How AI and Soft Skills Are Reshaping Marketing and the Future of Work With Stacey Force

Intro: 00:00  

Welcome back to the Response Drivers podcast, where we feature top marketing minds and dig in to their inspiring stories. Learn how these leaders think and find big ideas to push your results and sales to the next level. Now let’s get started.

Rick Rappe: 00:19  

Hey, I’m Rick Rappe, host of the Response Drivers podcast. Here I dive deep with marketing experts and innovators to learn how they approach targeted marketing and use data driven strategies to acquire and retain customers. We’ll talk about what’s working, what’s changing, and how we can stay ahead in an evolving marketing landscape. 

Response Drivers is brought to you today by RPM Direct Marketing. RPM helps companies develop hard hitting, direct mail creative and utilize advanced testing and targeting methodologies to reach customers and prospects.

Our goal is to fully optimize your marketing performance to drive more sales and exceed growth expectations. RPM delivers smarter, more profitable direct mail solutions so you can turn your direct mail programs into a predictable, efficient sales channel. Check out rpmdm.com to learn more. 

My guest today is Stacey Force. Stacey is a results-driven marketing executive with 20-plus years of experience driving impactful strategies and fostering innovation within the B2B landscape. 

She’s a fractional chief marketing officer with The Marketing Blender, providing executive leadership and strategy to help organizations build a system for predictable, sustainable growth. She’s also the co-founder and chief commercial officer for Geminon, an employee experience solution that transforms workplace contributions into portable, verified micro-credentials through AI-assisted peer recognition. A technology enthusiast and polymath, she has spent her career working to enable more efficient business practices through the integration of data and emerging technologies. 

Wow! I’m excited to hear and understand all of this new technology. And thanks for joining me today.

Stacey Force: 02:08  

Thanks, Rick. That’s kind of a mouthful. I appreciate the introduction.

Rick Rappe: 02:12  

No problem. Can you share a little bit more about the journey that led you to your current role and at The Marketing Blender and Geminon?

Stacey Force: 02:20  

Yeah. So boy, I’ve had 25 years of experience working across all different aspects of marketing, from public relations to, you know, product marketing, brand marketing. I’m attracted to ecosystems, but I’m really interested in working at the intersection of people and technology. And so I spent about ten years working in HR, mostly in product marketing and disruptive innovation. And at the end of the day, I realized that my passion was really for helping organizations think about creating that very predictable success framework so that they can really, you know, tell a differentiated brand narrative and put the pieces in place to tell their story.

Rick Rappe: 03:08  

Wow. That’s great. And what inspired the creation of Geminon, and how does it aim to transform employee recognition?

Stacey Force: 03:16  

Yeah. So I did spend about ten years working in HR, and a lot of the work that I did in disruptive innovation there was thinking about how to help people with their own personal brand narrative, but take people who maybe had one certification in Microsoft or Cisco transform into working in an IT role. And as we did that, I worked with a technology that was able to take and look at people’s skills, break down people’s skills, and we could tell them from a skill perspective what kind of things that they were going to have to do to make that leap into knowledge work. But over and over what we found was there was a real gap in being able to predict how successful people would be in those roles. It’s very hard to understand soft skills.

I left Manpowergroup and I joined Korn Ferry and had an opportunity to work directly with Microsoft Viva Data, which is looking at sentiment and behavioral signals in the flow of work, and sort of realized that there was a real opportunity to, you know, think about skills in a different way. And so, you know, when we started thinking about Geminon and we saw AI coming into the workforce and doing a few things. World Economic Forum says by 2030, 65% of people will work, project or outcomes based roles, coupled with the massive impact that AI is going to have on how people work. I really believe that organizations are going to have to disassemble, work and rethink about how people and technology work together to maximize each other’s value and to really drive productivity. And then the one last thing that really tipped, tipped us over for Geminon was, you know, this idea, that organization. 

So skills, hard skills are expiring faster than ever before as I can do things that we can describe really well. And so for people to be successful in the coming years, it’s really going to be about how they get work done. And so a focus on softer, transferable skills, it was the combination of those things that led us to Geminon, which is really all about helping people create agency as work evolves and giving organizations the ability to assemble smarter, project based teams.

Rick Rappe: 05:43  

Wow. That’s amazing. How can you talk a little bit more about how AI assisted micro-credentials would impact employee engagement and organisational culture.

