This week, James Kyd of Xero talks about how the online accounting platform with over 3 million customers has successfully built a community around the brand. By fostering a deep commitment to understanding the “real human costs” of running a business, Xero has nurtured a community composed mostly of accountants and small business owners. This dedication to understanding and addressing consumers’ needs is highlighted in Xero’s brilliant Behind Small Business Campaign, which tells the real stories and motivations of the people behind Britain’s small businesses.
James and Eric talk about how Xero’s marketing function remains innovative. How do you keep a team of 150 marketers aligned? By making sure the brand’s values are not just celebrated but lived within the company. James explains that the marketers are encouraged to experiment in a culture promoting curiosity over perfection. Creating an environment where people feel psychologically safe and are encouraged to “bring your whole self to work” means that Xero’s employees are more attuned to people’s real experiences elsewhere, and including their customers and the world around them. By keeping “the real costs of business” and customers’ lived experiences at the core of everything they do, Xero fosters meaningful relationships with and among their customers.
You can get in touch with James on Twitter or find him on LinkedIn.
Scratch is made in partnership with Attest, a consumer research platform with access to over 110 million consumers across 50 markets.
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Transcript
James: If as a brand, you can find communities that want to connect to have value in connection. That's, that's powerful.
Eric: 'm Eric Fulwiler. And this is scratch, bringing you marketing lessons from leading brands and brains rewriting the rulebook from scratch for the world of today.
Eric: Hey, everyone, my conversation today is with James Kidd, the Chief Marketing Officer for Xero. So you probably heard of Xero. They are a SAS online business accounting tool founded in 2006, originally in New Zealand, which is where James joins us from so it's very early days here in London and late, where he is in New Zealand. But we were able to make it work. And so zero now has over 3500 employees over 2 million subscribers. We talk a little bit about the marketing team that James has. He's got 150 people on his marketing team. And so we touch on a few different things, we go into a recent campaign that they did called the behind Small Business campaign, how they did it, how they created content that in my opinion, is actually pretty engaging for the topic that it tries to cover, and what we really focus on in the conversation. And as I'm taking a step back now and thinking about it, we talk about how you find and bring out the humanity in the marketing content and messaging that you create, on the creative side, how they created these videos, how they got these people to tell a more interesting and differentiated story. But we spent a lot of time and this is what I love about James having done a couple conversations like this with him. We focus on the human side and the culture side of the team and the ecosystem that he's built internally. How do you get 150 people plus the partners they work with all clear and aligned on what matters, the purpose, the brands, how they want to go about doing things, and finding these human insights in the work that we do. So I really enjoyed this conversation. I hope you do too. Please enjoy.
Alright, James, it's so good to see you again. Thank you for joining me all the way from New Zealand's Good evening. How are you?
James: Eric. Good morning to you. And really great to see you again. Look, I'm good. I'm good. Since we last did one of these a lot to happen in the world, but feeling pretty good. You know, it's, it's been changing times, but But everything's still going okay.
Eric: Amazing. Yeah, it's all about keeping things in perspective, isn't that. So James, I was really looking forward to this because I know we haven't spent a lot of time together. But the last chat that we had for the FinTech Marketing Podcast, when I was at 11:FS, I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed your perspective on things, the way you approach things. And of course, the work that you and the team are doing for Xero. So there's a lot to talk about, I'd love to just get into it. I would imagine most of our audience knows Xero. But maybe you can just give kind of a quick overview on on you introduce yourself and kind of your career and what brought you to Xero.
