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On Episode 58 of the “Law & Business” Podcast, Anthony sits down with James Kwon, the CEO and Executive Strategy Chef of Figmints, a digital marketing agency in Providence, Rhode Island. Figmints has cracked the code on creating, developing, and delivering the scalable, repeatable marketing, and sales models that create results, drive revenue, and keep its clients smiling.
The conversation is about the Three Items Marketers Need to Know Now – right now, with the COVID pandemic hitting. Earlier, the podcast discussed why now is a perfect time for companies to continue to advertise – here are some thoughts on the strategy of how to advertise and market.
A lightly-edited transcript follows:
Anthony Verna: (00:02)
All right, everyone. Welcome to the Law and Business podcast. With me is James Kwon from Figments. How are you doing James?
James Kwon:
I’m doing as well as I can be. Thanks, Anthony.
Anthony Verna:
You’re feeling a little cabin fever lately?
James Kwon:
There’s certainly the Groundhog Day scenario of repetition. I just had a great morning check-in huddle with the team and just reminding them to break the repetition and to stay sane. And that was my tip for this week.
Anthony Verna:
I think that’s a very good, good tip for this week and I have to check in with my team as well. Our team is split between the East coast and the West coast. So I generally don’t have like a one team phone call.
James Kwon:
That makes sense.
Anthony Verna:
Yeah. So James, tell us a little bit about yourself and a little about Figments as an agency.
James Kwon: (00:58)
Yeah, happy to. So, I run a digital marketing firm, full service digital firm called figments fig M I N T s.com. And, we do storytelling that actually proves revenue results. So start with brand storytelling, logo design, website design development, because of course we have to, but this last part where we’re actually proving results for clients by setting up digital automation, content creation, thought leadership so we can drive traffic and see real results happen, and we actually do some of those calls on behalf of the client. So we’re really trying to take as much of that funnel responsibility as possible. And I’ve been running an agency now for, it’s our eighth year. We’re about 20 full time employees. Since Figments I’ve started about nine companies so I’m a little bit of a serial entrepreneur. Have a little, some startups and some software companies and some subsidiaries.
I just got invited to speak at Inbound. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it.
Anthony Verna:
I am certainly familiar. I’m certainly familiar with it. I mean, everybody listening is, sure.
James Kwon:
So Inbound, it’s the largest marketing conference in the world. It’s run by the software tool, HubSpot’s, which is very fast growing. It’s a hot stock to keep your eye on and just got invited to speak which is flattering.
Anthony Verna:
One particular question you certainly said that your agency helps with thought leadership, which is a buzzword, but I’m gonna have you break it down. What does thought leadership exactly mean?
James Kwon:
Yeah, great question. So this day…
Anthony Verna:
I only try to ask the great ones, man. I try not to ask stupid ones.
James Kwon:
Great job so far. So the thought leadership is a principle behind content marketing where today buyers are more informed than ever because they can go online, they can research blogs, they just go to Google and start searching.
Well, what do I need to know if I’m going to hire a great patent attorney? Or what do I need to know if I’m going to hire a great agency? And you can find a lot of information. The person who can author that great content becomes the authority in that world. And so, this is the category we call thought leadership. If you can start to author a lot of great content, all of a sudden your name gets attached to all these great SEO content, all these great keywords when people are searching for that particular niche, that particular item, your name starts to keep come up more and more. And so you become the thought leader in that category.
Anthony Verna:
Gotcha. Sir. I just wanted to break out the buzzword. That’s, that’s all.
James Kwon:
It’s so funny.
It’s like the curse of knowledge. I don’t even think about that as a buzzword anymore. It’s so ingrained in my…
Anthony Verna:
As a lawyer, I’m a trained cynic. So I was going to make, I want to make sure, and also somebody recently said that I take complex ideas and I break them down so that the average person can understand the well. So, I do want to try to break, that is a goal of mine is to try to break things down so that everybody can understand.
James Kwon:
That’s great.
Anthony Verna:
As best as possible. Cause that’s not always true. Right. So, let’s talk about three particular rules that businesses need to remember while this pandemic is going on, our lockdown is going on, our self quarantine is going on. However we would like to define this right now.
James Kwon: (04:44)
Sure. Yeah. It was so interesting when you gave me this prompt to think about, just so the listeners know you came up with this idea that the three rules, that are highlighted. And it was interesting the way you phrased it because I don’t think a lot of people think about marketing in terms of rules. And so, I kinda had to go back and do a little bit of research myself. Like what would be the rules around marketing? And then I stumbled upon a book that I read probably 10 years ago called The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Reese and Jack Trout which is a classic. Al Reese is toted for having created the category of marketing positioning, which is something many companies use on a daily basis, you know, positioning yourself against your competitors, right?
