The Traditional Ways We Think About Customers Are Obsolete

The traditional ways you may think about your customers are obsolete. There’s a shift happening that you need to know about. That's why we've got Michael Solomon, Professor of Marketing at Saint Joseph's University with us today. He's got some amazing insights to share.

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The Traditional Ways We Think About Customers Are Obsolete

Tim Fitzpatrick: The traditional ways that you may be thinking about your customers is obsolete, there's a shift that is happening that you need to know about, and that is what we're going to dig into today with our special guest.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Hi, I'm Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult. All you need is the right plan. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am really excited to have with me today Michael Solomon. And Michael is the professor of marketing at St. Joseph's University in the Philadelphia area. Michael, welcome. And thanks so much for taking the time.

Michael Solomon: Hi, Tim. Thank you. I'm really, really pleased to be here.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I'm I am ready to go back to school with you today. I haven't been in college for a long time, but I'm looking forward to that because one of the things that we really focus on with clients is focusing on those fundamentals of marketing, getting those things in place to build the rest of your marketing house from. So to me, the first fundamental is target market.

Tim Fitzpatrick: And I know we're going to talk about consumers and customer behavior, so I know I'm going to learn a lot. And I know our audience is going to learn as well. Before we dig into this, I like to ask an icebreaking question just to kind of help people get to know you a little bit with the last name Fitzpatrick. I'm obviously Irish. St Patrick's Day is next week. What's your favorite libation?

Michael Solomon: I guess I'm an honorary Irishman, but basically I'm not picky. I'll serve your serve in there. If you can send something to me on this platform, I'd appreciate it. That's what they haven't figured out yet. I mean, calls is how do we send real stuff.

Tim Fitzpatrick: How do we virtually send you a drink? That's the next million-dollar idea right there.

Michael Solomon: Exactly.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Well, OK, so I'll share with you. I asked you I don't drink all that much anymore, but when I do, I tend to have a beer with Mexican food or pizza or something like that. There is an amazing brewery in Aurora, Colorado, called Drydock Brewing Company, and anything that I have had from them is awesome. So before we get into this, just tell us a little bit more about you. You're professor. You've got a consulting business. You've got a new book that's just coming out. Help us get to know you more.

Michael Solomon: Well, yeah, sure. So, as you said, I'm currently a business school professor at St. Joseph's University in Philly, and I've been in that and several other universities in my career. I hate to tell you, I've been doing this for about 40 years. So I teach full time. But I also have had the privilege over the years of working with a lot of great companies to make them more consumer-centric. My specialty is consumer psychology. My doctorate is in psychology, actually, and a lot of what I do focuses on the meanings of brands and understanding really critically how those brands make sense, not to you as the person who creates the brand, but to the person who consumes the brand.

Michael Solomon: And there's often a very big gulf between the two. So I've had the opportunity to work with lots of great, mostly bigger companies, honestly, but also I'm a textbook author, and my book on consumer behavior, I'm happy to say, is the most widely used around the world. And that keeps me on my toes because I'm constantly updating that thing. Things are changing so quickly as you said, they are every day. There is something I've got to change in that book because we've never been in a situation where things are changing so rapidly in terms of understanding our customers.

Tim Fitzpatrick: So you're constantly making updates to the book?

Michael Solomon: Yeah, yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. It's too bad books aren't set it and forget it. Right.

Michael Solomon: I wish I would but yeah, book is a work in progress and consumers are a work in progress and companies need to be a work in progress.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes. Yeah. One of the things I always talk about is from a marketing planning standpoint, our businesses are evolving all the time. The market is evolving and our marketing needs to adapt to that as well. So it's not you can't just put these things in place and leave them there and expect them to work long term.

Michael Solomon: That's right. You can't rest on your laurels. And, you know, many, many big companies have made that mistake. Frankly, it's not just small companies. You know, the marketing graveyard is full of brands that thought they had figured it out. And they did. But then they said, OK, now it's you know, it's time to retire and let's just sell our stuff and just doesn't work that way.

Tim Fitzpatrick: OK, so the first one that comes to mind as we talk about this for me is Blockbuster Video right. I mean, they killed the rental market. They knew what was going on, but they refused to see the shift in how people wanted to consume content. Netflix and Redbox and all these companies probably could have been squashed if they would have seen that shift coming, right?

Michael Solomon: Yeah, I think you're probably right. And another one in that category is Sony Walkman if you remember that.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes. Yes.

