Chatbots Are the Future of CX According to Kellogg Professor

We live in a digital era. Consumers are technologically empowered and they demand interactions tailored to their digital savviness. Jonathan Copulsky, Professor at Northwestern‘s Kellogg School of Management and Medill School of Journalism, and former Deloitte CMO, understands that chatbots are the future of customer experience. Jonathan talks digital transformation, Martech, voice, and more on the Brand Lab Series podcast.
“All the things that I do, I learned from watching, observing, and sitting at the knee of others, so I think that’s important to pass on.”
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BRIAN Jonathan, you showed no signs of slowing down since your first appearance on the Brand Lab Series back in 2016. One of the things that I find super interesting though, and probably very helpful to future marketing leaders is that you now teach and lecture at Northwestern. You have to run content and marketing at Deloitte. You’ve traveled all over the world, as we were just talking about before we started recording. You’ve climbed Kilimanjaro. You’re technically retired, but you seem to be moving faster than most people. And one of the interesting aspects of your post-Deloitte career is guest lecturing at Northwestern University, specifically the Medill School of Journalism as well as Kellogg, which I think is really interesting. And there’s a lot of talk around higher education these days. So, talk a little bit about why educating future marketing leaders is so important to you.
JONATHAN Well, Brian, first of all, thanks so much for having me back and a delight to be here. And you have been a pioneer in podcasting, which is terrific because that now seems to be the new and thing. I know when I walk around Chicago with my iPhone, I’m generally listening to one podcast or another. So, delighted to be back here. In terms of education, I was lucky enough to find a role as a member of the faculty at Medill, which is inter-school of Journalism, Media, and Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern. And had a class called Brand Communication Decisions, had a wonderful time, and when I finished, I asked the dean if I could continue to teach, and fortunately, he let me. Back in June 2017, when I retired from Deloitte, where I’d spent 20 years, I had an opportunity move to the faculty as a half-time. And in addition to doing that, I also teach at Kellogg and run a program which is called Business Marketing Strategy. It’s a terrific opportunity.
I teach for two reasons. Number one which is, I’ve had the benefit of wonderful mentors, teachers, trainers, instructors, rabbis, whatever we wanna call them, who taught me many things about marketing, about how to be an effective CMO, all the things that I do, I learn from watching, observing, and sitting at the knee of others. So, I think that’s important to pass on. But the other thing is, I think that teaching is all about learning. And the more you teach, the more you learn about the things that are important to the next generation of marketers. So, I’ve learned more in the past two years since I’ve been teaching half-time at Medill, and I could probably see I learned the five years before then, because I have to stay on top of new technologies, new trends, new issues, and so forth, because we’ve got students who are incredibly smart, incredibly demanding. And since we have an expectation that they’re not gonna only learn about marketing today, but the marketing of the future.
BRIAN Well, you just touched on something that I wanna follow-up on, which I think is really interesting. I know you saw this in your professional career at Deloitte, and you’re still seeing it now which you alluded to, and I know you have a new book, “The Technology Fallacy” that we’ll talk about as well. I think one of the knocks on higher education is, how can they adequately prepare students for “the real world,” whatever the real world is. But I think in this particular area that you’re lecturing in, I think and teaching, and it’s even more important because we’re in this era of digital disruption where technology and digital transformation is moving so fast. What are some things that Northwestern or any university for that matter can do to make sure that they’re better preparing students for this speed economy? 
JONATHAN Well, we certainly spend time having our students speak to people outside the university, those are guest speakers and guest lecturers. We spend time having them work in practicums and jobs with real companies in the real world. We spend some time thinking about what the future might be and what that’s hands-on skills. One of the things I did in my class, I just finished on marketing technology was, had all the students learned how to program a skill, literally a skill in Alexa, so that they could command their voice first devices to perform or taking the test. And more than likely, that’s a skill that they may never use in the next 10 years, but understanding what goes into taking a voice first device and making it do some of the activities that you’d likely to do, I think is important that people then get a hands-on feel for what’s involved and bring technology to life.
