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Talking About Marketing

Talking About Marketing

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Talking About Marketing is a podcast for you to help you thrive in your role as a business owner and/or leader. It's produced by the Talked About Marketing team of Steve Davis and David Olney, with artwork by Casey Cumming. Each marketing podcast episode tips its hat to Philip Kotler's famous "4 Ps of Marketing" (Product, Price, Place, Promotion), by honouring our own 4 Ps of Podcasting; Person, Principles, Problems, and Perspicacity. Person. The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for. - Oscar Wilde Principles. You can never be overdressed or overeducated. - Oscar Wilde Problems. “I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity. - Oscar Wilde Perspicacity. The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. - Oscar Wilde Apart from our love of words, we really love helping people, so we hope this podcast will become a trusted companion for you on your journey in business. We welcome your comments and feedback via podcast@talkedaboutmarketing.com

2026 Auscast Network Economia Marketing Marketing e vendite
Episodi
  • The Hidden Half Of Business Success

    The Hidden Half Of Business Success
    Sep 30 2026
    Dr Angela Duckworth spent years telling us to stick at it. Now she says the situation you stick at it in matters more than your willpower, and if your good hires keep leaving after six months, the problem probably isn’t them. Michael Blastland explains why the best-laid plans can fail on one small detail, and David reaches for survivorship bias and the OODA loop to keep small business owners moving anyway. The AI doom headlines get a calm second look, with David following the money and Steve calling Claude Code an intern who has read a lot but never done anything. Samuel Pepys, a wine-loving politician and a bee-themed Banrock Station ad show how a label creates value, and why status signalling and virtue signalling are different things. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 01:30 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.Change the Situation Before You Blame the Person Steve opens with Dr Angela Duckworth, whose 2016 book Grit gave us “stick at it, sunshine and you’ll get there.” Her new book is, Situated. David notes she was explaining her own life at the time, when writing Grit. Later she saw that passion and persistence work best when the situation around them is supportive. Jerry Seinfeld’s “nighttime Jerry” and “morning Jerry” show why willpower alone bends to circumstance. The guy who looks like the party animal is actually one of the most organised people you could imagine. Duckworth’s box theory runs from situation to thoughts to response. Self-help books tell us to change our thoughts, but if the same negative situation keeps dragging you back, that has limited effect. Steve recalls an organisation that held a big “we’re doing things differently” meeting every couple of years. It never lasted a week and left everyone cynical. David lists the four parts of a situation you can change: physical space, peer relationships, mentor relationships and culture. You change culture by changing the other three. The small business test is a good one. If talented people you interviewed and hired keep leaving after six months, ask what’s wrong with the situation. Tired, frustrated staff and cynical comments overheard at the end of the day are the signs. David’s first step is to stop blaming yourself or others, find one tangible thing to change, then look for the next. 15:00 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.The Hidden Half and the Photocopier That Sank a Water Project Steve brings Michael Blastland, author of The Hidden Half, from an EconTalk conversation with Russ Roberts. We spend our lives finding regularities, like trusting our bike brakes. A lot of life sits where those regularities break down. Blastland’s example is a water supply project in the Indian subcontinent, reported to have had a very low sign-up rate because nobody could photocopy the application form. Esther Duflo’s point is that one weak link in implementation can mean total failure. David adds the fundamental attribution error: our successes are skill, and other people’s are luck. He also names survivorship bias. We hear from the entrepreneurs who took the risk and won, and never from those who took it and disappeared. Look at the 99 failures and you find more than one way to succeed. You can spread your bets, with some low-risk, reliable earners and a few small long shots. Steve calls it a dose of stoicism, shock absorbers for your head, heart and business. David’s OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act) keeps you doing small things in a big world. Be prudent, but keep moving, because sitting still too long simply hands the opportunity to someone else. 26:45 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.How Do You Solve a Problem Like AI? Steve borrows from The Sound of Music and swaps Maria for AI. Both are useful, occasionally alarming and hard to pin down. David has a calm view on the recent wave of AI horror stories. In the cases he’s read about, these were models in training with low alignment and few controls, deliberately tested with minimal restrictions. His real line in the sand is letting AIs run their own recursive self-improvement. Steve says he now feels more anxious than when the segment began. David’s view on the commercial side is to follow the money. The data centre builders are making it, and he suggests scary headlines suit companies that need us to buy protection. He cites Jensen Huang’s remark that there’s no problem, just a lack of code: build in the alignment and don’t test with out-of-control AIs. Steve’s own experiment with Claude Code on a WordPress site was so dumb at times he could have done the job faster himself, like having an intern who has read a lot but never done anything. David’s advice for small business is to use the tools that are useful and pay for what adds value. If ...
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    47 min
  • Is Your Business Leaving A Mark ?