James: Yeah, well, Hi, everyone, glad to be with you today, wherever you are. And whatever time it is, look, James Kid, I'm a, I guess a marketer by profession. Through my career, which is sort of 25 years old. Now. The focus has been in marketing roles for some time and strategy and sales. And I've always gravitated back to marketing, because I love the the challenges of holding, driving immediate performance for a business together with longer term growth permission, which I think marketing has a huge role to play in creating for an organisation. And in the fact of marketing, you have to be able to really straddle those, those data points and those objective facts which drive decisions you make with some kind of innate understanding of human nature and behaviour. And a great marketers can hold those two things together, and use those to guide what they're doing. So I love those holding that all together. For me, it's been a really stimulating and rewarding time for me and my career. So that's kind of what I do. And I was lucky enough, four and a half years ago, to join this amazing company, which was founded in New Zealand is now working with customers and well over 100 countries around the world called Xero. And effectively, Xero provides small business software for businesses that are small and growing, to run their business, their accounting, their cash flow, and many many other things. And well, the great things about Xero founded 14 years ago, we were born on the cloud So we have an incredible ecosystem of over 1000 applications which plug in to Xero itself, over 300, financial services partners as well. So there's a massive amount of business value that we can bring to our small business customers, every day, anywhere in the world.
Eric: Amazing. And going back to what you were saying about kind of holding it all together, I was having a conversation with somebody yesterday, and there's something I'm thinking about and talking about a lot. I think that great marketing combines what I would call the art and the science of the human side of things, but also the business side of things, I think you have plenty of organisations, marketers, marketing teams that are more one than the other. But I would imagine and let me know what you think about this part of the role of the CMO or the marketing leader is to kind of take stock of where the organisation and the team is in that balance, and try to bring maybe what's lacking, or the opportunity for what, you know, if you can create more of one or the other, to create that balance. So I love that. And I know that you, you know, knowing you a little bit and seeing some of the stuff that you put out there also seeing your LinkedIn bio, passionate about human brands in our changing world. You know, it seems like you really come at things from the the human side of things, I actually think that that comes out in the work as well, which we're going to talk about, but is that something that you are? How do you purposefully think about holding it all together? When it comes to the day to day and the week to week of how you're building your team and going about these campaigns?
James: Well, yeah, great question. A lot to unpack there. I think, firstly, at a strategic level, or information level is your absorbing information your teams are, there is lots of data out there, you've got to be hungry and passionate about the data. But then, then alongside that is the curiosity. So what sits behind the data? And what drives that data? And for me, the answer that can unlock a lot of insight is, what's the human thinking or behaviour that's driving that data, because data is simply representing some kind of behaviours or wants or desires. So that's how I kind of square that circle. It's like trying to get those human insights out of data, wherever you're presented with data. And for me, that helps a lot. You can't always explain it. And sometimes you still have to go on your observations or insights, which are beyond just the data. I think, you know, we talked about that as humans as as gut. But I think as we we mature as business leaders, we realise guts a lot more innate than just some instinctive reaction, it's your all your centres, and knowledge coming together. So I think you know, being comfortable that feeling something in your gut, getting curious about it, and trying to unpack it is really, really key. And it is with your teams to helping them to do that, discover that and try and hold the to imbalance is really key. And, you know, I do see this a lot today, where teams are chasing numbers, performance, and outcomes, you can tend to get quite mechanical sized into the data and what's in front of you and not asking those deeper questions. So I think one length, as a leader you got to always be doing is bringing it back to either data or humans, depending on where teams are on that spectrum.
Eric: Yeah. And you know, the concept of balance, sometimes I think that can bring up this idea of like, you find the perfect level, and then you just stick there. But it's actually more of a constant calibration, at least in my experience, it's thinking about standing on a balance beam, for example, like, it's impossible to just completely fix yourself, you're always kind of trying to rebalance things take stock, and figure out how to kind of stay on that beam. So I think that I'm sure that we will talk more about this as we dig into this campaign that you all did recently, but the behind Small Business campaign. So can you give just kind of a quick overview of what it is. And then what was the business problem you were trying to solve? At the start of concepting and briefing in this campaign?
