When the word “recession” lands, most businesses freeze, and Mike Michalowicz’s deceptively short book reveals why that freeze is the most expensive response of all.
Steve whispers the word “recession” in a dark alley at the top of this episode. David laughs. Then they get serious. Consumer confidence in the US is currently at its lowest since records began in 1952, lower than during the Cuban Missile Crisis. That context shapes everything Steve and David unpack here, drawing on Mike Michalowicz’s book The Recession Response, written in 2020 and, as it turns out, very much written for right now.
They walk through the five stages of a recession response, apply Michalowicz’s business hierarchy of needs to the decisions you are facing today, dissect a fear-based marketing email targeting allied health practitioners, and dust off a 1977 General Motors ad that tried very hard to convince anxious petrol buyers that a massive car was actually quite sensible.
Get ready to take notes.
Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes
02:00 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.
The Five Stages (And Why Knowing Them Restores Your Agency)
There is a word that makes grown adults freeze. This episode names it.
Mike Michalowicz wrote The Recession Response in 2020 as COVID hit and financial markets groaned. It runs just over two hours as an audiobook. That brevity is deliberate. He knew that a business owner in shock would not wade through a 400-page tome. The book is short because it had to be, and it works for exactly the same reason.
His framework mirrors grief, applied at a societal level. Stage one is shock: businesses freeze, decisions get delayed, and the most dangerous thing of all happens: nothing. Stage two is retreat, where costs get cut, often including the marketing that was quietly keeping the pipeline alive. Stage three is adaptation, where businesses reassess what customers actually need right now and direct engagement becomes critical. Stage four is re-emergence, stabilisation, then controlled growth. Stage five is thriving: expanding, capturing market share, outperforming the competitors who never moved past retreat.
David raises a striking piece of context. US consumer sentiment data goes back to 1952. The current numbers are the lowest on record, lower even than during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Steve shares his FED System: Fish Every Day. A simple discipline of contacting one existing client or contact daily, not to sell, just to connect. It sounds almost too simple. It is also, Steve admits, easy to let slide when you’re busy. David adds a story from the 1987 crash: a colleague of his father’s arrived at the dinner table the week after, ready to buy a transport company, numbers probably solid, looking for partners. He misread the room entirely. The people he needed were still in shock. He came across as brash and self-serving. The deal never happened. The lesson: you cannot move people forward until you meet them where they are psychologically.
15:00 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.
The Business Hierarchy of Needs
Maslow had a pyramid. Michalowicz built one for your business.
Most people are familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: physical survival at the base, safety above that, then belonging, then esteem, then self-actualisation at the top. The rule is simple: whatever the lowest unsatisfied level is, that is where your energy goes. Michalowicz applies the same logic to business, and David’s observation is apt: this model works whether there is a recession or not.
The five levels, base to peak: sales (survival and cash flow), profit (financial resilience), order (systems and processes), impact (brand, loyalty and market presence), and legacy (the business outlasting the owner). Two questions drive the diagnostic. Do we have sales? If yes, do we have enough sales to generate profit? If the answer to either is no, that is where the work goes: not on branding, not on systems, not on anything higher up the hierarchy.
Michalowicz’s starkest warning is about debt. Do not borrow money simply because it is available. If the business cannot grow sales and profitability with existing structures, adding repayment obligations makes the next stage harder, not easier. Steve closes this segment with a useful provocation from Stephen Covey: managers find the most efficient way to climb the ladder, but leaders check that the ladder is against the right wall. Michalowicz offers a grounding exercise to find your wall: draw a circle marked A on a blank page, draw three arrows outward, then place a circle marked B in the corner representing where you want to go. Are any of your arrows pointing at B? In uncertain times, the temptation is to move anywhere to escape discomfort. Moving without direction is costly.
26:45 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.
When Fear-Based Marketing Targets Your Inbox
Recessionary times bring out the opportunists.
Steve shares an email received by a client in the allied health field. The subject line: Why your clinic isn’t showing up when patients search for you. Written with confident authority. Entirely untailored. Almost certainly generated by AI. The classic structure: assert a frightening problem, imply the reader is falling behind, offer a paid workshop as the cure.
Steve ran the email through Google’s Gemini and shared the assessment with his client. Four things stood out. The claim that one in three patients uses AI search draws on broad global surveys of early tech adopters, not the reality of a specialist vestibular clinic in Adelaide. AI visibility is largely a matter of good SEO: schema markup and authoritative content, things a well-managed site is likely already doing. The promise of ten new patients per day would operationally overwhelm a boutique specialist practice, which tells you the sender never actually looked at the business. And deploying Seth Godin’s Purple Cow, published in 2003, as a selling point for cutting-edge AI services in 2026 does the credibility no favours.
