Making Marketing More Human-Centered, Strategic, and Effective With Sarah Oyungu

Intro: 00:02

Welcome back to the Response Drivers Podcast, where we feature top marketing minds and dig into 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 we dive deep with marketing executives, experts, and innovators to uncover 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 ever evolving marketing landscape. This episode is brought to you by RPM Direct Marketing. RPM helps companies with hard hitting direct mail creative, and we utilize advanced testing and targeting methodologies so you can fully optimize your marketing performance to drive more sales and exceed your growth expectations.

With a proven track record, RPM delivers smarter, more profitable direct mail solutions so you can turn direct mail programs into a predictable, efficient sales channel. Visit rpmdm.com to learn more. I’m really looking forward to learning today from my guest. Sarah Oyungu is a powerhouse marketing strategist, global brand builder, and founder of The MRKTing Alchemist. With 15 years experience across six continents, Sarah helps founders, businesses and nonprofits turn big dreams into magnetic brands that light up the world. 

If you’re ready to spark connection, fuel growth, and make some magic, you’re in the right place. Thank you for joining me today, Sarah.

Sarah Oyungu: 01:43

Thank you. Thank you Rick. Pleasure to be here.

Rick Rappe: 01:47

Can you tell us a little bit about how you got into the marketing world and how you established The MRKTing Alchemist?

Sarah Oyungu: 01:55

Great. So I’ve always been a professional convincer. Working with different organizations and causes to basically coalesce people around a mission or vision of something that needs to be accomplished. So starting right out of college, when I worked with churches as a music minister into becoming a musician and traveling band to raise money, and now with marketing, when I discovered marketing, it just all made sense that there was actually a science behind this thing that I had instinctively been doing. So I’ve worked with a whole bunch of people from nonprofits and education non-profits, raising funds for teachers to take teacher certification and get incentives all the way to working for like a one of the larger banks in the world, Standard Chartered Bank, which has a footprint across a lot of Africa, Asia and Europe.

And then even working with World Vision, which is one of the largest, if not the largest humanitarian organization on the planet, to drive their digital marketing acquisition, to get donors to sponsor the children. And so I had been doing this for a while and a couple years. I can’t believe it’s a couple of years ago, I reached a point where I’d been working with World Vision. My role had kind of come to a close because they brought me in, you know, at the height of Covid, where digital strategy was everything, and now they were kind of rejigging their marketing mix. And I did the job hunting thing for a while. 

And I’m not saying I’ll never go back, but as I was, because at the time I was in New York, as I was meeting with people, I kept meeting all these founders, all these nonprofits, all these small business owners, you know, and they would say, man, marketing is hard. And I’d go like, no, it’s not, you know? And they’d be like, no, I wish I had someone like you. You know who? Come and help me. 

And that’s basically what birthed The MRKTing Alchemist, bringing enterprise level marketing strategy and expertise to these smaller businesses who need that level of expertise to scale. Because getting a free intern who works, you know, five hours a week isn’t going to cut it for you, you know? And then that also opened me up to being a fractional CMO, so that I could work with a number of organizations who may not have been able. It wouldn’t have been feasible for me to work with them only. But now I can work with different groups and just share learnings, share resources. I have a wonderful collective called the. 

I call them The Alchemist Collective, where I partner with all sorts of marketing specialists all over the world, you know, so that whenever a client comes to me, there is nothing in the marketing realm that they’re going to ask me, hey, I need to do this. And I’ll say, I don’t know, because you know a guy.

Rick Rappe: 04:53

Right, Exactly.

Sarah Oyungu: 04:55

Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 04:55

Well that’s perfect. We want to be part of the collective at RPM. That sounds really good. We do things kind of similarly, actually. It’s very interesting.

I mean, I, I came from a big agency world and kind of escaped the big agency world and started serving smaller clients and trying to bring the the knowledge that I learned in the agency world, working on big fortune 500 clients to these smaller companies and, yeah, same kind of thing, building a network of, of smaller resources and piecing things together. But, you know, it’s worked out really well for our clients. So it’s very interesting and sort of a very successful modern approach, I think personally. So talk a little bit about how you approach your what’s your philosophy when you approach a new client, a new opportunity. What are some of the common challenges that you face and how do you think about that — overcoming those?

