Ep. 13 – The Emotion of Marketing with Kevin Knight.

Transcript

00:09
Ellie
Hi, Kevin, and welcome so much to the elusive consumer. We are really excited to talk to you today about all things marketing, as well as your role at Vida Health.

00:20
Kevin Knight
Thanks for having me.

00:22
Ellie
So, before we go into the specifics of your role and what working for a med tech company looks like, could you tell us how you first developed your love for marketing?

00:33
Kevin Knight
Oh, that’s. I mean, we’re going way back now. It actually goes back to high school. I didn’t know what marketing was. My dad worked in finance for a nonprofit his entire career. My mom was a teacher, and I didn’t know that there was anything like this. I mean, I grew up thinking, okay, I guess they’re sort of lawyers and doctors and, you know, maybe business people or whatever. And then I took a class in high school on business, and I think that my teacher wanted to give me a little bit of a nudge toward increased productivity in my high school career. And so she came to me one day and said, hey, I signed you up for the future business leaders of America. Some sort of competition. And I was like, what do you mean? Like what?

01:18
Kevin Knight
And she’s like, yeah, it’s in a couple of weeks on a Saturday. I’m like, you signed me up or something on a Saturday? And she’s like, yeah, sorry. You’re already committed. I’m like, all right. And so I went to it, and one of the things that they had us do was take a test on marketing. And this was multiple choice. It might have been some sort of, like, essay component or something to it. I don’t remember. I was, like, 16 years old, and as I went through, I was like, this is just the most intuitive stuff in the world. Like, this is the easiest test I’ve ever taken. And I came in first place. And from then on, I just started thinking about.

01:51
Kevin Knight
I love this idea of connecting a buyer with the product that they’re looking for and doing so in sort of creative and fun ways. In my early college years, my neighbor and I started a window washing business, and that was, I guess the first ad I ever wrote is we passed out flyers in our neighborhood that said, we got this kind of blurry font, and it said, eyes going bad. Maybe it’s just those dirty windows, and then had our number to call us, and the rest is history, as they say.

02:24
Ellie
Very nice. I always love talking to someone who’s truly passionate about their role. I mean, we all have works and jobs, but finding people who have that internal sort of drive for what they do is always more fascinating. So you’ve worked at some of the big tech companies, everything from Google, Microsoft, Meta and Pinterest. Can you talk us through that career journey and how those roles shaped your professional view of marketing?

02:58
Kevin Knight
Yeah, you know, that’s interesting too. It’s amazing how if you look back on your career, there were these little moments that stand out to you as being really defining. But at the time they didn’t feel so defining. They certainly didn’t feel like forks in the road. And in my case, I was at MIT doing my interview to hopefully get into business school there. At the MIT Sloan school. I did end up going there. And as I was waiting in the sort of reception area to go have my interview, they had these pamphlets that had kind of sample career trajectories and there was one for entrepreneurship.

03:29
Kevin Knight
And it said, the first x number of years of your career you should spend working for a big company, make your mistakes on their dime, learn as much as you can, and then sort of move smaller and smaller until maybe eventually you start your own company. You’re never really going to retire because you’re always going to keep advising and keep some figures in different pies. And I don’t think I thought that much of that at the time. But it’s amazing however many years, 1516 years later, I still remember that. And it actually has served as a pretty interesting blueprint for my career. So I went to work for Google when it was about a 20,000 person company.

04:10
Kevin Knight
And then I graduated from business school in what is probably the worst time in history to graduate from business school, which was the summer of zero nine. So everything had collapsed and nobody was hiring. And Google instituted a hiring freeze on all of their non engineering roles. And so Microsoft swept in much bigger organization, about 90,000 people at the time. And they could absorb, there were like 18 of us interns at Google, at least in that sort of part of the business. They could absorb most of us. And so I think at least half of us ended up at Microsoft. And that was fascinating. I learned how a different sort of big company, publicly traded company, operates things, how it runs things, got a lot of exposure to global business there.

04:50
Kevin Knight
But I still found myself itching to do what I had initially intended to do, which was start with the Google experience and then maybe move upstream from there. When I had the chance to join Facebook in 2010, which was at the time a pretty small company of 2000 people, I took the leap, moved down to the Bay Area and learned so much. And what I learned there is how fulfilling it was to scale a company, and a lot of people refer to that as building a company, and certainly it is in many respects. But I was early enough at Facebook to know the people who were truly early at Facebook. These are the people who had to figure it out. And the war stories they had were just absolutely exhilarating. And so I found myself increasingly wanting to have that truly early experience.

