Ric Navarro

Simon Dell: So, welcome to the show, Ric Navarro. You are down in Melbourne today. How is sunny Melbourne today? Or is it indeed actually sunny today?

Ric Navarro: Thanks, Simon. It is. The sun is parting through the clouds as we speak, so it's actually prime to be a good summer's day in Melbourne.

Simon Dell: Chances are it'll rain and snow by the end of the day as well, I would say.

Ric Navarro: I can probably assume that we'd get four seasons, indeed.

Simon Dell: Just very quickly, I've obviously introduced you prior to this, but give us your elevator pitch that you tell people what you do, who you are, when you meet them.

Ric Navarro: It's really interesting, because as marketers, we should be so accomplished at doing it for ourselves. So, obviously, adept doing it for organizations and for brands. In fact, some of my colleagues will sit down, I'll do a 'what's your value proposition' exercise, and work through that. So, for myself, I'm like the painter whose house is never painted.

But if I was to try and summarize it, I'm probably a marketing leader with a diverse background that looks to intersect marketing with bottom-line growth. I think that's where a lot of marketers, quite honestly, this is where the discussion will end up going today, you need to focus on that bottom-line growth, so really helping brands from the perspective of customer obsession. For me, it's about addressing customers where they want to be spoken to in a form that they would be reached. I suppose my elevator pitch is helping brands grow by delighting their customers with meaningful, tailored, and consistent experiences.

Simon Dell: Okay, awesome. What I was going to do, because I looked at your background. I've been through your Twitter, which you haven't updated for a while, so we need to have a talk about that. Obviously, I want to talk about the role that you've been in for quite a while now with Norman Disney & Young.

But I actually wanted to touch on three of your earlier roles because I think they're quite fascinating. You may not have put yourself into them, but you found yourself in roles that I think would be quite challenging roles in the sense that you're, to me, a little bit in the firing line. I'll start with the obvious one, which is your work with the Former Prime Minister John Howard. You were media and comms manager there.

Ric Navarro: Yeah, for a particular initiative, which was during the day called the Supermarket to Asia initiative. This was during the time when there was a huge push to take Australian agribusiness and processed foods to the Asian market. So, back in the 90s when there was a magnificent sort of impetus towards supporting our agribusiness and primary producers but also processed foods.

That was a really interesting time because the Asian markets were emerging. China was just starting to come up on the radar. Japan was still our number one export market, but there were little pockets of opportunities across Southeast Asia in particular that the government at the time were looking to capitalize on. That involved a lot of, as you're probably alluding to, Simon, a lot of interesting stakeholder management in doing commerce.

Simon Dell: I imagine that politics in marketing is one of those things that kind of jars together quite badly sometimes.

Ric Navarro: Ultimately, marketing is about reaching and greeting human beings. And I think that sort of pedigreed, and I started as a journalist as well, I think that ability to understand human behaviour, be relatable as well, and to be able to tell a story are really vital ingredients.

I think we speak about B2B and B2C, but we're really about, I'd like to call it, human-to-human marketing, because ultimately, that is what we're all in the business of doing. When I think back to that time, I think it was a really fascinating, interesting, and unique breeding ground for a marketer.

In terms of, yes, it may seem like worlds apart, but in fact, there's a lot of skills, attributes, and experiences that you can derive from that particular environment that is so relevant in today's CX laden environment. From that point of view, it's been a fascinating ride.

Simon Dell: Give me something that you probably took out of that experience working in that political arena that sort of helped you later on in your life.

Ric Navarro: I think, first of all, the initiative that I was working with as part of the Prime Minister's army was apolitical. So, was seen to be almost like this is an export initiative that we focused on. That said, it's really that understanding human behaviour, particularly early on in your career, we all strive to find our particular niche. For me, it was about understanding the way the different characters were being able to understand and read different environments, but also start to learn how to influence. I think that that's a really key component of what we all do in our day to day lives whether we're marketers or in any other role with the brands.

Simon Dell: You've touched on prior to that, you've been a journalist. I'm always fascinated to talk to people who used to be journalists back in the old days about their perception of the journalism trade, and media today, and how it's changed. It feels like someone, for me, looking on the outside, there's a radical difference between how it used to be back then and how it is today. Is that actually the case?

Ric Navarro: There is. There is still obviously tremendous pockets of excellent journalism. I think what we've found is that there are now individuals who can post content at any time, and we're all, in some ways, journalists when we post on social media, when we post on Twitter, or we don't, as you alluded to.

