Training Improvement Café - Episode 03: Learning from marketing
In Roy's Training Improvement Café, Roy de Vries, Learning Innovator at aNewSpring, explores how people really learn and what we, as training experts, can learn from that to keep improving our training.
In this third episode of the Training Improvement Café, Roy talks with Bianca Baumann and Mike Taylor, co-authors of Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro. Together, they explore how marketing mindsets and methods can help learning professionals better understand their audience, personalise training, and move beyond one-size-fits-none learning.
💡 Spoiler alert: Thinking like a marketer doesn't mean just "jazzing up" your courses.
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Show notes
Episode 03 – Bianca Baumann & Mike Taylor on learning from marketing
What happens when you mix marketing smarts with L&D practice? In this episode, Roy talks with Bianca Baumann and Mike Taylor, co-authors of Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro. Together, they explore how marketing mindsets and methods can help learning professionals better understand their audience, personalise training, and move beyond one-size-fits-none learning.
💡 Spoiler alert: Thinking like a marketer doesn't mean just "jazzing up" your courses.
About Bianca & Mike
Bianca Baumann is a learning strategist based in Toronto with roots in business education and a passion for designing campaigns that drive behaviour change. Mike Taylor is a learning designer with a background in digital marketing, known for his Friday Finds newsletter full of L&D inspiration. Together, they believe L&D can learn a lot from marketing…if we’re willing to listen.
What you’ll learn in this episode:
Why it’s a problem if your course needs to be “jazzed up”
What L&D can learn from email marketing and digital body language
How personas and empathy maps help you really understand your learners
Why “go to Gemba” is still solid advice for L&D teams
What to try first if you want to design learning as a campaign
Why “Compliance 101” might not be the best title for your course
How Mike and Bianca accidentally ended up writing a book together
Resources & inspiration
📘 Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro – by Bianca & Mike
📚 Alchemy by Rory Sutherland
📚 Books & blogs by Seth Godin
💌 Friday Finds by Mike Taylor
Quick tips to apply right away
Start your next learning journey with audience interviews, not assumptions
Use headline tools (or AI) to craft more engaging course titles
Test small campaigns using tools you already have (like email)
Think beyond your LMS—learning can happen anywhere
Call it a pilot if you want to try something new without pushback
Episode highlights
[00:01:00] – Why learning needs a marketing mindset
[00:10:00] – Why digital body language matters for L&D too
[00:13:00] – The mistake of buying tools before building strategy
[00:16:00] – Personas vs. demographics and how to create them
[00:18:00] – The training that failed because of a 64K connection
[00:21:00] – Behaviour change starts with meaning, not more info
[00:24:00] – Thinking beyond LMS: the electric vehicle expo story
[00:27:00] – Using triggers like clickbait (ethically!) in learning
[00:30:00] – How to get buy-in for new ideas: “yes, and…”
[00:32:00] – Common resistance from L&D purists and how to respond
[00:34:00] – Why standing your ground takes time and confidence
[00:37:00] – Inspiration sources and real-world marketing examples
[00:41:00] – Bianca’s first learning crush: a situational leadership course
[00:43:00] – Mike’s least favourite myth: learning styles
Listen to the full episode:
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We’d love your feedback!
What did you think of this episode? Do you apply any marketing ideas in your training design? Let Roy know via roy@anewspring.nl or drop him a message on LinkedIn.
📣 Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with fellow L&D pros who want to make learning actually work.
Full transcript
Roy: Welcome everyone to another episode of the Training Improvement Cafe, and in this series we explore the different categories of our GROWTH Training Improvement Model. Every episode I invite guests from all over the world to share their story on how they help people learn. And for this specific episode, I was triggered by the launch of a new book.
Because see, I think there's a lot to unpack when it comes to instructional design and creating courses, but what a lot of us are missing is a bit of marketing spirit in how we talk about learning. I mean, we can probably still recall those commercial jingles from our childhood or recognise specific brands just from their slogans.