Sarah Oyungu: 05:56

Yeah. So I think that products change, channels change, political situations change. But the thing that remains the same is human beings, their motivations, what causes them to act. We live in a world now where when people say, oh, I want, you know, share of wallet, you know, I want you are no longer competing against, you know, is it Diet Coke or, you know, Diet Pepsi you’re talking about, do I want to buy something to drink? Or do I want to get some ice cream?

Or do I want to rent an online video like so. People’s needs vary so much, and I think because of the one of the outcomes I think of Covid was it changed the way we consume everything, changed the way we consume media, it media change, the way we consume, where we how we make our decisions on what we purchase. You know, because it used to be that we’re all watching TV. We’re all we can all sing you the State Farm jingle, but now are we all watching TV? No. 

We’re streaming, we’re doing this. And, you know, and so one of the things that I found is that is constant is human behavior and human motivation. And so when I work with my clients, what I’m what I’m really looking to is discovering and uncovering what is that value that you are feeding in someone’s heart, you know, if it what is that core motivation? Is it something in that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? Food, clothing, shelter, you know, which in some ways is straightforward. And even then it’s not. 

If it’s shelter, is it comfortable shelter? It’s close to my school shelter. Is it, you know, and so people are making decisions based on a matrix. So whatever client I work with, I say, who are your target audience? Understand your audience very well. 

And then you can say, within the matrix of their life, what do we need to say to them? What’s important to them? How do we reach them? And then also giving people comfort to say, you don’t have to reach the whole world, you just need to reach your people. You know, you just need to reach your people. 

So the trick is understanding who are your people and what’s important to them. Everything else follows.

Rick Rappe: 08:21

Yeah, that’s so true. Yeah. And direct response. In direct response and direct mail, we talk about, you know, achieving a high response rate. And sometimes that could be 2 or 3% of the people that we mail out to that can make a difference between 2% and 3% could be a big difference making a campaign very, very successful.

But we do try to remind people like, you’re not. When you’re dealing with creative for marketing, Kidding. You’re not trying to speak to everyone and make a message that works for everyone. You’re trying to find the 3% or the 2% that your message resonates with very powerfully. So it’s not like you’re trying to, obviously we run into clients that like to do things by committee and want everyone to love it. 

Yeah. Have you ever run into that kind of situation?

Sarah Oyungu: 09:12

Oh, I’ve seen it a lot. I’ve seen it a lot. There used to be a guy called The Oatmeal and he would do these cartoons, and he did one cartoon. I wish I could find it. It’s like what the client says they want.

And then for website and what you end up with, you know, the client gives you their needs and you come up with this really cool website and then they go and then the CEO is like, well, you know, my favorite color is red. It really should have red. And then his wife is like, well, what about the people who love cats? You know, and then the VP is like, well, we really should have something there that rewards people. Maybe we should have a special offer. 

And coffee. And then somebody’s child pops up and says, but what about my school? You know. And then at the end of the day, when you look at the website, you get you’re just like, yeah.

Rick Rappe: 10:00

Yeah, right. Too many cooks in the kitchen.

Sarah Oyungu: 10:03

Too many cooks in the kitchen all with their own motivations.

Rick Rappe: 10:07

Right. For sure. Well that’s interesting. Getting back to your philosophy and your approach. I mean, I love what you’ve said about focusing in on the right the mind of the consumer.

Obviously incredibly important. And understanding their needs and their emotional drivers and things like that. When you think about channels and driving response, I mean, what comes to mind for you is in terms of what’s working these days.

Sarah Oyungu: 10:42

It really goes back to the audience. And so I have B2B as well as B2C. And then we have b2b2c. I tend to work more because I’m a digital strategist with those whose model better fits in the digital world. But even then, what you meet online, there has to be offline touchpoints.

Even if you’re a fully digital enterprise, there has to be. And so it comes down to again, the audience. Who is your audience? Where are they? What are they consuming? 

If you are reaching out to leaders who are making decisions on supply chain, on buying, on choosing vendors when they’re on Facebook, that’s not what they’re thinking about. So, you know, yeah, you can send them all apples. They aren’t even going to see it. It’s not if you can show that, show that algorithm. Right. 

Maybe you want to focus on LinkedIn. Maybe you want to do a more direct marketing thing where they actually have something physical that comes across their desk that they can read and, you know, interact with. And so it really comes to the audience and where they are and what they’re doing. And I always say, don’t try and do everything well. Pick three things and do them very well. 

