Sometimes it’s obvious when you need an outside opinion, like when you’re trying to decide if that sweater from Anthropologie is actually cute or just weird. Other times, the value of an outside opinion is less clear. If you have a strong marketing department with great ideas and clear goals, do you really need to engage with an outside agency? What are they going to contribute that you don’t already know about your industry and customers?

In this episode of the podcast, recorded under stay at home orders, the Umault team discusses the top 5 reasons why an outside opinion brings value, especially for marketers.

Listen to the podcast, check us out on YouTube, or read the transcript below to learn more about the top five reasons why you should get an outside opinion on your marketing ideas:

1. You can't read the label on your own jar.
2. You have the curse of knowledge.
3. An outside opinion can bring new perspectives or validation to what you already know.
4. The outsider doesn’t have your “boss filter.”
5. Bringing in an outside opinion gets you out of the echo chamber.

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Key quotes

"You can try as hard as you want, but from the inside out, it's very difficult to see how people from the outside in view you without talking to them or being outside of yourself." - Tory Merritt

"The same thing can happen with your marketing messages. Because you're so immersed in what you're saying all the time inside your own company that you don't remember that not everybody is spending the day in the same environment that you are." - Hope Morley

"An outside opinion or an outside perspective challenges the base assumptions of the organization based on the past. It allows a total challenging of what we thought was everything, up is down, left is right. And the outside perspective makes people explain why. Why has it always been like this?" - Guy Bauer

Resources, videos, and other stuff we talked about

Did you know we're also on YouTube? Check out what all our WFH set-ups are!

You can listen to the episode using the player embedded above, or you can read a full transcript below.

Episode transcript

Hope Morley:

Hello, and welcome to So You Need a Video, the only podcast ...

Guy Bauer:

That we're aware of ...

Hope Morley:

... About simplifying your brand’s sales message with video. I'm Hope Morley.

Tory Merritt:

I'm Tory Merritt.

Guy Bauer:

I'm Guy Bauer.

Hope Morley:

And today's episode we're going to be talking about why it can be valuable to get an outside opinion on your marketing ideas. So that can come from an agency or from someone else you know. But this episode was inspired by a new business call that Guy had. So Guy, do you want to tell a little bit of the story of why we thought of this episode?

Guy Bauer:

Yeah, we were on a new business call. I won't mention who the client is, but we were talking about our process and how we'll do a competitive analysis and all of the steps in our process to understand who they're talking to, what their message is, and then how we distill it all down. And their response was, "Well, if you could possibly learn more about our industry," basically alluded to that it'd be virtually impossible for us to learn more about their industry, about their business, than they already know. And they were discounting the insight that we would bring to the engagement.

Hope Morley:

Yeah. So this inspired us to talk about it, and we've come up with the top five reasons why an outside opinion can be valuable. So I'll jump into it with the reason number one. We're going to call this, you can't read the label on your own jar. So this is something that we didn't come up with originally. We got it from David C. Baker's book, The Business of Expertise. Maybe some other people have said something similar, but Tory, you want to explain what this metaphor means?

Tory Merritt:

Sure. So the way that he sets it up is, you're standing in the middle of a jar, a glass jar. We've all seen Mason jars. And you're trying to figure out who you are and what you're about. And what you don't realize is there's a label on the front of that glass jar that very simply states exactly what you are and what you're about. And from the outside of the jar, other people can just pick it up and read it quickly and see exactly what you are and decide if it's for them or not, whatever, and set it back down. From the inside, you can't see the label. So you can try as hard as you want, but from the inside out, it's very difficult to see how people from the outside in view you without talking to them or being outside of yourself or outside of the jar.

Guy Bauer:

Yeah, and the idea of the jar exercise is that it's literally as easy as just picking up the jar, reading the label. Most people, and they don't need to be experts in your industry, can easily do that.

Hope Morley:

All right. Reason number two is the curse of knowledge. And Guy, you want to take this one, explain what that is?