Michael Solomon: It's in museums today. But, you know, they figured out people wanted their music to go right. Brilliant. But then they stopped innovating and when I say to my students, how many of you listen to music while you're on the go, they all raise their hands. I say, how many of you listen to it on a Sony Walkman? And I get zero.

Tim Fitzpatrick: You probably get blank stares.

Michael Solomon: But you know what? I get a lot of blank stares, so.

Tim Fitzpatrick: That has nothing to do with you.

Michael Solomon: You never know.

Tim Fitzpatrick: So let's jump into some of this consumer psychology and behavior. One of the things that you really harp on your mantra is that we don't buy products because of what they do. We buy them because of what they mean. And I think this is probably a shift for thinking for a lot of people to unpack this for us a little bit.

Michael Solomon: Yeah. So this is you know, this is a huge mistake that a lot of marketers make. And what I mean by that is they think that they're selling attributes of their product or service. But what I mean by that or the actual features that you're going to list, maybe it's miles per gallon, maybe it's, you know, how much you charge per hour or whatever it is your customers are not buying that. They're not really interested in at the end of the day.

Michael Solomon: What they're interested in is the benefits. And so, you know, one of the things I remind you on the first day of class, the first day of of their first marketing course, we talk about this idea that and I think it's summed up in a great it's kind of cliche, but it's a great saying, which is that marketers sell a three-quarter-inch drill bit, but a customer buys a three-quarter-inch hole.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes. Yes, I've heard that.

Michael Solomon: We'll hear that and hour variations on that. But it really is is the case. And when you talk about Blockbuster, we talk we have this phrase marketing myopia. And that means this nearsighted focus on all the cool things that your product does without thinking about what that means to people. And so Blockbuster perhaps thought of themselves as being in the video rental business, but they really were in the video entertainment business. And so along comes Netflix and others that eat their lunch for that reason.

Michael Solomon: So whether you're a big business or a small business or a solopreneur, you can get so hung up on all the cool things that you think you can do or you're your product does. And you need to maybe put a Post-it on your computer screen that says it's the benefits, stupid. You know, it's not the attributes. And many times, by the way, those meanings that we consume are radically different than what the company intended.

Michael Solomon: And maybe we'll get into this a little more. But today, one of the biggest changes we see is that your customers are so actively involved in defining the meaning of what you sell. That you literally need to think of them as a co-creator of what you sell and not just as a passive customer because they are anything but passive.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Well, because one of the things we always talk about is you've got to enter the conversation that your customer is having in their head. When you can do that, the way you communicate is going to resonate so much better with them. I love this because so many people fall into that trap. We're going to talk about features, features, features, but people are buying the benefit or the result that they're going to experience when they do that.

Michael Solomon: Exactly.

Tim Fitzpatrick: And we can't forget that. Do you think that a lot of businesses focus too much on themselves when they're trying to communicate with customers?

Michael Solomon: Well, yes and no. I mean, you want to focus on yourself in the sense that consumers today, especially younger consumers, but consumers today, one of the biggest things they're going to look for in any kind of business is authenticity. They want to know who you are. They want to know your back story. So in that sense, you know what I say when I give keynotes and so on, you know, I'll say, look, if your company has a great back story, like a Founders story, like Hewlett-Packard, two guys in a garage, classic founders story.

Michael Solomon: If you if you have a story, tell it. Because that, again, people for the most part and this makes marketing people crazy when I tell them, look, you think you live and sleep with your product, you think it's the best thing since sliced bread. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, when you when you go out to customers and you line up, let's say it's a physical product, they line up five of them in a row. And you say, which of these is the best one? You know what they often say. They're all pretty good.

Michael Solomon: And that's what marketer wants to hear. But the fact is that what separates when you look in just about any category, you'll see one or two brands that are hugely dominant at any point in time. Again, that can change. But at any point in time, it's not the physical features of their products that differentiate them. It's the story behind that. So whether you're talking about the perennial favorites like Apple or Nike or Lululemon, whatever it is, so much of it is about the story that you're telling.

Michael Solomon: So, yes, they want to know that, but they only want to know it. The reason I qualify my answer is that especially right now with the pandemic, a lot of companies, rightly so, have figured out that what consumers are looking for before they pledged their loyalty to a company is they want to know that that company is giving back to its community, to its employees, to its customers, et cetera, to the environment as well.