So, the craft of journalism is still there. What's been pleasing for me to see is that a lot of those former journalists have been swept up into corporate roles. So, there's a realization from a lot of brands, savvy brands, that they need good story tellers. And one of the things that journalism, the craft of journalism allows you to do, is to actually weave together content, and you know what from a practical sense, do it to a deadline as well.

There's a lot of pluses that journalists have actually started to introduce into branding, and marketing, and within corporate communications. Some have moved into corporate fields. I think to your question, journalism has shifted, has changed. We still look at New York Times, Washington Post. In Australia, we've got The Financial Review, which I would hold up as a premier piece of journalism as well. I think there are pockets that exist that are still good quality content. Of course now, the way in which it's consumed is very different, too. The rivers of gold have disappeared. The actual model has changed significantly for publishers.

But when you get down to it, to the null of it, it's really about being able to articulate the story, to catch the essence of a story and report on, hopefully, the facts.

Simon Dell: Yeah. I think that's a fantastic point. I don't think that journalism has necessarily died. I think your point that it shifted to perhaps who is paying the journalists now, where it used to be perhaps the independent media outlets, and now they have an opportunity within corporate areas to tell stories about particular companies and things like that. I think that's key.

Ric Navarro: Yeah. And what's really interesting, Simon, is that today, we have vloggers, bloggers, et cetera, that occupy a lot of the reading time that as individuals we spend. So, whether we're on the train, tram, bus, wherever we are travelling, we most likely will be listening to or reading content, often not, produced by an official media house. So, what that's done is it's opened up and become a very democratized way of reporting.

There's much more discussion which we could have a whole podcast series about in itself, but what does that mean about integrity of reporting, of news, fact checking, et cetera? Because the beast of the media corporation is that anything that's put out there has to be fact checked. The environment we live today. The upside is if you've got a very specialized niche, you're going to find followers.

Simon Dell: The third area that I quickly wanted to discuss about, your previous roles, was the Australian Beverages Council. And the reason that one interests me so much, not just because I came from a background myself of not necessarily soft drinks, but more alcohol drinks, that they, again, are another brand that have been fairly well-attacked over the last, say, 10-15 years. Was that the case? I look at the timelines when you worked in that. Was that the case when you were there, or was that starting?

Ric Navarro: Yeah. You've hit it, because it was right at the cusp of the sugar debate. There was publicity starting to emerge big time around: What are we actually drinking in each bottle or can of soft drink? What does that translate to? And you had the literal displays of teaspoons of sugar. We had dieticians, nutritionists, weighing in on the debate. We had federal government weighing in on the debate.

So, on the one hand, we're working with some of the largest brands in the world, Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola, and then sort of Coopers, Schweppes, and niche players as well within the Australian market. They were trying to position their products and weighing that up against government pressure and community and stakeholder concerns.

That creates a really interesting working environment for any marketing division. What it did do, though, and one of the things that came out of that, was, and like marketers, we all look for solutions, is bottled water. This was at a time when, obviously, bottled water wasn't new, but it catapulted bottled water into the limelight. The marketing focus went away from the sugar debate to, "That's okay, here's an alternative." So, the lesson from that is as marketers, we can always look at a scenario and say we have a particular situation. It's not so much about distraction but alternatives, so giving consumers choice.

I think that that placated a lot of the community concerns, and like most issues, that pardon the punt fizzled out. So, bottled water was set up. It was even an institute set up, I think the International Bottled Water Institute, something about that. It's big business, and today, in some cases, outsells a lot of soft drinks. And now, we're seeing the latest trend is for flavoured bottled water or carbonated water drinks. These are all good choices and these all come...

All of these changes, when you look at the timeline, we're looking at FMCG at the moment, but if you look at many products and services, a lot of it comes out of consumer sentiment. So, we are now at a point where we have shifted from huge volumes of carbonated heavy sugar water to what we call healthy alternatives, zero-sugar, or no sugar, or low-sugar alternatives, I suppose if you were to chart those sales, they're far outpacing the traditional soft drinks and beverages sales. This again all comes from consumer sentiment.

Simon Dell: From your experience there, and I'm going to imagine that somewhere in your experience with Norman Disney & Young, you've dealt with brands or businesses that have a negative perception. How do you generally talk to brands about approaching those issues? What are some of the things that people out there could do? If there are marketers out there or the business owners there that perhaps there is a negativity around their business, what are some of the things that they can do to tackle that?