But to be fair, the content of a well-crafted training couple of years ago, probably gone, vanished. So what is their magic and what can we learn from marketing when it comes to training? We'll learn more about that today in our conversation with Bianca Baumann and Mike Taylor. Welcome both. Great to have you here.
Bianca: Thank you so much for having us.
Mike: Great to be here, thanks for having us.
Roy: This is actually our first online cafe recording. The first episodes were live here at the Rotterdam headquarters. So I'm curious because of course, the previous guests, we gave them some coffee and some nice snacks. Is there anything, what did you do this morning or my afternoon to make your own cafe setting?
Did you get a coffee? Did you get a tea? A little fireplace maybe in the corner of your room?
Bianca: Well, it's a little too warm in Toronto for a fire, but I did have my tea to get started. I'm definitely tea drinker. And now I have a big glass of water here to make sure I stay hydrated throughout our conversation. And, oh, very important. I have my cat on my lap, so that is like super perfect comfort right there.
Mike: And I've been up for a long time already, so I've transitioned from my morning coffee to water as well, and snacks are never out of reach, so.
Roy: Perfect. I couldn't have wished for more. I have my my cup of tea here as well 'cause I don't drink coffee in the afternoons. So well, happy to hear that we're all set. First of all I'm very curious and interested. Let's start with a question that forces you to go probably back in time a little bit.
So why and when did you decide to pursue a career in learning in general? Can I start with you, Bianca?
Bianca: Sure. I am one of these people. I actually wanted to go into learning and development, so I'm not an accidental learning and development professional.
Roy: As you see quite often. Yeah.
Bianca: Yeah, exactly. Which, nothing wrong with that at all. I am originally from Germany and I went to university for a degree in Business Education.
So it is a mix of an MBA and a master's in Adult Education. It's very specific to Germany because back there, it actually allows me to, on one hand, work in a corporate environment, HR and L&D. But it also would've allowed me to become a teacher at a vocational school, which I started teachers college and I lasted a whole of six weeks realising, okay, this is not for me.
I kind of wanna go into the corporate world and see what I can do over there. So yeah, I really started this career many, many, many, many years ago.
Mike: I'm not one of those rare rainbow unicorns like Bianca is, but I didn't even know that this field existed, but I've always been energised by the process of learning, even when I was a kid in school. So I thought the only thing I knew was even a possibility, I thought, a teacher or college professor or something.
Something like that. And so, I kind of did take that left hand turn when I discovered that it was a thing. It was, you know, like the skies parting and the sun coming out or like a revelation that this was an exciting one. That this was a, a job that you could do and people would actually pay you for. So I'm like most people and sort of accidentally stumbled into it.
Roy: That's a great combination between the two of you. And then at some point I think you found each other also in the marketing expertise, the marketing field. Because for everyone who's listening, we haven't mentioned your book yet, but it's Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro, right? So you guys were at some point also thinking about thinking like a marketer. Where did that come from?
Bianca: So, when I first came to Canada 17 years ago, my first learning and development job here in Toronto was for a company called Eloqua, which is now part of Oracle, and it's an email marketing automation software or revenue performance management, as we were supposed to call it.
Roy: Interesting name.
Bianca: My job. Yeah, I know, I know.
Because I think the reason we were taught to call it revenue performance management is, it sounds much fancier, but also when you hear email marketing, everyone thinks about spam. So I think, it's just like a positioning thing, speaking about practicing what you're preaching. Anyway, my job was an education specialist. So I was actually teaching our customers how to be better marketers using the Eloqua software, but there was also some best practices in there as well. And while I was doing this job and teaching online, I realised, oh my gosh, there's so many parallels between learning and development and marketing.
Mainly we're really driving, in our case, learners and marketing's case users or customers to do something. And for us it's that behaviour change for marketers it's usually to purchase a product or service. And I started blogging about it and thinking about it, and then it just kind of evolved into what is now a book.
Roy: Cool. Yeah. And then, and then at some point Mike also joined a party.