Michael Solomon: But so many of the claims that companies make are B.S. and they're flagrantly false. So, for example, in terms of environmental marketing, green marketing and so on, by some estimates, about 90 percent of the claims that consumers see are actually not true. And it's so pervasive. It's called greenwashing. And what that means is, unfortunately, it poisons the well for everybody else, because when consumers see that you're talking the talk but you're not walking the walk, that's when they don't want to hear about you anymore.

Michael Solomon: So you've got to have both of those things together. But remember, you know, there's an adage in public relations, do good and talk about it. So if you are doing great things, if you're giving back to your community, if you're you know, I don't know, you're helping with vaccination efforts, whatever it is, don't hide that under a bushel because people do want to hear about that.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, OK, cool. I love it. So I want to pull this out because if this is the only thing that people get from what we're talking about today, I think there will be well served. We don't want to focus on the features and of what we're selling. We've got to focus on the benefits and the results that our customers experience when they buy it or and do that. So super, super important. You have a new book, The New Chameleon's Engaging with Consumers Who Defy Categorization.

Tim Fitzpatrick: And I alluded to this in the beginning. The traditional ways that we're thinking about customers are obsolete. Things are changing. They're shifting. What do we need to pay attention to is business owners with this shift?

Michael Solomon: Well, it's you know, it's no secret there's lots of changes going on. And the pandemic, by the way, hasn't caused most of those changes. What it does is it throws fuel on the fire and accelerates those changes. But they were happening already. A lot of fundamental shifts, like, for example, how accepting are we of automation when we shop or should we be buying our groceries online versus offline, things like that. These changes were already happening, but now they're kind of at warp speed. The problem is that the way we the way and I'm to blame for this because I'm an educator as well. The way we teach students about marketing is based on principles that worked really, really well in the nineteen-thirties and forties.

Michael Solomon: And at that time and I won't give you a long history of the history of market segmentation. It was basically invented by General Motors in response to Ford. Ford famously said, my customers can have their car any color they want as long as it's black. And so General Motors said, well, you know, some people want this, some people want that. And they created this idea of divisions like Chevrolet. And and that kind of logic became very, very powerful, as it should have, because it reminded companies that not everybody is the same. So let's identify these large, homogeneous groups that we can that we can reach and very efficiently send the same message to everybody in that group. So and that was great.

Michael Solomon: During a time when some of your listeners may remember when we had three television networks in this country, maybe four. Right. I'm obviously dating myself. But at that time, it made a lot of sense to think in terms of large segments like, oh, my customers are women in their 20s who live in urban areas, let's say.

Michael Solomon: But fast forward to today where we have thousands of cable stations and all that and et cetera. What we have is that everybody is much more individual than they used to be. And again, the Internet is largely to blame for that, but travel as well when it comes back. But the many, many people in the US have had the opportunity to visit other places, even other places in the US where things are different, food is different, clothing is different.

Michael Solomon: And as we see this stuff, we're much more proactive about picking and choosing the things that we want to define us as an individual. So I need to stress, some people say all brands are dead. Nobody's interested in brands or advertising anymore. That's a bunch of malarkey. As I would say. It's not true. But the fundamental ways that your customers think about your brand is very, very different. And so what I talk about in the book, and I call it the consumer chameleon's because today we're much more like that little humble reptile in that that the chameleon changes colors frequently as it encounters different environments and to blend in.

Michael Solomon: And actually what I've learned is that even if it's in a good mood, it changes its color just like we do. Sort of. And so we change our identities very, very quickly. Sometimes in the course of a day, we're actually different people. Right. So at work, you're the dutiful employee. Maybe you're the devoted husband or wife. Maybe you're the obedient child. You play all these different roles. Maybe you're the man about town. Whatever you are. I can tell from looking at you, you're the man about town.

Michael Solomon: And so every one of those roles that we play in, new ones that we're discovering require different sets of products and services to play those roles. So what I do in the book is I talk about some of the fundamental assumptions we make because we love to put our customers into these big categories, assign them a label, and then think we've explained them, but we haven't explained them because they don't want to be in those categories or in those cages, if you will, like a chameleon any more.

Michael Solomon: And so there are these basic and I'm talking about as basic as you can get. So, for example, male versus female, what could be more basic than that? And yet today, when you look at the conversations going on in our society and elsewhere around the world, even that basic assumption that everybody's going to be either traditional male or female is definitely not true anymore, especially among younger people. We have a lot more fluidity as opposed to what's called gender binarism, where you're either one or the other.