Guy Bauer:

Yeah, so I read about this experiment they did at Stanford University, and they had two groups of people. One group were the tappers, and their assignment was to tap out a very simple song that everyone knows. For example, Happy Birthday. So they would tap out Happy Birthday. And then there was another group of receivers who didn't know what the song was, and they had to figure out what the song was. Before they did the experiment, they asked the tappers, "What percentage of people in the receiving audience will nail that you're tapping Happy Birthday?" And so after the experiment, they found that the tappers grossly overestimated the percentage of people that would get what song they were tapping.

Guy Bauer:

And the idea is that the tappers had the knowledge of what they were tapping. It's clear as day. If you're tapping Happy Birthday, it's, "Happy birthday to you," in your mind. But to the audience, they're just hearing taps. It doesn't make any sense. So we'll do a little experiment. All right. So I'm not going to tap Happy Birthday. Let's see, but this is a song everyone knows. So let's try it. Okay?

Hope Morley:

Okay.

Guy Bauer:

And away we go.

Tory Merritt:

I'm hearing church hymns in my head.

Guy Bauer:

It's not a church hymn, I promise you.

Tory Merritt:

This is the curse of your knowledge base, is nobody knows what you've been exposed to. So your brain is drawing on things that you don't know. Hope, do you know what it is? Because I do not.

Hope Morley:

Well, my brain went to Pop Goes the Weasel, probably because I sing a lot of songs to my 8-month-old.

Tory Merritt:

There you go. Liana, this is your fault.

Guy Bauer:

All right, so maybe that is right, because I know nursery rhymes all borrow the same stuff. So it was the Itsy Bitsy Spider. Was that the thing that would be Pop Goes the Weasel? No, it's not.

Hope Morley:

No, it's not. That's so funny that I didn't get that, because I sing that song eight times a day right now.

[Editor’s note: As I, Hope, reviewed this episode, it was SO OBVIOUS that the song was the Itsy Bitsy Spider, because I knew that’s what he was tapping. The curse of knowledge.]

Guy Bauer:

Isn't that crazy?

Tory Merritt:

And it's still, yeah. Well, it's like the curse of knowledge is almost like, we always talk about, you don't know what you don't know, but you also don't know what you do know, in some ways. You don't know what you're using as your frame of reference compared to what someone else is using. Because think about how many different things, even my sister and I are both, we're quarantining together, but in different apartments. But we don't go outside the apartment and do anything that the other person's not doing. We do it all together. But inside our apartments we're doing our own things. So you don't know what someone is ... Even when you're with someone most of the time, your individual experiences and what you're being exposed to are still different. So you don't know, what's top of mind for you is not necessarily top of mind for your audience. So it's hard to know whether it's, "Oh, that's so easy. I got it so quickly." Well, what did you look at that day? Who did you talk to? What did you hear? Versus the other person.

Hope Morley:

And you have to remember that you are, especially for things like jargon, you're immersed in your work world all day long for eight hours a day with your coworkers. So if you think about, I know I've had this experience, maybe you guys have too, if you go home and you start talking to your spouse about what you did all day, and you start telling a story and using jargon that you don't even realize is jargon because you just use it all the time, and you forget that not everybody is so immersed in your day-to-day that they know what some of these things are, what some of these acronyms are, things that you're talking about at work. And then your spouse is like, "Wait, wait, wait, back up. What does that mean?" And you have to explain it.

Hope Morley:

And the same thing can happen with your marketing messages. Because you're so immersed in what you're saying all the time inside your own company that you don't realize that ... You just don't remember that not everybody is spending the day in the same environment that you are.

Guy Bauer:

That's where the outsider does add value, because the outsider is the litmus test. The same way the outsider picks up the jar, and then the outsider also says, "I don't know what song you're tapping." We need to make it more clear what song you're tapping.

Tory Merritt:

Yeah. And I think from the- Oh, go ahead, Hope.

Hope Morley:

No, please go.

Tory Merritt:

Okay. So-

Guy Bauer:

All three of us are going to go. No, I'm just kidding.

Tory Merritt:

No, I'm going. No, I'm going.