So, highly recommend this book. Anybody listening? It is a classic, it’s textbook marketing literature. You should absolutely check it out. And what else are you doing these days? You should absolutely be trying to better yourself. And this is a great book to pick up, but there are 22 laws. We don’t have time go through all the laws here, but I’ve found there’s six themes. I’ll go over the six themes to give you a general idea of what the book is about. I thought it would be good to kind of highlight three or four different laws in the book that I think are really relevant today. If if you think that’s all right.
Anthony Verna:
Absolutely. So let’s go, let’s jump right into these six themes that you’ve thought of.
James Kwon: (06:23)
So, first one is be first. Yeah. So, in the book, the first few laws around leadership category, mind perception, the general principle here is the authors are encouraging you to be first in a category or to be the first one that says something. And if you can’t be the first one that invented sugary caffeinated drink, you can be the first one that has a sugary caffeinated drink that tastes like cherries. I don’t know. So there’s different ways to be the first in the consumer’s mind. Or you could just be the first in their mind or you can be perceived as the best of the first in a certain way. So I think being first is extremely, it’s a strong law around marketing.
Anthony Verna:
I would tend to agree with you there.
You know, one of the things that I find interesting is when I try to peg a keyword, not with just a blog post, but also with one of my video blog posts. And I noticed that the SEO when it goes up with my video, my video transcript, maybe some other notes on it, you know, it tends to go up because I might not be the first one on that topic, but I might be the first one with the video on that topic.
James Kwon:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. 100%. So that principle a tried and true and it makes sense, right? I mean, if you’re the first to say something, it sounds new and we’re all addicted to the new and shiny things out there. So, I think that’s a strong law. Second one is to own a word.
Anthony Verna: (08:00)
I’m curious as to what that means.
James Kwon:
Yeah. So the general principle here is that if you’re going to do marketing well, you can latch onto a single word to try to carry the idea of your brand forward. So really interestingly, the bigger companies that you see out there, really in different categories. McDonald’s, for instance, I think they use the word love, right? Yes. I’m loving it.
Anthony Verna:
And they use that worldwide as well. It’s the same phrase in every language.
James Kwon:
Yeah. Right. So, Coca-Cola happiness, right? Yes. So they, they kind of key in on this one, one word, one phrase, one idea, and the shorter and more simple, it can be a simpler, it can be the better. So, well not just average people, even smart people aren’t that smart.
You’re still probably struggling with how I described fragments at the beginning of this podcast. But if I said something like, we make it easier to sell things for everybody. I don’t know. So maybe easy, easy is the key word that I want to try to continue to get into people’s minds. I don’t have the marketing budget of Coca Cola or McDonald’s to try to get happiness or love into people’s minds, but they’ve done a great job. When you think about McDonald’s buh da buh buh buh know, that was the really poor rendition. Let me do one more pop up.
Anthony Verna:
All right. There you go. You got it.
James Kwon:
So, owning a word, focus, exclusivity. If somebody else has that word, well it’s hard to compete. So you have to find your own word.
Anthony Verna: (09:49)
And I find a lot of professional struggle at that. When we do networking meetings, when we do events, I’m always finding that professionals can’t seem to get that simple idea out of their vows, that they want to take 70 seconds to describe what they do. And really, you should be able to do that very simply, very easily. Maybe not in a word, but you should be able to do it very simply and easily.
James Kwon: (10:21)
Yeah, absolutely. Yep. The third one here is a, the third category I’m grouping together is, something I call the run matters. So, in the book the authors talk about how it is a competition. It’s a race, right? Or you know, there is a best in class and then there’s a second best in class and then so on. So you have to understand where you are on the ladder. You have to understand that eventually it’ll always become a two horse race. So the the categories that have been around the longest, like sugary drinks, right? Coke and Pepsi. Yeah, there are other, you know, players, but nobody has the market share that Coke and Pepsi has. There is always going to be a two horse race. The idea that if you’re not the first on the ladder, you can use whoever is the first, and combat their weaknesses or say that their weaknesses are your strengths, or say your strengths are their weaknesses, et cetera.
Right? And then the category is going to become divided. It’s always going to become divided. You need to plant your feet in the ground and, and try to own the own that word, be the leader, you know? Really interesting principal here. And I have a little story that I think shares this really well. If you been around in the, I think it was the 70s, Avis did a really great campaign- Avis, the car rental company. They did a campaign that said we’re second, we’re the second best or something like that. And the campaign, the commercial was basically, well, since we’re second best, our lines are shorter and we’re not going to hassle you and we know we have to compete for your dollar.