05:42
Kevin Knight
And so when I had the chance to join Pinterest, when it was 100 people, I jumped at that chance and really got that. Let’s figure it out. Build stage experience. I joined about 18 months before Pinterest monetized. I was very involved in the monetization strategy. I personally approved all of the ads that ran on Pinterest for the first six months that we had ads just to make sure we set the right tone. So I really was able to get that experience that a lot of my friends who’d been really early at Facebook got. And then I wanted to have the CMO role at a smaller company. So the company called expert voice that I had been advising, they asked me to come be CMO. You know, it was definitely bittersweet to leave Pinterest.

06:25
Kevin Knight
I loved and continued to love that place, but I went to my first CMO gig, and then maybe I can pause there. But that’s sort of how I progressed from sort of big to small.

06:37
Ellie
That’s quite the journey. And with all the big players as well, we’ll touch upon how it is and what it’s like working at a smaller organization versus the big players and what marketing looks like in terms of differences between the two. Firstly, I know you’ve talked about differences in terms of B two B versus b two C marketing, and you’re quite adamant that people should stop from separating those two. Could you elaborate a bit on that?

07:08
Kevin Knight
You bet. I understand why from a budgetary standpoint, and even from an organizational standpoint, you might need to have a line of demarcation between B two B and B two C. But from a career perspective, I do not think anybody particularly early in their career, should be so quick to define themselves as either a b two B marketer or a b two C marketer. And the reason for that is, as someone who has straddled b, two B and B two C for my entire career, it is amazing how much of one area you draw upon to be really successful in the other area. The way that I generally, and this is, of course, a huge generalization, think of b two C marketing is. It’s quite a bit more emotional in general. Right? You’re trying to get that emotional hook with a consumer.

07:52
Kevin Knight
It’s easier to do that because you can kind of picture the consumer, you can talk to the consumer might be a lot like you. And ultimately you’re just trying to tell stories and really stand out in, particularly in advertising, where there’s a lot of noise and the stuff that stands out and the stuff that gets through and the stuff that evokes the kind of emotion that leads to a purchase tends to be more creative in consumer marketing. And then if you look at b two B, a lot of people think that, oh, it’s unemotional, just stack rank these things and these features matter to me and these features don’t, and it’s a completely unemotional sale, but that’s not true at all. Of course, you’ve still got humans buying these things.

08:32
Kevin Knight
And my favorite example of this is actually Volvo trucks, which is a b two B organization. I don’t know of any consumers who are buying 18 wheel big rigs, its businesses that do that. And Volvo and their agency partners at Forschman, they really picked up on this idea that the people who ultimately were going to place an order for Volvo trucks were dads and husbands and brothers and had friends, and they wanted to be cool, too. And they wanted people to think that it was cool that they drove or bought Volvo trucks. And so out of that insight was born the now infamous Jean Claude Van Damme epic split ad and a whole series of really cool videos that went very viral on YouTube.

09:19
Kevin Knight
And that is, I think, the perfect example of how you can tap into emotion in a b two B sales cycle. If you approach the b two B audience from more of a consumer mindset. Now, at the same time, traditional b two b marketing, I think, makes you really good at sophisticated marketing sequences. You’ve got people at different stages of the funnel and you’re nurturing them and sending them emails, and you are segmenting them and you’re thinking very sophisticatedly about the handoff from one channel, say, ads, to the next channel, email, even before you get a sale. And I think if you bring that rigor and sophistication to consumer marketing, as someone who maybe has spent more of your early career in b two B, it’s going to give you an advantage in b two C marketing as well.

10:10
Kevin Knight
So I see them playing off of one another, because ultimately, the people that we’re selling to, regardless of what we’re marketing, are human.

10:19
Ellie
Absolutely. That’s a really valid point. We always say in market research that if you’ve done b, two b, two c will come much more naturally to you. Because if you’re able to target those hard to reach companies within that b, two b space, then finding the niche audiences or the elusive consumers is going to be considerably easier. So I like that you thought about that in terms of not separating the two. Now, I want touch a little bit on the aspect of social media in both of these, in the regard of b two B and b two C marketing with the rise of various platforms. What is your view on engagement with the two different audiences and using these types of platforms for connecting with business professionals as well as consumers?