Bianca: Oh, absolutely. That's our get to know story. But I'll let Mike talk first about how he got into marketing and then, Mike, you can just go into how we actually got to, you know, being in each other's lives.
Mike: When I made the left hand turn I talked about earlier then I had spent 10 or 11 years or so in corporate learning, pretty traditional big company stuff. And about the same time that Bianca was in her role, she was just talking about, then I spent five years doing L&D work for a digital marketing agency and had a similar light bulb go off in my brain of like: oh, there's a lot of this stuff. We're trying to do the same things. And the two fields do it differently. And I think a lot of times these marketing folks may have a leg up on us in many ways. And so that is a similar path to Bianca of having those combinations of the two different backgrounds.
Roy: And then you felt there's this need. We'll have to write a book about this.
Mike: And then The Learning Guild had a online event and we were both speakers. And then at the end of the event, the closing event was a panel and we were on the panel togetherand we sort of realised like, hey, we're thinking a lot of the same things we're aligned on kind of our view of this and all that sort of stuff. And we were messaging on LinkedIn and I said, hey you know, we should do something together. And so that was the seed that started this whole path. And so, you know, what is it 8 years or going on nine years later, the book is here and all the other cool steps that we've been able to do since.
Roy: Very, very cool how that came together, and very in a sort of organic, natural way as well.
I'm curious if we take a look at the marketing principles. What's your weirdest or maybe most unexpected inspiration from the world of marketing?
Mike: That's a great question, and I don't know that I have a specific instance that comes to mind, but if anybody is familiar with Rory Sutherland? So he is a marketing leader at Ogilvy, which is a advertising agency in the UK. If you've never seen him speak or he's got a really great book out as well. He really talks a lot about how our brains don't work the way most people think they do and how a lot of times, you know, it might be total opposite of what intuition would tell you are the things that work. And so he talks about trying these out of the box things and creative approaches and for me that's something that really sticks out is that mindset.
Bianca: And I think for me, I mean now I know this, but back in the day I didn't. That email can be so powerful. So that's definitely something I picked up at Eloqua and just the concept of digital body language, which really means marketers can read all the things you're doing online, right? Like you navigate to a website, they're already starting to capture information.
The moment you are on this website, even if it's just your IP address. And the moment you sign your soul away, meaning you enter your email address somewhere. They start combining the information they already have with the information they continue collecting about you, and then start sending you content usually in email that matches your needs in the moment of need. And yeah, when I learned that back in the days, I was like, whoa, this is amazing, and kind of helped, you know, think about how we could leverage this here in learning and development as well.
Roy: Yeah, that makes it even more bizarre that we're still just pushing those linear one size fits all courses out, right? If we have all this expertise within the marketing field when it comes to personalisation and just in time information.
Mike: Yeah, and I say all the time. One size fits all usually means one size fits none.
Roy: Yeah. And I like what you said there, Bianca. Also when it comes to the unexpected inspiration, I had that as well. I also saw marketing from the other side and like all the data that's been gathered and collected, I'm like oof, I didn't know that as a consumer myself when I didn't get to experience that. What else is all out there?
Bianca: Absolutely. And I think, you know, as you're saying, it's so interesting that we don't pick up some of these processes here in L&D. And to be fair marketing, I don't know how many years ago, they were just like learning and development. They had no way of showing return on investment, and they didn't know how many leads really came from a billboard or whatnot. And then digital became a thing and all of a sudden you have all these technologies moving into the marketing space and all of a sudden the marketing function, the CMO function really became this driving force, and working closely with sales. And now given all the technology that's available to them, they are able to show the return on investment.
And they're really viewed as a very different function even than a couple of years ago. And they're also given more money because of that. And so I think it's important for us to remind ourselves that marketing wasn't always there. But it's also a great example of, hey, if they can do it, I think we can too.
Roy: And how should we do that?
Bianca: That's the million dollar question.
Roy: How many time do we have left? Two hours. Let's go. No.
