Don’t let your CX be a laughingstock.
When you think of the comedy greats, who comes to mind? Dave Chappelle? Tina Fey? The producers of Often Imitated? Well, there’s someone else you should be adding to that list, someone who paved the way for women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community: Moms Mabley.
Moms started doing stand-up comedy in the late 1910s and her career lasted nearly 60 years. She had a specific style of dressing and speaking that kept people enamored with her. In her unassuming day dresses and sun hats, people were shocked when she shared her edgy jokes about love, race, and politics. She knew how to communicate and keep her audience engaged. Which is all that most of us want when it comes to good CX. So we set out to find an expert who could help us learn how to communicate well with our customers. And that’s Grad Conn, Chief Experience Officer at Sprinklr. He knows what it takes to have successful communication as a brand, and a comedian. Let’s find out how he does it.
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"Shift from thinking your product is the center of the universe to thinking about your customers as the center of the universe." - Grad Conn
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Time Stamps
* (0:00) Your mom: the queen of comedy
* (8:40) What is Sprinklr?
* (10:16) Who’s a better communicator, your marketing exec or a stand-up comedian?
* (14:25) Is being an online troll worth it?
* (17:25) Prioritize your customers over your product
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Sponsor
This podcast is presented by Oracle CX.
Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at Oracle.com/cx/perspectives
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Links
Narrator: The music starts to play...the room feels electric...you’re waiting in anticipation for the show to start...the crowd starts cheering the headliner’s name…wait, what’re they chanting? ...“Moms??”
Suddenly, the curtain opens and a woman dressed older than she is walks on stage. The crowd goes wild. With a dress in a clashingly bold print, a matching floppy hat, and for some reason no teeth—she looks pretty unassuming. You figure with a name like “Moms” you’d be in for a rather tame night of stand up comedy...but you couldn’t be further from the truth. I mean...they don’t call her the mother of stand up comedy for being polite.
Moms Mabley was wittier, smarter, and raunchier than the competition...or at least she would have been...if she had any competition.
///Moms Mabley Clip From 0:42-1:26 (she’s pretty funny. Worth the watch!)
As you can tell, Moms—like all good comedians—has a distinct voice, style, and pace that she tells her jokes with. Over her stand-up career that lasted nearly 60 years, Moms had perfected her craft.
Born Loretta Mary Aiken (like Clay), she had a horrific childhood. While still a young teenager, she had to put 2 kids up for adoption, and both of her parents died in unexpected and troubling ways. Her dad died on the job as a firefighter, and her mom was hit by a car on Christmas a few years later.
With 15 brothers and sisters, there wasn’t much she could do at home...so she ran away to pursue show business. Which wasn’t going to be easy.
It being the early 1900s and her being the descendant of enslaved people, Loretta started off working in minstrel shows and then moved up to vaudeville.
As she began to refine her comedy style, Loretta became a mentor to other aspiring comedians. Which is how she got the nickname “Moms”. She got Mabley from an ex boyfriend, who she said “had taken so much from her, the least she could do was take his name from him.” Iconic.
Moms originally started wearing her signature dresses that somehow matched and clashed at the same time and hat to play on African American stereotypes at the time. Once she got older, she started taking out her dentures to perform, because it added to her “old mother” persona. On stage she joked about loving younger men, reluctantly dating old men, and all that goes with it. Her signature line being “Ain't nothin' an old man can do for me but bring me a message from a young man.''
Moms had perfected the image she projected to her audience. She became one of the highest paid comics of her time. At the peak of her career, she made today’s equivalent of roughly $160,000 a week. People from all over — regardless of race — were obsessed with her.
Moms knew how to hold her audience’s attention. How to make them fall in love with her and hold on to every word. She could keep them engaged with her signature style and animated facial expressions. In a career based in telling, Moms excelled in showing her captivated audience the world as she experienced it. She didn’t shy away from telling stories of race relations, even when her white audience might’ve disconnected. She joked about sex and dating younger men, when those topics were highly taboo. And would bring up politics even if it would alienate people.
Her personal brand of a welcoming persona with an unexpected edge was phenomenal, and she communicated it flawlessly.
Moms career lasted 60 years because she was an incredible comedian and expert communicator.
And considering we as CX leaders want to be expert communicators, we wanted to look at how the heck she was so successful.
She had some many funny stories, she must be telling tales from her own life right?
Not so fast. It turns out Moms had a few tricks up her sleeve.
Thanks for being here we have a great show for you tonight! Coming up we will here more about Moms. Grad Conn is here, former CMO at Microsoft and the CXO at Sprinklr, and the word on the street is he has quite the set. Although, we don’t have a 2 drink minimum here at Often Imitated, why not let loose? So sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.
Welcome to Often Imitated, a podcast about remarkable experiences from the past, and how they inspire people to create great customer experiences today.
This episode is all about using your brand’s voice to show, and not tell. How Moms Mabley, one of the first comedians, was able to do it, and what CX leaders can do today to follow in her footsteps. On this episode we talk with Grad Conn, Chief Experience Officer of Sprinklr, and previous CMO of Microsoft, about what it takes to communicate effectively with your customers. But first, a word from our sponsors.