BRIAN Yeah. I know we’ll talk a little bit more about bringing some of that emerging technology to life, especially through some B2B lenses and that later, which again, you’re well-equipped to speak to. And I know if you don’t follow Jonathan on Twitter or LinkedIn, he’s a great follow. And I’ve seen firsthand that you also bring in some additional people to help lecture with some of your classrooms. And I think one of the things that I’ve seen be highly successful on social is the who were at best. And you seem to always pass along a Northwestern hat to some of the people that come in to talk to your students. Where did that start? And is it the same hat? 
[laughter]
JONATHAN Well, thank you. Thank you for the compliment about the social media. I’d say, I’m still a beginner when it comes to social media compared to some people out there. But I think it’s an important way for us to communicate and important. Once again, that we understand this because if we’re sitting here 10 years ago, social media just was a blip on the horizon. Now, it’s part of every single marketers strategy. So, I’ve had people come to my classes from all kinds of organizations, Salesforce, HubSpot, Adobe, client organizations where people may be CMOs, and often talking about the role of technology when it comes to marketing. Now, Northwestern’s are very well-endowed organization and university, but as an individual lecture, I don’t have a big budget for guest speakers. So, a couple years ago, hit upon the idea of, “Well, what can I give them? I could give them a hat.” And that’s just a Northwestern hat. It’s a Northwestern Medill hat.
So, if you look at the logo on these hats, it’s Northwestern Medill, which is this school as I said of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communication. And so, I hit upon the idea of, “Well, give a hat to people.” Hat that cost a lot of money. I’ll take their pictures and then post it to LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter with the legend or the hashtag “who work best.” Hats been interesting because these things have just like mushroomed in popularity. And I’d say that I probably have had over 100,000 views of the various post. Have then just within the past year related to people wearing the Medill hat. So, it’s wonderful for the speakers because they get a little bit of pleasure of, “Did my post out rank the last post?” And it’s also wonderful for the students because they get all excited to see the people just came to class. And it’s wonderful for the school because it helps to publicize the program that we have in Integrated Marketing Communications, both of the undergraduate, graduate levels. Oh, everybody gets their own cap.
BRIAN Okay, that’s good to know. I wondered about that.
JONATHAN And if you come to class, you will get a cap.
BRIAN I would love the chance but I do think it’s just a great way of, as you said, engaging your audience in the classroom, engaging and recognizing the people that come to speak in your classroom and then obviously being able to amplify that in social. Another person that we follow and learn a lot from is David Meerman Scott, who authored the New Marketing Mastery principles and I think that’s just such a great example of trying to be relevant and trying to be fun and showing a bit of personality. And that’s really what I think social should be all about. Unfortunately, social has been a little hijacked these days by too much news and too much politics. So it’s nice to see that, but it sounds like the bar those high in terms of the engagement and the number of likes. So if I do get the chance, I’ll obviously be trying to be mindful of that as well.
JONATHAN Just one thing, Brian, I would throw in here which is interesting because this goes back to a core marketing principle. I think for people who are non marketers, they sometimes look at marketing as a bit of fairy dust. I’m gonna sprinkle this thing on and all of a sudden, boom, some magic will happen. And while we’d love to believe as marketers that’s all about creativity and imagination, so forth, some of it is about taking a good idea and repeating it. And I have to sometimes to emphasize with non marketers that there’s a bit of repetition in this and we can change things up and so forth, but the consistency of having a message in this case it’s just literally a cap and the #whoworebest which then had started to develop a following and people have come to expect it. So it’s funny just even in the world of social media going back to a core idea of creativity is important but repetition and frequency are also important elements of what we need to do as marketers.
BRIAN And I think that that’s such a great point as it relates to the downside of social beyond what I mentioned is sometimes politics and news tend to hijack a lot of the feeds is that it’s become a bit of an instant gratification attention economy and attention marketing. And to your point, it is about that back to the basics of repetition and consistency of that message. I know we’ve joked before that you’re a long distance runner, you don’t get to become a long distance runner without a lot of training. And the 3Ks, the 5Ks, the 10Ks get you to where you are. And I think a lot of times, people tend to get complacent and expectation setting in terms of investments and marketing can be challenging because people want that immediate return.