    Is Your Business Leaving A Mark ?
    Sep 14 2026
    A lamb ad and a locked-profile troll teach Steve and David the same lesson: the pause is the whole trick, and social media is built to make you skip it. A British comedy sketch about a dry cleaner called Touching Cloth becomes the unlikely launchpad for Mini Steve’s business-naming principles, tested live and mostly agreed with. A client’s expired domain name turns into a lesson about renewal traps, Melbourne IT’s pricing, and the difference between penny-wise and paranoid. An organ donor ad about the world’s biggest asshole gets the Perspicacity treatment, with a verdict on whether shock still works when the target audience has gone numb to it. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 02:15 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.The Pause That Saves You From Yourself Steve opens with a confession disguised as a question: has David ever fired off an emotional comment online, or been on the receiving end of one? David has, and it wasn’t pleasant. Neither host thinks the commenter would have said it to their face, which is really the whole problem in one sentence. From there, a lamb ad supplies the unlikely proof of concept. The ad restages a real comment section as a portable grandstand, strangers hurling abuse at each other over nothing, until lamb arrives and somehow calms the mob. David’s read cuts straight to the point: the redirection doesn’t need to be profound, it just needs to be better than the dumb thing people are already doing. Steve connects it to Jill Bolte Taylor’s Whole Brain Living and the 90-second window before an emotional reaction locks in. He’d had his own test that week: a stranger with a locked profile telling him to stick to snooker, a lame pun on his name. He didn’t bite, because the algorithm wants the reaction more than it wants him to be right. Turning the other cheek, in this case, isn’t weakness. It’s refusing to feed the beast. 14:15 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.Touching Cloth and the Business of Naming Yourself A comedy sketch about three well-meaning entrepreneurs naming their dry cleaning business Touching Cloth (a name with an unfortunate second meaning involving cloth, poo, and a failure of restraint) becomes the launchpad for testing some business naming principles. David’s take on the sketch is blunt: the comedy comes from watching well-meaning people talk themselves past an obvious problem, out loud, without noticing. Steve turns to Mini Steve, the AI model trained on his blog archive, to stress-test some naming principles, and finds himself agreeing with all of it. Say the name aloud to a stranger on a bad phone line. Check every handle and domain before falling in love with anything. Search the trademark register before you print a single business card. Avoid clever misspellings, since everyone types the correct version first and wonders why you didn’t. The sharpest distinction is descriptive versus distinctive. Descriptive names explain what you do and help with search from day one, but they’re hard to trademark and easy to blend into the background. Distinctive names cost more to build meaning into, but once they mean something, that meaning is yours alone. Either way, the name’s job is to be memorable and spellable, not to carry the whole value proposition. That’s what the website and the tagline are for. 37:30 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.The $108 Lesson in Domain Renewal A client let a valuable domain name lapse and asked Steve, a day after it had expired, whether she should renew it. She should, because the test is simple: how would you feel if a competitor grabbed it? Terrible, she said. Renew it. The real sting was the price. Her domain was registered with Melbourne IT, which charged $108 for a single year of a .com.au domain, against roughly $24 to $25 elsewhere. David’s read is that reputation pricing like this survives only while people don’t do the research, and that window is closing. Steve draws the comparison to scam invoices dressed up as official renewal notices, official-looking, fine print disclaiming everything, designed to catch harried business owners at exactly the wrong moment. Nobody’s going broke over $108. But looking after the pennies, as Steve puts it, still says something about how a business runs. 44:00 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past.The World’s Biggest Asshole, Revisited This episode’s Perspicacity ad is 2016’s The World’s Biggest Asshole, made by the Martin Agency for Donate Life America. It spends its first 45 seconds building an unlikable man before revealing he was an organ donor. The numbers are real: daily registrations jumped roughly 625 percent in the first week, and video views passed 100 million by ...
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    43 min
  • Questions Arising From Women In Business