11:15
Kevin Knight
You know, I am endlessly surprised by people who continue to think that LinkedIn is the only place to play for b two B now, LinkedIn is a great place to play for b two B, and I probably wouldn’t do a lot of b two C on LinkedIn, but not for the reason people might think. The reason is rather that LinkedIn is pretty expensive, if you think about it, the same people who log into LinkedIn log into Facebook and TikTok and Pinterest and Instagram, and you name it. And if you can find a way of reaching them on those other platforms, it tends to be cheaper because there just tends to be a lot more volume of impressions and also it’s a little bit harder. It takes more effort.

12:00
Kevin Knight
It’s easier to say, hey, LinkedIn, give me everybody with a CMO title who works at a company with this many employees or more to go and build the type of targeting that you would need to reach a similar audience on a consumer platform like a Pinterest, for example, you would have to put a lot more effort into it. And it’s in that effort that comes the reward of lower cpms, lower cpas, lower CPC’s. So I’m a big fan of cross pollinating because at the end of the day, they’re all human.

12:32
Ellie
And what about not just using these different platforms, but also in particular for the b two C, the rise of misinformation that exists on different platforms? How can brands more effectively ensure accuracy and credibility of content that they’re sharing to also avoid it being misused?

12:54
Kevin Knight
Gosh, that takes me back to the early days of Facebook, where advertising on Facebook was nowhere near ubiquitous back in 2010. And I can remember having so many conversations with marketers at big brands whose legal teams were saying, you know what, you can’t market on Facebook. We’re just not going to let you. And as we started to probe and get a little bit deeper into the rationale. They would say things like, well, what if we run an ad or even just post something on Facebook, and then some random person makes a comment, maybe that is construed as a claim on our part. And it was this enormously gray area, which I think has since been very much settled.

13:37
Kevin Knight
However, the underlying concern persists, arguably even more today, which is, well, what if somebody says something that’s fundamentally untrue or unnecessarily unproductively provocative in the same sort of experience in which I’m running my ads? And I don’t know that I have a perfect answer for that. I don’t think anybody does, which is why it continues to be so messy, except to say that the world is messy. And the brands who are willing to wade into the mess and figure out a way to navigate it will reap the rewards. And the brands who sit on the sideline will just have to wait and it’ll all be figured out. But they’ll be late to the game and they will have missed out. On the upside.

14:19
Kevin Knight
But I do think that it is important for brands, and obviously, we see this happening like crazy around Twitter, where it’s. Many folks would say that it’s gotten toxic. And that means you’ve got to, as a marketer, as a CMO, as a CEO, you’ve got to make a decision about how deep you’re willing to wade in and what type of toxicity you’re willing to wade into. But in general, I think the world around us has a degree of toxicity and polarization, and we can’t stick our heads in the sand in the real world any more than we can in the online world. And to use that as an excuse to sit out of advertising probably doesn’t make sense. At the same time, this forms the basis of pinterest ad pitch, right?

15:01
Kevin Knight
Where they’re saying, look, there is a place on the Internet that’s largely free from this sort of riffraff, and LinkedIn would make similar claims and others to varying degrees. And so I do think that the onus is on the platforms to make sure that they keep it as positive as possible so that this doesn’t become a distraction.

15:18
Ellie
Right. And in terms of the corporations and brands that are looking to utilize different channels, whether social media or others, what do you think is the role of marketing and how is it, in terms of the next, let’s say, five years or so, evolving, considering the advancements that also happening in technology, with AI, with VR, with augmented reality and the rest.

15:46
Kevin Knight
Yeah, well, maybe it’s the Sci-Fi that we’ve been exposed to, like Star wars and the Jetsons and so many others, but it is amazing how quickly we humans jump to an interpretation that advancing technology is advancing to an end of ultimately replacing humans. And certainly that has been the case time and again over history. The people who used to operate elevators have been replaced by computers that operate elevators. Even horses have been replaced by cars in most places. So there is an element that has been around for a very long time, ever since the advent of tools, where you can use tools and technology to replace humans, or at least human labor. However, I think the far more interesting side of this coin is how can this technology be brought to bear to unlock greater human potential?