JONATHAN Exactly.
BRIAN So I think that that’s a great little point and a good bit of wisdom from you per usual. Besides teaching, as I joked, you don’t seem to slow down in retirement. You’ve written books in the past, your book Brand Resilience is a must read if someone has not read it. I’ve got my autograph copy with me in the studio and everyone at AE Marketing group has to read it as well, when they come on board. But you’ve also co-authored a new book called The Technology Fallacy, which I think is also super interesting in terms of the timing because it’s obviously talking about how people are the real key to digital transformation. And digital transformation is a bit of a buzz word today but it’s a reality as well. One of the things that really impressed me, which I shouldn’t have been surprised by, is the length of research that went into the book itself. If I read the data correctly, you talked to 15-16,000 people in terms of surveys. This went over the course of multiple years. So there’s a lot of great insight there. So talk about digital transformation and why people need to read this book and better understand digital transformation.
JONATHAN Yeah, if we were sitting here 10 years ago, 15 years ago, it would be a different conversation. What we’ve seen is the advent of all kinds of new technology, which changed the way that we buy, interact with vendors, interact with each other and so forth. And I sometimes remind my students, it was only 2007 that the iPhone was invented. And if we think about all the things that we can do in our lives, whether it’s order in Uber, go to an Airbnb, doing something to make an order with Amazon, all of that is because we’ve got this iPhone which didn’t exist 12 years ago. And even if we went back 12 years ago and we looked at the iPhone that existed, it’s just a shadow of what we have today. So this and many of the things that we have today when it comes to digital technologies existed but they seem to be improving capabilities and functionality at an amazing, amazing rate. And so the studies that led to the book was really about how do organizations, particularly legacy organizations, right? We’re sitting here in 1871, so all the cool kids are here, including you and they’re just in what we would call digital natives. They’re used to doing with digital technology, it’s been part of their life and so forth. But then you go to some of the large established manufacturing companies, the healthcare companies and so forth, which have been around for 100, 200 years, for them, it’s a different challenge about how they use and that’s who we wrote the book for.
BRIAN Well, it seems as though individuals and businesses today and you were kind of hinting at this in your last response, but they seem to be a little bit more reactive versus proactive when thinking about digital transformation. Did your research support that? 
JONATHAN Well, it did, yeah. So you alluded to this a second ago, Brian, your question. So we’ve done surveys, and when I say we, this was originally started by Deloitte when I was there and I was the executive sponsor of this, and then MIT’s Business Magazine Sloan Management review. And we do these surveys every year, we’ve got over four years of surveys, more than 16,000 people in organizations around the world. So it’s a pretty big base. And then we did in-depth case studies with about 75 companies and these are market leaders, everything from sales force to Walmart too, you name your favorite market leading company. And then we also did extensive and secondary research about theories of organizations, technology transfer, technology adoption and so forth. And one of the things that came out is, as you said, nobody is blind or oblivious with the fact that digital transformation is taking place. So when we ask people the question, “How is it affecting your business?” A very, very high percentage said, “Yes, of course, it’s affecting my business.” In fact, that percentage… I’m just gonna go to my notes here, 87% of the people that we spoke to believe that digital technologies will fundamentally disrupt their industry. That’s a pretty big number. Now, you wonder about the 13%, you could say that, but let’s ignore them for a second. But only 44%
Believe that their organizations are adequately preparing for disruptions that will happen in their industry doing digital trend. So we’ve got this sort of knowing doing gap, this gap between I know it’s gonna disrupt me but we’re not doing enough. But what’s also interesting, and this goes to your question about reactive, when you talk to people who are senior leaders, they believe that their organizations are doing more than the people who are at lower levels in the same organization. And so we looked at that and said, “Well, that’s kind of weird.” And the reason I believe is because they hear all the good news. The good news filters up and people show them their favorite projects and they go to places like 1871, and they go to conferences, and they talk to other CEOs, and they hear what other companies are doing, they’re are on boards, and they hear all that. So politely, I think there’s a challenge that many of the leaders believe, they’re in a trap, they believe their own rhetoric, they’re in hell in their own exhaust. And I think that’s a dangerous symptom of inability to respond, because they think they’re actually doing more than people at the frontlines know that they are.
