Marketing With Purpose Kit: The Problem—Why Marketing Is Broken

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Steven Zagash** (0:17)
Well, come back to The Bliss Business Podcast, where we explore how to build love into scalable systems. I'm Steven Zagash, here again with Mike Lusky and Tulio Seregusa. Hey, guys.

**Tulio Seregusa** (0:30)
Hello.

**Mike Lusky** (0:30)
Hey, Steven. Good to see you.

**Steven Zagash** (0:32)
Yeah. So let's get to it.

**Tulio Seregusa** (0:36)
This is going to be a fun one.

**Mike Lusky** (0:37)
Yeah. We want to talk about marketing today. As a marketing agency with aicmo.io, we really get to witness almost first-hand this really difficult truth that it really feels like marketing is broken today. I love to use the analogy of marketing just is almost like this blaring horn in all of our ears, and we almost have that reaction of just wanting to push away. And unfortunately, it's doing the opposite of what it's trying to do, rather than connect, it's, you know, disconnecting.
And yeah.

**Tulio Seregusa** (1:15)
You know, Mike, you remind me of a... I grew up in a small town in southern Italy, and there are guys who would go around with these little Vespas, like these Tri Vespas with fruits and vegetables in the back, and they had this megaphone, and they would be like, we got French fruit, you know, in Italian, French fruit, bananas. And that was marketing. And to this day, in those little towns, they still do that.

**Steven Zagash** (1:40)
I think now, now, Tilo, the way the stage of marketing, though, is like a hundred of those guys in Vespas, all yelling right now. People are people are being bombarded with messages and ads.

**Tulio Seregusa** (1:51)
Because it was only one guy doing that, not like 20 others doing it at the same time. Could you imagine at the same time? And that's marketing today.

**Mike Lusky** (1:59)
And so it's the resonating that's really missing, right?

**Steven Zagash** (2:06)
Yeah, because like traditional like those guys, they're all thinking about the transaction, right? Not resonating with people. And that's what marketing is like today. A bunch of people with the megaphones, and it's built on focusing on the transactions, not emotions, and it focuses on selling, not connecting. It's about pushing products, not building relationships, right?

**Mike Lusky** (2:29)
Yeah, yeah, 100%. So really what we're going to talk about today, I love the thought of like, tell your audience what you're going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you just told them. So what we're going to cover today in this episode is really trying to shed a spotlight on this problem, this breakdown that's happening, why marketing is failing, why that emotional connection just seems to be missing, and really how empathetic story telling or empathy driven story telling can change all of this. So yeah, let's jump into it.

**Tulio Seregusa** (3:04)
Yeah, and again, it's funny, I see again and again this, marketing has become a race for attention instead of a vehicle for meaning. It's this idea that we just mentioned about the person on the megaphone, but hundreds of them doing at the same time, and it's the loudest one who thinks they're going to get the attention. So the iron is that people don't want more noise. They want to feel seen, they want to feel validated, and empathy really isn't the trend. It's actually what business has been missing all along, and in marketing, it's really missing more than ever.

**Steven Zagash** (3:43)
Yeah. So let's talk about why it's kind of broken. So it's right now, I think marketing, it's about how many, for most people, it's about how many eyeballs you can capture, how many clicks you can get, how many conversions you can squeeze out. But attention like this doesn't mean connection, right?
And without connection, I think marketing really does feel hollow. It feels kind of manipulative and it feels very empty.

**Mike Lusky** (4:08)
Yeah. And that's why everyone's sort of tuning out to it, right? I mean, you think about some of the most famous songs out there, like a love song, or why does it so successful? Because it touched you, right? You'll remember the words, it'll create a feeling.
And everyone's just not doing that with marketing. They're turning it off. We've got different kinds of ad blockers. We even produce what we call today banner blindness. And so it's actually quite widely accepted that today, someone will see anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 messages. And there was actually a little study, because I looked into this a little bit further because that stat really shocked me. And on average, a person will only really recognize anywhere from 79 to the low 90s of message. Just imagine, right? So many messages in one day. You're just going to scroll and just keep moving through.