Ric Navarro: I think, and this is where in my book Marketing with Purpose I talk a lot about, clearly the importance of brand purpose now, brand purpose has received a lot of airtime and oxygen over the last few years, and for good reason. Brand purpose should ultimately be the most important for the organization. So, driving behaviour, driving the ethics and values of the organization is the brand purpose.

If that is in place, that should be the guiding light for the entire C-suite and the whole executive team. Leadership plays a vital component in brand success. So, the attributes, values, or behaviours of your leadership team will cascade down across the entire organization. It’s never to be underestimated that the values that a leadership team brings. We only have to look so far as the Royal Commission to see the trust, behaviour and brand performance and perception were all inextricably leaked. Also, ultimately as well if that is broken. So, if you break that consumer trust, that's where our brands get into a lot of strife.

So, to the point about brand purpose, it really is a nucleus of providing the go-to-market strategy. Engagement is so important as well. We look at brands that are successful, and they'll have fantastic internal engagement scores. Why? Because they feel empowered. They love working for the brand. They understand they come in to work for a particular reason, for a brand that upholds the highest ethical standards, for example. They believe in the products themselves. So, my advice simply would be to look at a leadership team, to look at what the brand purpose is. And if it's not well articulated and understood by your own people, that's a big red flag. I think that ultimately, we're guiding light to say well on this particular pathway, we need to understand that brand purpose is something we need to get our house in order with that.

Simon Dell: When you talk about brand purpose, and again, when you work in a big agency, that customers that are coming to you are able to spend budget, time, those kind of things, investigating brand purpose... If you're down at the other end of the spectrum, you're a small business, it might be a family business, you might have two to four employees, maybe 10-20, finding the brand purpose is often a bit of a challenge because you just don't have the time and the money. Is there anything that you can suggest, any sort of exercises, any processes that those smaller businesses could go through to actually work out what that brand purpose is?

Ric Navarro: That's a good point. I think we can all get caught up in agency names and hiring the experts to do it for us. The first point I would make is brand purpose, and agencies may hate me for this, but should never involve the agency, at least at the initial stage. I think it needs to come from within the organization. It needs to be unpacked from what the brand stands for to its own people. So, it's almost working in reverse to create the ultimate outcome. So, unpacking that in two is important for small business.

Quite simply, ask your customers. They're the greatest form of people towards what the brand purpose is. Ask them: What are the first two or three words that comes to mind when I give you X, Y, Z service or provide you with this particular product? You'll find that over time, there'll be a consistent pattern, so you end up with a purpose that actually resonates with you and your customers. It doesn't have to be an extensive exercise. It doesn't have to be a cumbersome exercise. It can just be a conversation we run that over time really impacts what is the essence now of your brand.

Simon Dell: The obvious thing that springs to the back of my mind is, and I know different people have different opinions on this, but Simon Sinek's Starting with the Why, understanding why businesses do what they do... And whether you like that book or not, it's one of those ones that I think, from a small business, if they sat down and just read that to start with, it would probably be a good help. Is there anything else that you think from a reading perspective or a learning perspective online that people would be worth gravitating to?

Ric Navarro: I'm a big fan of Seth Godin as well. I look at all his work and it's very easy to read and understand whether you're a marketer, or a small business owner, or a marketing leader with a team of 50. It's applicable. He's got a range of books out there. He's a prolific expert, he’s got a daily blog. Definitely a big fan of Seth Godin, importantly because he does make it real. He does talk in a way that's actually meaningful to the brand, but ultimately, always looks at it from the lens of the customer.

Simon Dell: I think my Seth Godin recommendation would be, the first book to go and get would be Purple Cow. I think that's the defining Seth Godin book. It's interesting because it's written in a day before social media, and in the early, early days of the internet. You kind of have to perhaps reframe it as you read it, but for me, I think Purple Cow is the starting point for any Seth Godin.

Ric Navarro: Yeah. I mean, you look at Purple Cow, Lynchpin, Poke the Box, or even All Marketers Tell Stories. They're all great. The storytelling one in particular, I myself got a lot out of it. There's great content, and as we were talking about earlier, I think looking online, doing some research, there's some great Australian marketers as well. We've got great-minded talent. I think we can often default to looking at overseas examples.

But you look at the list of Top 50 CMOs, and this is wonderful marketing talent. They've done some transformative work themselves. Again, social media plays an important part in winning those lessons from individuals who have made a goal through a huge transformation process themselves.