BRIAN That’s so interesting. I don’t wanna go off topic ’cause I know we’ll talk a little bit about this later, but we see that in some of our own customer portfolio, in some other areas as it relates to customer experience, where a lot of folks in the C-Suite see and believe one thing but then when you talk to people that are on the frontlines of those customer interactions, it’s a very different narrative, a very different set of experiences.
JONATHAN And you definitely see this now with digital transformation. So you talk to a CEO and he or she says, “Yeah, yeah, we’re doing all this great stuff. We need to do more but we’re doing great stuff.” And then you talk to people on the frontline. So it’s exactly like people say, “Oh, yeah. It’s wonderful to be a customer,” because if they’re the senior executive on an airline, they’re sitting in the first class seats. If they’re a senior executive of a auto company, they’ve never gone to car dealer or have to buy a car. So they don’t see those things and they somehow fall in this trap of believing their own rhetoric.
BRIAN This kind of disconnect between the nearly 90% that recognize it’s happening but the 44% that are prepared, is an interesting disconnect. And in many ways, it makes me wonder if it’s less about technology and maybe more about people. And I think that that’s a little bit of what your book is trying to get at as well which is is digital transformation really all about the people and the talent, and what is kind of the impact that digital transformation can have to the lens of talent? 
JONATHAN Yeah, so yes, in a work. That’s why we have the subtitle that we do but what’s interesting, and this just sort of got reinforced every year when we did the survey, was that many leaders believe just because the digital technologies cause the problems of digital disruption, therefore, the solution should be in adopting new technologies. It sort of makes sense, right? I’ve got all these technologies to change my world, they’re disrupting my world. So therefore, the best solution is, I have to adopt those. And while in theory, that sort of would seem to make sense in practice, the problem is really around culture and people and organization and processes. So it’s a little bit like trying to give somebody who doesn’t know how to drive the super-powered Maserati or Ferrari but you still haven’t taught them how to drive. So giving them this wonderful tool doesn’t solve the problem in fact exacerbates the problem because now the people aren’t trained and equipped and able to deal with these new technologies.
And so the process of making organization technology ready, making them able to adapt and use these technologies as an important as the technologies that you actually select and try to implement. And that’s kind of the core message of the book. So we cover in the book, not a lot about the technologies itself. This is not a book about technology, it’s not about you’ll pick the right technologies or how to use mobile or how to use digital or how to use social or anything else like that. It’s really about how to make your organizations technology ready and what you need to do to be specific in the talent area. One of the other things that just came out in spades, was when we asked people about their willingness to leave the organizations that they currently work for. The answer was pretty high if they felt that the organizations were not helping to make them technology ready. And what was interesting was this was not just millennials, it was not just the people who sort of “Oh, I need to move to the next big thing to get my… But in all levels.”
So there’s an expectation among executives, as well as frontline people that they… All of the organization when it comes to technologies, helping them to learn about new technologies and helping them equip them with the skills that they need to be technology savvy. So all this came back to me as organizations are failing their people when it comes to training, teaching, learning and educating them about new technologies and if they don’t do that, people pick up and go somewhere where they will learn that even if it’s not necessarily a higher paying job or doesn’t have better benefits, it’s all about learning.
