131 episodes

Despite the latest new digital marketing technology, the fundamentals of good marketing haven’t changed a whole lot. At its core, we still need a solid strategy. And we still need to make human connections.

That is The Heart of Marketing.

Join hosts Jayme Soulati and John Gregory Olson for an informative and entertaining romp through the digital marketing world today. You get an insider view of a variety of topics to help you win customers and grow sales. Some of the topics we’ll cover include: online publishing, public relations, content marketing, social media, mobile, branding, message mapping, marketing integration, and lots more. All delivered with the wit and wisdom of two accomplished marketing pros.

Meet your hosts …

JAYME SOULATI is president of Soulati Media, Inc. and is a message mapping master. She hails from Chicago's public relations firms and delivers strategically blended marketing based on core PR with content, social and digital. She is an award-winning blogger since 2010 and brings perspective in business since 1984. Jayme is a past president of the Publicity Club of Chicago. Find her at Soulati.com.

JOHN GREGORY OLSON has more than 25 years of B2B marketing experience in both agencies and corporations, spanning the manufacturing, legal publishing, imaging supplies, healthcare, and nonprofit industries. Over the course of his career, John has designed and implemented marketing strategies that have generated in excess of $300 million in revenue for 3M, Thomson Reuters and other global businesses. He is Past President of the Midwest Direct Marketing Association. In 2014, John was ranked #52 on Onalytica’s list of the top 200 content marketing influencers in the world. He is a consultant who specializes in helping midsized business organizations grow customers and sales with integrated marketing strategies. Learn more at his blog: jgodigital.com.

The Heart Of Marketing Jayme Soulati and John Gregory Olson

    • Business
    • 5.0 • 19 Ratings

Despite the latest new digital marketing technology, the fundamentals of good marketing haven’t changed a whole lot. At its core, we still need a solid strategy. And we still need to make human connections.

That is The Heart of Marketing.

Join hosts Jayme Soulati and John Gregory Olson for an informative and entertaining romp through the digital marketing world today. You get an insider view of a variety of topics to help you win customers and grow sales. Some of the topics we’ll cover include: online publishing, public relations, content marketing, social media, mobile, branding, message mapping, marketing integration, and lots more. All delivered with the wit and wisdom of two accomplished marketing pros.

Meet your hosts …

JAYME SOULATI is president of Soulati Media, Inc. and is a message mapping master. She hails from Chicago's public relations firms and delivers strategically blended marketing based on core PR with content, social and digital. She is an award-winning blogger since 2010 and brings perspective in business since 1984. Jayme is a past president of the Publicity Club of Chicago. Find her at Soulati.com.

JOHN GREGORY OLSON has more than 25 years of B2B marketing experience in both agencies and corporations, spanning the manufacturing, legal publishing, imaging supplies, healthcare, and nonprofit industries. Over the course of his career, John has designed and implemented marketing strategies that have generated in excess of $300 million in revenue for 3M, Thomson Reuters and other global businesses. He is Past President of the Midwest Direct Marketing Association. In 2014, John was ranked #52 on Onalytica’s list of the top 200 content marketing influencers in the world. He is a consultant who specializes in helping midsized business organizations grow customers and sales with integrated marketing strategies. Learn more at his blog: jgodigital.com.

    128: Develop Your Intuition for Breakthrough Business Ideas [with Bernadette Jiwa]

    128: Develop Your Intuition for Breakthrough Business Ideas [with Bernadette Jiwa]

    Bernadette Jiwa joins The Heart of Marketing to share ideas from her new book Hunch: Turn Your Everyday Insights into the Next Big Thing. In it she busts some of the myths we believe about “creative genius” and how innovation really happens.

    “We covet groundbreaking ideas and the people who have them,” Jiwa writes in the introduction. “We believe in superstars and visionaries, in the power of Eureka! moments and special circumstances that set great ideas and their creators apart. But when we dig deeper, we find that the secret of these visionaries isn’t necessarily their pioneering nature, but rather that they made connections others overlooked.”

    The good news is that YOU can learn how to make those connections and cultivate your intuition to transform your marketing and your business. Listen in to discover how.