Michael Solomon: Why do we care about that as marketers? Well, you know, many, many products are sold to people because they're expressing their gender identity. And so if people's identities are changing, you need to morph with that. And it also when you have that kind of focus and this is just one example of a dichotomy, it opens up enormous marketing opportunities because, for example, if you're marketing based on traditional gender, by definition, half of the market is not available to you.

Michael Solomon: But if you expand your focus and get more in step with how customers are thinking, for example, in the UK and I know I assume most of your listeners are American, but in the UK, it's not that unusual for men to wear cosmetics. And there actually are our stores in the UK that only sell cosmetics for men. Products like manscara. We don't hear. But I'm not making that up. And we're laughing now. But five years from now, you and I'll probably be putting on our rouge before we go on the potty.

Michael Solomon: But that's just a silly little example. But what it says is if you're a cosmetics manufacturer, all of a sudden 50 percent of humanity is that wasn't your customer before is now. And in the book, I give lots of examples of that in different categories. And so these basic assumptions we make online versus offline. User versus consumer, rich versus poor, male versus female. As I said, home play versus work. How about that one?

Michael Solomon: In the pandemic, those boundaries have been obliterated, right?

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes, they have.

Michael Solomon: And when things get back to, quote, normal, lots of us are not going to want to restore those old boundaries because people figured out you're not kind of like working from home at least a few days a week. So everywhere we look, there's very basic assumptions that have guided us for many years. And they did a great job for a long time. But we are not the people that we were in the nineteen forties.

Tim Fitzpatrick: So how do business owners stay on top of this as it's happening? I mean, you've given a few examples of some of the traditional ways we may put people into various buckets. There's a lot of them, right?

Michael Solomon: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick: So how do we stay on top of this?

Michael Solomon: Yeah. I mean, that's you know, that's the million-dollar question. And ironically, I know a lot of your listeners are in fairly small businesses, not the big corporations. Ironically, it's actually easier for smaller businesses to do this. And I say that because a lot of times people say to me, well, a small business doesn't have the resources to track their customers, et cetera.

Michael Solomon: And what I say to them is actually you're tracking them a lot better than Coca-Cola is because, for example, you may have salespeople or whatever you call them, representatives, distributors who are on the ground every single day talking to customers and hearing objections and hearing ideas. Oh, it would be great if you made this product in that color. And so what I tell people is actually your two biggest assets are also your most underused assets, and they're sitting right in front of you, one, your employees, two, your best customers.

Michael Solomon: So you don't necessarily have to commission a very sophisticated consumer research study. I mean, if you can, I recommend it. But if you can do one thing you can do is identify your really loyal customers. And by the way, if you can't do that, you have a bigger problem that we to talk to you about that, right? Yeah, but assuming that you can I mean, these are people that would love to give you a piece of their mind, because we know that when you consult someone, when you involve them literally in the production of what they're buying, their engagement level goes through the roof.

Michael Solomon: Sometimes we call this the IKEA effect. So people if you build a bookcase from from scratch, whether or not you have a few screws left over at the end, as I always do, you know, you build it from scratch. That is you're invested in that. And every time you walk by that bookcase, it's not just another bookcase because your sweat and blood went into that. And we can take that analogy and transfer it to lots of things.

Michael Solomon: So any time you involve somebody and just by asking their opinion, hey, I'm thinking about doing a promotion next week, you come in here twice a week. What do you think about this? Whether or not you follow their advice, the fact that you've taken the time to consult them is a really, really positive and frankly, very flattering thing. So there's lots of relatively free resources out there. There's more expensive ones that work well, too, like actually doing that kind of research.

Michael Solomon: But even if you don't have the budget for that, if you're a solopreneur, you don't just sit in your office and assume that you know what your customers want. You know, like a fish where the fish are.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I love that. One of the things we see so often is it's so hard for business owners to articulate the value that they offer and the benefits that people see because they're so in their business, they can't see the forest through the trees, the same things happening here. We just need to go to the source, ask the right questions and listen.

Michael Solomon: Yeah. You know, and it's a fundamentally difference in perspective. So, you know, one thing you can do is, is do your pitch, you know, do your elevator pitch, whatever it is. But then listen to it. Listen to it as if you have never heard it before or show it to other people. Obviously, they've never heard it before. And you're very quickly going to poke holes in it because from where you sit as a customer, you just don't have the same perspective.