The broader point is practical. Fear-based pitches multiply when economic pressure rises. Knowing how to read them clearly is its own form of marketing literacy, and it protects you from spending money on solutions to problems you may not actually have.
33:30 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past.
A 1977 GM Ad and the Stubbornness of Status
History has a long memory for bad ideas.
With petrol prices uncertain and supply lines strained, David suggested revisiting the 1970s oil crisis for some advertising perspective. The ad in question is a 1977 General Motors campaign for their full-size vehicles. The pitch: these new models have been refined by computer and wind-tunnel tested to reduce drag, while remaining spacious and comfortable. In other words, GM ran the sums and the big car is still big, but now you can feel okay about it.
Steve calls it the Emperor’s New Clothes, delivered with a straight face. The conversation that follows is genuinely enjoyable, touching on the psychology of status, the peculiar persistence of enormous vehicles in Australian driveways, and a detour into civility versus selfishness that both hosts agree deserves its own episode. For many buyers in 1977, the rational response to that ad was simply to go Japanese. For others, the status and comfort argument was enough. The marketing question for 2026 is whether the same psychology still holds. David suspects it does. Steve remains sceptical, and slightly indignant about a particular vehicle he watched idle at the Paradise bus interchange.
Transcript This transcript was generated using Descript.
A Machine-Generated Transcript – Beware Errors
TAMP S08E05
Caitlin Davis: [00:00:00] Talking about marketing is a podcast for business owners and leaders produced by Steve Davis and David o. I’ve talked about marketing. More than 8,000 conversations have taught them something. You can’t read the label from inside the bottle. Everyone needs external perspective through their four Ps person, principles, problems, and purse per cassity.
Yes. You heard that? Correct. They explore marketing with curiosity, generosity, and the occasional gentle eye roll. They hope this becomes a trusted companion on your journey in business.[00:01:00]
Steve Davis: David, if I, um. I came up behind you in a dark alley. Yeah. And I leaned forward and I whispered. In your ear recession,
David Olney: what’s your first reaction? Probably to laugh hysterically when I realized you’ve just walked up behind me in a dark alley and said recession.
Steve Davis: If you were a normal person, David, what would be your reaction?
David Olney: Probably to run screaming and then wonder why you said recession.
Steve Davis: And that’s exactly the point I was angling for because, uh, a lot of today’s episode is going to be based on a book by Mike, Mike Leitz called The Recession Response. And we are gonna do our best to make this applicable and practical good challenge.
David Olney: I think it’s a great challenge and it’s also. Thankfully what Mike is about in writing, very clear and engaging books of things that people can immediately put to use[00:02:00]
Caitlin Davis: our four Ps. Number one person. These are insights for the whole person, not just the business operator. Oscar Wild, put it this way. The aim of life is self-development to realize one’s nature perfectly. That’s what each of us is here for.
Steve Davis: Mike Markowitz is just one of those rare business writers. He’s actually lived through a lot of disasters that he writes about apparently.
I’m not sure if you knew this, David, but he has built companies. He’s sold them. He’s lost most of his money. He’s started again. This guy has, you know, battle scars from the world of business, but he’s. Found his niche in writing a business book after business book. Things like Profit First, uh, what’s the other one?
What next or something,
David Olney: uh, what to do next.
Steve Davis: Yes. Something like that.
David Olney: And [00:03:00] something called The Pumpkin Plan, which I haven’t discovered
Steve Davis: yet.
David Olney: Yes,
Steve Davis: clockwork is another one. But he also, uh, in 2020. So as the world was adjusting to this thing called COVID and wondering what the heck is going on and, uh, financial markets, uh, groaning under the weight, he wrote a very short book.
Now, the, I haven’t held it physically, but let me just explain it like this. Most business books that we listen to, audio books, so somewhere between seven and nine hours long, this is just over two hours of listening. So as you can imagine, a short. Punchy book. It was called The Recession Response. And that’s gonna lead the first two segments of our discussion because with what’s happened in Iran, uh, the constriction of oil supplies, these have knock on effects that threaten and knock up against, uh, our economic health.
David, what makes you feel that this book, the recession response in [00:04:00] 2026. Still has relevance as it might have had in 2020.
David Olney: I think one of the most important things from my perspective is consumer confidence crashed at the start of COVID. Uh, so in the u you know, in the US context, we have consumer sentiment data since 1952.
And the numbers in 2020 were bad, but the current numbers on consumer confidence are the lowest they’ve been since measurement started in 1952. Ooh. They’re even lower than during the Cuban Missile Crisis,
Steve Davis: which was a very heady time.