Often Imitated is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at oracle.com/cx.
Moms was clearly an icon in the comedy industry, but what she represented off stage was equally if not more impactful.
In addition to being the first female comic to headline the Apollo Theater, and perform at Carnegie Hall...Moms was also the first openly gay comedian in America. On stage, she was frumpy and obsessed with men. But off stage, she was stylish...always put together in beautiful adrogynous clothing, and openly living life as a proud lesbian.
Moms is an inspiration for women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community today. But she was a trailblazer for people back then. She showed that you could absolutely have it all, no matter who you were.
Her voice and personality kept her relevant. Regardless of the incongruence between the lifestyles portrayed on and off stage, her cleverness and wit remained a constant, and that shone through. Even attempting to have a comedy career from the 1910s-70s while being a gay, Black woman sounds borderline impossible. To be able to do it with such success, is exceptional. When people went to see her show, they had an idea of what to expect, but would be swept off their feet once they experienced her live. It wasn’t just going to a comedy show, it was going to step into the life of someone else. Moms mastered the craft of showing her audience a good time...as well as a subversive one. She knew how to get you laughing without realizing that maybe it was you she was poking fun at. Moms was clever and ethereal, and anyone who listens to her comedy can tell that they’re about to experience something unique.
We want our customers to have the same experience. To know what they’re signing up for, but to have moments of delight and surprise along the way. And the first step is figuring out how your brand is going to communicate with your potential and current customers.
Grad Conn, Chief Experience Officer of Sprinklr, and previous CMO of Microsoft, has great insight on how to do this. But first, a little bit about Sprinklr.
Grad: so sprinkler is, uh, described as a unified platform for customer facing functions. Let me just parse that apart for you a little bit. So let me do the customer facing. Part first. So when we say customer facing functions, we're talking about any function in the company that touches a customer directly. So as opposed to say SAP, which is all back office, uh, we're focused on what people sometimes call the front office.
And so these customer facing functions are things like marketing, um, selling, advertising. Research customer care or customer service, depending on how you phrase it, all this stuff that customers are seeing and engaging with. And, and typically in most companies, all those functions are set. And they're all using separate applications.
So customer experiences generally are quite disjointed across multiple industries. I mean, I would say that's the rule. The rule is the customer experiences are just joined it, the unified platform piece at the beginning of it, is that what we believe and what we've done many, many times with some of the world's largest covers.
Is that if you can put all the information about the customer and all the functions that you want to do with the customer in one spot and one platform, you allow collaboration to occur in the company around a common data profile of the customer, and that allows you to have a much better experience with the customer.
Narrator: Joining customer experiences across several industries and platforms is a tall order. Since Sprinklr is such a revolutionary product, giving the customer clear communication is a necessity. But in a world of so many voices, how do you make yours stand out?
Grad: In this sort of era of conversational marketing, it's not enough just to, to tell people. What they should think about a brand. And I use this one example, which I am a big fan of, which is, you know, who are good communicators, right?
Who are the best communicators out there. And I think some of the best communicators on the planet are comedians. Uh, so we don't talk about this for a second. So, and imagine that a comedian had a creative, brief, you know, a typical creative brief, you've got a creative strategy. You've got a reason why, and you've got a brand character now for most comedians.
They're the reason why. And their brand character can be quite different and quite unique, but they all have the same strategy. So the strategy, you know, typically a strategy statement is to convince the audience that Ty gets closed cleaner or something like that. So for every comedian, their strategy statement is absolutely identical,
They all have the same goal to convince the audience that they're funny. That's it. Now typically, if a marketer were to take that creative brief and be thrust on stage, they would say, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna communicate my message. And the marketer would say, I'm funny, I'm funny.
I know that I need to get a frequency of about seven for people to remember a message. Right? So. I'm funny. I'm funny. Maybe I'll get a testimonial, someone from the audience say, yep, grad's really funny. And they'll hand out some flyers because I know multimedia works. And when people leave that performance and someone says, you know, how was it?
How was they act? The honest members will say, well, you know, he said he was funny, so they got the message, but they're probably not going to go see that performance. And too many marketers do this. They tell people what to think. And increasingly people are resistant to that. Now, comedian is much more intelligent about how they do this.
Narrator: Grad this one hits waaay too close to home. This is how we often feel as CX leaders. We are spending so much time telling people how great we are. How easy the product is to use. How much value they will get. And it garners a similar response “Well they told me they were great”
But a comedian operates in a different mode.
Grad: So a comedian will send out a stimulus, the stimulus, they send out as a joke, as an audience member, you hear the joke and not every time, but often if it's a good comedian, you'll laugh. And while you're laughing, you think to yourself, wow, she's really fun. But you made that conclusion on your own. So you it's a very tightly held belief because you decided that she was it's funny because she got a reaction from you from a stimulus that she sent out.
And so after the show, someone says, how was the act? You'll say, oh my God, she was hilarious. Super funny. You should totally see her.
And that's where that's a very subtle shift that marketers need to make, which is we've gotten so used to just telling people in broadcast media, how they should think about us.