16:46
Kevin Knight
So from, I’ll give an example from healthcare, for example, because I work now at beta health and I’m exposed to this all the time, a lot of people think, well, gosh, it would be so much more efficient if people didn’t have to talk to healthcare providers, if bots could do the whole thing. I mean, okay, yeah, it would be more efficient. But is efficiency the end goal of everything we do? Or to what extent does efficacy play into this? Obviously, in healthcare, efficacy plays a major role. And I think a far more interesting question is to what extent can that technology free up the healthcare providers whose superpower is the fact that they are human and they’re able to connect with other humans on a human level? How can the technology set them up to have more time to use their superpowers?

17:27
Kevin Knight
So in healthcare, you’ve got to do things like take notes after every visit, and you’ve got to do scheduling and all of those types of administrative things. Most people don’t get into healthcare, particularly not providers, because they want to spend time writing down notes and processing paperwork and doing administrative tasks. If technology can do a lot of those things, then the healthcare provider is able to spend much more of their time doing the stuff that draws on their superpower. The same is true here for marketers. Let’s take ad creation as an example. Anybody who does any advertising knows that in a world of sophisticated a b testing, you want to have lots of different variations of your ad and be testing those.

18:11
Kevin Knight
The production of all of those different variations, subtle changes in the color of the call to action button, or different call to actions, or a different shade of ad or things like that. That’s not really making the best use of any marketer or designer’s time. That time would better spent thinking about who the person is you’re trying to reach and engage and what other messages might be more interesting for them. And so, yeah, I think that if you were to hold a marketers workload consistent and fast forward by even a year or two, you would find that many of the tasks that marketers do today will be replaced very shortly by technology. However, if marketers think about this as a how can I harness this technology to get me to free up more time for the stuff that only humans can do?

19:03
Kevin Knight
I think ultimately they will have more fun and be more effective.

19:07
Ellie
Very valid point. A topic that’s covered across all industries at the moment. Now, you mentioned Vita health briefly, so let’s talk about that. And for our listeners who might not be familiar, could you give us an overview of your organization and its mission in healthcare?

19:25
Kevin Knight
Yeah, you bet. So if you look at, if you ask anybody, most people will say the american healthcare system is pretty darn broken, but it’s broken in so many different ways that it can be hard to kind of see why. So if you look at things like causes of death, cardiometabolic disease, which is basically the effect on our bodies of obesity and prediabetes, or insulin resistance and diabetes, and high blood pressure and high cholesterol, all of that kind of stuff is not only one of the leading causes of death in America, but it makes every other leading cause of death worse. Cancer outcomes are much worse for people with cardiometabolic disease. Heart disease is obviously affected by cardiometabolic disease. Hence the cardio Covid incidence of death with COVID were much higher in people who had cardio metabolic disease.

20:15
Kevin Knight
If you want to really help people, it’s a natural place to start. And as you start to unpack it, you find that one of the limitations of our healthcare system is that doctors tend to only have literally a handful of minutes to spend with each patient, and that’s not enough to effectuate the kind of behavior change that most people need in order to change their lifestyle and get healthier. And so what beta health does is brings to their healthcare providers, registered dietitians and the like to help people to change their behavior. And if you talk to people every week for a few months, you can really start to change their habits in a way that traditional medicine has not been able to.

20:56
Kevin Knight
So today, beta continues to be very focused, as we have been for the last ten years, on cardiometabolic, but very specifically on obesity and diabetes. And we do it mainly through virtual care. And in addition to that one one coaching we also have doctors and offer prescription medications, which are very helpful for a lot of people on these conditions.

21:16
Ellie
And it’s such a hot topic at the moment, particularly around the drugs that help improve obesity and diabetes. Is that something that you see, particularly with some of the current drugs that are in short supply? Do you think that’s going to continue be of high importance for this particular industry? And do you think people are going to be more open to utilizing those types of drugs?

21:45
Kevin Knight
Oh, absolutely. And the reason these drugs are in short supply is because so many people want to use them who really don’t need them. They would probably benefit from other things. So we have just onboarded a lot of people in the month of January into what we call obesity step therapy, where we basically take them and we say, okay, well, if the goal here is to achieve weight loss, and I’m not talking, does Kevin fit into his favorite bikini? Weight loss. I’m talking to, is Kevin healthy? Weight loss. I’m talking, does Kevin have too high blood sugar or dangerously high blood pressure, those types of things that can lead to hospitalization and really affect your lifestyle, your quality of life?