Simon Dell: When I was going through your Twitter, and looking at some of the older stuff that you've shared, and some of the articles that you passed on, there was one that sort of jumped out at me because I think this is a major problem in the marketing space, was your comment about marketers getting caught up with the shiny new things versus understanding that traditional marketing still really works well. Talk to me a little bit about that. What are perhaps the shiny new things that we ought to be aware of?

Ric Navarro: Ok, so we are going to go down the digital marketing path now. I think if you were to ask a dozen people what digital means you would get close to, there'd be a dozen different responses. Digital, for me, is a way of working. It's not necessarily a noun. I think we can all get caught up in this idea that digital is the panacea, the company down the road has gone digital, whatever that means, so we need to hurry up, and catch up, and make sure that we're digital as well.

In the race to do that, though, are we focused on our customers? What is it that is important to our customers? So, always go back, for me, to what it is that the customers want, how do they want to be communicated with, what content do they want to consume, and what's really important to them at the end of the day. Digital you know are really the enablers. They enable marketers and other teams to fulfil their customer obsession.

So, the shiny new toys exec was really about some marketing leaders and even the C-suiters start getting caught up in the fact that we need to implement this particular martech solution because that's going to help transform our business. And in some cases, it does. In some cases, you get really short-term, solid results. The problem with that is it's not sustainable because there's no key foundation based on really deep dive customer research. So, that post, if I recall correctly, was really about saying that digital, yes, it's important, but let's not forget traditional marketing in the sense of understanding your customers, understanding what their drivers and needs are.

In today's environment, doing as much listening as you do talking to customers, and this is where voice of customer is so important today. For me, if I was to talk about digital in a sense as a particular tool in marketing, for me, it would be that voice of customer. It's doing a lot of listening that's going to inform your strategy.

Simon Dell: That sort of leads me to my next question. And I think we've been in a point for a couple of years where marketing is changing. The basics that you're talking about is understanding what the customer wants still underpins everything, but the channels are changing, the route to talking to the customers is changing. And even today, I think social media is still undergoing this change. There's a lot of people leaving Facebook. Twitter has just died on its backside from the engagement perspective. Those channels are fracturing. And I haven't looked at it, but things like TikTok and gaming channels where people exist now.

What are your thoughts? And I get that there's still that core thing that we've got to get right with marketing, but from a channel perspective, where do you see all this going to in the next 5 years? What are the new, shiny things that perhaps we should be looking at in terms of overall execution and tactics?

Ric Navarro: Experience. So, what experience in inverted commas and customers. So, there's a lot of talk recently about experiential marketing. There are agencies that are dedicated to having that and helping marketers to achieve that with their customers. I see it as a huge growth area. I think sensory experience is, let's not forget, going back to our human-to-human discussion, still dominate. And I think we're at a time and place where it's been fantastic is upsurge of social media channels. What we find is that some will come, dominate, and drop off, and potentially even die off, but there'll be a new player in the market.

I think ultimately, it's an umbrella across all of them. It's what experience you provide your customers. And by that, I mean, most of the experience. For example, if you own a golf shop, having customers come in and not only look at golf clubs but perhaps having some sort of AR or VR environment where they can actually test the golf club within the shop, same with the clothing retail, for example, it’s happening already, we are going to see more and more of that.

And what that does organically is create ambassadors. So, as a customer, Simon, you've gone and you've tried this latest 9 iron if you’re a golfer. You're going to talk about the wonderful experience you had. You just knock that fair, this is the best thing ever. So, for me, it's about experience.

Simon Dell: It's interesting you say that, because one of the exercises I've worked with with a client of mine was about a process that I think it was the Airbnb guys went through when they started their business, was trying to understand what they called the 11-star experience. The theory behind that was that any business should be delivering a five-star experience. That's what they're there to do. In today's age, survival alone necessitates that you need to deliver a five-star experience.

But the Airbnb guys were saying, "Well, if we are delivering a five-star experience, let's assume that we've got that right, what does a six-star experience look like? What does a seven-star experience look like?" And they work that all the way up to an 11-star experience. I've read this in a book, but I can't for the life of me remember what their 11-star experience was specifically, but I think it was something like staying in an Airbnb that was orbiting the planet while the Beatles were playing for you live.

Ric Navarro: If you like The Beatles.