Guy Bauer:

I'm going to start doing that. If two people are battling out and then I'm just going to, "No, actually I'm going."

Tory Merritt:

And from the outside in too, it's not just the amount of knowledge. Like you said, it's the one key insight that you haven't been able to find yourself, someone from the outside may be able to because they've experienced something else. And this may lead into one of our other points, but from an agency perspective, we work with a lot of different parts of a business ecosystem. So you might be one component of your industry's ecosystem. Or talk about a solar system, one component of your industry's solar system, you're one planet. But there's times where we actually work with the other planets, if that makes sense, and we know their movements and their gravity and what they're planning to do next.

Tory Merritt:

And sometimes, obviously not in a way where we're compromising confidentiality or anything like that, but having a little bit of a wider view of the full ecosystem or what other planets in the solar system are doing allows us to bring some insight to you that you may not have access to because of the difference in the different planets or the different companies, the different parts of the system that may not be communicating to your benefit.

Hope Morley:

Yeah. That leads exactly into reason three, which is that an outside opinion can bring new perspectives or validation to what you already know. So like you were saying, your agency, who sees the full ecosystem, can bring in either cross-industry experience or even cross-departmental experience. There's so much more that you can be bringing in that you might be missing in your day-to-day with your just single team.

Guy Bauer:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Hope Morley:

And I think that that outside perspective too, people can bring in new ideas, but they can also just bring validation to your ideas. They can confirm that the ideas that you have are actually good, because they can look at them with that outside experience and opinion or something from their industry. And be like, "Yeah, this is really interesting. I would be really engaged in this content," or, "This really speaks to me. This would speak to people in my cohort," and so on.

Guy Bauer:

Yeah. The litmus test for 99% of the videos that we make is, I show them to my wife, and if my wife gets it or if she laughs or cries. Because my wife comes in with no bias. She hasn't seen the brief, she hasn't seen goals, she hasn't seen the funnel, the marketing funnel, or anything like that. She's coming in and just purely judging it, just like if she was watching it on Netflix or whatever. And it gives tremendous amount of insight, even though she is not an industry expert in whatever particular industry we're working in. But it's super valuable, to Hope's point.

Tory Merritt:

And then on top of that, if you want to do something more formal, being able to rely on focus groups, as long as you're able to set up the questioning in a way that isn't biased and they're able to set up the sample in a way that isn't just people who already know what's going on, and you're asking them basically yes or no questions, or you're making it really easy for them to find the answer that you want, or you put your logo in the front half. As long as they're setting those up to not be biased, they can be helpful as well. Even a small sample. Luckily for us, we are not trying to get a drug approved by the FDA, so anecdotal evidence is okay for us. We're able to use that information. So don't be afraid to just talk to a couple of people if a big, controlled study isn't something that you have access to.

Guy Bauer:

Yeah, you can actually start picking up trends with not a huge sample size in terms of, "Is this message clear? What do you think about this?" I try to keep my questions very open-ended too. So even if you're not feeling something, your questions shouldn't be, "What don't you like about it?" It should be ... Because if you ask that question, people will tell you what they don't like about it, and that could actually skew.

Tory Merritt:

Right.

Hope Morley:

And they start looking for something not to like.

Guy Bauer:

Correct.

Hope Morley:

As soon as you click play, they're like, "Okay, well what's wrong with this? What should I be looking for?”

Guy Bauer:

Right, right.

Tory Merritt:

Right. Or if you make it too obvious you know who it is that they're supposed to like or what it is they're supposed to like, then from the beginning, there's a bias in all humans, we want to make people happy. We want to do what they want us to do, so that's what people end up doing if you don't set things up the right way. If you said, "What don't you like about it?” Or like, "Don't you love this, what do you love about this?"

Guy Bauer:

Right, right.

Tory Merritt:

We talk about it as a client service too, as we're working with clients. You can't set up a question to a client if you want a real ... Or anyone, your boss, whoever you're showing it to, you can't set it up with, "So how much do you love it?" Or, "Do you hate it? What do you hate about it? I really hate this part." When you're looking for a real outside opinion, you have to keep it open, at least from the beginning, and allow them the space to feel how they feel and express how they feel without trying to make you happy.