Bianca: Yeah. Let's go. Right. I mean there's a ton of different concepts you can borrow from marketing and I wouldn't go straight to the technology, and I think that is just something in general in learning and development. I see that as a mistake in my mind to go out and purchase whatever great platform is out there because it promises you that engagement of your learners will go up and behaviour change this and ROI and then you implement it and it doesn't do any of the things you thought it would do. Because Without a proper strategy ahead of time, it doesn't really matter what technology you get in and you've gotta make sure it works with your entire tech stack anyway. So for me it's really, A: getting to know your audience, what is it really that they need and want? And then from there really figure out what content do we have? How do I wanna actually strategise around that? What do we have? What do we need? Start writing better, start using better visuals. And then kind of creating these learner journeys and learning campaigns to really make that learning come to life using technology. And then obviously, measure what you're doing and continue to improve. It's easy!
Roy: Ah, there you go. See, you did that in one minute. I mean, we don't even need those two hours.
I think you touched upon a very good point, one that I also wanted to address because I think that marketers are doing a really good job knowing their audience, right? Who they want to target and when, and what point, at what time, what they need.
So how can we in L&D or learning & development move beyond just knowing demographics and actually start to understand our learners. One of the things that I'm very familiar with, because of my colleague Ger Driesen, is the jobs to be done method, which actually also comes from marketing, which is a more in depth method than just, for example, personas.
What do you think? How should we, approach that?
Bianca: Listen, listen to the people around you. But yeah, personas is the vehicle to do it. To your point, there's obviously other ways of how you can do it. You have your empathy maps, which are slightly less work. You have your persona, slightly more, and then obviously, you can kind of blow it up after that if you wanted to.
But knowing the time and dollar restrictions we usually have on projects, no matter what you're working on, creating research based learner personas is usually a great way to do that. So you identify first, within your target audience, who has to take a certain programme, who are these people in general?
You segment them and that might be geographic, it might be job roles. And then from there you dig a little bit deeper and sit down with them and interview them. Or if you can't get them off the floor, so to say, send out surveys at a minimum. And really gather information about them.
What do they see? What do they hear? What do they do? What do they think and feel? Which is the critical one because there I can really now synthesise the pain points and then the needs of these learners. Add a little bit of demographic information on top of it to make it more fun and give that persona personality, and then start using them throughout your design.
Roy: And listen, mainly listen.
Bianca: Yeah, it sounds so simple, but especially when you do these interviews, have the same questions for everyone, so you can compare apples to apples, but there will always be nuances, right? And read someone's body language too. Now it's great when you do virtual meetings, you can actually really focus on the person, because most of us now have our AI notetaker assistance, which is fantastic.
So you don't have to look down and scribble notes. You can really just focus on the conversation and really tune into the person in front of you.
Roy: And was there in your time as a learning and development specialist, also a moment where you got the audience completely wrong? So you misinterpreted your whole audience while developing a learning solution, and if so, what did that teach you?
Mike: I have one. It wasn't me getting it wrong, it was sort of an adjacent team who really got it wrong badly. So I used to work for American Electric Power, which is a power generation, big electricity, coal-fired power plants, usually in pretty rural places. And kind of one of the reasons that a lot of these compliance courses get a bad name is people don't understand the audience.
And so they built this crazy big course, really heavy multimedia stuff. They had clearly never visited one of these power plants before because it's crazy loud. It's really dirty. There's equipment and it's just this incredible, it's an incredible place. One of the key things that they didn't understand was the entire plant, so a 100, 200 people.
They're sharing a 64K internet connection. And this multimedia rich thing, it just won't work. It won't run at all. And so that's bad enough. But then when they try to track down the people who aren't taking it, so they're trying to keep, literally keep the lights on and we have these HR people who are calling them and kind of scolding them for not taking this course that doesn't work. So it's not possible for them to take it, and they just, they clearly have no clue what that environment is like. It's one of those things where you just hate to see it because people in organisations, they don't know that there are different training groups. It's just the training group. And so everybody is painted with that same brush, which is really unfortunate.