David Olney: Yeah. A serious low point in people believing there was a tomorrow. So I think that’s really significant, and I think the fact that Mike put this book together so quickly, but even though the book is short throughout the book, he goes, here’s a worksheet.
Go to the website, download it, use it. Here’s a worksheet. So unlike a lot of short books, where you go, how much is really in this, if he’d put all the worksheets [00:05:00] in and he’d gone through a lot of the steps in depth, it would be a 12 hour book. But he has deliberately gone. We’re all stressed and we need to do something in a hurry, and we only need to do the practical and we can understand the deep philosophical issues later, but let’s get busy moving forward now.
Steve Davis: And this is what I think is one of the strokes of genius that he brings to the table because in his book, he lays out the five stages of a recession response and the very first one, which is shock is. A, a reaction that often leads to uncertainty and therefore we freeze. It’s as humans, whether we’re running businesses or not, there’s a tendency to freeze.
I think just the way you were talking before, David, he knew. That if he made a long tome, no one would read it. This was a book written for its moment, which has come around again.
David Olney: Yeah, it’s the irony. In a lot of [00:06:00] ways. It seems like this book could have benefited from a bit more editing it. It feels kind of rushed, but also because of that, it feels very emotionally authentic.
Like he’s worried about what happens next too. But he knows having gone through three recessions as a business owner and coming out of all of them with better ideas, better understanding, and always enough resources to give the next thing a go that he knows as long as you move forward in a productive way.
You will be okay. He of that, he is absolutely certain, and unlike so many people that are trying to convince us of a good idea, he’s simply telling us what keeps working recession after recession, after recession, and that’s very powerful.
Mike Michalowicz: I wanna show you the trajectory that I’ve experienced, at least when it comes to a recession like this and how it affects businesses. [00:07:00] And, uh, it follows something similar to the five stages of grieving now as opposed to an individual grieving. We now have societal grieving. Now, I, I’ve been through. Two other significant recessions.
So my experience is based upon that the 2001 recession when I had my, uh, my technology business was triggered by the nine 11 attacks, and then there was economic decline. It happened again in 2008, the Great recession. Was triggered by the housing market decline.
Steve Davis: And we’re gonna tease that out as we go through these first two segments. This is run through those five stages right now. So the first stage is shock, uh, and remember, this is the person segment. So we are going to be grounding this on the personal experience, uh, and then we’ll turn it to the business afterwards.
But before we do that, I mean, what happens in this shock stage is many businesses freeze or they delay decisions. So the key risk here is. Doing [00:08:00] nothing, and it happens in our personal life too. I think I confessed a couple of episodes ago, which was just in the immediate wake of the Iran war, uh, taking place that I was hit for a six for a bit.
I was a deer in a, in the eyes of the headlights for a little while while I drew breath. The next one is retreat. Stage two is retreat. Start cutting costs, reducing spending. The danger he says is cutting essential growth activities like marketing, for example. Then we move to stage three where we adapt, we reassess customer needs, we adjust our offerings.
Um, direct customer engagement, he says in this stage becomes critical. I will talk more on that in a moment. And stage four, reemerge, the stabilization occurs, businesses refine operations, they begin controlled growth. And then stage five is thrive. Businesses can expand, again, capture, market share. Those who adapted well, outperform their competitors.
And what I [00:09:00] wanted to come back and just mention briefly was, uh, direct customer engagement becomes critical. Yes. Just having, I, I developed a little system a few years ago called the Fed System, called Fish every day.
David Olney: Hmm.
Steve Davis: And it’s really simple, David. You just choose one client, customer you’ve got, and some businesses will be more applicable than others.
You give ’em a call, you say hello, not to sell anything, just to check in, see how things are going. I am surprised by how often that does end up leading to, uh, some work, but not always. And that’s not the point. The point is to remind everyone that you are here to actually express some genuine care and connection.
And it’s easy to be too busy to do. And I say that to myself. I don’t follow the fed system as much as I should, but it is the sort of thing. That I think is a little secret weapon for helping to make a business as [00:10:00] recession proof as possible.
David Olney: It’s really interesting you’re talking about that. ’cause as I was listening to the book, it reminded me of, you know, the 1987 crash as a teenager.
And my dad was in the big business world when I was a teenager, and I remember the week after the crash had happened, a friend of dad’s coming over on a Saturday night and simply saying at the dinner table, I’m planning to buy this transport company. Uh, do you want in?
Steve Davis: Wow.
David Olney: When things were seriously bad?
And I always remember being struck by his confidence that he’d done the math. He knew what he could afford to risk. He knew how big the wind could be. But I realized when listening to Mike’s book, the thing dad’s friend missed, and it was a really important thing, is he was past shock. The people he was talking to weren’t so becoming in so braly and making it all about [00:11:00] him.