Stacey Force: 05:56  

Yeah, yeah. So one of the things that I saw at big time, especially because I have teenage children, is that in today’s like and subscribe culture, young people, especially people just coming into the workforce now, really expect to have more real time affirmation than our systems are prepared to give. So I saw a statistic that said people under 35 expect to have positive affirmation from their managers once a day, which is crazy. Nobody’s built to do that. And so, you know, we call Geminon a peer based recognition system because as people are going through the course of work, they can gem each other or recognize good behavior.

And then we use a large language model to take those behaviors and start to build people’s gem sphere or essentially their digital credential. That looks at how they’re performing against the five key softer transferable skills. So you’ve got that consistent validation from your peers. It’s visible through the shine to your whole organization. And it allows individuals to start creating a validated record of their performance. 

So it is kind of like a digital 360, a digital real time 360 or a, you know, real time performance evaluation. And then we write the person’s gem sphere or sort of their validated credentials into a digital blockchain. So you’ve got a credential that you can take with you from company to company, from project to project, and you can share it with your peers.

Rick Rappe: 07:39  

Wow. Will you know or could you tell us what those five key soft skills are that you mentioned?

Stacey Force: 07:48  

Yeah, absolutely. So critical thinking, communication, collaboration, creativity and acumen. And that is based on work that we did with a group out of Harvard, the 21st Century Skills curriculum, and sort of blended with a Hogan based raw assessment for what does it take to be employable, generally employable and successful in any role? And we bridged the gap between those two to come up with our model.

Rick Rappe: 08:23  

Interesting. Wow. Very teams driven approach. Obviously it seems like there’s always people that are don’t play well with others, but somehow seem to do really, really well in the long run.

Stacey Force: 08:39  

Yes, yes. A lot of the solutions that are out there that are looking at projects like and I, I hate to name them, but you know, things like Jira give you great insight into the work that’s being produced, but you don’t necessarily have the insight on how our team’s interacting and what are the different skills of each of the team members. With Geminon and a project manager that’s assembling a team has the ability to go and look at the mastery level of each of those soft skills for each of the people that they might have be part of the team. And we also give back a lot of really good dynamics about how the work is getting done, how people are collaborating with each other, and we even use some of the language that people are using in their affirmations or their Gem awards to go and look at how is the culture of that team, how are people like like, what does that actually look like? So we’re really hoping to quantify a lot of those behaviors with Geminon.

Rick Rappe: 09:41  

Wow, Wow. I assisted team building. Amazing.

Stacey Force: 09:46  

Exactly.

Rick Rappe: 09:47  

Wow. How can you talk a little bit more about. In what ways have you seen AI transforming marketing practices? I mean, we’re already talking about it, but how do you see this changing and evolving in the near future?

Stacey Force: 10:06  

Yeah. So I guess first I’m going to answer a question that you didn’t ask me a little bit to say that when we talk about artificial intelligence, I think that artificial intelligence itself needs a brand facelift. You know, we talk about artificial intelligence, particularly in marketing. And there’s the connotation that, oh, if you’re using AI, maybe you’re lazy or unexperienced and it’s sort of closing the gap for you. Yeah.

It’s like.

Rick Rappe: 10:35  

Cheating. It’s unfortunately.

Stacey Force: 10:37  

That’s exactly how she framed it. Yeah. Yeah. I recently was listening to sorry is out from sublime, and she was talking about, you know, if we had called AI ci Collective Intelligence, that would give us such a different frame of reference when it came to how you’re inviting expertise into the room when you’re doing your work. And so, you know, I think that that is a really critical way to look at AI, not as something that’s going to replace our jobs, but something that’s going to give us a new toolkit.

We’ll have to level up and think about how to use it differently. But it is this fabulous collection of knowledge that we can tap into. And she likened it to, you know, when we before we had laundry machines, people did their laundry once a week, once a month maybe.

Rick Rappe: 11:27  

Yeah.

Stacey Force: 11:28  

Once we introduced washing machines, we started doing it every week. So in some ways it created less of a load, but more work. It raised the bar and what we thought was normal. And I really look at AI in a similar way. AI is raising the bar on what our capabilities are.

And yes, it gives us the ability to to ten-x our work. But the work that we’re doing now is and will do in the future is, is going to be different. I sometimes I talk about the three level levers of strategic advantage. And those are, you know, cost personalization and differentiation. And if you think about AI, cost and personalization are two things that they the machines will always do better than a human being can. 

And so as marketers, we have to lean into differentiation. And that can look like product differentiation that will look like brand differentiation. And to come all the way full circle to the question that you actually asked, you know, the data that we’ll use is data to really understand our Our customers, both psychographically and demographically, so that we can create a very differentiated offering that meets their needs. And then that we’ve got the ability to reach them. You know, where they are with messaging that is really compelling based on the problems that they’re trying to solve.