Bianca: On my end I worked or supported an oil and gas company and their goal was, their training goal was "Goal Zero", right? Like imagine a plant very similar to what Mike was just saying, right? There's lots of spills and ladders and lots of opportunities to hurt yourself. And pure training just didn't get this organisation to that Goal Zero. And so we took a step back and tried to identify what actually motivates these learners, because clearly they don't care enough about their own lives to be safe because they know, right? They know if there's a spill to not walk into the spill, but around it. They know to put on a harness. So the issue was not that they don't know, they didn't do it.
And so we just took a very different approach, which had nothing to do with training, but we asked them to put a picture of their loved ones at their locker or an area that they see every day because okay, if you don't want to be safe for yourself, maybe you wanna go home to these people, right?
Or your cats or your dogs or your rubber duck, or whatever it is. And that made a huge difference on that training programme or that actually not training programme on the output of, you know, goal Zero, the goal.
Roy: I love how in those two, both these cases, you went from something that just didn't work to a whole outside the box idea and created something else to make it work. Especially by visiting the place, by looking at what is important to them. So like you said, Bianca with listen to them properly.
My colleague Ger that I've mentioned two or three times already by now today, he talked about jobs to be done, but also about go to gemba. And that means go to the place where the work is done, which is, I think, very relevant still. And a very important takeaway for a lot of learning & development people.
Bianca: Yeah, and I always say it's the work, the worker, and the work environment, right? Those are the three things you really gotta look at because it has an impact on everything we do every day, including taking training courses.
Roy: And I also think that, maybe that's a whole different topic, but you also say, don't necessarily talk about courses, but more thinking campaigns. But how does that start and what's the first campaign like thing someone can try when they go back to the office on Monday after listening to this podcast?
Mike: So I think one of the things that most people can grab onto pretty easily is like onboarding. We've all probably experienced a poor onboarding experience where it's an all day or an all week even, and it's just this tsunami of too much information. Then you just can't process it and you're just wiped out at the end.
And so breaking that apart into manageable parts and pieces and just drip feed, what do I need when. And Bianca mentioned email marketing tools, which is a great tool to manage that and makes it really simple. So as a new hire, I can plan things intentionally. I get things before my first day.
I get things on my first day and spread that stuff out and give people a way to actually digest that and get the right stuff to the right people in the right time. And I think that's a really good example that sort of illustrates the type of thinking that we're talking about.
Bianca: I think. If I may add to that, a learning campaign sounds quite overwhelming, if you just hear the term. It can be very short with some kind of an awareness piece to something, and then you have the main training piece, and then you have some kind of a follow up.
So other people might just call this a blended learning experience. But I think two things here. One: use the content you already have, as Mike was saying, and see how you can adjust it. An email might be one way of doing it, but you could still have your e-learnings in there and you could still have your instructor led sessions in there and whatnot. But I also say the second point I want to make is: think outside of the LMS box, it doesn't always have to sit on the LMS, I mean, email obviously is one of those examples, but I always like to share. It was a rather small campaign, but we kind of broke this out into like experiential marketing is something that inspires me when I think about solutions.
And so we had a client who asked us about, oh, we wanna educate our headquarter, so automotive industry, our headquarter people on electric vehicles. So if you think about the what's in it for them, it's like, yeah, it's important to know, but in the end the people that really know about these vehicles already, they know about them, and the others are like: why do I need to know this?
So we have to think about something better than the original ask, which was a two hour. V.I.L.T. session with a quiz after. So we decided to make this a little bit more experiential and we had a ton of promotion before this, and then we turned it into an expo. It was still two hours, but we had six booths that people actually went through and experienced EVs on their own time. There were videos, there were some instructor led sessions, like 10 minutes. There was a backsplash with QR codes where they could just engage. We had a movie night set up with like popcorn and everything, and a lawn chair to look at the EV lifestyle. There was an event app with a scavenger hunt, and then there was some follow up pieces to this in terms of performance support basically. We still have to do the quiz in the end, which, you know, it is what it is. So this could still be considered a campaign, right? Because you're really thinking in multiple steps,
Roy: Great example. I love that one of combining all these different kind of things and thinking outside of your LMS.