He actually alienated a heap of people who could have helped him take over that business, run it better, and make a bag of money. And it never happened. Even though he was sure he could do it, and even though I’m pretty sure his numbers were right, but by reading the situation, the psychology of the situation wrong, he couldn’t get the people he needed on board.
And that lesson has always stuck in my head that if you don’t. Interact with people where they are psychologically, you can’t possibly get them to move forward or move forward with you at a faster pace.
Steve Davis: And in our next episode, in a fortnight from now at the time, these are being published. We’re going to reflect more on the emotional, uh, dynamics of us as humans and in business.
But just to round off the person segment and, and where this has some application just for us, I think the beauty of this, the five stages of recession response, comes from [00:12:00] the fact that there are five stages. Mm-hmm. And there’s a cyclical nature here. If we can, and you correct me if you disagree on this, but I think if we can all.
Have the faith that these things do come in cycles over time so that we have the confidence to keep down and applying ourselves where we feel we can do the things that need to be done. The sun will rise again. Uh, I think we have to act like that because to not act like that means to give up and as Mike says, then your competitors will just eat you for dinner.
This is your way to be that obstinate little, you know, weed or flour in the garden that just doesn’t seem to die. Doesn’t always flower or blossom, but it hangs in. Do you think that is the, [00:13:00] the gift of knowing that there is. Uh, such a thing as the five stages.
David Olney: I think about it because of my philosophical training, very much from a question of agency shock reduces agency desperation reduces agency.
But if you accept, you have to go through shock and desperation to get to adaptation, then get, just get through shock and desperation as quickly as you can without doing anything really stupid. So take control of going through the things you have to go through to get to the better bit of the cycle as quickly as you can, and you know, get your agency back as fast as you can and do something productive with it.
Steve Davis: Interestingly, uh, I think this, we might close on this example, but, uh, I have been thinking about going to an electric vehicle for a, a long time, this latest bout of prices for petrol going through the roof and uncertainty of supply, et cetera. I thought, you know [00:14:00] what, I’m going to do this, and thanks to your insights, you’d already been researching things.
So I was able to start with my focus, and as it turns out, the world has gone crazy. It is hard to find vehicles, et cetera. I ended up choosing one that I’ve become happy with. But as I said to my daughters, it wasn’t the perfect purchase. I did what I could with the time and resources I had to take one degree of psychological stress off the plate knowing that we had a vehicle we could get around with, thanks to our solar array, we could keep it fueled.
And to your point, David, what that meant was. Now you put it in those terms. I did what I could to maintain agency, some degree of control over the actions that were within my purview.
David Olney: Absolutely.
Steve Davis: And I think there’s a little message of hope from the first part of this episode,[00:15:00]
Caitlin Davis: our four Ps, number two principles. These are ideas worth building on. As Oscar Wilde reminded us, you can never be overdressed or overeducated
Steve Davis: In the principles segment of this episode, we’re gonna stick with Mike and the recession response because there’s something fascinating that he touches on as he explains. This nature of, uh, traversing a time of recession and it’s the business hierarchy of needs. And we’re all familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, aren’t we?
David Olney: Well, I am. ’cause I used to teach people about it, but I’m not sure everyone is.
Steve Davis: Give us your short version. The short version, David.
David Olney: Yeah. Short version is you have physical needs first. Above that [00:16:00] you have safety needs. Above that, you have love and belonging needs. Above that, you have self-esteem needs, and at the top you have self-actualization needs.
And the rule is whatever the lowest level of needs you don’t have sorted, safe, and well is where you should put your energy first.
Steve Davis: Alright, so what, what’s an example
David Olney: if you and I are going, oh, the front door doesn’t look properly. That could be the most significant thing in the world, but if we haven’t eaten for two days, it’s more important we find food.
Steve Davis: Well, let’s apply that to here because, um, his business hierarchy of needs, um, I think these stand, whether or not it’s a recession,
David Olney: it does. I think this model is just a great business planning model. All round
Mike Michalowicz: we are. Neurologically wired to ourselves. We can satisfy our own needs because we just know instinctually. If you ever walk down a dark alley and feel that you’re at jeopardy for being [00:17:00] harmed, please turn around because your senses are triggering that you are at jeopardy. But we are not neurologically wired to our business.
Yet many of us trust our instincts alone, and that’s dangerous because we don’t know if our business is at risk of harm. We just feel something. We need empirical data. So this is like Maslow’s heart give date, uh, of needs with one substantial difference, that this is something we’re not neurologically wired into.
Steve Davis: So at level one, you’ve got sales, which is survival. So. You have to be able to generate revenue and maintain cash flow. It’s the foundation of a business. The next level up, the hierarchy of needs is profit, which brings stability. If you can make sure the business retains money and builds financial resilience, you’re achieving that, that need of profit.