And at the end of the day, we know we need to work harder. So, choose Avis and it worked incredibly well. It was a great campaign.
Anthony Verna:
I’m kind of thinking here with rung matters, does that include the customers or clients that accompanies services? Because supposedly as you move up the rung, maybe your clientele moves up the rung with you.
James Kwon:
Yeah, really great point. It depends on the category. It depends on the competition themselves, I mean sometimes, and Enron was at the top of the room so you know, you’re going to collect some of those clients. It absolutely changes. It absolutely adapts. And, your marketing strategy has to adapt with it. So, if Avis became number one, you’re going to drop that campaign pretty quick.
Yes. So there is definitely a shift. There’s always a flexibility that you need to have running the marketing wall.
Anthony Verna:
I completely agree with you on that. And the next principle that you have is called the long haul.
James Kwon:
Yeah. It’s the idea that there is no single marketing effort that happens in an isolated way. Every company is in it for the long haul. And so, if you’re going to do marketing well, you need to think about how that particular campaign is associated to the other things that you’re doing. Right. Does this work well with this billboard? Does the way that we’re responding to this negative event like this era, in the era of covid, how we communicate with our clients?
Is that in line with how we’ve been doing other types of marketing communication, you know, does it feel as genuine? Does it feel in the same vein. So, a quick story on that. Figments, we’ve been a fairly positive company in all of our literature and all of our writing. And so, we wanted to keep it very positive, be aware of that this is happening, but quickly moved to helping people staying positive, a little lighthearted in the vein of things. So, it’s happening. It happens all together. And so, it’s interesting, one of the laws in this category, in this book here talks about how over time though, this one channel or this one element of your marketing will always out shine the others, right?
It’ll always get the best results, the last singularity. I’ll talk about that later. I think that’s this is a time, when that can really… This can be a time when you really make that imprint in your customer.
Anthony Verna:
To go back to fast food and talking about our current situation. I’m noticing a lot of fast food restaurants are saying, still open for drive through. They’re telling you, you can come to us, you can get what you want. Like you’ve always been able to get what you want in a way that’s to me it’s the long haul. Like, I don’t know how long this is going to last. Not one of us do.
But if you want your burger, you can come to us and you can drive through and be safe is effectively what they’re trying to promise.
James Kwon:
No, absolutely. Yeah. And it plays into the laws in here and perspective extension. Absolutely. So the next one is called contrast. This is one of my favorite ones. There’s a couple of great books, lots of great marketing books written about this. Marty Neumeier wrote about a zag. When your competitors zig, you should zag. Seth Godin wrote about purple cow, right? Being unique oftentimes is better than being good. From a marketing perspective, right? Once they get there, you still have to fulfill. So, I think the really interesting thing about contrast is it’s such a timeless principle in marketing that the shiny thing, but also the weird thing, the loudest thing that that’s going to get our attention to the squeaky wheel.
Right? And so there’s, there’s something about that that I think is a really interesting standout, right? A lot of people are using the same exact language today, in this crisis, in their marketing as some in present unprecedented times. And there everybody’s doing webinars, right? Everybody’s doing like, uh, we’re trying to do something different. Like we’re, we’re going to go and put out an entire class, not just one webinar. You’re going to do video podcasts or videos on top of doing just podcasts. I think that’s powerful if you could. I’m going to say most attorneys in the IP space aren’t doing what you’re doing, right? So I think that…
Anthony Verna:
Yes, that is a part of why we’re doing this.
James Kwon:
So that’s one of the best pieces of advice. I think it’s a really great category. Not sure why this is so low in the number of the laws in this, but it’s something I really appreciate.
Anthony Verna:
A few episodes ago, we had Chelsea Pendock from InnoVision advertising, which is a placement agency and we discussed the need to advertise in a time like now. In a way a company that continues its advertising and its advertising budget and its SEM budget and its SEO budget, in a way that’s a contrast.
James Kwon:
Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it’s so interesting. We’ve had about half a dozen clients get a little nervous…
Anthony Verna:
Only half a dozen?
James Kwon:
Yeah, we have about 30 or 40 clients at different stages, different sizes. And half a dozen came, and they were a little nervous about where things are going. The first week and four or five of them came back and said, “Hey, you know what?