Simon Dell: If you like The Beatles. So, they defined that as their 11-star experience, and gone, "Well, obviously, we can't make that happen." But what are the elements of an 11-star experience that we can go, "Yeah, alright. Let's try and do that. If we can't make The Beatles playing live, what if we did do live music for people in their Airbnb?" That sort of stumped up a lot of questions that suddenly started to make that experience better, and this is a digital company.

Ric Navarro: Exactly, yeah. And I think what's really interesting there is it's going to be different for different types of brands. But ultimately, we have that desire to achieve best in room. I’m not one for always focusing on the competition as well. So, if you're on a particular market segment, every market segment these days is crowded. I think we can get consumed with looking at what our competitors are doing and trying to do with upmanship. I think the really important thing was use that imaging, take that focus, and put it on your customers. That'll be the ultimate guiding light. I think at the end of the day, whether you're selling shoes, or selling consulting services, that's going to be your focus. The experience is going to be different, but ultimately, yeah.

Simon Dell: I think this sort of leads me to the last discussion point that I wanted to run through with you today. I think about myself as a consultant, a marketer, and I think about that 11-star experience. You can't, unfortunately, go past the point that part of that 11-star experience is going to be delivering results for your customers. You could take them to an Airbnb that's orbiting the planet and have a live Beatles performance in front of them, but at the end of the day, if you're not delivering results, they're probably not going to stay your client that much longer.

Right at the start, you mentioned a focus on bottom-line growth. This is probably a really obvious answer, but I'll still ask it anyway: Why is that so important for marketers to be aware of?

Ric Navarro: As a marketer, if you go into the boardroom and start talking about soft measures and don't really connect that to what the pressures are on a board or an executive team, you're not going to have a very productive conversation. Ultimately, one of the issues we face as marketers if still being thought of as a cost base rather than as a revenue driver. But if you change that conversation, if you switch that up into a language that they understand and really think about where the two meet, where do the customer needs meet, and where do the company needs meet, and the brands needs meet. If you get into that sweet spot, then it's a really fruitful conversation where you can drive profitable growth for the business.

As marketers, we're always balancing also short-termism which is another pressure on senior marketers about getting results now. What's the return on investment? What are the metrics from the latest campaign? I think we've got to balance that, also, and keep something fit for long-term objectives, to say, "We need to focus on this now, but ultimately, this is where we want to get to." So, having those meaningful conversations with your executive team and board, if relevant, are just vital so that marketers actually have that credibility to say we are a vital cog within the C-suite ecosystem.

Simon Dell: It's funny, because I've had that conversation a lot in the last 6 months when customers go, "How much should we be spending on marketing?" My answer back to that is another question, which is, "Well, how much money do you want to make?" And literally, last week, I presented to a client. It's a very pure marketing business. You could argue they're 99% marketing. And we've gone through all the figures and said, "You know, on average, somewhere every month, you make somewhere between $9 and $12 for every $1 that you invest in marketing.

My point to them was that if you want to make more money, you just invest more money in marketing. And yes, we've got to make sure that that ratio stays the same as we spend more money, but really, do you want to make more money? You want to make more profit? Your cost base is staying the same. It's overinvest in marketing. But to your point, I see so many marketers that don't even understand how much the company is making. I've sat in front of a C-suite of lawyers and none of them had any idea what the company was making or what their targets were for that year. It's amazing how many people don't really have their head around those numbers.

Ric Navarro: For marketers, that's really important because if you're part of the leadership team or aspire to be, having that sort of fiscal strength and focus on bottom-line is only going to improve your own credibility and focus on what matters to the company. This can all be tied back, going back to the early discussion around brand purpose. If our purpose is to deliver X, Y and Z, we're going to do that, but we're going to do it in a way that actually makes it more sustainable brand, and by sustainable, I mean profitable.

Because we can only continue to exist as a brand if we, in fact, look after that healthy bottom-line. To your point earlier as well, there's a famous phrase along the lines of not everything that counts can be counted; not everything that can be counted, counts. So, I think we've got to measure the right things and actually question what the statistics tell us.

Simon Dell: Okay, last three questions to wrap up. Obviously, in your experience, in some of the brands that you've worked with, you must somewhere have some favourites out there. I'm interested to here about, again, not necessarily ones that you're worked with, but I'm interested to hear about brands that you admire, that you look at and go, "You know what? Those guys are hitting the nail on the head every time."