22:28
Kevin Knight
If that’s the goal, and it’s not a cosmetic thing that we’re looking for, then the reality is most people don’t need those GLP one medications, even though many people do. And they are an absolute, wonder for those who do they. They work when nothing else seems to. But what I find and what we see in the data is that a lot of people who think that they have tried to lose weight without medications have really just been on a rollercoaster of ups and downs, as they follow along with a never ending array of bad diets. And that’s very different from having someone who understands nutrition, like a registered dietitian, who can help you understand what’s going on your body and help you make those changes.

23:07
Kevin Knight
So I’ve just been amazed as a, you know, we talk about consumers as a regular consumer who also happens to be an employee of a company like this. The amount that I’ve learned and the way that I’ve been able to incorporate into my life has been amazing. So, yeah, I do think the drugs are here to stay. I think that’s good news. And I think that the more attention we pay as a society to obesity as a chronic disease and not as a cosmetic condition or some sort of cosmetic flaw, then the more we can help people get healthy. And I do want to point out here, very important, when I say healthy, I’m not talking about a body mass index, necessarily. I’m not talking about a certain look or a certain shape.

23:46
Kevin Knight
I’m talking about clinical biomarkers like blood pressure and insulin resistance and things like that. And I think it is very likely that we will see great success with these drugs and other anti obesity measures that, well still end up with a celebration of people who come in all shapes and sizes and are just, on the whole, much healthier.

24:06
Ellie
Yeah, very true. And I want touch a little bit on the point you mentioned on the insights that you’ve seen in the data, because that’s all that we do all day long. But how does Vita health and your team leverage data and insights to create your marketing strategies and to better engage with your audience?

24:27
Kevin Knight
Well, ultimately, I like that you asked us what our mission was. I think that the reason why all of us employees are at Vita Health is because of the mission. We want to do our part to help people get healthier and happier and leave a positive impact on the world. So, for us, it all comes down as a marketer. It’s nice because all of my incentives are aligned with people getting healthier. In order for them to get healthier, they need to stick with their program, whatever that personalized program might look like after they begin consultations with their healthcare provider on the be that app. But, of course, as with any app, a lot of people will stop using it. That’s churn, and Churn is a reality of any app based business.

25:08
Kevin Knight
One way that we are looking at data right now, which I’m finding very energizing and fulfilling and interesting, is to look at what are the reasons why people churned to? Because at the most simplistic level, we can look at that and say, well, you’ve got active users and churned users, and the churned users need to be reminded to come back. Yeah, a lot of them probably do just need a reminder to come back. Others have churned because maybe their healthcare provider retired or left Vida to start their own practice. Maybe they went on a long vacation, and they just sort of fell out of the habit of using the Vida app, and it’s out of sight, out of mind.

25:46
Kevin Knight
Maybe they got a new phone and they couldn’t figure out how to transfer all of their old apps onto it, so they started with a clean slate, and they didn’t think to download the Vita app, and it’s just, they haven’t thought of it in a while, and all of a sudden, it’s six months, and, oh, well, I feel pretty good. Let’s not worry about it anymore. And this is where I think there’s this perfect intersection of data and the insights that make great marketers. You’ve got to first look at the data for signal that tells you, oh, there’s a group of people who look very similar. Their patterns that we see emerging in the behavior are quite similar.

26:19
Kevin Knight
And now you’ve got to put on your marketer’s hat and try and figure out what’s going on in their lives, develop Personas, figure out what makes them tick and how you can. I don’t want to use the word exploit because it sounds negative, but basically figure out how to use what makes them tick to motivate them to come back and get healthier, which ultimately is the outcome that everybody wants.

26:39
Ellie
Very interesting. That whole behavior change is incredibly, just fascinating to think about and talk about as well, especially going through the different pandemic that we’ve been through and everything that’s happening geopolitically. Getting people to stay consistent with their health proactively must be such a huge challenge for organizations such as yours and see healthcare as a journey rather than a reactive thing. And I think part of that is also something that we’ve talked about in the past with different guests in terms of the healthcare provider’s role and how open they are to be more sort of proactive about people’s health rather than reactive. So the healthcare providers that you have on your program, how do you go about onboarding them and making them truly engaged with this mission of truly accepting this more proactive approach to healthcare?