The third layer is structure or order, so creating some systems, some processes so the [00:18:00] business can operate efficiently. Then we move up to level four, which is influence or having some impact. So building the brand, uh, building and developing customer loyalty, uh, maintaining and, and perhaps even increasing your market presence.
And then you get to level five self perpetuation, which is your legacy, which is ensuring the business can sustain itself beyond the owner. Would you like to reflect on that business hierarchy of needs and, and perhaps we could give it that. This recession or times of uncertainty spin.
David Olney: Absolutely. Mike suggests two very simple questions to ask.
Starting at the bottom, bottom of the hierarchy, do we have some sales? If the answer is yes, we can move to the next question. Do we have adequate sales to have profit? If not, we’ve gotta go back to the number of sales. You know, either way, we need more sales, probably. Do we have [00:19:00] profit? If we’ve got some, do we have adequate profit to support growing the structures and order in the company?
So at each point you ask, have you got this level? And if you don’t, you immediately need to start working on it in earnest. But you also then ask, do you have enough of this level to facilitate working on the next level soon? So it’s never a thing that you’ve got enough sales until you’ve got enough sales.
That profit is assured. You’ve never got enough profit until you can start building systems and structures that can last. So you’re always working on the current level, but also being very aware of how it contributes to the next level. And when something goes wrong, like in Maslow’s hierarchy, you always go back to the lowest level first.
Steve Davis: Hmm. So that, that’s probably a good, really rec now for all of us. Do.
David Olney: It’s very brutal for those people who love what they do. But ask that first question, do we [00:20:00] have sales? And if you’re really lucky, you can say yes, but then you get to that second question, do we have sales adequate for profit? And that’s where so many small businesses, the, you know, the discomfort begins, there are sales.
Steve Davis: Mm.
David Olney: But is it enough for a nest egg that facilitates all the other stages of development? That will improve the business and your life as the business owner.
Steve Davis: I remember many years ago working with and meeting a, an accountant who specialized in profitability and cost, cost accounting, and he made a comment that many businesses will be shocked of particular products they might sell, which seem to have a good turnover, but are either not yielding enough profit or sometimes.
Um, having a cost, it actually costs the business to make it, but they’re not aware of it because they’ve got money coming from other sources.
GM : Yeah.
Steve Davis: This is probably that, that [00:21:00] moment to say, you know what, um, this is worth some degree of investigation.
David Olney: Yep. And recognizing that the minute you get to the point of going, we want to build more systems, we want to have a stable structure so that we can grow well as soon as you know what you want to build.
You have to go and work out how much that’s gonna cost and work out how much you need to increase sales to make sure it doesn’t put you in a worse situation to implement the improvements.
Steve Davis: Yeah.
David Olney: So it’s a difficult system because you keep having to reflect back on that would be lovely, but can we actually do it?
How much more sales and profit do we need before we can do it comfortably rather than actually making our situation more precarious?
Steve Davis: Yes, because you don’t want to, um, bring in some more money with a, a loan, for example, and just increase that dread that faces you every payday, every time you’ve gotta do a, a [00:22:00] run of pay.
Oh, are we gonna make pay this week?
David Olney: Well, this is a, a great bit in the book where he talks about all the money that was available with different kinds of loans and grants during COVID. And he makes the point, if you need one and you can use it, well absolutely apply, but don’t apply just ’cause it’s available, because that money will destabilize this hierarchy and at some point you’ll have to pay that back.
And at the point where you have to start paying it back, if you can’t increase sales and profitability with the systems you’ve already got, you’re not gonna be able to imp afford to improve the systems if you’re paying back the loan. So, you know, it’s probably his starkest warning in the book. Mm-hmm.
’cause I’m guessing early on in, you know, his making mistakes and learning better ways, I’m guessing he probably made that mistake the way he writes about it.
Steve Davis: The other thing, just to round off our principle segment, is. Uh, we, what have we, we’ve been talking about thus far of getting that [00:23:00] cascading effect right?
Within the hierarchy, you could argue is very much a management set of skills. I remember Stephen Covey talking about this and the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He talks about managers of being magnificent at finding the most efficient ways to climb the ladder. But the ladder needs to be against the right wall, which is when you switch across to leadership.
And the other part that he, I, I thought was fascinating in this book, and I, I’ll get you to expand on it a bit, is when he had a simple exercise, he asked people to do that, involved taking a blank piece of paper, writing the letter. A on it somewhere and then drawing three lines, David?
David Olney: Yeah. Basically the exercise is grab a piece of paper and a pencil, draw a circle in the middle and write the letter A in the middle of the circle.
