall at jw5150.com the marketing over Coffee theme song is called Mellow G by
Funkmasters and you can find it at Musically from Mevio or follow the link in our show notes.