BRIAN What makes that interesting is it reminds me a little bit of something that Tom Gimbel, CEO of La Salle Network, who was on the Brand Lab Series before talked about, he was kind of an early adopter to culture and he said many times, management tends to point the finger at the obvious solution. And you just said it like, “Oh, digital transformation is about technology, therefore, it must be technology when a lot of times it really is an underlying cultural element.” And it also reminded me a little bit, frankly, of your first book Brand Resilience, where you talked about brand is I’m paraphrasing a bit, but you were telling about how brand is so much bigger than just an advertising creative function, that there are so many things that go into a brand and that organizations really need to understand that mindset and everything that can influence that. And in the case of digital transformation, I think, and I know you’ve joked a little bit about where we are today at 1871, I think on this side, we almost overcompensate.
It’s just more tech, it’s more tech. It’s gotta be all about the techs. So I think, much like that disconnect between some of the percentages, I think it’s really important that organizations understand and I think the data point also that retention of talent and being able to provide them almost like you do in the classroom, right? Learning to be able to understand and harness technology moving forward is such an important part of their career. Now along those similar lines though is it does relate to technology, much like digital transformation. I feel that MarTech and Tech Stack are also big buzzwords. And as someone who has worn CCO hats and CMO hats before, how do you recommend your peers think about moving into that swamp? Because as you said earlier, technology though is important. The iPhone example and others that you gave are important in helping make marketers be more productive, more relevant and some of that. But I almost feel like we’re swinging the pendulum so far the other way where we’re just adding to all this technology. How do you recommend people go about some of those evaluations and thinking about that? 
JONATHAN Carefully. I teach a course which is called Introduction to Marketing Technology and the first time I taught this class, it actually had a different title. It was called Mastering Marketing Technology. And I was humbled by the time we finished that first class, I said “I better go from mastering to introduction” and it’s reflective. I mean, Scott Brinker, who some people listening to this broadcast may know, works for HubSpot and he has a blog chiefmartec.com. And every year, he publishes his chart, which has all the different technologies that support marketing, and the chart started out with a 150 different technologies, now over 7000. What I’ve concluded and what I tell my students is it’s absolutely impossible, impossible for anybody to weigh through 7000 different technologies and somehow optimize the choices among those 7000 different technologies. There’s some basic things that every organization needs. We still live in a world of email, right? So every organization needs to have some email capabilities. We still live in a world in which we need to be able to personalizing, so we need to be able to personalize both the content, as well as the addressability of things.
We somehow need to manage the workflow and the processes, so we need tools for project management and workflow management, we need to do webpages and mobile pages, so we need some kind of experienced delivery capabilities. So there are about four or five different technologies every organization needs to have. And so, let’s start with that. What’s that basic essential core set of technologies and I advise everybody make sure you’ve got those things right, you know how to work and so forth, and then you’re exercising their capabilities. But the other thing I’ve learned both on my personal experience since I talk with people is we learn to use technologies by using them. So if somebody asked you to describe what you needed in new technology or they gave you a new technology and say, “Figure out how to use it”. Now we’d be a little bit like the monkeys with the tool that we didn’t know how to use. But over time as you exercise and work with the tool, you learn more things. So we’re kidding before. You’re talking about Twitter and how in some ways it’s been weaponized by current politicians. And whether we like that or not, that’s the reality. But back when Twitter was first launched, that was never even in somebody’s vision of what Twitter could do. And how did that happen it’s because people use and discover all these things that they could do.
So there’s actually an academic concept, it’s called the affordances. And affordances are the capabilities that technology creates for an organization. And what we say in the book, going back to the technology fallacy is you learn and discover affordances when you work with technology. So one of the things I tell people when it comes to marketing technology is “You better have a plan to test, you better have a plan to pilot, you better have a plan to determine when the pilot’s effective or not. And if it is, you better have a plan to scale”. So the mantra we talk about in the book, and I say this with clients and I say this with my students is “Learn how to test fast, learn how to learn fast, and learn how to scale fast”. And it’s not about… Sometimes, particular in tech circles these days, we talk about fail forward or fail fast, and I hate those terms because most organizations don’t reward failure no matter what they say.
BRIAN I would agree with that.