James: , look, so this, this campaign is almost more of an ethos than how we work now. Rather than simply some kind of marketing campaign or logo, fake, you won't really see it as a logo or a campaign expression in the business now, but it really was an observation, it comes back to our purpose, which is benefiting small businesses and the communities and the advisors that work with small businesses. It was, you know, how do we keep showing that we're behind small business and meaningful ways beyond just saying it in a marketing campaign, which, you know, so easy to do, but doesn't resonate fully. So we said, what are some of the things we can do that really are going to demonstrate that and that's the kind of a nexus of the insight, and what behaviour has come from there and driven how this has come to life in many different ways. And I have to say it, it really took on a strength of life when when we entered this COVID pandemic period last year, when we said, Gee, now's now's the time, more than ever, that we can, we can really express this and look at how we do it. So it's a range of things. Now, Eric, from sharing small businesses, stories about how they've gone through an arc of challenge and triumph, or perhaps more in COVID times as a lot of pivoting and, you know, adjusting models that have gone on, as businesses do that they go through similar challenges of feeling perhaps daunted, or confronted through to realising they might have options through empowering themselves to take an option and find out what happens. And again, if we can start to tell and share some of those stories, it empowers people and encourages them, when they're going through that process to keep going, or to start. So that's been a really important part of it. To begin with, but it's led to all sorts of things we've done as a business to support our customers and the community. You know, on a roll off a couple of examples of that as, as we entered the pandemic, we realised this things we could adjust in our product, or code that would really help small businesses maybe get government access assistance, or understand their cash flow situation better. So literally, we coded things up to support customers, and deliver what they really needed in the early times of the pandemic. It also led to an inside there is a larger business for only 4000 people, right, but But compared to our small growing business, we were big now, we have all this access to help and support that we take for granted whether it's knowledge and insights from our data, whether it's support for people with mental well being and thing and things like that. So we've actually taken some of these and just shared them with abundance to our community, insight, data knowledge, even mental support for businesses that are struggling in some of our markets. So that's kind of what what it's become. And And again, as we were kicking off here talking about instinct, it, how do we just keep perpetuating that rather than perhaps fully managing or controlling it? And making sure it's a guiding, guiding light on what we do?
Eric: And how do you so 4000 people, how big is the marketing team?
James: We got a marketing team of over 150 people now globally? Yeah,
Eric: So that's a big, that's a big team. How do you think about, you've got a very clear purpose to the brands, and obviously a very clear point of view, and direction on how you want to deliver that through marketing from you. And how do you keep 150 people? And I would imagine there's some change and new people coming in and all that stuff? How do you keep everybody clear and aligned on what that is? So that they are always pushing for finding those answers in the same way that you just mentioned?
James: Yeah, that's a really good question. And I got, it's got to start with just revisiting and going back to that purpose, on a on a regular basis. You know, it's got to be top of mind as we start project as we work through projects. So the job's never done, in terms of reinforcing the purpose, and the values that inform our purpose, and we have some pretty well grounded and deeply held values. Just always trying to love them. And I think as a leader, it doesn't matter whether you're in marketing or any other part of a business. If you want to aspire to have some values, then then just holding yourself to account with them, and loving them all the time you've got to do. And that's not easy. That's not easy at all. So those are things you've got to start with, I think, then you've got to have an attitude of teams need to learn and experiment with their thought or that direction. So rather than trying to manage it and curate at all, I think it's definitely important to encourage curiosity and experimentation and exploration, and not expected all to come out right. Not expected or to work. But to allow teams to, you know, play with it and perhaps own it or take it in some different directions. And then then make sure we reflect on what's happened and learn. So I think if you can do those things, you can make it something that's alive and keeps evolving versus becoming some kind of hard rule book or playbook which, frankly, if you're hiring great people that want to be creative and make a difference, I think becomes becomes a disempowering kind of way to stay alive.
Eric: It's really the difference between culture and process. Right? So you think of the quote of culture eats strategy for breakfast, or one of the things that I like to say is processes a crutch for one culture is broken. And sometimes you do need that crutch, you need that scaffolding in order to scale culture, especially if there's a lot of change, or you have a lot of people coming in and coming out. But I think everything you're saying to me, a lot of what I hear is you focus on embedding it in the culture so that people are really ingrained in it, engaged in it bought into it, and can kind of use it dynamically, as opposed to dictating exactly what it needs to be.
James: Yeah, exactly. We audit rather than follow it.