Michael Solomon: And again, getting back to this attributes versus benefits thing, you know, I don't want to hear what a great accountant you are, and I don't want to know about all of your degrees, et cetera. I'm assuming that you're a great accountant or I wouldn't be interviewing you to be my accountant. Yeah, you've passed that hurdle already, I guess. But I want to know what's in it for me? I mean, let's face it, at the end of the day, it's all about the value that I'm getting.

Michael Solomon: You know, it's an exchange of value. I might be giving you money or I might be giving you a reputation or whatever it is. But what is the value proposition for me? And if someone can't write in a sentence or two what their value proposition is, then they need to start over. Yeah, and that's often a really good litmus test because that's a lot harder than it sounds. And it can't be something like we aim to be the highest quality service provider in the Northeast. That's hust words. That doesn't mean anything.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes. Yeah, we see that all the time there in a lot of different industries. You could pull up five different competitor sites, pull off their logos and you have no idea who the hell it is.

Michael Solomon: Absolutely. And it's true for advertising as well, by the way, take you know, take the brand off and, you know, collect ten car commercials, take the brand off and see if you can match it up. And they're all doing the same thing.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, you can't. So yeah. Yes, I love it. So consumer behavior, it's changing all the time. What's the biggest issue that business owners and entrepreneurs face and what can we do about it?

Michael Solomon: Well, you know, the biggest issue and again, obviously right now the biggest issue is COVID in all that. But we're going to move beyond that. Right. We're going to talk more generally. The biggest issue is very simply getting customers' attention. And I say this to audiences and to my students all the time, you can have the greatest, sexiest ad campaign and whatever if you can't get people to look up from their phone for a minute.

Michael Solomon: We are bombarded by, so I assume, a tsunami of information. So the average consumer today is exposed in a typical day, is exposed to about three times the volume of information as someone in the nineteen sixties and that number is only growing. So the biggest challenge is just getting past that first layer where the consumer is either not interested or is doing other things. And so customer engagement, that customer experience is so vital today. Again, going back to what we were saying earlier, the way you differentiate yourself is not by product features, but by product benefits and the story.

Michael Solomon: And so the only way you're going to get people to sit up and notice something is if it speaks to something that they're looking at at the moment. And that's where search engine marketing and all that stuff comes in. Or it's just such a compelling message and so different from everything else they're hearing that they're going to actually put down their phone if I can get my students in class to put down their phone while I'm lecturing. That's my victory for the day. And every marketer has that same issue. And believe me. Ninety-five percent of the messages that we get exposed to, we never really even process.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Got it. So the biggest issue is getting their attention. How we solve it here and we got to focus on those benefits, the results that they're going to experience.

Michael Solomon: I mean, and there are many paths to that. What I call it is brand resonance. If a brand really resonates with you, it's not just that you think it's cool, but it really speaks to it's a part of yourself. Maybe that brewery you were talking about, maybe that's a part of you because it's a local business and maybe you spend a lot of time there or whatever. There is a lot of different ways to do that.

Michael Solomon: If anybody wants to go to my website, I have a download there that lists some of the main ways to do it. It's called a brand audit. But, basically anything you can do to anchor what you're offering to people, what people are looking for, that's the secret sauce. And it sounds very commonsensical, but you need to show them that somehow what they're buying is going to solve a problem that I have and it's going to make it's going to help me on my journey to be the person that I want to be.

Michael Solomon: So, again, it's not just about three quarter inch drill bits and so on. Where am I going? How do I see myself? And there's lots of ways to ramp up that level of engagement. And it can be as simple, by the way, as, for example, game of find your message. You've probably heard of this perspective, gamification. And what that means is let's understand what makes people so riveted when they play a game, whether it's Monopoly or maybe there are video game or who doesn't stop to take a drink for twenty four hours playing this game.

Michael Solomon: That's the secret sauce. You know, can you get somebody to be that engaged in your brand? Well, maybe not to that extent, but what you can do is look at some of the reasons why we get so engaged in these games and transfer those to your marketing strategy. So, for example, just as a quick example, giving your customers frequent rewards rather than just one reward, you know, in the same way that I try to game find my classes by giving students a quiz every week rather than just an exam at the end so that they know how they're doing.

Michael Solomon: There's a benchmark. And lots of times when you play, when you're engaged in gamified marketing, you know where you are because there's a scorecard and it can be as basic as flying on an airline and becoming a frequent flier of that airline. And you see the lengths that people go to to move from silver to gold. Where they might literally by plane tickets just to get to the next level. There's an example of gamification at work and really any business can do that.