Rick Rappe: 12:57  

Yeah. Well, that’s really, really interesting. I mean, obviously you’re you’re talking about compiling with Geminon. You’re talking about compiling this new sort of information about employees and workers. And I imagine that also flowing into compiling a whole bunch of new information about consumers that can be used for personalization and for, you know, specific messaging and tailoring, the tailoring things to that individual person rather than treating the audience as a whole.

That’s very interesting. And what a lot relates a lot to what we do in direct mail and direct marketing all, all the time.

Stacey Force: 13:39  

Yeah. I would just say, Rick, that I’m a big direct mail fan and I think it speaks really beautifully to differentiation. If you think about the top of the funnel is a noisy, crowded place and people’s attention span is, you know, grows smaller and smaller every day. I think direct mail is really interesting because so many people will receive something and leave it on their desk. I think I saw a statistic that the average person will.

Something will hang around for between 9 and 30 days. There isn’t a single thing that we’re doing electronically that has that staying power.

Rick Rappe: 14:14  

Yeah, no. Even with we produce some small catalogs for some of our clients, and it was a bit of a hard sell selling them on doing a small catalog, because this might be like an internet and cable company. And they’re like, really? We’ve been doing postcards. Why would we do a catalog?

But we, we’ve we’ve tested catalogs, and we found that they stay around for 60 to 90 days. And each subsequent mailing drives people back to the catalog, and then they’re responding from the phone number in the catalog. So yeah, they can have a very, very long shelf life for sure.

Stacey Force: 14:47  

That feels like differentiation in action.

Rick Rappe: 14:51  

Yeah, I think direct mail is a good way to differentiate your marketing message from all the other digital clutter out there in the world, and that’s definitely what we try to do. I mean, be a little bit of the antidote for or at least complementary to the digital marketing that’s happening. And that, that is so hard to break through.

Stacey Force: 15:13  

Yeah, absolutely.

Rick Rappe: 15:16  

Well let’s see. How do you approach integrating data analytics into developing effective marketing strategies?

Stacey Force: 15:25  

Yeah. The marketing blunder. At the marketing blunder, we have a really well defined process for doing that. So when we help, once we build a plan for our clients, we partner. We partner that plan with the scorecard.

And we’re looking at the scorecard is what are the the leading indicators and sort of mid funnel indicators that are getting us closer to sale. And we are very disciplined about doing monthly tracking with that scorecard. And that data gives us the opportunity to see where our efforts are. We need to be dialed up or down. And I think, you know, having a really solid framework for how you understand the impact of the work that you’re doing that is as close to real time as it can get is really useful when it comes to, you know, staying flexible and trying different approaches. 

You really do have the data to to indicate when you need to pivot. And that’s really one of the things as a marketer that I think is so exciting. You know, 100 years ago marketing was marketing, and advertising was completely subjective, and it was about what people liked or didn’t like and sort of the taste of the agency or the group that was delivering it. And we are now a really data focused, you know, part we’re a part of the sales engine. And it’s so much easier to see what that impact looks like.

Rick Rappe: 16:50  

Yeah, absolutely. And so critical to have that real time data so that you can watch the trends and make fast adjustments. I mean, speed is critical in keeping getting things on the right track and and keeping them off the wrong track.

Stacey Force: 17:08  

Yeah, absolutely.

Rick Rappe: 17:12  

What techniques do you use to translate complex data into compelling brand narratives?

Stacey Force: 17:19  

Oh, that’s a really good question. At the marketing blunder, we start always with knowing your customer. And so we spend time really helping our clients develop strong personas. And these aren’t personas that, you know, Bob, Mary and Sue that you put on the shelf and never think about again. You know, by really understanding the psychographic and demographic profile of personas that we create, we can use that data to frame and lens the differentiate the brand differentiators and the problems.

And Blender uses a technique called messaging choreography that that looks at how you mirror someone to capture their attention, how you teach them something, even if it’s not necessarily about your brand or product, but about the way that they’re making a decision. Then we’ll prove we’ll use prove data that starts to compel someone to make a change. And then we’ll start to think about sale. And we do that. That is actually a tactic that you can use with your teenager when you’re trying to convince them to make good decisions, and you can lay it over a marketing funnel and use that to help inform how you approach the different types of activities that you’re reaching your customer with in a very sort of data and data driven and intentional way.

Rick Rappe: 18:45  

Wow, that’s so interesting. Where would I find more information about that if I wanted to dig into that and learn more?