Now draw three arrows going out from the circle. Doesn’t matter. You put them wherever you wanna put them. Now, in the very top left [00:24:00] corner of the piece of paper, do a circle with the letter B in it, and then he asks the question. A is where you are. B is where you should have thought about you want to go?
Are any of your arrows pointing towards B? Making the point that in a recession we so often want to move from the discomfort we’re in, that we will move anywhere to get rid of the sense of discomfort, but we won’t move deliberately to a point that is long term, a better place to be for the company. So don’t take action until you know where B is.
Steve Davis: And the beautiful thing is with the way our human minds work is even if our idea of where B is isn’t a hundred percent perfect, it does give our subconscious the chance to do some parallel thinking, processing, and. [00:25:00] Uh, you again, just to finish this one off, you correct me if you have a different position, but my position is sometimes it’s better to have a goal that you’re aiming for, even if it’s not a hundred percent right, because it brings in some sort of inner checking system.
Sense of logic, purpose, uh, a reckoner for making decisions more easily because you can quickly judge, are they getting us to point B better or worse?
David Olney: I think the whole point with that, and I agree totally is B is where we want to get to from A, but later on we can pick point C and then point D and point E as long as the point we pick.
Is better than where we are in a couple of meaningful ways that we can explain. That’s a good enough point for now. Like the idea that you can plan 10 years ahead perfectly. I, I’m not interested in that kind of planning. I don’t believe it works. Yeah. But you do need to be [00:26:00] able to go to sleep at night going, I did good thinking.
I took difficult decisions. I took action. I’ll do it again tomorrow. It might not be perfect, but I can go to sleep feeling that was a good day’s work.
Steve Davis: And you make a good point. ’cause in my plan. I’ve got a five year plan.
David Olney: Mm.
Steve Davis: In 2027, I was planning to open up a marina in the Strait of ous, and, uh, I don’t think that’s going to see the light of day.
David Olney: First of all, the IRGC might enjoy it, but they tend to blow stuff up and where they go, the Americans blow stuff up. So I, I don’t have great hope for your marina.
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number three problems. These are the marketing challenges, keeping you up at night. As Oscar said, we ask questions for the best reason possible. Simple curiosity, no [00:27:00] hidden agenda, just genuine interest in what’s actually happening.
Steve Davis: Let’s shift gears now in the problem segment. We look at different things that people encounter. I had an email from a client this week who is in the, um, allied health field, and it was from some people who are, you know, claiming and I believe one of them is in, in the medical field. And they’ve sent out this message Why your clinic isn’t showing up when patients search for you.
Now remember, this is written with that confident bravado that it’s true. Even though they’ve never seen you or looked at your site in life, but humans, our nature, David, is to assume that when someone writes something as emphatically as that, that it’s based on a current audit.
David Olney: Hmm.
Steve Davis: Of what we have. And it starts, uh, a quick heads up about something I think generally worth your time.[00:28:00]
You’ve probably noticed that how patients find health practitioners is changing fast. Google is no longer the only game in town Chat, GBT perplexity, Google’s AI overviews. These tools are actively recommending practitioners to people who are ready to book. And right now, one in three patients is already using AI search to find health services.
Here’s the uncomfortable part, and that bit is how I knew they’d written this using chat CPT. Most clinics are invisible in those results. There’s a free workshop on April 29th that addresses this directly. It’s run by business health, business mentor and friend Paul Wright. And Tour Davies, a specialist in AI search visibility for health businesses.
That’s an interesting specialty, David.
David Olney: Yeah, I wonder if it involves proctology.
Steve Davis: Um, and it’s called How to Get Your Clinic recommended by AI Search and in Bracket before your [00:29:00] competitors do. Uh, one of Paul’s VIP clients went from standard patient numbers to an extra 10 new patients per day directly from AI search Changes.
Changes. That’s not a typo. The workshop covers how to make your clinic the obvious answer, blah, blah, blah. Oh, and then it says, what, uh, how to make you the recommended practitioner in the area. What Paul calls becoming a purple cow in your market.
David Olney: Oh, great. So now we’ve got, uh, Berto, whatever his surname was.
The purple cow guy,
Steve Davis: Seth Godin.
David Olney: Oh, I thought it was okay.
Steve Davis: Yeah,
David Olney: I thought it was Berto R but we’ve had lots of purple cowing.
Steve Davis: Well, there has been. Um, blah, blah, blah. So anyway, she asked if she should do this. And I started writing back to her. I said, first of all, this is spam. It’s written by Chachi bt, and it’s full of generalization.
And I’m not sure if you remember, but when we were doing some research about a year ago, I used perplexity AI and AI search tool. [00:30:00] And it cited your website in its results. She’s already being found and recommended by these tools. I said, I wouldn’t trust these people as far as I could throw them. They’re preying on insecurity.