Michael Solomon: But you can give badges, you can just thank people more frequently, things like that. So that's just one example of a way to increase interest in something where you say it's kind of boring. What I sell, nothing is boring if you have a problem that's relevant.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Yeah. It's a really interesting point about gamification because I can't remember where I read this, but I read it a while back and it always stuck with me when they were talking about rewards. If the perception of the reward is that it's much further out and you're not sure when the heck you're going to get it, the less motivating it is. And I found myself doing that too. You know, you get a restaurant reward program, you're like, Jesus, I've been into this place ten times. When the hell am I going to get a free burrito? And when people are feeling that way, it's not going to motivate them to come back.

Michael Solomon: Absolutely. And you know who is the best at this. The gambling industry and slot machines in particular. I can assure you, have been very scientifically programmed so that as you're playing, you will get some rewards. Now, you may not get the big jackpot, but some of those nickels or whatever are going to go right down. And that is exactly the reason they do that, is to keep people pulling that lever for hours and hours at a time.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, because they know that, hey, last time I got ten bucks the next time it could be that one hundred thousand dollar prize that's sitting up there. So people keep phones a lot.

Michael Solomon: Believe me, it's all been predetermined.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Yeah. Casinos would not be in these huge luxurious buildings if they were losing money.

Michael Solomon: I wouldn't lose any sleep over them. They understand human behavior probably more than any other industry I've ever seen.

Tim Fitzpatrick: There's no doubt in my mind about that. This has been an awesome conversation, Michael. Do you have any last-minute thoughts, words of wisdom that you want to share?

Michael Solomon: Well, I would say just, you know, take a critical look at your customers and remember that in many cases people tend to market to the customer that they want to have rather than the customer that they really have. Everybody wants that glamorous woman in her twenties who spends a lot of money, whatever. And that's great, you know, but there's often opportunities that get missed because everybody's going after that same target and they have in their mind that that must be who buys their product.

Michael Solomon: That's not necessarily true. And so there are many examples when you move beyond these simple boundaries and it can be as simple as focusing more on, let's say, older consumers who actually, ironically, have much more spending power than younger consumers, but are very rarely represented in anything but pharmaceutical ads that tell them how they're going to die from the side effects of a drug. But there's lots and lots of examples of ignoring obvious pockets of customers that are just waiting to enter into a dialog with you.

Michael Solomon: And it's all about that dialog. And remember, it's not just about putting people into big pots, but rather looking at each one as an individual, using technology where you can like CRM systems and so on, that allow you to treat each customer as an individual. And remember, when the pioneers of market segmentation started to do this stuff, there was no such thing as a CRM and there was no such thing as behavioral tracking and cookies and all that stuff. So they didn't have the luxury that we have today of thinking about markets of one rather than massive homogeneous markets that don't make a lot of sense anymore.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Awesome. People love what we talked about. They want to learn more about you. They want to buy your book. Where should they be going?

Michael Solomon: Yeah, well, thank you for putting up my website there. That's exactly where they should go there. There's links to the book or some of my other books and so on. Resources, free resources that they can download, including that brand audit that I mentioned, if they're interested. But lots, lots of stuff on there. So please visit my website. And if you want to drop me a line, there's a link on there. But just email me at [email protected]. I'll be happy to talk to you.

Tim Fitzpatrick: OK, cool. So that his website is Michael Solomon. That's S-O-L-O-M-O-N.com. Shoot on over there. He has showered down some amazing wisdom here today. And I really appreciate you being here, Michael. With that, I'm going to close things out. A really thank you so much for tuning in, listening, watching again. I'm Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing. If you want to gain clarity on where to focus your marketing efforts right now, hop on over to our website at rialtomarketing.com.

Tim Fitzpatrick: That's R-I-A-L-TO marketing.com. Click on the get a free consult button. Guarantee you'll get a ton of value and walk away from that call with some clarity on what you need to do next. So thank you so much for tuning in. Till next time, take care.

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About the Host Tim Fitzpatrick

Tim Fitzpatrick is the President of Rialto Marketing. At Rialto Marketing, we help service businesses simplify marketing so they can grow with less stress. We do this by creating and implementing a plan to communicate the right message to the right people. Marketing shouldn't be difficult. All you need is the RIGHT plan.