If we look at marketing, one of the things that maybe a lot of people will also notice is that, not every marketer, of course, and I don't wanna overgeneralise, but some of them create click bait, right?
Five tips to this and seven best tips to this, and just to get people to your website and to make sure that people fill in these forms. How do you feel about that? And do you think we need that in learning to get people to our LMS or do you think it's cheap and it won't resonate?
Mike: So I think that that's an important point that comes up fairly often. And I think the key to that is those clickbait things they're using triggers to grab our attention, which I do think we, should use and we should employ. You know, in an ethical way. But the key point is, once you do click, or once you go register or whatever it is you want them to do, like you still have to deliver value. And it's the same thing that marketers, like marketers might have a great campaign and it might get me to buy something, but if it's just a garbage product? A, I'm never gonna buy it again. B, I'm probably gonna tell everybody I know. And so the same thing is happening if we have an amazing title to our course and people get in the course and it's garbage, the same thing's gonna happen. They're not gonna be likely to come back, and they're gonna tell everybody they know: don't waste your time.
Roy: So we can still learn a lot from that. Yeah. But then use more marketing, clickbait titles, but still add the value and make sure that the course is good.
Bianca: And I think it's important to remember that no one wants to log into their LMS. So going back to delivering value: I would question if that is the right call to action, right? But what you should consider is, not just when you're promoting something, but think about the course titles that you currently have or the titles for your training programmemes in general.
If they're a little bit bigger, like compliance one-on-one is not very exciting. And in our workshops we have this little exercise where we give people really boring titles, and then we give them tools like headline analyser tools, and now you can also just use ChatGPT or Claude or whatnot to help you come up with more engaging titles and then again, the value is there because hopefully your course is obviously nicely designed and it all works out.
Roy: That's a prerequisite, of course. Yeah.
Bianca: Yes, exactly. We're assuming that's the case. And I think it also just ties in with really learning in the flow of work. Our employees do not wanna log into the LMS, right? They have a problem in the moment and they need a solution in the moment, and how can we actually support that? I know there's still the bigger training programmemes out there, and they'll never go away, and that's okay too. Let's start thinking more, especially with AI now, how can I personalise that experience in the flow of work?
Roy: Has your marketing mindset, the way that you look at it, has it ever clashed with learning purists, for example, learning scientists?
Mike: Sure. I had a phone call with somebody at Nationwide on another learning team, she wanted to know: how do you get people to do outside of the box stuff, like instead of the traditional compliance sort of mindset that we're all probably familiar with, it's like, how do you do that? How do you get approval for that?
I think it's really important to understand a couple of things: one, we talk about this all the time, is if you wanna try something new, call it a beta test or call it a trial or call it something else, and people sort of seem to: "oh, okay, well this it's not threatening, we'll just try it". So do some small experiments that will demonstrate: hey, not only is this effective, but people like it. And people lean into that. And so when you can start finding things to show as proof, like: "Hey, we did this and it works, let's expand that." And people are always open if you offer better suggestions.
So for example, if somebody comes to you and says: "Hey, we need a training course." Yes, I can build a training course, and would you be interested in other better, cheaper, faster options? And so that's like an improv trick. You never say "no", you say "yes, and", and it keeps that conversation kind of a collaborative one instead of an oppositional one. And so things like that are really important and I get these questions a lot.
Bianca: Yeah, what I come across a lot is: "oh, you're simplifying this. It just doesn't work". So people just kind of shut down. "Marketing and L&D are so different." Kind of going back to what I was mentioning about they have more money, they have more technology, especially around learner personas, it's like: "well, you know, they won't solve all your problems."