    Questions Arising From Women In Business
    Aug 31 2026
    A group of 1970s kids react to modern life in a viral clip, and their horror at “the little box” gives Steve and David a fresh look at the toll of constant connection. Steve took his recorder to the Women in Business event and came back with real questions from real business owners, Jane from Eight at the Gate Wines and Ranee from Jarnell Cut Colour Curl. Their answers reveal a common thread that touches almost every small business. A $500 Chevy ad from the 2012 Super Bowl proves that great advertising does not need a big budget, just a true human moment. Get ready to take notes. Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes 02:15 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.What a Bunch of 1970s Kids Taught Us About Our Phones A video of children reacting to modern technology, from paying monthly for music to strangers delivering food, gives Steve and David pause about what they have normalised. David, who grew up in the 1970s, offers a rare counterpoint from his experience as a blind person: technology has given him more than it has taken. For most people, though, the trade has not been so kind. The conversation turns to research from Oxford University Press showing that reducing mobile screen exposure produces measurable gains in wellbeing, sleep, mood, and sustained attention. David distils it best with his old teaching trick: hold up the phone and ask, tool or toy? Steve lays out a six-step, fourteen-day experiment for anyone keen to find out which one their phone has become, from blocking social feeds during work hours to creating phone-free zones at each end of the day. 14:15 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.Jane, Ranee, and the Marketing Question Every Small Business Owner Asks Steve took his recorder to Adelaide Business Hub‘s Women in Business event, in conjunction with the Office of Small and Family Business, and asked two attendees what they would want to know if they had a marketer’s full attention. Jane Richards from Eight at the Gate Wines wants to know which marketing activity actually drives sales. Ranee from Jarnell Cut Colour Curl wants to know where her limited time delivers the biggest return. Both women have solid businesses already, and David points to a common thread: the constraint is not ideas, it is time and attention. His answer is the old 80/20 rule, applied to personas. Pick the ideal customer group most likely to move the needle, and build from there rather than chasing a hundred scattered efforts. Steve shares an old radio trick from broadcaster Jeremy Cordeaux, who kept a fictional listener named Gladys in mind for every interview, and suggests both women already have a “Gladys” walking through their door or tasting room every week. The pair also unpack Jane’s daughter’s TikTok following, and David asks the question that matters more than the follower count: is it converting to income, or is it just a vanity metric? They close the segment with Steve’s long-standing digital marketing triage order: website first, then content, then email database, then reviews, then social media, with advertising last. Learn more about Women In Business mentoring. 37:30 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.Meet Mini Steve, the AI Trained on Nine Seasons of Marketing Advice A client in Darwin has been testing something Steve built by distilling everything from nine seasons of the podcast, his blog archive back to 2004, and her own StoryBrand framework into an AI tool powered by Claude. David has taken to calling it Steve in a box. The test threw up a genuinely useful question: should a piece of content be a page or a blog post? Steve’s rule of thumb is refreshingly simple. Broad, essential content that most visitors need belongs in the main page structure. Narrow, specific content that answers one sharp question belongs in a blog post, where it can be found by search engines and AI tools alike when the right person goes looking. David flags the safeguard built into the system: when mini Steve is out of its depth, it says so and sends the question back to the grown-up. 44:00 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past.The $500 Super Bowl Ad That Beat the Big Budgets Steve takes David back to a 2012 Super Bowl ad for Chevy that cost just $500 to make and still won the day. A birthday setup goes hilariously wrong when the neighbour’s new sports car gets mistaken for the graduate’s actual present, a humble bar fridge. David and Steve agree the ad still works today, not because of production value, but because it taps something timeless: the human desire for status, the discomfort of watching a misunderstanding unfold, and the universal excitement of a friend’s big win. Steve’s takeaway is a good one for any small business without a big budget: ...
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    53 min
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