27:46
Kevin Knight
It’s a great question, and I think the answer to it has an enormous amount of commonality with marketing. So Vida hires. The most common credential that we hire for is a registered dietitian. And registered dietitians will have a certain baseline of expertise around nutrition, of course, but one incremental training that we run everybody through, which is an important part of our unique approach to this, is motivational. Interviewing if you look at any of these chronic diseases that I’ve been mentioning, they have an enormous overlap with mental health conditions like depression and anxiety. It remains to be figured out the extent to which the chicken came first or the egg came first. But the reality is that a lot of people, and in some populations, a majority of people who have diabetes also have depression.

28:43
Kevin Knight
A lot of people who have depression anxiety also have obesity. A lot of people who have obesity also have anxiety. And it’s this sort of complicated web of mind and body. When we hire registered dietitians, we put them through incremental training to help them learn how to do motivational interviewing, which is a best practice that comes from really the practice of therapy to understand what really motivates somebody. And what you’ll find is some people, let’s just take a handful of people that all want to lose weight. Some of those, let’s just say we’ve got three people. One of those people might want to lose weight because they have their 30th high school reunion coming up and they don’t feel, you know, like themselves and they want to, you know, maybe for them it is a little bit more appearance based.

29:32
Kevin Knight
That is a reality of the world that we live in, and it is certainly going to be a motivator for some people. Another person might have recently had their annual exam and their doctor says you’re pre diabetic and unless you lose five to 7% of your body weight, you’re going to advance to diabetes. And diabetes comes with all kinds of scary health complications that we’d like to avoid if we can help it. And that person sort of gets a wake up call and somebody else, maybe they just find that they’re not able to live the lifestyle that they want anymore. They want to be out. Maybe their kids are getting a little bit older and they want to be out hiking with their kids and doing the FuN outdoor activities or playing sports basketball in the front yard with their kids.

30:10
Kevin Knight
And they’re not able to do it because they’re not in shape to be able to do it. You have to be able to figure out what motivates those people to put together a health plan, a program that will be sustainable for them. If you put everyone into a one size fits all, most people are not going to be able to stick with it. And of course, that’s the magic that underlies the best marketing campaigns. There’s marketing campaigns that sound like they’re just yelling their value proposition over and over. Then there’s marketing campaigns where you see them and you’re like, my goodness, they have absolutely nailed the unique selling proposition to that consumer and its harder to do, but if you can do it, the results are much better in both healthcare and marketing.

30:50
Ellie
Thats an interesting point. And then it leads me to my other question regarding balancing that personalization and addressing health data privacy concerns. How do you handle that, particularly in your role in marketing healthcare services?

31:07
Kevin Knight
Yeah, you know, it’s really important. It’s a highly regulated industry and with good reason. Right. Health data is sensitive data and a lot of people are very private about there’s the common people don’t like to talk about their age. People certainly don’t like to talk about their weight. And a lot of people don’t want to talk about the fact they may have prediabetes or high blood pressure or things like that. And even if they don’t mind talking about it, they have a right to privacy with it, and we have to honor that. And so the way that I have to do this, and it’s a very interesting balance, is I want to be as sophisticated as I can in finding the right people for whom this value proposition will resonate.

31:50
Kevin Knight
But then when I approach them with, for example, an advertisement or a piece of direct mail or something like that, I have to be mindful of the possibility of, and I hold myself to an even higher bar than the regulations. I hold myself to a bar of I just don’t want anybody to think that I know too much about them. I want to figure out what motivates them, but I don’t want to ever come across as being creepy. And that is a potential for everything we do in digital advertising. We’ve sort of gotten used to the fact that if we click on a pair of shoes on eBay, that same pair of shoes might follow us around the Internet for weeks to come.

32:34
Kevin Knight
But when that first started happening, it definitely had a creep factor and spawned a whole bunch of episodes of things like Black Mirror. And so I think that it’s a blessing to work in healthcare and recognize that privacy is important, and just because you can doesn’t mean you should. And ultimately, I think we have to remember that there’s humans on the other side of every marketing and sales equation, and we don’t want to do anything that’s going to make anybody feel uncomfortable, even if maybe there’s going to be some short term performance gains, I think it’s always going to come back around and hurt you, right?