You know, and when you get traction, depend on your audience to give you that feedback. You’re converting audience to tell you, oh, where did you see this? What made you, what made you act? What made you pick up the phone and call us? What made you click and buy, you know, and then use that information to feed into where you find other people like them.

Rick Rappe: 12:21

Yeah, it sounds like you. You believe in testing and sort of starting things to test them out and see how they perform. And then obviously if they get traction, then ramping that up or continuing to do more of it.

Sarah Oyungu: 12:37

Yeah, yeah. And in this day and age, it’s pretty easy to test. Yeah. It’s not simple. Yeah.

Easy. Not simple. Like, there’s so many tools out there that you can use. I mean, if you’re doing an ad online and you have two call-to-actions, which one got the most clicks to your website? That’s a really quick way to test a little. 

Little things I’ve learned make the difference. Like was the button red or was a button green. You know, and you can test and see when you’re sending out an email. Was it, you know, this headline with this blurb or like, what did people actually like, you know, have enough analytics behind it now that we can actually look and see how people are interacting with our content from a digital perspective and from a real life perspective, which I’m sure you guys do at RPM. It’s actually seeing where you deliver, where’s the traction, where are they coming from, you know, and then picking up kind of that knowledge to say, okay, let’s invest more in this area or with this type of messaging as opposed to just, yeah, you know, let’s blanket the parking lot with flyers.

Rick Rappe: 13:52

Right, right, right. Yeah. In direct mail, we definitely think about targeting as a very big part of what we do. Targeting the right people and testing the right segments of audience and the right, but also content. And the materials that we’re mailing out are really important.

So we test messaging and offers. And I like the idea of A-B testing. We often end up doing A, B, C, D, E, F, G testing when we’re starting with a new client, because we have to kind of crack the code. And that gives us a really accelerated testing process, which works really well for getting new direct mail programs up and off the ground. But so I know your focus is on digital, on the digital world. 

Let me ask you a question about that, because I find it really fascinating because like I said, we’re more focused on traditional, old fashioned paper, direct mail marketing. Obviously, we do things that integrate both. But when you think about audiences on digital. Do you? Each platform seems to have its own unique, sort of fragmented audience, but then there’s a lot of overlap between them. 

So is it how do you find the right segments, or how do you think about targeting within the digital space?

Sarah Oyungu: 15:21

Yeah, targeting within the digital space, I use digital as a jump knowing that I’m going to integrate other things. So I say for existing businesses, targeting starts with your current customer base. So everybody goes and says, oh, we want new customers out there. But you know, it’s easier to start with the people who are already looking for you, who have used you, who have tried you, who have loved you to kind of get their characteristics, you know, and infuse those when you’re building audiences, when you’re building messaging, what worked with your current base, who brought them to you? I mean, what brought them to you?

And then incorporating that into now your wider audiences, your wider audiences, your wider audiences. Another way to do it, both on digital and real life is from a referral basis. So and so says, oh, my friend so-and-so talks to you. Maybe you are, I don’t know, selling jam. And as a school teacher who reaches, you know, you sell it to a mom and school teacher reaches out to you, and then you’d ask them, you know why. 

What was interesting about that for you? And you know, in my classes I have kids with their — you’ve got a whole new audience that has new things that you wouldn’t have thought of before, but just going after the characteristics of your referral audience. But yeah. So you can. And so as I said, different channels have different characteristics. 

Don’t try and do all of them. And you know what. Who is it? Who said the most obvious answer is usually the right one? You know when you hear what is it? 

When you hear hoofbeats, it really is likely a horse, not a zebra. You know.

Rick Rappe: 17:01

I haven’t heard that.

Sarah Oyungu: 17:03

So it’s like, start with the obvious. There’s room for innovation and you always should be innovating. But start with your tried and true. Start with what you know and then try. Try new things because that unlocks the new secret doors.

Yeah, but you know, don’t kill yourself and say we want to hold your audience when you haven’t even tapped your current audience.

Rick Rappe: 17:25

Yeah, it’s especially in marketing. In our programs, we think about establishing a control package, something that performs well and drives the results that we need to accomplish the client’s goals. And then we stick with that control piece as long as we can, and we try not to mess with it. So that’s the part of the program that is limiting risk and, and driving volume. And then we also have to think about like take 10% or 20% of the program and keep testing to try and beat the performance.