Hope Morley:

And Tory, that's a perfect lead-in to reason number four.

Tory Merritt:

Just running ahead of you, sorry.

Hope Morley:

No, it's perfect. No. Reason number four is, we don't have, we or any outsider, we don't have your boss filter. So we don't come in with any preexisting notions of what we think the higher-ups in your company want to be making, or what you think that you should be making to get this sign-off from the CEO or your CMO, or whoever is the final approver on the work that you're creating.

Guy Bauer:

Yeah, and I have a little example of this. When you work in a company for a while, there's always going to be a big boss. And when this big boss walks through the office, everybody is at their desk pretending to be very busy.

Hope Morley:

Yeah, stiffens up.

Guy Bauer:

Right. And I worked in a place where the first question everyone asked when they walked in the door is, "Is Bob here?" And if Bob wasn't there—and that's not the real name—but if Bob wasn't there, everyone would relax during the day. But if Bob was in the office, you knew you better have your stuff under control. So this fictional character Bob starts becoming this kind of all-powerful being inside the workplace.

Hope Morley:

Like a mythical creature.

Guy Bauer:

Right, a mythical creature. And so everybody has this tension around Bob. And that can actually cause work or whatever we're doing to be skewed towards what we think Bob will like or not like. The main thing we don't want to do is upset Bob. So we start playing tentative and just to what we think Bob's likes and dislikes. But one day a messenger comes into the office and just walks into Bob's office without knocking and without making an appointment. And the messenger goes in, and you see him hand a package and Bob and the messenger are laughing and talking. And you're like, "What? Doesn't he know that that's Bob? You can't do that." And in our minds it doesn't compute, but relative to that messenger, he's just Bob, he doesn't have any of that baggage. He's just another guy. And so the outside opinion, whether it's us, an agency, or whoever, the outside opinion, the outside perspective has no baggage on Bob. They don't know that Bob one time fired a guy for just walking the wrong way. They don't know anything about Bob.

Tory Merritt:

Or maybe we do. Maybe we do know stuff about Bob, but our job is to look at ... We've met a lot of Bobs. We've worked with a lot of Bobs in our life, a lot of Bobs. That's interesting. Anyway, and when you work with someone a lot, you have this, like you said, this pent-up fear that they're not open to anything new. They don't want to see anything. And it can be hard to see those openings when actually Bob is open to it. It's just, it hasn't been presented in a while, or he had a bad day the other day. But having somebody, like you said, who doesn't have three, five, 10 years of working with Bob and didn't have a little tussle with them or whatever the week before, can almost see that, and the same thing with outside, can see that opening that someone may be open to something different, and be able to bring at least one of the options that we put forward, something that's totally different and you may not have felt comfortable presenting.

Tory Merritt:

We can present two other options, because our goal is also to talk to Bob before we present anything. So we do understand his expectations and his thoughts, but not having the history, like you said, of 10 years of working with people in and out allows us or an outside person to find an opportunity to present something new that they may be open to, just you've never felt comfortable being the person presenting it. Like you said, it's like the messenger, that you get a little bit longer rope sometimes as a messenger to present something versus, "I told you I don't like yada yada."

Tory Merritt:

Again, as an agency we try to make sure that we incorporate that information. If clients are telling us, "My boss really doesn't like this, this, and this," we're not going to just present something that has that without talking to you about it. But we may be able to see an opportunity based on our other experiences to still present something that we think is right in a way that caveats what you've given us or told us and allows the opportunity for something new and cool to come in, that maybe just internally it wasn't an option, but external presentation of it makes it one.

Guy Bauer:

Yeah, an outside opinion or an outside perspective challenges the base assumptions of the organization based on the past. It's almost like when your computer is so sluggish, my favorite thing to do is format the computer and start all over. So an outside perspective allows a kind of formatting and a total challenging what we thought was everything, up is down, left is right and everything. And the outside perspective makes people explain why. Why has it always been like this?