JONATHAN Yeah, yeah. And it’s sort of hard to say, “Well, let’s learn how to fail”. I don’t agree with that. But I do think learning how to pilot and test and learn and scale, those are the critical tools that we have, right? Because when it comes to marketing, the typical marketing budget most organizations is decreasing, not increasing. So we need to learn how to do more with less, and less is often with lower budgets, fewer people and so forth. And the technology are potentially a tool for allowing us to take our basic process and make them more scalable. We don’t need hundreds of people, we can now do that with fewer people because of the technology. But you need that process to discover those affordances, those capabilities, and you do that by piloting and testing and learning and scaling.
BRIAN Building off of another emerging technology is voice, and I think we were joking a little bit before we started recording that AE Marketing Group is lucky enough to have our own Alexa, no pun intended. But when you think about voice, it has really become mainstream in most people’s lives, in their home or in their vehicle and in some other places as well. You talked about this as part of your North Western curriculum. But we see that B2B brands tend to still struggle with how to figure out how to incorporate voice and harness this power. Where do you see voice to the lens of a B2B brand? 
JONATHAN I’m just fascinated, fascinated by what I call conversational platforms and to expand the aperture just a little bit, right? There’s certainly voice first platforms like Alexa and Google Home and Siri, and Bigsby from Samson, and just a host of others and the way too many and at some point I think these things are gonna consolidate. But then there are also chatbots and in some ways the difference between voice and chatbots is less about your speaking versus typing, but there’s much more similarity in the sense of, we’re gonna have a conversation. So I refer to these things as conversational platforms and I’ve done a bit of research with some of my students written a couple of Articles, spoken about this, because I’m fascinated about how those might change marketing, and those of us who do have these voice first device, it seems to fall into a couple of camps one which is… Well, somebody gave me the device.
I wanted it, it’s like a door prize in a sales meeting, or whatever and I get it at home. And I used it for about two days and then can’t figure out what else to do. Because I’m tired of asking the weather, or I’m tired asked to play NPR or whatever. And then there’s some people who have just gotten the whole hog, often they’ve got smart plugs, and other things particularly in their home where they’re using their voice first device as a way to empower or enable that. And so it’s really sort of executed things. Instead of flipping on the white switch? Now, I say Alexa turn on the light and I put those in the category of funny pet tricks, things that you can do. But what has happened is, these devices have just penetrated thousands, millions of homes, so there is any estimates anywhere between a quarter to 40% of homes, in the United States have not only one device with multiple devices, and that’s likely to continue. And certainly, you mentioned on the things if you’ve got a iPhone if you’ve got a galaxy, you’ve got voice first capabilities there. If you got them in cars, you’ve got that as well.
So it will be interested to see how this happened. So I’ve got a little scenario in my head, and my scenario says at some point, those voice capabilities will go from executing command to actually, having conversation, which is why I refer to them as conversational platform. So imagine I’m thinking about buying something and I haven’t bought it, and it could be something as simple as a dishwasher or refrigerator. And sort of like what are the choices and my whole search process and discovery process is now a conversation, like I might have with intelligent salesperson or a consignee in a hotel and it’s really helping me to sort through all the different choices and the proliferation of choices that exist today.
So you asked a question about B-2-B. If we think about B2B purchases many of those purchases are way, way more complicated than the purchases that a consumer has. So it’s not just a refrigerator now, I’m buying a jet engine, or now, I’m thinking about a part too to fix a machine which is my factory. So if you take some companies right you call up or you go to visit salesperson, you have this consultative process. But I really think that voice devices, and chatbot wil enable conversation, which will we play some of the human factors and make it a safer, more exploratory conversation. So, what’s interesting, I just all these statistics the other day, is more than half the people who buy business to business product or service, don’t talk to a sales representative, it could be customer service, it could be sales person, whatever. So they’re pretty far down in that funnel in terms of making their choice and it may be, often through their mobile device where they’re searching, it may be through on some online interface, it may be through some other… So I do think it’s going to change the nature of how people explore and discover, and that voice could be in many cases very convenient, but I can also be chatbot as well, which allow people to discover the possibilities, a realm of options which are available and to think through and have somebody help them think it through.