    What you will learn:

    •    How ANYBODY can develop the “ordinary genius” that turns everyday insights into the next big thing
    •    Why hunches are more important than data in coming up with breakthrough ideas
    •    The reasons why data and technology can actually be the enemy of insight
    •    Three human characteristics that fuel intuition for birthing new business ideas
    •    How a brand or an idea becomes meaningful (and why it’s critical to success)
    •    How to make your brand story much more than just a storytelling message

    About Bernadette Jiwa
    Bernadette Jiwa is a recognized global authority on the role of story in business, innovation, and marketing. She is the author of five best-selling books on marketing and brand storytelling, including:

    •    Marketing, a Love Story: How to Matter to Your Customers
    •    Make Your Idea Matter: Standing Out with a Better Story
    •    Difference: The One-Page Method for Reimagining Your Business and Reinventing Your Marketing
    •    The Fortune Cookie Principle
    •    Meaningful: The Story of Ideas that Fly

    Bernadette is based in Melbourne, Australia. She works with global brands like LinkedIn, Zappos, and Adidas to intentionally create products, services, and marketing that help them matter to their customers. She has been named one of the Top 100 Branding Experts to follow on Twitter. She also spoke at TEDx in 2012 about “The Secret to Spreading Ideas.”

    Her new book titled Hunch: Turn Your Everyday Insights into the Next Big Thing releases in the U.S. on June 6, 2017.

    • 36 min
    127: Coca-Cola And The Future of the CMO

    127: Coca-Cola And The Future of the CMO

    Did you hear the news? Coca-Cola has eliminated its chief marketing officer (CMO) and in its place, drum roll, please, John Gregory Olson! (Well,  you're going to have to listen to what Coca-Cola is doing in the C-suite.)

    When you think about the role of the CMO, anyway, it's taking a beating. The average tenure for every big brand corporate CMO is, oh, about four years. They last less than a CEO these days.

    Think, too, about who reports up to the CMO. How about maybe 10 different departments and hundreds of employees in marketing in various roles? Heck, even public relations reports up into the marketing leadership in most organizations.

    On The Heart of Marketing, we've talked plainly about roles and responsibilities in the workplace.

    You might like:

    Episode 21: Specialist vs. Generalist
    Episode 102: Hear the CMO Whine?
    Episode 121: With Ann Handley on a variety of marketing topics
     
    There are way too many things for a marketer to do. And, ROI is still an issue. Does your organization have a CMO? If not, which title is closest to that role and are they accomplishing what they need to to take  your brand to the next level?
    And, we have a shout out today to our loyal listener, Shakirah Dawud. She's the most wonderful copywriter who knows how to deliver value. Reach out to her at Deliberate Ink.
    Thank you, All loyal listeners! This is The Heart of Marketing, and I'm Jayme Soulati.

    • 26 min
    126: How Evian of Suave To Make Us Naive In Branding

    126: How Evian of Suave To Make Us Naive In Branding

    Did you recently hear of the trick Suave played on its consumers? Millennial women, actually. Unilever's Suave heard from its base that they wanted a higher end brand at value pricing.

    Now, we all know that Suave ain't no top-shelf Tequila. It's often relegated to the drugstore shelf or the supermarket shelves with rows and rows of like products (think Head and Shoulders).

    We're not making fun of the brand, just stating the facts, Ma'am.

    So, some clever marketer decided to do this (take a listen and find out, K?). And, as a public relations marketer, I have to say I am duly impressed with this campaign.

    All brands are interested in earning more customers. And, it's really funny to observe the category leaders try to lure the next generation of consumer to the check-out line. In this case, millennials are that newest generation, but they have no money! Remember? They're broke with college debt, and that's why they're asking for high-quality products at bargain basement pricing. (Say, whatever happened to Filene's Basement?)

    We have some fun at the expense of Suave, and we also share a number of other episodes for your listening pleasure. You might like:

    More on Influencer Relations Programs: Organic v. Paid, episode 88
    Building Influencer Relations Programs, episode 94

    • 21 min
    125: Why Consider Social Listening Strategy & Some Tool Tips For You

    125: Why Consider Social Listening Strategy & Some Tool Tips For You

    If you're merely sharing on social media and not clueing into social listening, then it's likely your brand isn't powered up on social channels. There are way too many users on each social media channel and it's impossible to listen in on all the conversations without some help.