33:07
Ellie
Absolutely. I want to talk a little bit about differences in terms of marketing towards various generations. There’s a lot of talk about Gen Z versus millennials, etcetera. You’ve talked about the differences, or rather similarities, of b two b and b two C marketing. What’s your thoughts on marketing across generations?

33:30
Kevin Knight
Well, that is a big part of what I get to do at Vida. We have clients. So the way it works is organizations like health insurance companies, health plans, or employers will pay for Vida on behalf of their employees or plan members. With rare exception, people don’t pay for Vida on their own. It’s paid for by somebody else who benefits from them being healthier because the way the american healthcare system works. And so I find myself every day looking at a starting point of people who are eligible to sign up for Vida and don’t have to pay for it themselves. And those people range from people in their early twenties, even 18, all the way up to people in their late seventies, maybe eighties.

34:22
Kevin Knight
And I tell you, one of the things that I have learned, and this gets back to that idea of, you’ve really got to understand the consumer and what makes them tick, younger generations are far more likely to take a stronger interest in their own health. Obviously, I’m generalizing here where others are maybe a little bit more content to see themselves as consumers of healthcare. And ultimately, maybe it’s the doctor’s job to help them get better and figure out what medication will work and things like that. That is a shift that I’m seeing a very big difference between, if we just draw a line right down the middle at, call it age 45 or 50, those younger tend to be very willing to try new things to improve their health.

35:08
Kevin Knight
And I think a lot of this is because there’s a lot more, you know, here we are on a podcast. There’s a lot more podcasts about health these days. There wasn’t like health radio back when I was growing up. My mom didn’t drive around listening to health radio. She listened to news. But now people listen to health radio in the form of dozens and dozens of highly acclaimed podcasts. So I think people care a lot more about it and are willing to take a lot more active role in their own health, which is good for them and good for marketers.

35:36
Ellie
And do you use different, I’m assuming you would use different approaches for each of those segments and Personas based on their preferences. But do you also use different channels to target them?

35:51
Kevin Knight
You know, I use most of the same channels for everybody, but where I try to bring out the difference, though, of course different channels will perform better. But I’m going to, a lot of people will often say, like, oh, well, I don’t think many people say this these days, but certainly for a long time it was, well, do Internet ads work for older people? Of course they do. We all see the older people who we love alive and well on Facebook every day, though of course, they’re less prominent on platforms like TikTok. But ultimately, what I find is most important is that the message that hits people be a message that resonates with them. And for a message to resonate, it has to both sound right and look right, it has to say the right things.

36:44
Kevin Knight
So that might be a compelling testimonial or a statistic about, you know, improved health outcomes or, you know, something like that. Or it might just feature someone who looks more like them. I will share. I was recently looking at some data, too. I also see some breakdowns in gender, particularly among younger populations. Just as I said that younger populations tend to be a little bit more keen to invest in their health earlier on. Younger women tend to be a lot more engaged in this than younger Mendez. So I find that if I am to offer, for example, a free diabetes tends to affect people who are a little bit older. Why don’t we say weight loss solution?

37:34
Kevin Knight
If I offer a free weight loss solution to a population that reflects the makeup of the american adulthood, those who are older will convert at a higher rate, those who are younger and female at the second highest. And ultimately, the younger males are the ones who, I don’t know, maybe we still feel invisible and are less likely to. We need a little bit more humility in the way of lab results or something, but that’s the most reluctant population.

38:01
Ellie
Interesting. We always talk about who’s the most elusive consumer group for each of our guests, and I would never have guessed that particular audience for your organization. So that’s really interesting to hear.

38:16
Kevin Knight
Yeah, me neither. Give me more older folks.

38:21
Ellie
In terms of the future, or rather first, before we look ahead, is there any particular initiative or campaign that you’ve been part of that you’re very proud of and that you can talk us through?

38:34
Kevin Knight
Oh, I mean, I’ve been fortunate to be part of lots of really exciting ones, but maybe one that’s timely because we’re right around Super bowl time, is I had the opportunity when I was at Facebook. I worked in a group called the Facebook Creative Shop, which was like an in house creative agency. And I was working closely with the team at Frito Lay and the CMO at Frito Lay, and the leadership of the Doritos brand approached us and said, look, we’ve been doing crash the Super bowl for a long time. These are the ads that people might remember from a few years ago, dating back to many years ago, over a decade ago, where anybody could make an ad for Doritos, and then the winning ad would get to play live during the Super bowl.