Eric: For sure. So coming back to the campaign, one of the things that really stood out to me looking at some of these videos is the people I mean, so we'll include some of these in the show notes. And people really should go watch them, because they're not the typical, you know, testimonial of, hey, I use Xero, I'm a small business owner, like the humanity to go back to what we were talking about before, you know, trying to find a way to piece together everything that's in my head right now. But I think, to what you were talking about, where it's really about the insight, not the data, and it's about the human, not the statistic, I think that really comes through in this, these are clearly not just people that you found the kind of check the box of who you wanted to put in front of the camera. They're really interesting and engaging. And you see that it's ad a And, David, it's not just a small business owner in the UK. So one, I think it's really interesting and engaging, and great. And to how did you go about? Like, was that part of the thought process intentionally? And how did you go about the casting and the creative process? To make the content come out the way it did?
James: Yeah, you know, look, so I think it comes back to the conversation we had a bit earlier started on the observations around humans, and what it is to be a human on what it is to be a human running a small business. And, you know, I think that that's full of ups and downs, or good days and bad days, as we comment on some of these stories. It's days, when you feel like things are going well, and you're feeling confident. And then it's other days, when it feels like it's falling apart and you lose confidence, or you've, you've just got to push through. That's, that's the human, you know, the human existence in many, many ways. And it's no different small business. So we just felt it would be so much more relatable to celebrate that and recognise that rather than turn it into perfect Instagram moments, if you like. And the interesting thing about this, of course, is it follows a great technique for storytelling or, or even advertising, which is the story arc of challenge, struggle through the through the realisation and triumph. And it's really a version of that it's it's that simple in some ways, but rather than turning it into the big story, it's taking it to the human level, and recognising the humans in these stories and how they feel and how they went through it. And then you're right. So with that, and with a company like Xero. Look, we've got over 3 million customers now and what I love about the small business economy, is it a epitomise diversity, anyone can try and start a small business and have a go. So the diversity of our customer base in the small business economy is just beautiful. I think it's the colour in our world, it's the humanity in our world so often. And so, therefore, it's not easy to find just great stories that are those real humans, not those Instagram kind of moments. So that that was kind of the way it rolled almost. And it was very natural to find lots of those stories, and then just pick some lovely ones to tell.
Eric: Everyone, thanks for listening, I just wanted to take a quick moment to tell you a bit more about our partnership with attest. As you know, rival has partnered with attest a powerful consumer research platform to start producing our own proprietary research. And you'll hear more about that soon. We actually had our team onboarding and full demo of the test platform last week, and it was pretty impressive. I have to say I genuinely mean that. I think for those of you who know me, you know that I wouldn't say that if it wasn't true. And we wouldn't have a partner like attest on this podcast and associated with our brand if we weren't behind the platform. when they were building and the value that it can deliver. So I genuinely do think that if you are looking for insights, if you're looking for research, if you're looking for ways to remove the guesswork from your business growth, please do head on over to attest.com. Here, you can run a free survey to access 110 million consumers in 49 markets around the world.
Eric: So I want to, I want to double click on one of the, you know, the big thing that we're talking about here, because the sense that I'm getting a new see it in the work, but hearing you talk like clearly, the human insight is such a foundation to what you do, I'd love to take it down to the tactical level. And if you can share a little bit more about the process, if there is one, the structure, whether it's internal roles, or external partners, like how do you create an ecosystem that is able to, like search for those insights, find those insights, and then integrate them into the creative process such that you can build campaigns like this. And I also wanted to call out, one of the other campaigns that we found that we really liked was the emotional tax return that he did, I think it was in Australia. And one, it's really funny. And I can definitely relate and two in the article that talked about this campaign. And maybe we can just mention what it is briefly, because you'll do a better job than I. But it talks about to shine a light on some of the hidden emotional costs being felt by small business owners, we conducted a survey, the results revealed that two thirds of people running a small business claimed the last 12 months had been more emotionally draining compared to the previous years, I can definitely relate and confirm that I'm part of that statistic. But you know, you're running surveys. And so you know, it's obviously more than that. But maybe you can open up the hood for a minute on the machine that generates these insights for you in the team.