So we kind of have to fragment our thinking into two, two parts. You know, that’s don’t break, don’t break it if it’s working. And also it may not work forever. So we want to make sure that we’re out ahead of it and thinking about what’s next. Interesting. 

Okay. Well. I’m really curious about your experience in the nonprofit world, and it sounds like you might still be working and doing some consulting in the nonprofit world from time to time. What are the things that you’ve learned that nonprofits have to have to do to be successful.

Sarah Oyungu: 18:42

Nonprofits need to realize that their competition is not other nonprofits. Oh, it is life.

Rick Rappe: 18:49

So yeah.

Sarah Oyungu: 18:51

I’m doing so I’m on board. I’ve actually just come off a call where we’re working with teen moms to give them vocational training so that, you know, when they graduate, they can immediately go into a trade or something. And then we have a program that sponsors that basically supports their children so they can go for these kind of it’s like a boarding school. Not the kids. The moms can go to the school where they just really focus on learning their trade and accelerated rate to come out.

But then what happens there anyways? harambeecentre.org. Thank you. And so when we’re looking at things like the center, if I ask anyone on the street do you care about teen moms. Yeah. 

But of course you know, do you care about the children, welfare of children. Yeah, but of course. And you say, well, go ahead and donate. And then it comes down to motivation. Well, why should I donate in Africa when right down the road here I have, you know, a shelter that doesn’t have enough resources or. 

Yeah, I would like to donate. But you know, my, my light bill is due. And so one of the challenges with that nonprofits especially have to overcome is presenting their need. As there’s, there’s a lady I really like, Rachel Rogers, and she presents it like this, she says, is your business and this refers to nonprofits. Is it a multivitamin or is it a Tylenol? 

So if your head is aching, you’re like, I need Tylenol. I’ll get a pain, I’ll take it, and then I’ll keep some on hand so that I don’t have to feel that pain again when I feel it coming on. If life is good and I’m feeling great about myself, I’ll go ahead and get multivitamins. Sometimes I’ll take them, sometimes I won’t, you know. And so for all businesses and especially nonprofits, it’s really speaking to the urgency of what is going on and how it affects the world today. 

Why do you care that a teen mom somewhere in western Kenya, you know, needs a vocation to raise her children? You know, why does it matter? And so, tying it back to the, you know, the local motivations of do I care about this? Why do I care about this? If I can act, why would I not act? 

You know, and what makes donating to this cause so important that I will go forgo, you know, paying, you know, buying an extra burger, blah, blah, blah. And one of the things that we do a lot with nonprofits is when I work with nonprofits, even with financial services, by the way, is really focused on quantifying it into something. Your cup of coffee. Your cup of coffee will buy school books for this child for this term. If you do. 

If you buy her four cups of coffee, then all of a sudden it’s not like it’s like, yeah, I can do that, you know? And then again, it also comes down to when you quantify it into something measurable. But two, going back to the motivations, what are people caring about? I want the world to see these guys don’t have enough resources locally to make their world a better place. And then you do the messaging that way, or you got to fight and make. 

But then again, always presenting the urgency of the situation. But without tourism, no flies in eyes. Do you remember the, you know, the kind of the time magazine with the kid, with the distended stomach and, you know, flies in the eyes? The situation was that desperate. You know, at that time, people needed to act, and it was necessary. 

But unfortunately, what nonprofits and a lot are facing is that skepticism that says, is it really that dire, or are you portraying people in poorer ways so that, you know, you can tug on our heartstrings and find with most credible nonprofits, the other thing that’s really so important to them is the dignity of the communities they serve. So showing that the community they serve, as we are coming in as saviors, we’re coming to partner with them and giving them the resources they need to build their own dignity. Right. And right now, I think a lot of people, just because of the way the world is, they’re cynical. They’re very they’re like the money actually get them or you know, somebody, you know buying a plane. 

Taking like so so so it also comes down to credibility. The way you portray the people that you’re serving to give them dignity and again, show them as this is my fellow human, you know, there but for the grace of God, I could be in a war-torn country. I didn’t choose, you know, anyway. Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 23:52

Well, I think what you just said resonated with me a lot, because I definitely feel that when I, when a non-profit shows me how my donation is going to impact that community and exactly what I can do to, you know, push a project over the finish line or where I can see that my, my money’s going to have this specific impact. It definitely makes me feel so much more connected with the solution and the and the the situation rather than like, give money and we’ll go help these people that that doesn’t feel as connected to me, so I like I love the analogy of, you know, a few cups of coffee will buy this many books or buy this many meals for homeless or whatever the case might be. Those things definitely get me and tug at my heartstrings. And I never thought about what you talked about, about portraying the community with dignity. I think that is really important.

