392: Purposeful Strategies for Success- with Neha Bucaro

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The topic of relationships ties in very closely with marketing. That's why I like to bring on marketing experts with a variety of backgrounds for you to learn and grow from. Today's guest is Neha Bucaro. Her background, remarkable professional journey, spanning media strategy, creative, and research. Neha is a true believer in the power of transformative thinking. Throughout her career, she has worn some big titles, led inspired, brilliant teams, and collaborated with some of the biggest brands in the world. With an innate comfort with data and refined strategic and creative thinking skills, she has honed an expertise in her craft that is both broad and deep. She's helped her clients navigate shifting market dynamics, competitive disruption, technology and product evolution, and changing consumer expectations with grace and success. Over the last five years, Neha has applied her skills to benefit non profits, early and mid stage startups and investor backed businesses. Every client, no matter their size or stage, benefits from her unique blend of creativity, strategic acumen, and business pragmatism. Neha, welcome to the show.

Everybody's got their own definition. What I believe is that strategy is the combination of clarity of purpose, and the long term roadmap to achieve that purpose, the two things together. So a lot of times I think in the marketing world, we think of brand strategy as one thing that is typically purpose or vision and then business strategy as another thing.

And. For me, I feel like they're both necessary. Brand and business strategy are two sides of the same coin. If brand is doing one thing, but the business is doing something else, there's a total disconnect for employees, for consumers, for everyone. So for me, strategy is that roadmap to a clearly defined destination.

It should be the decision making rubric for every decision that an organization makes from how they allocate resources, to how they might organize themselves, to their internal processes and teams, to how they might recruit and hire and how they communicate both to internal and external stakeholders.

And there might be roadblocks along the way. Exactly.

Yeah.

Without a sound strategy, organizations that have a North Star, they can proactively address shifts in market and stakeholder dynamics. Without that, they're just not going to be able to do that. It's just going to be constant reactive.

And sometimes you have to, you know, realign the strategy because of that, but at least you're being strategic still.

And I think in so many organizations, they might have a clearly defined purpose, but the different functions within the organization aren't clear about their role in fulfilling that purpose. And so then you have a disconnect between the different functions. So like finance might be doing one thing, marketing might be moving in a different direction, HR is doing something else, and all of the functions are kind of on their own path.

And we, we see this all the time, right, where Marketing might say, Hey, we need to build a digital platform, or we need to build some machine learning into our CRM systems. And then finance is saying, well, we don't have the budget to do that, and we can't do that. And it's just, it's a constant disconnect and constantly challenging each other for resources.

And I think if there is clarity of purpose and everyone is aligned to that purpose, then decision making becomes that much easier because the question is, does this align with our purpose? Does it move us towards our destination or does it not? And if it doesn't, is it a detour that makes sense for us right now?

Because eventually it does ease that path towards our destination? Maybe. And I think those are the conversations that just aren't being had in organizations where they lack that kind of clarity of purpose and strategy.

It's like a lot of people are just focusing on what's happening today, that short term win and not necessarily thinking about the big picture and how, how even the actions that you're taking today will have an impact on the activities down the road that you're doing. So why take actions today that are helping to achieve a bigger goal.

They understand their role in it, and then they can fulfill it.

Everybody's talking about it right now. Mm-Hmm. , you know, for me, all my clients, I mean, there've been studies published, right? That say, you know. 80 plus percent of CEOs expect to integrate AI into their strategy next year. Yeah. But what does that really mean? I mean, right now AI is just, it seems like such a buzzword and it's been around for a while. It's not brand new. Chat GPT has, you know, brought it to sort of mainstream. But it's been around. And now that it is mainstream, though, everybody's talking about it. And everyone feels like they need to integrate it into their business. I think how it will impact creative services specifically is frankly, I think it'll make great creative delivery more efficient.

You can use AI to narrow your concept pool or to even initiate creativity to start your concept pool. If you've got a road, like I often find myself with a mental block when I'm trying to write something and I will go to chat GPT for some stimulus for some ideas, but it is a great springboard.

And in this era of everyone needing to do more with less. Everyone's resources are tight. Everyone is trying to deliver more with less. I think there is a role for AI provided that you are being thoughtful about what you are using it for, and you're being hyper aware of the limitations of AI and how you can actually integrate it into your work processes as a creative.

Yeah. Now, as it relates to strategic services, I think similarly, there's AI can be a great jumping off point. For me, I find a little bit less so. It doesn't seem to inform my strategic services as much as it informs creative services, because with strategy, there are so many individual nuances for a company, right?

You know, they've got resource challenges. They've got people challenges, the size of the organization, the vertical, there are so many different things going on that when I'm developing a strategy, I'm not going to use a generative AI, but if I'm writing something, if I am trying to ideate around something, if I'm trying to be creative, it can often be a great jumping off point. But again, like I said, use with caution.

So really clearly defining the challenge and how you might integrate AI into the solution is helpful. But AI is not the solution in and of itself.

And then we did eventually develop a chat bot for their website, but they were challenged with finding the talent to do that well. We made a lot of mistakes along the way because they thought they had the talent internally. They did not want to hire outside resources. And I think this is where people get into trouble.

Also with AI is there's, there's a skillset required.

It went very awry before we pulled in some external resources to build out something that was actually meaningful and engaging for their audiences.

But then I was chatting with the leadership team and they had commented they don't even know if anyone's using AI within the company right now. And this is a fairly sizable organization. And then some of the folks in the marketing team were like, Oh, Oh yeah, we've been, we've been using it. It's just like, I don't, I don't want to get anyone in trouble here, but this is why you need some policies in place. I mean, this is for everyone listening, anyone that if you have an organization and you do not have a policy that just says, Hey, let's talk to me if you're using this or let me know what tool you're using and how you're using it. You gotta have that initial level of awareness to realize that just because you, the CEO, aren't using it doesn't mean other people in your organization aren't using it as well.

If you could go back to your 20 year old self, what would you tell yourself to do more of less of, or differently with regards to your professional career?

Yeah, that's great. I've got a post a note on my computer and it says F fear in really big letters to just remind me to just do it instead of overthinking it.

I was working a job that was making me miserable at that time. And at four or five, she could sense it. And she wrote me a note one day and put it on my computer. And the note said in her like four or five year old phonetic spelling. It says, don't let anybody guide you, let you guide yourself.

So if you find others that have been in your shoes, it doesn't necessarily even have to be in the same industry. Sometimes that can be extremely beneficial though. I'm, I'm in a marketing agency owner peer group. I've had my firm for 15 years and I'm sitting next to someone who's, you know, their agency has been around for 80 years and they're the third owner of it. You know, and it's just like, wow, there's so much to learn from that.

So find someone, build your community, get your cheerleaders. Get the people that are going to help you when you're down, but celebrate you when you're up, you know? So that that's really important. Something took me a while to learn in my entrepreneurship journey as well.

If you have a burning marketing question or relationship question, just reach out and I'd love to answer it on the show. As mentioned before, let's connect on LinkedIn. I'm looking forward to hearing from you and I hope you enjoyed today's show. Go out there and get noticed.