And for fun, I turned to Google’s AI tool Gemini to review their email and my reply to you. Here’s what it said. Now I gave this message to her in full. I’ll just give us the, the, the key points, but it’s broken it down. It said, number one, deconstructing the fear factor. It uses classic fomo. The fear of missing out claims, like one in three patients are often based on broad global surveys of tech, early adopters, and really reflect the reality of specialized vestibular clinic in Adelaide.
Alright, so patients with chronic conditions like this specialized one are often looking for clinical authority. Not just the first thing that a chat bot spits out. You agree?
David Olney: Absolutely.
Steve Davis: Number two, [00:31:00] AI visibility is just good. SEO. The secret these workshops sell is usually some schema markup and some high authority content.
Things you are likely already doing, which is true,
David Olney: particularly if you’re working with a good company like us.
Steve Davis: Hmm. Number three, the 10 new patients a day. Red flag. For a specialized center like yours, a claim of 10 new patients a day is a massive re red flag. It actually says in the niche medical field that volume’s often unrealistic and would actually overwhelm a high quality small practice like hers.
Yeah, that’s very insightful from Gemini.
David Olney: It’s the ultimate proof that they didn’t do a real audit.
Steve Davis: And then the Purple Cow irony, the mention of the purple Cows, a reference to Seth Godin’s book from 2003, using a 20-year-old marketing trope to sell futuristic AI services is a bit ironic, says Google [00:32:00] and it shows their recycling old sales scripts.
David,
David Olney: that’s absolutely true and I, I will surrender the point. I thought it was Buro O’Rourke, but I, I’m happy to be Seth Godin.
Steve Davis: So there you go. Um. Uh, the reason I’m sharing this is it is a problem. We’re all being plagued by these supposedly heartfelt messages coming to us that just create more fear.
David Olney: Mm.
Steve Davis: So it’s bad enough that there are recessionary pressures. We’ve got these people nibbling away from our insides to try and make us spooked. I do like Google Gemini’s Last thought though, since they used her website’s contact form. It might be worth checking if your capture needs an update to filter out these automated marketing bots.
David Olney: That is very nice. And the only other thing I would add is keep in mind that if someone’s searching for a service like you sell, you provide using [00:33:00] ai. The AI desperately wants its human to like it and keep using it. So the AI is going to look for things to recommend that you would like based on its interactions with you.
So if you’ve got good content on your website that humans already, like AI is going to like it. It’s really, really simple.
Steve Davis: I think Seth Godin would say the same thing.
David Olney: Ooh, where’s the cattle prod?
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps, number four purse sy. Let’s examine a campaign from the past and ask would it work today? As Oscar Wilde believed, our one duty to history is to rewrite it, so let’s see what we can learn.
Steve Davis: Finally, in Post Per [00:34:00] Cassidy. Let’s take an ad from a long time ago and because, and you came up with this idea, David, we’ve got the oil shortage at the moment, petrol prices all over the shop. Some people will remember the 1970s when there was also an oil crisis and rationing was there. Odds and evens.
How would that work today by the way? ’cause there are so many personalized number plates.
David Olney: I dunno, you’d probably just never let them fill up. That would be a great solution.
Steve Davis: So vain people miss out. Uh, my apologies. You might have very good reasons. And I did have one for a little one. Okay. The ad we’ve chosen is from 1977 gm General Motors over there in America.
They brought out ads. Remember the whole of America was panicking ’cause you could hardly get petrol. Japanese automakers started entering the market because their smaller cars were more efficient. But GM can’t let a good thing die. [00:35:00] It was wedded to the big car, so it did. This
GM : announcing General Motors full-size cars for 1977, designed and engineered for a changing world. When GM began designing its new full size cars, it had a goal to use the world’s foremost automotive technology and build from. Ground up a line of totally new automobiles that would help conserve our natural resources.
These cars were refined by computer to help make them strong and secure, yet without using excess steel to help make them last. They received extensive new corrosion resisting treatments, and to help reduce drag. They were tested and tuned in the wind tunnel. Yet with all this concern for conservation, GM still retained the comfort and feeling of spaciousness people look for in full size.
The new full size Chevrolet’s, Pontiac, [00:36:00] Oldsmobiles, Buicks, and Cadillacs, designed and engineered for a change in world.
Steve Davis: David, what am I missing here? I feel like this is the Emperor’s New clothes GMs coming out saying. We’ve used computer aided design to put less steel in it. Um, used less fuel, but it’s still nice and big and spacious.
David Olney: I couldn’t help think ’cause we were listening to it of the current, you know, tank 300 and Tank 500 SUVs available in Australia going, the only thing that’s changed.