And that’s very interesting. Yep. Years and years ago, when I started my career in direct mail, I worked for an agency that only did nonprofit direct marketing. And that was how I started my first couple of years in the business a long time ago, actually. But we did. 

We did. I was a project manager, production manager at the time. So for me, it was a little bit. It was ink on paper, I guess you’d say. But I started to ask questions and learn and then I, I ended up going over to more of the commercial side working with, you know, regular clients, not nonprofits. 

But I still have a lot of friends in the world of nonprofit marketing. Obviously, up here in the northwest where World Vision is headquartered and stuff. Yep. Yeah. How do you think about direct mail when you think about direct mail marketing for your clients? 

Have you used much direct mail in your experience?

Sarah Oyungu: 25:58

For me it’s evolving. It’s evolved. If you’d have told me. If you’d have told me as little as four years ago. Let’s do direct mail.

I’d have told you. Let’s stop wasting our time. You know, people just take it and they throw it away and they throw it in the trash. But I really feel, you know, my viewpoint has evolved in that people also need physical touch points, and especially because a lot of there’s been a lot of fraud and fake enterprises perpetuated on social media. And there’s something about still the comfort of getting a physical coupon. 

It’s great to get it through the app. It’s great to get it, whatever. But that kind of just shows that there’s there’s a building somewhere where people are actually doing this. Yeah. And then my, my belief in direct marketing is really a very targeted tool. 

I think of targeted marketing more direct marketing more as bottom-of-the-funnel as opposed to you can use it for awareness and whatnot. And it’s good people look at the flyer and maybe they’ll keep it, maybe they’ll toss it, maybe whatever.

Rick Rappe: 27:10

Right.

Sarah Oyungu: 27:10

But you don’t know who, who at the top of the funnel is thinking, maybe one day I’ll get a deck, and then they get a thing with a guy who does decks, and maybe in that moment they put it away. But maybe one day they’re going to come back and say, hey, do you remember that thing that we, you know. And then lower in the funnel there is I seen this on TV, I seen this wherever. I’m ready to do something right. And then I get a piece of direct mail that has a very clear call to action, not, you know, a fridge for fridge, you know, fridge magnet for fridge magnets sake, but, you know, coupon and offer up a call to that.

You know, one of the things that we’re discussing the other day was a very well known supermarket chain coming to the area and, you know, just musing on how would they get let people know that they’re there. Yeah, I can see it on TV. I can have a preference for that fruit, that supermarket. But if I know that this supermarket has come to my community and I get a circular in the mail that says, hey, we’re here to look at these great offers that we have as opposed to this other great, this staple that you have. And we are just right down the road. 

Bet you that drives footfall. So I really liked I personally like direct market. Marketing one for services such as. And this is Sara’s bias for services. That people can touch, feel and aren’t so confident to buy online. 

And for events. Definitely for events and especially local events or where there’s a rabid following. You know, direct marketing is great there. Yeah. And just to get people thinking. 

So I particularly like direct marketing for that.

Rick Rappe: 29:03

Well, good. That’s interesting. We have one client at RPM that’s a grocery store chain. And we’ve had some interesting learnings working with them most recently. I think there’s a new blog article on our website about it.

But we you know, they were doing a lot of radius marketing around each store in their chain. And what we were able to do is continue that radius marketing but do a predictive list model, basically looking at their customer base and saying who’s responding, who’s who’s shopping here, and then picking out key attributes that were predictive and putting them together into a scoring algorithm. And then we’re able to basically now not mail to everybody but really target the most responsive people. And so that’s made a big difference in the efficiency of their mail program where we’re sending out less mail, but we’re targeting it and making it perform at a much, much higher rate than what they were seeing in the past. So it’s interesting. 

But yeah, the different, different people, obviously in the retail space, grocery stores and things like that, they do a lot of spray and pray direct mail, which is like mail everybody and hopefully we’ll get a bunch of traffic.

Sarah Oyungu: 30:22

Somebody will. Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 30:24

And we, we certainly try to to be a little bit more sophisticated than that. But yeah, also I mean, I think what you said before about digital was interesting because we’ve definitely seen and heard clients talking about kind of a crisis of trust in some digital marketing. I mean, obviously, I think with email especially. You know, it costs almost nothing for people to send you an email. So your inbox is flooded with messages that aren’t relevant, and you have to filter everything out just to deal with the onslaught of email these days.