39:22
Kevin Knight
And what the Doritos team said to us is, look, the Internet has changed a lot since we first started this campaign, and we would like to reimagine what this could look like in today’s Internet and what characterized today’s Internet in that day. This would have been, I don’t know, 2013 or so, is of course, that it was much more social and interactive. And so we designed a new app. Instead of just having these people who would create their own ads and sort of submit them, we created an app where people could come. And maybe you just had a good idea for a Super bowl ad, but you didn’t have any equipment or filming skills or acting skills. You could find other people who live near you who wanted to collaborate one. Maybe they had production skills but didn’t have any ideas.

40:13
Kevin Knight
And it was by far the most successful of these crash the Super bowl campaigns in terms of its reach and its benefit to the brand, its increase in sales, all of those types of things. And its a good reminder to me that we constantly have to be reevaluating even the stuff that is working the best in our marketing portfolio and ask ourselves, what is different about the world today than when we first incepted this idea? And is there anything we should do today to change the way we approach it to make it even better?

40:42
Ellie
That’s a very interesting point. I want to look ahead now, and I want to talk about emerging trends that you’re paying attention to, particularly in marketing overall, but especially in that intersection of health and technology. Is there anything you’re seeing in terms of mindset shifts or trends that you think will shape the future of health and technology?

41:09
Kevin Knight
Gosh, there’s so many. I’m going to avoid the cliche of talking about AI here, because that’s sort of an obvious, I think rather, there’s the infamous quote of, I know half my advertising is wasted, I just never know which half. And the reason for that, of course, is that targeting is very hard. So in the early days, we used demographics as a proxy for psychographics, because we didn’t have psychographics. So, for example, if you wanted to run ads for laundry detergent in the 1960s, you would run them on daytime television, obviously, hence the name soap operas, because that’s when a lot of moms were watching television and moms at that time were making the vast majority of purchase decisions as it relates to laundry detergent.

42:00
Kevin Knight
Of course, it would better if you could find a way to just find people who are shopping for laundry detergent. And over time, we’ve gotten better at that. Cookies kind of enabled that and as privacy. And this is what I say about sort of, this is why we can’t have nice things if we use the technology at our disposal in ways that creep people out, we’re going to find that stuff is taken away from us, it’s regulated away, or ultimately the platform start changing the way that we’re able to deploy that technology in a way that protects a consumer sense of security and safety and privacy. I think the most interesting thing for me, though, it’s far from the sexiest thing in the future. The near future of marketing, is how is the way we target people going to evolve?

42:49
Kevin Knight
We first saw this manifest in the changes to iOS 14. We now see it manifesting in efforts to do away with cookies. We see it with GDPR. The regulatory environment, I think, is going to continue to evolve. And ultimately, I think it just comes back to the craft of marketing. If we get really, really good at understanding what our consumer wants, and we can spread that message in a compelling way that evokes emotion and that stands out from all of the noise, then it’s always going to be the x factor that differentiates an okay campaign from a great campaign from a performance perspective.

43:34
Ellie
Right. And that was actually going to be my last question in regards to do’s and don’ts or advice that you would give to brands that are looking to connect better with their audiences, whether it’s b two B or B two C. But you’ve touched upon that already. If there’s any other tips that you could think of.

43:55
Kevin Knight
Well, I think it’s just remembering in this day and age, and obviously a central theme of this discussion has been data. We have to remember that in every spreadsheet cell, there are people represented in those numbers. And in no field is that as important, arguably, than marketing, where if we lose sight of the people there and start to just pull these levers in sort of anonymous technology for the sake of technology driven ways and do wrong by the consumer, that it comes back to haunt us.

44:29
Kevin Knight
If we do right by the consumer all the way from developing the right products that are based on the right insights and getting them in front of the right people at the right time in a way that makes people feel happy about them and excited and engaged and interested and entertained in some cases, then that’s how it’s going to work. And it’s as true today as it’s ever been in marketing. Without connection, marketing is doomed to fail.

44:53
Ellie
Love that perfect ending to our session. Thank you so much, Kevin, for taking the time to join us today. That was very interesting to hear your thoughts on marketing generally and more about Vita health. Thank you so much.

45:06
Kevin Knight
Thank you, Ellie.

About Our Guest