It is the hybrid power train. In all other respects, we are still making the ridiculously big car that people don’t need but want. And the, the car world is still predominantly about what people want, not what they need. And that the ads are still [00:37:00] just an attempt to go, we’re gonna give you what you want, but we’re also gonna give you a justification for not really thinking this through.
Steve Davis: And that’s why I think this is a timely ad to play and reflect on because I would hazard a guess that it worked for some who thought the oil crisis, well maybe not fake news back then, ’cause it was real. Uh, but they couldn’t let go themselves. And so they would just sit. With their engine idling for seven hours to get a bit of petrol, to keep the guzzler going.
But for many people, I don’t think it would’ve worked. I think they would’ve gone. I, I don’t, I don’t trust it. I’m going Japanese. The thing that has surprised me way before this event, I might’ve even mentioned it before here for at least two years as I see more and more of these stupidly huge, unnecessarily huge.
Tanks that people are driving around is, um, friends. When I was at primary school, we talked about oil being a [00:38:00] finite resource and D-Day coming. Are you trying to hasten it to hurry up the end of oil? It just absolutely. I, I don’t get it David. I don’t get it. Unless you are a tradie and you are using it for tools and there are probably better but less sexy options like a good Ford, a Conno van or whatever.
I don’t know. I’m not getting into that.
David Olney: Yeah.
Steve Davis: But there are so many people. I was waiting to pick up the girls from the Paradise Bus interchange last night and some dad came to pick up someone and he’s got this tank that wouldn’t even fit in a normal car park and it’s a pretty tight to Regi regulation car park there.
He couldn’t do anything. He just came in, blocked everybody, waited, idling, chewing up 7,000 liters of petrol a second, and then had to back out and twist around to get out. It is just how we [00:39:00] let this happen. Begs belief and it then means, I have already said that I think this ad is not gonna work. Maybe I’m wrong, because these sort of ads are still pushing those huge beasts, even in this time of war.
David Olney: It’s a strange thing. I almost wonder if the psychology of fear will get us to behave slightly differently. But at the end of the day, there’s something about a psychology of status and comfort that if you can give someone status and comfort back with the size of the vehicle and the apparent luxury of it all, or whatever, as long as the fear thing can be packed off to the side and the status and comfort comes back, it doesn’t matter if the vehicle is still ridiculous.
It is like ridiculous is built in to underlying human psychology for cars.
Steve Davis: Mm-hmm.
David Olney: I, I don’t understand it. Here you are driving a sensible, [00:40:00] mid-sized electric vehicle here, my wife and I with a little Suzuki Swift that does 19.9 kilometers to the liter. And yet our two households are the exceptions in their car choices rather than the norm.
Steve Davis: Uh, we’re on a step or are we seeing the reality of the world? Because the other thing is it makes it worse for everyone.
David Olney: Yeah.
Steve Davis: If you are using more than your fair share of the resources, I use that term lightly. ’cause um, we’re even us using a fair share, it’s a lot more than many people in other parts of the world.
Um, it just seems uncivil, uh, which is a weird thing to bring into a marketing conversation
David Olney: that actually raises a, a thing we should revisit one day in an episode. Yeah. This idea of civility as a driving force for an individual versus selfishness.
Steve Davis: Mm.
David Olney: Because that’s really, actually, that’s the, the core of this, it’s civility versus [00:41:00] selfishness.
And that’s an uncomfortable thing to have to confront. And we might be sounding a bit egotistical saying we’re on the civility side. I think in an awful lot of decisions in life, in hard times. It’s easy to do the selfish thing. It’s harder to do the civil thing, but what message do we wanna put that out there for other humans and for young people?
Steve Davis: And then within the realms of a marketing podcast, it’s about your customers.
David Olney: Yeah.
Steve Davis: Your
David Olney: ideal. Who do you want as a customer and how do you want to be perceived?
Steve Davis: Hmm. So final thoughts on these ads. Would this ad work in 2026? David?
David Olney: I think we’re probably gonna see another round of the same garbage. Yes.
Steve Davis: On that note, let’s hop in the car.
I’ve gotta take you home.
David Olney: At least we won’t be using fuel.
Caitlin Davis: Thank thanks for listening to talking about marketing. If you found this helpful, please share it [00:42:00] with someone who might benefit. And if you’re so inclined, leave a rating in your podcast app. Both help more than you think. Steve and David welcome your thoughts, which you can send to [email protected].
That’s. Podcast at, talked about marketing.com. Want to continue the conversation beyond the podcast? You can book 20 minutes with [email protected]. No cost, no obligation, and we’ll leave the last word to Oscar Wilde. There’s only one thing worse than being talked about. And that’s not being talked about.