    As John Gregory Olson and Jayme Soulati suggest in this episode of The Heart of Marketing, it's also important to know your objectives when you use social media. It's also important to better understand your customer so you can offer the right goods and services your customer is demanding right there on Twitter.

    Every brand is suffering from negative customer sentiment; well, we only hear about the negative stories that impact a brand, right? The airline industry is one such vertical market truly suffering from poor customer service, irate customers and mission statements that fail to reach the frontline.

    If you enact social listening with tools, your brand can get ahead of the negativity with some basics.

    In this episode, we review a few tools to help you select social listening tools that are right for your objectives and budget.

    Take a look at this PC Magazine article with a plethora of options.

    Then, look into Sprout Social, one of the paid favorites, followed by Hootsuite, Clicky and Buffer.

    The tools available are numerous, too numerous to count. Ultimately, it's going to depend on the size of your brand or agency, the number of clients/companies you're listening for, the budget you have to spend on these expenses, and the demands by the client in a reporting mechanism.

    • 23 min
    124: IKEA Seizes Opportunity With Veggie Balls, More Food Items To Compete for Customers

    124: IKEA Seizes Opportunity With Veggie Balls, More Food Items To Compete for Customers

    Veggie balls at IKEA are a hot topic, so much so that the global retailer is putting more attention on its food menus to attract a growing market of folks who just come to IKEA to dine.
    Have you ever been to an IKEA, smack in the middle of nowhere to accommodate the massive warehouse and shopping experience people love to see and visit? Truly, it's not easy getting there, nor is it easy getting to the front doors depending on where you have to park.
    Imagine traipsing to IKEA just for dinner?!
    Well, that's what IKEA leadership began to see in the numbers of dinners served -- 650 million in one year, which caused the light bulb to turn on brightly.
    IKEA has been revamping the dining experience for customers to capitalize on people who enjoy the food, like the modular dining, and want to dink around in the retail side of things and then feed the kids.
    How is this a marketing story? You'll need to listen in to The Heart of Marketing and find out! And, while you're at it, you might tune in to episode 30-someting when we covered IKEA when it launched its brand new veggie ball story!
    We are John Gregory Olson and Jayme Soulati, co-hosts of The Heart of Marketing.

    • 15 min
    123: Why This Email Worked And This One Didn't

    123: Why This Email Worked And This One Didn't

    There's an art and science to email marketing, and today on The Heart of Marketing your #RockHot co-hosts Jayme Soulati and John Gregory Olson share a few back and forths about an email that did and an email that didn't.
    What does it take for you to open an email and read it until the end? Have you ever said, yes, I need to speak with this guy? Or, maybe mostly, it's delete, delete.
    John and Jayme have a few stories to tell as to why one of their experiences worked while the other not so much.
    And, along the way we recognize one of our buds -- Jason Falls for his enthusiasm about an email that didn't! (Remember, Jason was our guest on a recent podcast episode, and we always love speaking with him 'cuz he knows his stuff.)
    Listen in today for a brief conversation about the elements that work and don't in an email you've received or sent recently.

    • 15 min

Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5
19 Ratings

19 Ratings

Maura4u ,

Heart of Marketing Captures the Missing Piece

In the endless sea of business, entrepreneurial and digital-speak podcasts, The Heart of Marketing stands out as capturing a missing -- and genuine -- piece. Creating an intimate, intelligent, yet easy-to-listen to environment, co-hosts John Gregory Olson and Jayme Soulati invite you to join their inquiry into the human connections involved in marketing success. If you like listening to creative stories from marketing pros who can inspire your personal imagination while helping you connect with your personal interests and preferential leanings, you will find valuable "soft skill" insights right here. Highly recommended.

Inritool ,

Great experience and content

This podcast provides such a wide range of material...Certainly and marker, business owners, or entrepreneur could benefit from. John and Jayme bring a fun style and fresh perspective. Take a listen.

Jeremy Reeves ,

Great Podcast

Love this podcast! I love the message Jayme & John are putting out to the world, combining both a positive message with actionable marketing tips. Great stuff!

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