Tory Merritt:

Well, it gives you an opportunity to try something new. It gives you the opening that you need to try something better, find out what really was actually working, versus just what we've said was working or we've just been doing because we haven't had time to sit down. No one's forced you sit down and just been like, "We got to go, we got to go, we got to get it out." It gives you a moment to stop and think about how you might be able to do it better and what your other options could be, versus just constantly foot on the gas with no rest stop breaks.

Guy Bauer:

Yep.

Hope Morley:

Yep. And even as the internal team, once they have a better understanding of why certain things are just liked or disliked or done or not done, then going forward you can make better work because you understand the reasoning behind it.

Guy Bauer:

Yep. Yep. Yeah. The outsider almost forces the organization to explain why. Because they have to explain it to the outsider. And that's where the outsider can go, "That makes no sense."

Tory Merritt:

Right.

Guy Bauer:

And because the outsider has outside perspective by definition, the outsider can pull examples and reasoning why that doesn't make sense.

Tory Merritt:

That are objective.

Guy Bauer:

And really give a lot of insight for the organization of, "Well, this doesn't make sense and this is why. Because I've worked with these clients and I've seen this space, and your assumptions are incorrect."

Hope Morley:

Which leads into reason number five, is-

Guy Bauer:

Whoa.

Hope Morley:

Whoa. Is that bringing in an outside opinion gets you out of the echo chamber. That it brings in diversity or helps you develop ideas to broaden your opinions, so you're not just talking to the same 10 people in your department over and over and over again and making the same work over and over and over again.

Tory Merritt:

Right. You don't have just that one colleague that, we've talked about this too, is in every workspace there's somebody who's more abrasive or louder or just able to come in and just take over. You see this a lot in podcasts and round tables. I was watching an actor's round table the other day, and Jamie Foxx is in it. And as soon as he pops in, his presence just fills the room. It's just the way that it is. And sometimes that person is able to put forward things and push things through just because they're the loudest or the most abrasive, or unfortunately someone likes them the most. Being able to bring in a third party allows somebody to insert themselves in that situation and help you break up the echo chamber and help you get some other voices in. And sometimes ... Actually, working with David C. Baker was a good example. He tried to talk to everybody, or talk to different people who may not always get a say because of the way that their personality is or just the way their organization is set up.

Tory Merritt:

So having a third party lets you hear those voices that sometimes don't, they don't speak up, or they've gotten to a point where they just don't have a say, it seems. And we're all human, and that just happens sometimes.

Hope Morley:

And getting out of the echo chamber for people, you don't necessarily have to pay an agency to come in. It doesn't necessarily have to be a true full outsider that costs money. You can also just go to different departments within your own organization and talk to them more.

Tory Merritt:

Yep. Very good point.

Hope Morley:

Not everyone wants to talk to competitors, but talk to people in other industries that you know who may be a marketing department in a different industry. And once you strip away Sherry, once you strip away Bob, let's talk about what we've got here and what we can make better.

Guy Bauer:

There was this business book I was reading that said, it was trying to explain Steve Jobs' method. And what Steve Jobs did was constantly learn about other industries, totally different industries, and how they work. Like hospitality and textiles or whatever, and he was able to take those things that they did, which had nothing to do with manufacturing technology or services, but he was able to take some things and transpose them over to Apple. So remember, it doesn't have to just be your industry. It doesn't just have to be exactly what you do. There's so much value in people that have nothing to do with what you do, but you may find a glimmer in there of what they do that you can easily transpose over to your industry and what you're doing, and actually leapfrog the competition. Because who would ever get something from a totally different industry like that?

Hope Morley:

I think all of this, you as a person too, when you're going to get an outside opinion or you're talking to a competitor or you're researching another industry, there's two important things that you need to do. You need to go in with genuine curiosity. You have to actually want to learn about what's going on and come out with something new. And you have to be open to challenging your own ideas. Because it's easy enough to go out and hire an agency and then just make them do what you've always done. Or it's easy enough to talk to another department and be like, "Whatever. Logistics doesn't actually know what we do over here in marketing. Let's just do what we planned to do."