Ric Navarro: I'll give you two quick examples. One is the local leather goods manufacturer in Australia, Bellroy. Now, Bellroy are considered to be a niche play, but they've grown successfully because they've developed an approach to storytelling that is meaningful to their customers. I love the way they've done it because they've been able to maintain a certain quality about their product and attraction to their product as a premium product. And yet, reached a diverse audience through their particular product.

On a larger scale, I look at German skincare giant like Aesop. They market things like Nivea and all sorts of stuff. What I like about Aesop is that they do a lot of online, social listening, so they're constantly actively listening to their customers in a competitive, crowded marketplace. They're surviving because they're able to shape their products accordingly. They're able to maintain agile and responsive. We hear a lot about agility from marketers these days. It means being able respond to different customer needs that have evolved. I mean, they're two quick examples off the top of my head that I would say, from different perspectives and from different size of the scale, they are doing it well.

Simon Dell: I'll ask you the alternative question. Is there any out there that you look at, and you think they've lost the plot or that they could be doing better?

Ric Navarro: Obviously, we all know the VW emissions scandal. I suppose that's a prime example of putting profit above everything else. That's a company that really, at the leadership end of the spectrum, lost its way in terms of brand purpose. Their ambition was to be the largest automaker in the world I think by 2019. When you've got an aggressive growth strategy like that, everything, your going to cut corners, your really going to do things that aren’t true to your purpose. I think the purpose going back to that has got to be so centred on what is sustainable and what is true to your ethics and values as well. That's one I highlight in the book, is really an area where brands don't want to get into cutting corners, if you like, with their customers.

Simon Dell: Penultimate question: You've written one book. You've been with Norman Disney & Young quite a while. You've just started a new role, advisory role, haven't you?

Ric Navarro: That's right, yes. So, I'm working with the Australian Marketing Institute, board advisory role, and that's focused on really professional development of marketers within Australia. So, there is a lot they've done. There is actually certification for marketers. So, CPM, Certified Practicing Marketer. So, much like CPA for accountants. The idea is that a CPM becomes the pinnacle of marketing prowess, if you like. So, it really embodies the best of marketing. So, to have a CPM after your name is really showing, showing internally your own leadership, that you're a marketing leader and that you've gone through the accreditation process.

Simon Dell: Have you got another book inside you, do you think?

Ric Navarro: Well, I think everyone's got a book inside them. Do I have another one? I think one of the benefits of having a journalism background is that you're comfortable with writing. I think I'm starting to think a lot about trust within brands and the importance of that. By now, I mean from a consumer and customer perspective obviously we want to talk about that trust for longer, and share what the audience need to know about continues to show where people are losing faith in brands. I think that's an area that requires further explanation, but we'll wait and see what the next 12 to 18 months impacts me.

Simon Dell: On a side note, I find a lot of journalists at the moment writing fiction, actually. I've read a couple of books in the last year by Australian journalists who obviously decided to pick the pen up and... I don't know if that's something that's happened recently.

Ric Navarro: A lot of journalists or ex-journalists are also ghostwriters. So, a lot of books that you see in stores who are supposedly penned by certain celebrities are not. There's always been that going on in terms of a ghostwriting perspective, but I think most journalists are closet fiction writers at heart.

Simon Dell: Well, that begs the question, then. If you were going to write a fiction book, what genre would it be about then, Ric?

Ric Navarro: I have some interesting corporate tales that I could tell. I think it would not only be a book. I think it could be a Netflix series, so who knows.

Simon Dell: Yeah, and you probably have to do it under an assumed name as well.

Ric Navarro: Yeah.

Simon Dell: Well, last question: If anybody wants to come and talk to you, if they've got some questions, what's the best way of finding you?

Ric Navarro: Online, as you mentioned, I'm not really huge on Twitter but always active on LinkedIn. It's a great way of reaching me. And of course, I've got a marketing book website. So, marketingwithpurpose.solutions. That has a contact page as well, so if anyone wants to reach me, they're probably the two best ways to get in touch.

Simon Dell: And how much is the book, just so people know?

Ric Navarro: $24.95. That's hard copy. It's available on Google Play and iTunes.

Simon Dell: Cool, awesome. Mate, thank you very much for your insight today, and your ideas, and your suggestions, and I hope people will get some value out of that. I really appreciate your time today.

Ric Navarro: No, thank you, Simon. I hope there's been some pillars of wisdom amongst my ramblings.

Simon Dell: Thank you, mate.

Ric Navarro: Thank you, cheers.

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