So we know from research that direct mail and tangible marketing can be much more trustworthy and get through and help break through that clutter a little bit. So I thought that was interesting.

Sarah Oyungu: 31:16

If I can pick up on what you said on email.

Rick Rappe: 31:18

Yeah.

Sarah Oyungu: 31:19

When I work with organizations, you know, they’re like, well, let’s send a bunch of emails. We’ll reach 10,000 people. And actually, the cost of email is more expensive. If it matters if you are spraying and praying, whether it’s direct mail or email marketing. Spraying and praying to everyone in the world just because you can reach them.

You are wasting your time getting caught up in the mail. I mean caught up in the mess. It’s like take your time, do your research. Reach the right people, for crying out loud. Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 31:49

It’s cheaper. It’s cheaper to blast to everybody.

Sarah Oyungu: 31:53

But cheap is expensive.

Rick Rappe: 31:55

Right. Well, I guess that’s the mentality that is sometimes hard to explain to people. But cost per piece versus cost per sale?

Sarah Oyungu: 32:04

Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 32:05

You know what I mean. Like we’ve got to think in terms of results and how much you’re spending for a responder or a or a or a sale ultimately. So yeah that’s interesting. Let’s see. Let me shift a little bit into questions about new technology.

I’m really curious about AI and marketing and what’s happening with AI in our space. How do you think AI is changing marketing and how is it being incorporated into your marketing strategies?

Sarah Oyungu: 32:42

I think AI is changing everything. It is changing everything. And it’s not just marketing, it’s absolutely everything and people in ways that people think about and they don’t think about. We’re calling it AI now, but it’s something that’s been around for a while. It’s just that now it’s been democratized to the point that now it’s in our hands.

The fact that you can start doing a Google search that was like, how do I. And then it gives you a whole bunch of, you know, examples. You know, all of a sudden it’s like, that’s what it is, but now you have the power to impact it. And what I get a lot in marketing and in some of my with some of my clients who are changing their models. Is that fear that AI is going to miss things, that our data is going to get lost, that our jobs are going to go away and you won’t need people. 

Here’s the trut: it will not take away anyone’s job. The people who know how to use AI are the ones who are going to take away your job, because AI, at the end of the day, its job is to create efficiencies and to optimize what human ingenuity and creativity has already put together. AI does not create. It builds, right? I didn’t wake up one day and paint a painting, know how humans behind it that trained it and trained it and trained it. 

And using its massive brain power, it found a way to optimize that and take it to the next level. And so I think the future belongs in all fields to people who are able to be AI fluent, which means I don’t have to build a ChatGPT on my own. I don’t have to, da da da. But I have to know what AI is doing so that I can give it the value add. I mean, ask anyone who’s gone on ChatGPT to do something. 

Let’s do this because we both do content. I can go until I write an email or write a message that talks about this, this, this, this, this. Here’s the features, here’s the benefits. Give me something. Go and I will do a great job. 

You can even go further and say, well, make it funnier and then I will make it funnier. And then I’ll say this and add da da da da da, and then I will make it da da da da. And so it’s wonderful that AI will do that and give you the feedback so you understand why it’s not missing the mark so you can improve your prompts. But what made it? What made the final project? 

The final result was special because there was a human being who was further engineering. Engineering optimizing because AI doesn’t know how you feel. It might say, oh, I did a recent A recently and I’ve seen some other people do it where I took a pic. I wanted a, I wanted a really cool, I’m an animated avatar, and generally I would have gone to an animator and said, hey, can you do this for me? I said, let me, let me use AI. 

I use six AI programs. Same picture, same prompt in one. I looked like a demented Disney character, in the other. In another one, I looked like me, but just like a white lady. In another one, I looked like an alien. 

You know, maybe they had told it that these are the desirable features. Tight. Tighten the cheekbones, like tight, you know, and and to me, it spoke to these are all really great tools, but without humans in the back end to shape it and and okay, I’ll just add this really quick one and then we get back to AI. But this is why diversity and inclusion matter. Because when we train AI, we are training it to interact with the different expressions of humanity. 