Interesting enough the researches says that people may be way more comfortable having that conversation with a machine, then they may be with a person because they’re not worried about a parent be ignorant, they’re not worried about that, What are they projecting? And how a sales person may be reading them and saying, “Oh this is an easy buyer, and so forth. It’s like we all hate going to car dealers or most of us do. Because we know that they’re are more experience in selling cars that we are in buying cars, and same thing with other sales representatives. So I do believe that the conversational platforms may be viewed by people as much more sympathetic and empathetic than actual people.
BRIAN I’ve alluded to on a couple of occasions that you were kind enough to be an early adopter to the podcast, you were back on in 2016, in episode 34, were you talked a lot about the evolving role of the CMO, and I know one of the things that was interesting in that conversation is in the life span of the C-suite executives, the CMO is newer role, and more and more we’re starting to see the CMO topped with the responsibility of customer experience. You talked a little bit just there about chatbots as it relates to Conversational marketing, but we’re also seeing more where organizations are able to use chatbots to improve customer experience. Talk a little bit about where you see that playing a role.
JONATHAN I do think B2C were used to organizations that deliver outstanding customer experience, whether it’s the hotel business or just Amazon in terms of its ability to find and ship a product to you real quickly. And was it interesting, once you go the Research and the Salesforce, many people know is one of the leading purveyors of marketing technology every year does a survey, it’s called the state of the connected customer, highly recommended and it’s just closing out at this weekend. And one of the things that they found in the current survey is that the expectations of business customers, these are B2B customers is higher than B2C customers for outstanding experiences, and many of the expectations they have are shaped by the experiences that they have as a consumer. So if I use Amazon to buy a book likely technology fallacy that we’re looking at here, or buy my groceries, all of a sudden as a B2B buyer, I have that same paradigm. And I apply it. It’s interesting, as I’m sure many people know Amazon has…
Increased its footprint in B2B services over the last 10 years, and certainly people are very aware of the business that they have in cloud services, Amazon Web Services, AWS which was one of the most profitable businesses but they’ve also gone to other businesses. MRO which is the business of supplying parts for maintenance and repair operation. That’s now a big business for Amazon. So I do think that if we think once again about chatbots there are a couple of roles. One which I just talked about a few minutes ago, which is the discovery process, But the other is the process of customer service, where is my bag? KLM has started to use chatbots for that. Help me buy a simple thing. Property insurance. So there’s a company Lemonade which sells apartment insurance. And you can do the whole thing through a chatbot and it’s actually pretty pleasant. And it’s kind of cool and has a bit of an attitude, if you will, because it’s appealing to those millennials and the next generation after the millennials who are probably getting insurance for the first time. Bank of America introduced last year, Erica. And Erica was about both a combination of voice first device but also a chatbot to understand things about your financial affairs. So I just think that’s cool. If we went back in time 10 years ago and I keep on using 10 years because a lot has happened the past 10 years.
And we talked about social media, and I said to a CMO, “Social media needs to be part of your marketing mix.” He was a like, “Hugh? Really? And what am I gonna do?” And it’s all about Facebook and so forth. And even the B2B circles now, we just expect that things like LinkedIn will be an important part of what we do as part of a marketing mix. So my prediction is less than 10 years, three to five years, everybody will have to have chatbots and conversational devices as part of the marketing mix. And they better start experimenting today because you can’t wait until your competitors have done it. And if we look around, every day I see more and more things coming on line as examples of people using these tools to improve the quality of customer experience, making it easier to find things, making it easier for customer service, dealing with all the issues that come up with as its consumers, helping with the discovery process, helping with connecting and forming communities. So you better have some experiments on top. And it goes back to what I was saying a few minutes ago about you gotta learn how to pilot, you gotta learn how to test, you got to learn how to learn from this stuff and you gotta learn how to scale. And so if as a CMO that’s not part of your plan for 2019, you better put it on the agenda for 2020.