And I'm the first one to admit that they don't, but they do get us closer to our target than a target audience analysis. And so, to Mike's point, I think the trick is when we hear these things to acknowledge, it's like, yes, I agree here, there are shortcomings. However, what we're trying to do is inspire and think differently, and it's not, our book is less, or our thinking is less about how to promote what you're doing, but to really tie marketing principles into your design to make it a better design. And see better outcomes and impacts in the long run. And I think that's definitely always a good starting point to start with the end in mind, as Mike was just saying: wouldn't you like to do X, Y, Z?
Roy: Yeah, that makes total sense. I want to go to some closing questions. And I wanna first start with a reflection question on your own careers, again, as I did in the beginning as well. So when you look back at your career, what's something that you wish you'd done more like a marketer earlier?
Mike: Yeah, so I can still remember the first online e-learning course I ever built. So I was working at the power company and it was the thrilling topic of pH and water chemistry in a power plant. So crazy complex stuff. And at the time I was not as in tune with my audience. And so I remember. Oh gosh. This is kind of boring. We need to jazz it up. We've all probably heard those kind of requests of: "Hey, can you just jazz this up a little bit?" And then, I recognise at some point looking back, that's not what we're talking about when we say all of these marketing things. It's not extra extraneous stuff that we're trying to jazz up anything. It's really simplify, make sure it's useful and relevant and hopefully it resonates with the people emotionally and it makes them care about it. And so I think that's a really important distinction. It's not just running around, adding clip art and jazzing things up, but there's really meaningful goal and targets in there that we're shooting for.
Bianca: I think for me, I wish I would've started to actually practise what I preach earlier. And it was like I was thinking about it, I was talking about it, but I didn't necessarily bring it into my work because there were so many naysayers. And there still are, right, as we just talked about. And so kind of standing my ground. But I think it also. I needed the years and the experience to fine tune the messaging and really understand it for myself in order to show up as that person in meetings and be comfortable to push back and be comfortable to suggest things that are out of the box. And up until this day, I'm still learning for one, but also sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
And we're just working on a client project where we actually proposed a campaign and it's actually for a marketing team, so it's like: hey, you know, you guys get this. And now we're in the middle of it and everything changed so much that the original idea behind the campaign has actually been out the window for at least two months.
And so to just also be okay with that. Because sometimes clients, they might get it and then you go into it and they just fall back into their old patterns and there's only so much you can do as an L&D professional to push it and to know when you should stop pushing and just accept that this is not going anywhere and focus your efforts on where you can make a change and a difference and call it a pilot or whatnot.
And I'm just sharing this, that even today I'm not always successful bringing these campaign and marketing ideas to the audience, but if it works, it's amazing.
Roy: And what kind of people inspire you from the marketing field? Is there somewhere you're looking up to when you have those meetings, you're like, oh, I'm gonna see if this person has some insights that I can use in my client project, for example.
Mike: Yeah, so I mentioned Rory Sutherland earlier and he's really fantastic. Just the mindset. It really aligns with a lot of the stuff we're talking about. Seth Godin is somebody, he spoke at the ATD conference a couple weeks ago. Again, just unique perspectives and thinking outside of the box and being creative in the way they approach things for me.
Bianca: No big names on my end necessarily. I signed up to Marketingprofs.com, great website, great resources, so I just get their newsletters and get inspired by that. Also, I still have a very strong network of marketers because I used to work at Eloqua. So following them on LinkedIn, seeing what they're doing, like that inspires me. And yeah, that's where I get most of my inspiration from is really just seeing what these people are doing in real life. And as much as I love being inspired also by Seth Godin, as Mike was saying, for example, sometimes it feels a little abstract. And it might be too farfetched for what we're doing. Well, what actually happens day to day in an office. So that's why for me, I really rely on my personal network and Marketingprofs.com and the content, what's it called? Content Strategy Institute, I think. So great resources. Thank you. I thought something sounded off. Content Marketing Institute. So they have some amazing resources as well to get inspired.
Roy: I will make sure to include all those in the show notes and of course, a link to your book: Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro. I definitely recommend everyone to take a look at that book to improve your own skills when it comes to using marketing in learning and and development.