There are people’s different accents, people’s different skin tones. If you’re in graphics, people’s different abilities, if you’re dealing with, you know, disability, physical disabilities and whatnot. And it’s our job to train the AI so that what we as human beings get to the AI, it has some sort of a backing of our experience that it can integrate. So going back to AI and how we use it in marketing, I strongly believe that every, every, every, every professional, every person in this day and age should be AI fluent and should be AI fluent in that you at least know what’s out there. You don’t have to know everything. 

You at least know enough to know that you don’t know. So you can go do a simple Google search and say, hey, is there something that can help me do XYZ, right? That’s step one and two where the skill comes in. All of us need to become AI prompt architects. Yeah. 

And we were talking about it with a friend of mine the other day. We were talking about hiring for a small business. Why I. Assistants sometimes seem better, as I will tell. I do this and then it’ll give me this, And then I’ll say, no, this is missing. 

Add that and then it’ll feed it back to me. And this. And so it keeps giving me feedback so that I get a final result. Whereas when I talk with a human being, sometimes I say do this. And then they give me what they thought I said, and then I start giving them feedback, and then someone’s feelings get hurt or they feel that they know better. 

I mean, and it gets really, really complicated. But at the same time, on the AI side, it’ll give me feedback. And if I do my prompts right, it will give me what I want. But on the human side, it will. A human will say, hey, but remember X, Y, and Z. 

Hey, remember that our customers actually care about this. Hey, do you remember that when you did this, there was that opposite, you know, result from our base or whatever? And so I think working in concert, you know, between the two of them, one helping the people who you are with become affluent. Get better at creating air pumps. There will be those who are going to come and build me to do new things. 

God bless them and I’m not one of them. But then there are those who are really going to leverage AI to make their jobs faster.

Rick Rappe: 39:30

Right?

Sarah Oyungu: 39:30

More streamlined, more effective. But AI is not taking away anyone’s job.

Rick Rappe: 39:36

I hope not, I mean, we’ll see, but I, I think every new technology takes away a certain number of jobs and then other jobs become, you know, come, come in and replace and, you know, maybe in the, in the long distant future for the human race, who’s to say that we’re all supposed to end up having jobs in the long run anyway? Maybe the computers and the machines will do all the work, and we can just sit around eating grapes. And I know, I don’t know.

Sarah Oyungu: 40:02

But was it. Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 40:05

You never know where we’re going in 50, 100, 250 years. It’s hard to say. But I think it’s certainly is an interesting time with all these new technologies and new tools. It certainly is interesting. And we’re using AI for, you know, creative work and accelerating things like list work and predictive modeling and things like that.

But yeah, it’s very fast. But you’re right. You have to have people involved in the process to understand when it’s giving you a good result and when the result isn’t ready yet isn’t good enough. And then guiding it to and I think there’s a lot of creativity in the prompting of it, you know, and, and in figuring out how to get what you need or what you want out of it. But I think it takes senior level or mature, experienced people, or maybe not even mature. 

I probably can’t call myself mature. I probably should just call myself experienced. It takes experienced people to understand when the result is sort of good enough for the world, good enough to release out in the public. Well.

Sarah Oyungu: 41:20

Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 41:21

Wow. Interesting stuff.

Sarah Oyungu: 41:23

But before we move on, I will just wind up with that by saying it takes people who know what they want. If you don’t know what you want, if you don’t have an end goal in mind, anything, whether it’s AI or human being, will take you down the garden path and have you output things that you aren’t ready for or the world isn’t ready for, or that are just bad. So it’s just it’s that thing of wherever you are in life having a clear view. What is it you want to accomplish and then use the tools to accomplish that?

Rick Rappe: 41:56

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you could take the first article that or the first thing that ChatGPT produces and just publish it. Or you can work with it and refine it and try it in other platforms and edit things together and have it rewritten. Rewritten again.

And, you know, yeah, we’re definitely using AI that way because it seems like it needs us. The first output isn’t usually quality enough for us. So. A couple more quick questions before I wrap up and let you go. What would you say are some daily habits and routines that have contributed to your success as a marketing leader?

Sarah Oyungu: 42:50

I would say maybe not daily, but regular. Always be aware that you don’t know everything that there is to know. So get out there. And we have never been, we have been. We’re now in a time where there’s never been so much information at our fingertips.