James: Yeah, yeah. So look, I think this comes back again to culture. And what we value as a company, it's not just the marketing or communications teams that I work with. So often, it's right across the business, that that awareness and knowledge of, of the human side of business, the real human costs. And being open and aware to that. And so one of the things that is really key here is, we work hard in terms of creating climate and organisational, we're an organisation where people feel psychologically safe. And we even talk about bringing your whole self to work. Because if you allow people to be open to that, and feel safe in that environment, I think you start to become more attuned to it and see it and look for it elsewhere. So I think that's a really big part of it, Eric being being part of our ethos and our culture, to have that safety and recognition of almost the human state as being being who we are in a good thing. And, and that creates them lots of conversations that we have with our customers all the time. You know, we have a team of people, 4000 staff that will ask customers and partners, how are you doing? And they'll mean it at a deeper, more genuine level than then many humans still do when you ask that question. In fact, often you don't want the answer, right? You don't know how to handle an honest answer. I think we've, we've created a better attuned pneus to that. And so I think from that, from creating that ability to share, and openness, it comes back and it becomes easy to evoke it from from customers, partners and among people.
Eric: Great. Yeah. And I think, you know, oftentimes, when we try to talk about the tactical realities of something, it's easy to say, Oh, I've got this research agency, or I've got this weekly meeting. But the real answer, the thing that will really unlock the value is exactly what you're talking about. It's getting the culture, right, getting people clear and aligned on this as a priority to then give them the freedom to figure out the way to do that in whatever their you know, day to day and week to week brings up. Yeah, yeah. So how is how did the campaign do for you? I mean, it's one of the things I always think about is, you know, we can have as an outsider, I can have a perspective or anybody can have a perspective of like, I think this campaign is great. This is really interesting. It's really engaging, but, you know, really, marketing exists to drive the growth of the business at the end of the day. So to the extent that you can talk about it, how did the campaign do for the business? And how do you kind of measure those results from something like this?
James: Sure. So I think we do you know, we use some of the measures you would expect as a marketing professional in terms of things like brand growth, brand, understanding and then how that moves through into a, a acquisition funnel. So we we definitely look at all of that pretty closely and understand the impact. And look, we've we've felt pretty good about the growth that we've been able to achieve over the last periods. However, I think there's, there's a more, there's a more subtle set of measures that you need to look at. And it is around how it makes our people feel, how it makes our communities, customers and partners feel connected to our brand and different about a brand. So I spent a lot of time looking at how different are we and how do we feel? And and do we get a different kind of reaction and depth of reaction? So we look at that a lot. And then you know what, I try not to dissect it too much by every campaign, I think it becomes how you show up in a whole lot of spheres. So that's something I look at as a body of work, if you like, over a period of time. And look, we were always learning, but I think we we feel like we're getting that balance. Pretty okay, at the moment and over the last couple of years.
Eric: And what's the what's kind of the internal dynamic when it comes to the C suite or the board? How, how do they ask questions of you, when it comes to proving, you know, the return on the investment that you're making in marketing, or kind of the efficacy of the work you're doing is that because I think it's so interesting, you know, every marketer deals with that to a certain extent. But oftentimes, the kind of DNA and perspective of the C suite can be very different. And so you can be in an organisation where it's much more aligned than you can be in an organisation where it's a constant struggle day to day just to invest anything in really marketing, but brand marketing, anything that's not short term return. So I'd imagine, you know, knowing the brand, the way I do and seeing the work you're doing, you have support to do that. But I'd be curious if you could touch on that element of your role when it comes to kind of stakeholders, and, you know, managing expectations and proving results to them.