We’re not going to pause marketing. We have to keep going, on marketing because this is a good time to be working on it.” And people get that, people understand, well, our clients do. They understand how important it is to get that right. And we just have this feeling that there are a lot of companies out there that if they knew more about marketing, maybe they would feel the same way. That’s why we’re actually creating this online class to try to teach people this principle. So, we call it the 60-day marketing challenge. So you can go to a 60daymarketing.com, check it out, sign up. It’s totally free. I’ve partnered with a few different agencies to help teach this material and get it out there. I can’t make ventilators or masks, but I can help businesses think through their marketing better during this time.
Anthony Verna: (19:31)
I can’t do that either. My bachelor’s in computer science, so I can code, but I can’t. Well even then, nearly 20 years out of date on my on my coding. All right, let’s talk about this a sixth theme that you pulled out, which is the future.
James Kwon:
Yeah. So really interesting. You know, the last five or six laws in the book talk about how unpredictable the future is.
Anthony Verna:
Who would have thought two months ago we would’ve have been doing this for?
James Kwon:
Right, exactly. Success leads to arrogance and arrogance leads to failure and so the law of success, the law of failure, the law of hype, so interesting. There’s a lot of these that I think play into especially, in crisis times, war times like this. The law of hype for example is usually the way things , are usually the opposite of what the press says. The way that our, which is a little controversial, so you can claim outreach. The law of acceleration don’t build on fads, build on trends, which is, that’s the way they write it in the book. And there’s not enough time to unpack all that.
Anthony Verna:
But yes, I was going to say, what’s the difference between a fad and a trend?
James Kwon:
That’s a fascinating, I think trends stay around. The idea that the internet was a trend, it wasn’t a fad. So, focusing on those areas, but it’s so hard to tell, like, how do you tell between one or the other, like a cryptocurrency?
Are you a crypto fan?
Anthony Verna:
Yes and no. I can see the potential benefits of crypto. I have had crypto clients. On the same token, I’m a little dubious about the average person say buying into crypto as well. Yeah. And we know that governments don’t buy an a crypto either because they want to treat it as if it’s an asset and not a currency and deal with taxation from that particular standpoint. So, I’m a fan and yet I’m not a fan, if that makes sense.
James Kwon:
Well, you’re cautious, right? You don’t know yet if it’s a fad or trend. And I think a lot of people are still on the fad boat, but, I dunno, it seems like such a logical move or logical progress of where currency is going.
Anthony Verna: (22:22)
Well let me give you another fad or trend to kind of thought which is video on your website. Oh yeah. An ad trend, but certainly it doesn’t act the way Facebook and Twitter made videos seem as if people would grab onto it. Like in other words, it’s important to have audio and video files say on your website, that does help with SEO. Yes. But I kind of seem to think that the way social media companies were pushing video, it was as if nobody would ever want the written word again.
James Kwon: (23:06)
That’s definitely the extreme. Yeah. I don’t think we’re going to get ever get to a point where there are no words on websites and it’s all video. But video is here to stay. You know, all the stats point in the right direction. It increases search engine rankings by up to 20 to 30%. It increases the time you stay on page two to three X. People are 60% more likely to buy from a company if they have video as a part of their sales process. Amazing stats around video. The hour that you’re pulling up from social is really interesting. LinkedIn is a good example of this. LinkedIn’s always really late to the game around technology and how they roll things out.
So they were doing live video pretty late. It was like a year after Facebook, Twitter and the other folks. But, they won’t outright say this, but it’s absolutely true. People who are using live video on LinkedIn, their rankings shot right rank. They were getting ranked higher because they wanted to promote people who had video. Right? So they wanted to show off and they wanted new streams to be full of all these videos. And so it works. I mean, because they own that of course it worked. They fixed the system. Is there hype? Yes, there’s absolutely hype around it. Is it valuable though? Absolutely. I think it’s here to stay.
Anthony Verna:
So, let me ask you this. Why did you highlight the themes that you did highlight?
James Kwon:
Yeah, there’s some obvious ones in here, cause I go back to your question, which ones are highlighted during the time like this. And I think there’s easy ones like on predictability and there’s hype, the law of sacrifice. You know, I think those are all really obvious laws that happened in crisis times. But, the law of category really interesting because in a time like this, I want to highlight that one as a special time where companies can reinvent themselves and invent new products. Right. And you know about that.
Anthony Verna:
As a patent firm, we might have been handled a new thing or two in our time.
James Kwon:
Sure. Yeah. The story I like to use is, you know, maybe there’s a barbecue restaurant that was struggling, and they have a great fan base and they’ve never thought about technology.
You know, they’ve done things the old way and now they’re kind of forced, you know, their hand is forced to maybe consider doing takeout and maybe consider doing selling their barbecue sauce. Right? Why not sell your barbecue sauce? It’s easier than ever to do that and many companies out there could think along those lines and do similar activities, right. They could digitize by their offering in a way that helps them in this time and create new stuff. Do you think it’s as easy as I’m saying it is?