Stacey Force: 18:52  

Oh, themarketingBlender.com is a resource, and we also have an award winning podcast that our CEO, Dacia Coffey, has started. And she also has a book called Corporate Caffeine. So there’s lots of different ways to learn about those methodologies.

Rick Rappe: 19:12  

I will definitely check that out. How do you guide organizations through the rapidly evolving marketing landscape?

Stacey Force: 19:20  

Yeah, I mean, that’s a great question. I’m as a fractional chief marketing officer. We play both a strategic and and very tactical function when we go in and work with our clients. And so it is so part of it is a mix of how being part of an organization like Marketing Blender helps me stay abreast of new tools, techniques, tactics. You know what’s working for other clients.

We have a rich group of CMOs that really is always, you know, helping level up each other’s best practices. And I can bring those insights back to my clients. And so, you know, we’re we’re playing a very strategic role in trying to help our clients think differently about who they’re reaching and how they’re reaching those customers, while we’re helping them with some of the basic sort of brand blocking and tackling that they need to do.

Rick Rappe: 20:17  

Interesting. What advice would you give marketers aiming to stay ahead and build their career in today’s dynamic environment?

Stacey Force: 20:31  

That feels like a layup, Rick. My advice would be to lean into your softer, transferable skills, right? We will have and stay curious. We will see. We are seeing and will continue to see tremendous capability come through the toolsets that we use.

So stay curious. Focus on what it is that you’re trying to accomplish, and look for tools that help you accomplish your tasks, as opposed to sort of following all the sort of shiny objects that are doing interesting things, but might not actually speak to your customer and the thing that you’re trying to achieve. And then really, you know, those five soft skills we talked about are critical to success in any role. And I think particularly for marketers making sure that, you know you’ve got strong communication skills and you’re thinking about ways to lens your narrative from a from your customer’s perspective. You know, staying creative, looking for new ways to help people differentiate their message, differentiate their voice and so on. 

 But but yeah, I think, you know, certainly the advice that I give to my teenagers who are going into college and thinking about their careers is, you know, this, we are in such an exciting moment. It’s the time to stay flexible, curious and and specialize in the things that are going to help you succeed personally and the the hard skills and the tasks and the what it is that we will do will continue to evolve.

Rick Rappe: 22:04  

Yeah. Well, and it seems like a lot of people are fearful of AI and the, the, the innovations that are happening right now so rapidly. But you’re really encouraging people to embrace those those changes and become experts in new tools and be curious about learning all the new tools. And I think that’s really great advice, especially for young people.

Stacey Force: 22:28  

Open, open AI, which may be a little biased, but they did put out the statistic that 80% of jobs and roles will be changed significantly because of AI. And I just believe that’s our opportunity to become orchestra’s of our careers, you know. And we should think that we’re about lending our skills to the places where we can create the most value. And, you know, always looking at how do you level up, how do you use this toolset as an enabler and really use it to allow you to do good work?

Rick Rappe: 23:05  

Yeah. Well, I heard someone say too, that the people that do figure it out and use it to level up will be, like you said, ten x better than they were before us. And the hard part about that is also that I guess society has to figure out what to do with the rest of the people that don’t come along for the ride. Right? So that is a bit of a challenge that we have to figure out, but I’m sure someone smarter than me will definitely be taking that on.

Stacey Force: 23:34  

Yeah, that feels like a topic for another day. Rick.

Rick Rappe: 23:37  

Yeah, that’s a big one. A big one for sure.

Rick Rappe: 23:43  

Well, this has been really interesting and we’ve covered a lot of great topics and a lot of interesting ideas. So I really appreciate your time. And I want to say, if people are interested in learning more about anything that we’ve talked about or getting in touch with you, how would they go about doing that?

Stacey Force: 24:02  

I’m always available on LinkedIn and I’m always open for conversation. I’m Stacey Force, if you’re curious about Geminon, Geminon.ai is our website. And if you’re curious about Marketing Blender, I would encourage you to go listen to the podcast where the team always has great advice on how to think about everything from pay per click, all the way to some of the scorecarding and messaging choreography that we’ve talked about.

Rick Rappe: 24:34  

That sounds great. I’m definitely going to check that out, and I appreciate your time today, and thank you very much, and we’ll hope to talk to you again soon.

Stacey Force: 24:43  

Thanks, Rick. Great discussion.

Outro: 24:45  

That’s a wrap for this episode of Response Drivers. Thanks for tuning in. If you found today’s insights valuable, make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left a review. Got a question or a topic you’d like us to cover?

Just drop us a message at responsedrivers@rpmdm.com. Until next time, keep driving response and making your marketing work smarter.