Hope Morley:

So you need to, as a person, be aware of that you have your own biases and it's hard to get them challenged. So when you're going into this, have an open heart, be curious, listen to what people say. Not everything is going to be great advice that you should take and move forward, but you should think critically about it and see what's valuable and what isn't.

Tory Merritt:

My last point on that too is, marketing and advertising has expanded to not just being marketing and advertising, but also your customer experience and the full customer experience. And as a marketer you need to understand what your prospects and customers are experiencing from start to finish and how what you're making fits into that. And that's where logistics is helpful, because you need to know how long they're waiting to get whatever it is they need to get. You need to know what customer service is doing, how the phones are being answered, how the chatbots are working, what they're responding to when people are upset. You need to understand all of that stuff as a marketer, and I think we used to forget that part, like you said, and be like, "They don't know what we do." Maybe they don't know what you do, but you need to know what they do in order to design a customer experience that's engaging and helps you beat the competition.

Hope Morley:

And they should know what you do, because someone who works in customer service should know what the marketing messages are. Because then once those customers convert, they're going to be talking to those people that were brought in. So they should know what kind of messages were being shared. It should all be an ecosystem that people know what's going on.

Tory Merritt:

Yeah. Well, and they should feel supported as well. And I think knowing what you're putting out there helps them to know you've got their back. You're not constantly telling customers, "Oh, yeah, sorry, our customer service ..." You've got it. It all works together in a way that supports the people within the organization, as well as your prospects and customers outside.

Guy Bauer:

So I think the main takeaway here is that the prospective customer we were talking to is wrong.

Tory Merritt:

Or maybe they're not wrong, but ... Here comes the account guy.

Guy Bauer:

Yeah, yeah. That's wrong, but let's roll that back.

Tory Merritt:

But no, not that he’s wrong. I think they do have a point, which is, there's a certain part of that information that the outside person will never know about what you've dealt with. But there's also a segment of information that you will never know that the outside person does. So the goal is actually to bring all that information together to find the best solution, versus just saying, "Well, you've never worked as an AI solution so you don't understand," or say, "Well, you've never been in an agency so you don't understand." It's bringing it all together so that everybody can understand, and then we can make something creative that actually solves problems.

Hope Morley:

Yeah. That prospect is an expert on their industry. Like Tory said, they do know best, but we know best about video marketing and other solutions and things that they don't know. So if we can bring it together, that combined experience is really, really powerful, that we don't just get on our own without them telling us what their industry is like, and they don't get it on their own without hearing from marketing experience.

Tory Merritt:

It could be a panacea, if you will.

Guy Bauer:

Yes, we know panacea. We know what that means.

Hope Morley:

And now that we've said panacea three times, that's the sign that the episode is over. There's a bell ringing off in the distance.

Tory Merritt:

Yeah, the panacea bell.

Guy Bauer:

That should be our tagline, is, "Umault. Panacea, we know what that means."

Tory Merritt:

There you go. That's our safe word, panacea.

Guy Bauer:

Isn't that our goal? We want to say panacea in every episode, right?

Tory Merritt:

Yeah, that's why I threw it in there.

Guy Bauer:

Good job. Good job. I forgot. I forgot. We've got to keep that up.

Tory Merritt:

It's why you hired me.

Hope Morley:

All right, so thank you everyone for listening to this episode of So You Need a Video. If you don't know what panacea means, I recommend going to merriam-webster.com and looking that up.

Tory Merritt:

Yeah.

Hope Morley:

And for more information and possibly to links to merriam-webster.com, you can visit us on our website at umault.com. That's U-M-A-U-L-T.com. And yeah, like us on your podcast app, give us a like on YouTube. And do we have a question that we want to ask commenters to leave today, to answer today?

Tory Merritt:

I just say, "Hmm" in every episode when this comes up, and then I stare at Guy.

Guy Bauer:

What's your drink of choice at Starbucks? What's your go-to drink at Starbucks? Leave that in the comments.