Anthony Verna:
Probably not, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t find it to be something that’s worthwhile to think about. Let me take the first example that you said the barbecue sauce. I think a lot of people who are chefs might create a barbecue sauce for a restaurant but might not understand what it takes to go into retail on a barbecue sauce. Those two markets are radically different markets. You also have to think about packaging. You also have to think about food regulations, which you know from a restaurant standpoint you might have cleanliness as one particular part of the regulations that you deal with labor and employment. But if you start selling food now you have to start thinking about how to brand the food. You also have to think about the nutrition in the food. You also have to think about how you’re going to calculate with the nutrition facts are in your food. What a serving size is. A lot of chefs probably never thought would a serving size was cause they’d probably just take the barbecue sauce that they create and slather it.
But now you have to think about what a serving size is. You have to get the chemical breakdown for how many calories. Shelf stabilization. Exactly. So, on one hand, yes, I understand completely where you’re thinking if I’m a restaurant, if I’m the chef at a restaurant and now I can only do take out. And so my real estate costs have stayed the same but my income has not. Gee, that seems like a very simple way of going from one market to the next. So, I understand your logic completely. They’re just items there that, that you know, that restaurant owner has never had to deal with before.
James Kwon: (28:08)
Yeah. And it’s exactly why I’ve started this class because I think that the topics that you’re talking about are easier then people assume it to be. Right. So thinking through branding, thinking through validating your market, thinking through packaging, thinking through how you’re going to sell it. Yes, there are some technical things that you still have to go through like getting chefs, chefs legalization and labeling and nutrition. Sure. But there are some cottage laws right, where you can sell some absolutely right from, from your home. So the food is interesting. I didn’t mention this, I’ve a degree in culinary on top of some other degrees that I got, but I got it to impress a girl and it worked. But I just think now is the time, right? You know, for that particular company, we have more time or some people have more time to consider inventing something, creating a category for themselves.
It’s a great time to invent.
Anthony Verna:
That doesn’t mean that my questions… You know, again, I’m a cynic. I’m a lawyer, I’m a trained cynic. That’s the line that which just means if somebody comes to me and they say, I have a new invention. My first question then is, what’s your business plan? That’s what I want to say, I want to see your business plan as well. And you know, if not, I’ve got many referrals for you to go get a business plan as well. Because once you spend money on trying to get your invention patented, getting your name trademarked, getting whatever else you need, protected. You’ve got to make money on it.
James Kwon:
That’s a whole other podcast.
Anthony Verna:
Yes, it is.
James Kwon:
I’d love to talk to you about the validity of business plans these days because my bachelor’s is in entrepreneurship. I wrote like six or six or seven different business plans in school and they’re just so worthless.
I could have done other things with my time. I could have actually started businesses. I feel like Anyway, some of the things like category, a lot of singularity I think is really interesting. You know, it’s a to point out in this time, in each situation only one move will produce the most substantial results, right. So, it’s basically the Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule. And so, really focusing in on kind of one activity especially during this time when you can market. And I didn’t mention this, communication is such a powerful tool today, right? I call it the sledgehammer, right? You can build a house, it’s an important tool to have while you’re building a house and it could break, you can break things, it could break bones, right?
So you can do a lot of damage with this tool. So be careful of how you communicate. So you know, how you market, being absolutely genuine in your candor like Avis, right? Just being real about where you are and out there. Those are just some of the rules I feel like are really powerful. Great book. Check it out. It’s awesome.
Anthony Verna:
So James, so thank you so much for being on and we’re just about out of time. So how can everybody find you?
James Kwon:
Yeah. So, you can check out our website figments – fig M I N T s.com to see more about the main agency. You can follow our blog there and see all of my crazy musings of of weird projects that we’re doing, but the best one, the law of singularity project that we’re doing right now, we call it the 60 day marketing challenge. So, you can go to 60daymarketing.com and check out that program. It’s a free class where you can learn how to start a business or learn all the things that you didn’t know about marketing. So we have two those two classes kind of running simultaneously and for totally free for everybody.
Anthony Verna:
James, thank you so much for being on. And once again, this is Anthony Verna. I’m also the managing partner at Verna Law. Please remember to subscribe to the podcast. If you haven’t subscribed, please rate us. Please rate us five stars. And if you only rate us four stars, well, I’m just gonna think that you’re disagreeable. That’s all. Thanks very much for listening. We’ll see you next time on the Law and Business Podcast.
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