James: Yeah, look, it's on my mind, I think I work in an environment in a business where the value is understood. So it's not like I need to walk into rooms to explain my existence or my existence or my teams. And I know that's not the case for for all marketers, but what what we currently marketers do is fall into that as a constant, you know, mental state. So if you understand that, that's, that's, there's value there. There's inherent value there, then it's, how do we measure that? And what are we going to really stick by in terms of some key measurements that we create that dialogue around. So we've done that in a few ways at a measurement level, which is set up a framework for measuring experiences of our customer throughout the lifecycle. And those become true TrueNorth measures, We call a Jedi journey, experience, data and insights. But it is it is how we really say are we delivering a great experience, right through the engagement. And that's really seeking to attach marketing, to sales, to onboarding, to education to support and product experience in a holistic way. Because I think it's really dangerous. If you unpack it into all the little elements and try to optimise them too much. Just like as a marketer. I think if you try to atomize each individual tactic or dollar spend, you never really looking at the whole picture. So we look at that holistic view. And then I do constantly look at challenge with my team and ask the question of are we getting the balance right between areas where we're deliberately driving a performance outcome, versus more of a brand engagement or brand difference outcome? And we were always learning, we were always understanding how they relate to each other and how they move. The other thing. So we talked about that with our stakeholders. The other thing we do is, as I said earlier, along the spirit of psychological safety as we do try new things, emotional taxt return. We didn't know how that would work and how it'd be received. But we knew there was something going on in terms of emotional tax and taxation. So let's, let's see how it resonates and put it out there. And so what I'd ask of our leadership group, and what I would always do in terms of myself with my leaders is, is understand if it's going well or not, and then learn from But, but never tried to try to pull any individual thing out and make it a failure. It's either a winner or learn. And people should feel good always about trying new things and trying those, those different experiments, whether on a large campaign format, style, or a behaviour that we might try to accentuate, or a particular activation.
Eric: One of the things that I think about a lot is the trajectory of learning, because actually how smart you are, or how good something is, in a moment in time matters much less than the trajectory of whether you're getting smarter, whether you're getting better. And I think that's one of the things that you see in successful organisations or successful organisations that are able to grow effectively, is that they constantly get smarter with what they do. And a lot of that I'm sure comes down to the culture, as we've been talking about. But I think it's also really interesting if you don't have that culture right now. Or if you want to accelerate the existence of that culture, to put in place some processes of asking, what did we learn from this campaign? What's the hypothesis that we want to test with this so that you're not just doing the work, but you're purposefully and intentionally getting the learnings from everything that you do? So James, clearly, the what you've been doing is working, not just because I think the Xero business is doing pretty well these days. But also you were named a breakthrough brand, by Interbrand last year. So congratulations, would love to hear exactly what that means being a breakthrough brands, and what that's meant to you, as well.
James: Yeah, well, thanks. And look, it's not my thanks to receive or ridiculous recognition to receive, it's really the sum of so much what the business has done across a period of time. But I will say, as a team, we're particularly humbled and proud to be recognised in this way, because I think, what a breakthrough brand suggests as a brand that is doing things a bit differently, and in breaking out of a mould or, you know, transitioning the way the category is looked at. So that's kind of one of the things we do want to do here at Xero. We, we want to be challenges for, for our purpose for small businesses, and the economy. And so you know, that that was great recognition. And I think what, what is when you look at some of the ways Interbrand looks at Breakthrough brands, is how have they really done things different in their category, or evolve to category. And so for us, there were a few things that that came through. One was definitely remodelling the category, we were, you know, early, early to the cloud in terms of small business software. So it was inherent in our business model and what we were doing to change the category. And that's, that, in itself is a really powerful part of the story. And it has very little to do with what marketing did itself or my teams have done. It was the division of the founder, and why we do what we do. But underneath then, and underpinning that there's some other elements that I think you'll see in a lot of breakthrough brands. One is creating a really strong following loyalty, but I think it's more than loyalty. It's a passionate following, maybe a movement amongst a core group or community. And that's something certainly we feel we've done at Xero to a great extent with accountants and bookkeepers, because well, our software benefits small businesses massively. What it really does is help it make it so easy for an accountant or bookkeeper to work with a small business and help them be a more successful small business by using cloud software. So we really embraced accountants and bookkeepers, showed them a lot of love, and gave them more confidence and more tools to do a better job with their clients. And I really feel like that they're paid back to us massively. And we keep paying that forward to our community. To the extent that, you know, we run some pretty large events. Globally, we call xero con, which is really a celebration of that accounting and bookkeeper community, and trying to make sure they feel part of something really special and big. That is what they do every day but part of something bigger, globally in terms of really championing the small business economy. So I think that that that that movement, that sense, we're really passionate community is really key. Equally Elings for us has been sort of generosity to the community, and the customers you serve, beyond In a traditional, I would say brand or corporate mentality. You know, we touched on some of that earlier, Eric, we've, we've done things like shared our knowledge and insights with abundance. We have data and insights on how small businesses are performing and economies are performing. And we share that at an anonymized and aggregated level, to government to account to small businesses. So they have more insights about what's happening, and how we can support the small business economy. You know, we do things like create content that supports directions, we know businesses want to go and, like sustainability. And we recently launched a small business sustainability hub. So we just do a lot of things that I think are about open source generosity and giving to their community with no immediate expectation of return. And I think that's something that breakthrough brands just take a different mentality and look to. So I think those are some of the things we would like to think of helped us be recognised in that way, and we certainly think are well worth pursuing.