But we now live in a world where people are deciding how to think about it's based on the experiences that we land and based on the opinions of others. So there's all these stimuli. They're essentially telling me how to think about our brand and the brand can be saying whatever they want, they'll stimulate or the things that are going to.
And so we were moving into a world of comedians, not a world of marketers. And so how do you actually sort of use that as a way of talking and managing and sort of communicating?
Narrator: When it came to reading the room and getting positive feedback from the audience, Moms Mabley led the pack. In a time where it seemingly would’ve been impossible for someone like her to pull ahead in the industry, she had people from every demographic laughing along and cheering her name.
Her unassuming outfits and demeanor meant she could surprise the audience with edgy topics like race, romance, and politics. She played a raunchy, crazy grandma who spoke whatever was on her mind. She showed people she was funny by keeping her unique brand of comedy front and center. There’s a reason she was the most famous female comedian of her time, and it wasn’t because she told people she was funny—it’s because she knew what her audience wanted and delivered.
Grad has another great example of a brand’s comedic communication.
Grad: So here's an example from Xbox and go back to Microsoft. X-Box got somebody. And this is a public example. X-Box got someone who was playing, uh, one of the first person shooter games, uh, and they were, they had lost their squad.
So typically you'll have a three or four players all playing together as a squad, often their friends. And it's very difficult to play these games without a squad because you know, there's people from behind in front, et cetera. So he lost a squad and he was complaining that he lost a squad and it was having trouble finding a new one and X-Box was making it.
And so Xbox jumped into the conversation it's on Twitter and very helpfully made some suggestions on how he could find a squad. And he was a little edgy on the first one. The second message. His reply to X-Box is helpful. Reply. Inappropriate, like just really like, you know, all bunch of negative stuff and, um, you know, negative stuff about the platform, et cetera, just not helpful and not nice.
And so X-Box had three choices. They could ignore it, they could continue to be helpful or they could do what they did. And so they replied to his not very nice message with a, I thought it just brilliant reply, which is they said, ah, and now we see why you don't have any friends.
This got onto Reddit because people started posting on Reddit. Thousands of people weighed in on this conversation. Not everybody thought it was a cool thing for X-Box to do, but most it, and that's the, the, the issue on conversational marketing now is that when you're having conversations with people, they're not always gonna like the conversation.
And I think the thing we fooled ourselves into believing in the broadcast era is that we could create a message that would offend no one that was never true, but we could kind of make believe we can kind of squint our eyes and look through our eyelashes and sort of make believe that that was true in the conversational marketing era.
We can tell right away when people don't like what we've said, cause they say it to us. And it's a quite frankly, a lot like a comedian, no comedian than I've ever seen. Has everybody laugh at everything? I just, it's not true. No one ever laughed at every joke. Every comedian bombs on some jokes, some comedians, nobody likes her only one person likes, but there's always a variety of points of view.
And we have to, as brands start to get comfortable with that, see Microsoft having a very sophisticated perspective there and really be able to embrace that and be able to say, Hey, I'm okay. If not everybody likes me, because I want to be true to my own brand voice. Brands need to try to become a few people's most favorite thing. And then that's where you get momentum from. If you palatalize your message to the point where you're offending no one, you'll also appeal.
Narrator: That XBox interaction is...objectively hilarious. But taking that bold of a move when it comes to how you communicate with your customers can be scary. After taking a chance, do you engage with the hecklers, or have the bouncer throw them out? It depends: are you focused on selling XBoxes or are you focused on making your customers love X-Box?
Grad: I think the shift that companies need to make is they need to make this shift from thinking about their product as the center of the universe, to thinking about their customers, a center of the universe and the beauty and the power of that.
The truth is that the customer already is the center of the universe.
The only reason that you have money as a company to pay your employees is because customers are giving it to you. Now, if you go to most people's sites or most people's motions, they're all feature and product related. And people organize their, everything around their products. That's not why not organize it around your customers?
Uh, why not? Why don't I go to your site and why don't I see a customer list? And I'll say I'm like that person or that's a person I aspire to be. Yeah. Connect me to what that person buys and what that person likes to do. And when that person says about the brand and maybe even actually connects me to that person, like make it customer to customer.
And I don't think I've seen anyone actually do it that radically. Um, but that to me is the future that, you know, we will sell based on, Hey, you look a lot like, um, Sue and this is what she's saying about it.
And that to me is the natural evolution of where we are today. And that's where companies are going to have to.
Narrator: Making your customer the center of your universe is crucial. Communicating that with them is imperative. Whether you’re perfecting your Tight 5, or engaging with customers on Twitter—getting your point across can be like walking a delicate tightrope.
So be sure you’re showing your customers how great they can be when they use your products, not telling them how great the features and benefits are. When you stay committed to what they want, and customers will follow.
And regardless of outcome, hopefully there are some laughs along the way.
This podcast is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at oracle.com/cx.
This is your host, Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios. Thank you for listening to another episode of Often Imitated. If you like what you’re hearing, tell one friend. This podcast was narrated by me, Ian Faison and produced by Mackey Wilson, Ezra Bakker Trupiano, and Ben Wilson. You can learn more about our team at CaspianStudios.com