Before we really round off, I've got a couple of fun questions that I, well, I cannot ask all of them, but I do want to ask a couple. And for one of them, Mike, you do not get a choice. Because I just want to ask you that one. Because, I read your Friday finds every week. I love all the insights I get from it, especially with the new format. You give the more longer summaries and that's really something I admire. But there's also one little part that I've sometimes also send you an email about, for example, the playlist of Dido, which has been in my algorithm for two weeks now, and my girlfriend's getting insane.
But that's a whole other discussion. Nah, that's okay. She's okay with that. But I thought of a question when it comes to sort of a learning jingle. So if you get to launch a training campaign with a theme song, what would be your pick and why?
Mike: Oh gosh, that's super hard Roy, you're not giving me any easy ones.
Roy: I know, no, of course not.
Mike: I don't know specifically, but I love my favourite musical sort of thing is when somebody takes an old song and remakes it in a new genre. And so, for example, I did a webinar with TechSmith yesterday morning, and they had the coolest. It was the Mario Kart theme song that somebody had remixed and done in another style. Then they also had like the Star Wars theme and another style. So it would be something recognisable, but new in that sort of remaking kind of context.
Roy: All right, so leave the original song in its own context, but then reiterating it bit so that it fits your own.
Mike: So, it's creative and new and different, but recognisable.
Roy: But then still two questions. If you pick a number between one and eight, and you cannot say two because that's the question I just asked you, Mike. What number would it be for you, Bianca?
Mike: Go ahead. Hope you don't take four.
Bianca: No, you can take four. I'll take six.
Roy: You take six. Alright. That's about your first learning crush. So what was the first piece of learning, either a course, a teacher or a workshop that made you think: wow, this really works!
Bianca: It was actually, I worked at the bank at the time. It was my first people manager role, and I had to go through people manager training and it was a Blanchard course on situational leadership, which is still around up until this day. But I still think about this experience a lot. It was a face to face over a couple of days, which I'm like, oh gosh, like I was not looking forward to it. But the facilitator was amazing. The people I was learning with were great, and I got so much out of this experience that I'm still using up until this day. That was definitely, big crush there.
Roy: What then made it made that, so was it the emotion? Was it that moment?
Bianca: It wasn't. The mix of the right people, the right facilitator. The content made sense to me, like the whole concept of depending on what the situation is, as the name says right, you manage your people differently and recognising what situation you're in, the person who's sitting in front of you, what they need, what they don't need.
To just not have that one style, but to really be that coach and mentor when it's needed. Be the micromanager when it's needed. But yeah, it was really the people, the exercises, the facilitators.
Roy: It all clicked.
Bianca: Yeah, it just all clicked. It all worked, and the food was good too, which I know is always one of those things, right. So that didn't hurt.
Roy: So on the evaluation, on the smile sheet, you said, I like lunch.
Bianca: Exactly. "I like lunch", that was my only feedback I had so it was really valuable. Yes.
Roy: Great example. And Mike, you picked number four. That's about your least favourite trend. So what is a popular L&D trend that you would love to, to say in marketing terms, unsubscribe from?
Mike: So I don't know if it's a trend, but it's been around for a long time and still remains for some unknown reason, and that's every time I hear the learning styles thing. And when using AI tools, the very first thing I do is go in and put in instructions of never ever, ever, ever mention learning styles. And so it's unfortunate that it's still taught in some educational, academic circles and I kind of get it a little bit 'cause it's sort of intuitive, but it's just so bad and wrong that,
Roy: It's not true.
Mike: And it just needs to go.
Roy: That's a good one. And a persistent myth. So let's get that out of the world as soon as possible. Alright, time is flying and up. I want to thank you both for joining me today on the Training Improvement Cafe. And everyone at home also thanks for listening or watching to another episode of the Training Improvement Cafe, this time with Bianca Bauman and Mike Taylor, where we talked about marketing and your new book: Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro.
So make sure to get that book and to be inspired. Thanks both. And, thank you for watching and viewing and I hope to see you at the next one.
Mike: Thank you Roy
Bianca: Thank you Roy.