If you don’t watch the news, I know a lot of people who don’t watch the news, that don’t watch the news, but find, you know, on social, I would say, at least for professionals on LinkedIn, for smart people who are doing smart things. And then you can consume a bite, a bite, a bite and walk off and let that sit and marinate and use it in your life. But there are opportunities to learn a bite at a time. Obviously, there are opportunities to seek conflicting views, just as you’re saying, so that you aren’t. You know, you were saying earlier to kind of check, is this the whole worldview or is there another perspective that I need to look at? 

I feel like one of our problems in the world today is that we are one issue, people. We come with one perspective and we will die for that perspective without listening to other sides. But then the other sides can also be wrong. That’s another story for another day. I ain’t going to get into it.

Rick Rappe: 44:02

But no, you’re right. That’s a real significant issue these days in public life is that people lock on to their answer and they think that there’s no room for learning, there’s no room for open mindedness and saying, like, I don’t know everything. I need to be open to ideas and to taking in new information. And I need to question my beliefs sometimes.

Sarah Oyungu: 44:27

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, so I mean, bite sized learning. There’s so many free webinars. Do put yourself, your own professional learning plan even if you’re not in school, even if you’re a busy professional. One webinar, one podcast, this podcast, you know, say to yourself, I’m going to do a podcast like this once a week so I can listen and hear what other smart people are saying, you know, and learn from them. Get up at the same time every day, even when you’re on vacation, and then you can go back to sleep.

But if you get up at the same time, your body doesn’t fall out of the rhythm. Don’t force yourself to live in a shared life. I do things because I want to, not because I have to. So I had a very smart coach who wants to. And he’s like, I’m like, I’m silver. 

I was like, why? Because I’ve tried this proposal and I have to do this, and then I have laundry I need to do and then I need to. He’s like, so what do you want to do? I said, I want to focus on the proposal, said focus on the proposals. The laundry can wait, the dishes can wait. 

And you find that when you live that way, you take the stress off you, and then you start being creative about the other thing that has to be done that you don’t necessarily want to do, but it has to be done. But then you’re focusing on things that are important to you. So those are my tips.

Rick Rappe: 45:44

Okay. Those are great. Thank you so much for that. I’ll have one last quick question for you before we wrap it up. And I think this is just thinking about yourself as a younger person or thinking of any younger person out there in the world today. What advice would you give to a young, aspiring marketer who’s looking to have a great career and make a significant impact?

Sarah Oyungu: 46:10

There is more to the world than this. You have. So when I think back to my younger self, good situations and bad situations, you know, I stayed in some bad situations longer than I had to because I couldn’t see an alternative. But then I see I’ve stayed in good situations longer than I should have because I couldn’t see an alternative. Like, it can’t possibly get better.

It gets better. Whether you’re living in a bad situation, it gets better. Whether you are living in a really good situation, it’s even better than this, you know? And so just having that mindset and that spiritual grounding, also that spiritual grounding where you’re checking in, you know, I don’t know who your audience are, whether it’s your higher power God. But checking in and having that meditative, reflective space that gives you space to be who you are so that you can look out beyond situations and says, it gets better than this. 

Don’t relax. It gets better. Keep moving. Keep it moving. Enjoy what you have in the moment. But it gets better than this.

Rick Rappe: 47:17

Oh that’s awesome. Thank you so much. That’s great advice. That’s wonderful advice for young people. And I hope they’ll pay attention to that if they happen upon this podcast somehow.

Well I think that’s all the time we have today. So I’m sadly I’m going to have to wrap this up, but I really thank you so much, Sarah, for the opportunity to learn from you today. And where can people get in touch with you if they want to reach out and make contact?

Sarah Oyungu: 47:45

Sure. I mean, you can always visit my website, mrktingalchemist.com without the mrktingalchemist.com, as you can see on my whatever. Or you can find me on LinkedIn. Sarah Oyungu.

Rick Rappe: 47:58

Okay.

Sarah Oyungu: 47:59

LinkedIn I can confidently say I am the only Sarah Oyungu you are going to find on LinkedIn. If you find another one like I’ll give you $100.

Rick Rappe: 48:09

Yeah.

Sarah Oyungu: 48:10

And don’t create the profile either.

Rick Rappe: 48:14

Yeah. Just for $100. I definitely will not do that. But you never know. Someone might. Well, thank you so much for your time again today, and I really appreciate it.

And I hope to talk to you again soon.

Sarah Oyungu: 48:26

Thank you Rick, I appreciate you sharing your platform with me.

Outro: 48:30

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?

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