BRIAN Jonathan, I know we’ve talked a lot about a number of different aspects to technology, to digital disruption, to Conversational marketing, to the use of voice and chatbots and everything. A fascinating conversation per usual. One thing I’d love to leave our listeners with is a thought around what’s the one thing that an executive should be thinking about and doing in this era of digital disruption today? 
JONATHAN Okay, so we started talking about teaching and I talked about how teaching has for me become learning. We talked about digital fallacy, technology fallacy, and how it’s about people. So the one thing in my view that any executive should be focused on right now is how to make their organization learn faster.
BRIAN I think that that’s some fabulous wisdom. Everything is about speed. But I think with learning and growing, I think that’s paramount. So I love that. So as we wind down, one of the things I’d love to do for just another minute, it’s just go through a couple of speed round questions. I know this wasn’t discussed beforehand but we’ve had such great conversations around marketing and technology and some of this other stuff. So I thought we’d make it a little fun, based upon what I know of you. So just the easy answer but oftentimes, this is what stumps people. So as I mentioned, you’re quite the global traveler. What’s your favorite destination? 
JONATHAN The place I’ve never been to before.
BRIAN Well, that leads into my next question which is, is there a bucket list destination that you haven’t been yet? That you’re like I’ve gotta hit this one.
JONATHAN I’ve got to go to Bhutan, the happiest country in the world.
BRIAN Is that on the radar in the near future or…
JONATHAN 2020.
BRIAN 2020. I know we joked also about you being a long distance runner. What’s the longest run you’ve ever done? 
JONATHAN Longest run I’ve ever done is a… What’s called a 50K which is 31 miles for those of us not familiar with Ks. And that was on the Lakefront here in Chicago, back in about five years ago.
BRIAN So 26.2 miles was just not enough.
JONATHAN It was just not enough.
BRIAN We’ve talked a ton about technology today. What’s one piece of technology that you can’t live without? 
JONATHAN My phone, and my wife would like me to live without it more.
BRIAN That seems to be a common theme I hear. And then this is probably gonna be a tough one for you, ’cause again you have such depth and expertise and very distinguished career. But if you could be CMO of any brand, what brand would that be? 
JONATHAN That’s a tough one because I’ve had the opportunity to be CMO in two B2B organizations never in a B2C organization. But one of my focus recently is education and I’d love to be the CMO of a major university.
BRIAN Well, Jonathan, thank you again so much for being on the Brand Lab Series not once but twice now. We’re thrilled to have you back. We talked a lot today about using a decade as a time stamp. And what I think is interesting is you were on the show back in 2016. So just even then think about how much has changed. People weren’t talking about chatbots even in 2016 to the extent that we are today. So I’m so thrilled for you to share your wisdom and you’re a voracious learner. And to hear you talk about everything that you’re doing is great for our audience. I’m super excited to read The Technology Fallacy. I encourage our listeners especially if you read Brand Resilience, you should definitely read this book as well. I’m sure it’ll be fantastic. I know I mentioned earlier a great follow on social media. How else can people learn more about you and what you’re up to today? 
JONATHAN Well, certainly, I had welcome visitors to my class, both as speakers and observers. So if you’re interested, I teach at Northwestern, and just contact me through LinkedIn and happy to hook you up. The other thing is I am… I just love learning about things. So if you’ve got a new technology, a new offering and so forth, that you think would be interesting to me, that I can help you with, just let me know. One of the things I’ve discovered, and I got this advice from somebody when I was retiring from Deloitte is never stopped learning. Never stop learning. And what I’ve learned over the last two years is the faster I can learn the happier I will be, and that also increases my capacity to learn more.
BRIAN It’s wonderful to have you on. I learned from you every time we’re together whether we’re in a podcast studio or having coffee or having a lunch. I appreciate your mentorship and guidance to me personally, and I know that that’s transcend a marketing group as well. So now we’re all grateful and thankful for you. And I hope that I’ll have the opportunity to some day wear the hat best and look forward to that opportunity as well. So Jonathan, thank you so much again for your time today.
JONATHAN Alright, thank you for having me, Brian.
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