Eric: So we have our rival marketing framework, which is essentially our perspective on what it means to market like a challenger. And there's two halves to that. One half is the value mindset. And one half is the Agile Model. And the Agile Model includes kind of intelligent deployment, and constantly learning and iterating, and all that stuff that we were talking about before. But in terms of the value model, I really believe that the brands that are winning, modern day challenger brands are focused on value as the North Star for a lot of what they do. And within that, when it comes to what we call building a human brands, there's three building blocks that we see within that there's being purpose driven, which we've touched on already, there's being customer centric, and then there's being community oriented. And I think that's the one you hear a lot about purpose driven and customer centric. And I think, you know, that is ground well covered, you still have to do it right and do it well. But I think community, especially outside of the FinTech world, because community within FinTech zero is a is an example people throw out all the time as his Monzo, as are a couple other brands in that space. But I think that doesn't get talked about enough and hasn't yet been translated to a lot of other industries and be curious to go read up on who these other breakthrough brands are. Because I'd imagine that's a red thread, if you have a purpose that people can relate to, if you have a product and marketing, message and brand that's truly focused on solving the problems that they have, and you create a platform, or ecosystem around the brand for people to connect with each other and feel like they're part of something, I think that's a huge part of not just what brings people to the brand. But it also creates this kind of moat, around it. Like once you're it's a lot harder to leave a community than it is to stop using a product. So I hadn't, you know, obviously knew about Xero con and all the things that you've done for accountants in creating a community in that space. But it's great to see the connection between that and being recognised as a breakthrough brand. And just what that means.
James: Yeah, that's a great observation. And it comes back to the human insight writers, as humans, we do like to belong. You know, if we took up a kind of a global kind of meta observation at the moment, there's, there's a lot of division, or divisive forces in the world. But if as a brand, you can find communities that want to connect or have value in connection. That's, that's powerful. And, you know, you go and explore it and see how you can add that value. I love your analogy, the analogy there bringing value to the table. I think it works really well. If it's if it's authentic, so you can link it back to what you do, and why you do it.
Eric: And Xero Con will finally be back in person next year.
James: Next may we go in May May, in the United States. Yep. New Orleans. And look, we're really excited about that. I think it motivates us and our community to be together. And I think I keep hearing from our community that they miss that and we miss it. So we were super energised to get the I guess, get the band back together. Again. You might say, Eric,
Eric: amazing. Well, I'm sure you're already deep end planning and production for that. So James, I know that we're up on time, but it was great. It was great to see you again. Great to get into some of the stuff I always enjoy hearing what you have to say and hearing the latest on what you've been up to. If people want to get in touch or find out more about what you're up to where should they go.
James: So look, they can reach out to me on LinkedIn or on Twitter and maybe we could put those those handles into the contact details. You know, really open to him. Having a dialogue and a conversation. And then if you want to find out more about Xero, if you go to Xero.com. There's lots of information and visibility on what we're doing there that, you know people will get a lot from if they care to check it out.
Eric: Amazing. Well, James, thanks for making the time. Thanks for making the time zone. Work with me here in London. I really appreciate it.
James: All go the Eric, it's been great to hang out with you again.
Eric: Scratch is a production of rival. We are a marketing innovation consultancy that helps businesses develop strategies and capabilities to grow faster. If you want to learn more about us check out we are rivals.com If you want to connect with me, email me at Eric at we are rivals.com or find me on LinkedIn. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, share with anyone you think might enjoy it. And please do leave us a review. Thanks for listening and see you next week.
