Hello and welcome. My name is Peter Sumpton, the Lego master of marketing. And you're listening to the marketing study lab podcast live. Well, this bit isn't live, but the rest of it is. You'll hear a bit about that later. I mean, now, let's crack on. These episodes are taken from my live show marketing, where we look at the relationship between marketing and a specific topic subject or specialism, sometimes there'll be guests Other times, it'll just be me. So let's get cracking. Okay, here we are. First first guest no introduction needed so much. So I haven't even prepared an introduction. Because Because I know the doctor, I will have my own introduction cuz she appears everywhere, all the time constantly, probably falls asleep, saying her introduction whenever she's live. whenever she's on social, so, Doctor, I don't think I've ever called you that before. But,   Dr. Ai Addyson-Zhang  1:06  you know, I needed to show some respect.   Peter Sumpton  1:08  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, sorry. Sorry. Doctor, I firstly introduce yourself and then I'll explain what the heck we're gonna be talking about for the next half an hour, 40 minutes, something like that,   Dr. Ai Addyson-Zhang  1:19  I'm really excited.   I'm a fan of Peter. I love everything you do, and really honour to be your very first guest on aalnc live and congratulations, you know, gaining access to LinkedIn live. So for me, I'm a professor dropout. And I taught in the classroom for 10 plus years, and really believe that current education model is broken and decided to leave the broken system to build a better system. So I left teaching, and I then started to build my own school, which is classroom without wars.   It has been   incredible. journey and I wish I started their journey earlier. But everything happens for a reason. So I'm really thankful for where I am today. I'm still a teacher, but on a much different stage.   Peter Sumpton  2:12  I love the fact you call yourself a professor dropout. It's almost like you know, you went to that university you went to that college and you got halfway through your education. And you just stopped now this isn't to me. I just love that   Dr. Ai Addyson-Zhang  2:24  kolonie Yeah, it's definitely not for me I actually the last several years while I was a teacher, I cried. There's so much every single semester and just seeing how broken the educational system is. And I wanted to help my students more but I couldn't I felt very helpless and that killed me and I I don't enjoy that feeling at home but now I love it a lot more so yes, dropout   iPod.   Peter Sumpton  2:55  So anybody that doesn't know or hasn't seen check out classroom without walls. Absolutely. mazing programme doing wonderful, wonderful things. I'll drop some links in comments after this live because I'm not as proficient in you are as you are with your lives. And so I'm kind of new to all this kind of stuff. And one thing I've learned is how you put a ticker on on stream, which sounds really stupid, but bit of admin going on in the background. So what I'm going to do is press this funky button, and there you go. So what we're going to talk about today is marketing and education. And what I mean by that is you just said your professor dropout, the system's broken in terms of education, myself, I'm fully educated right through the system, school, six, former college, university, all that kind of stuff and then postgrads through professional qualifications. So So for me, it's our many, many years of going through that system. And seeing all these things, but because of the way we're brought up, not actually seeing what could be broken and what you could be doing differently. So that was a bit of a long ramble. But what I want to get across is that I personally think there's a mixture of this lifelong learning and education to an extent dependent on your profession. But what I'd like to go through first is your take on education at this moment in time your take on the state of education at the moment.   Dr. Ai Addyson-Zhang  4:33  Yeah, and I see our friend Lance, oh, my God, what time is your freelance 3pm and so   Peter Sumpton  4:41  always joins you it doesn't matter what time I think Lance is a robot, Lance. Just reply, so we know you know, a robot that would be really handy.   He doesn't sleep. So I think   Dr. Ai Addyson-Zhang  4:53  the current education model is so broken   especially for those people who are interested in Becoming a marketer starting a business become your creative, or social entrepreneur. And I don't think the traditional education is the best way to develop those important of soft and hardest skills. And you know, one example I always say so for example, and in the US, we call this GPA, which is great point average. So pretty much academic performance. Most of students and parents and teachers, they are really obsessed with their grades, right? And am I getting a 4.0? Like how many A's I'm going to earn a point that's actually a while important reason I left my teaching position. I got so tired of that. But do you actually know research has shown GPA or academic performance is actually inversely related to innovation orientation. So in other words, you know if we want to you and I were entrepreneurs, we know how important it is to eat No wait, how important it is to be creative, like marketing, you need some sort of creativity. And GPA is now too good to benchmark. But can you imagine a student going through the traditional educational system, the only thing they feel like they need to pay attention to is you know, I need to get that a for my marketing class, then you are really killing their innovation to be a good marketer. So here's just one example to show the kind of how broken the education model is. And speaking from my from my personal experience, you know, I used to teach social media marketing, I used to teach public relations and communication classes, but I never practice anything that I used to teach. Until I became a practitioner. I started to finally understand, oh my god, this is actually social media marketing. This is actually how you build a business. This is how you promote yourself. I didn't understand anything. Like I mentioned earlier from my, you know, master degree from my PhD degree. I learned so many theories, but it's not what I needed to know successfully run my business. I think that is a big, big missing link in today's education, you know, for marketing and business.   Peter Sumpton  7:22  Yeah, I agree with you going through that system, myself entirely. I know nearly every single step of the way I would have benefited 100% from having that experience from having that hands on experience on a whole host of different things to know and understand how you apply theory or how it works in the real world. I think you need both Meet Me personally, I feel you do need both particularly in marketing. So let me just explain that and get get your thoughts on it. What I mean by that is that to be in I talk about an all round marketer. So to become an all round marketer, you need a whole host of things that people don't necessarily see as marketing. So if you take the traditional models like the four P's product, price, place promotion, a bit bit tacky, there are no but if you take those four P's, then you take promotion away from a marketer, they should still be able to do their jobs that leaves them with place, it leaves them with product, and it leaves them with price. But a lot of those things have been taken away from marketing. And I don't think many people could do a marketing role a marketing manager role or above without having that educational piece on, on pricing, on on distribution, and on product development, and all that kind of thing. But the calm side of it, I think is where we get hugely confused. So the communication side, I personally think you could spend six months on YouTube, on LinkedIn, and a whole host of different platforms and learning from people and under On these platforms and understand how you communicate with people, but the other parts of marketing, I think are very, very sorely missed. And that's the educational piece that I think is warranted in marketing. So what what's your thoughts on on those kind of elements?   Dr. Ai Addyson-Zhang  9:16  I agree. And also I read an article talking about the four PE, they also added a face p, which is people, right? So when you think about the four p they're all developed from the organisational perspective right? So what is a prize? How am I going to promote is always about me as the organisation right? But when you add the fifth p which is p PL, you are actually shifting your perspective, from only Rukia and me to look at the people that you are actually serving. So I actually write that. Yeah, and I agree, you know, I think both theory and practice are important just like when, like in my earlier interior interview, we're talking about you know, both hard skills and soft skills are really important. And I think even if you are, you are extremely good at pressing a practice and theory they are inter related, right. Yeah. So one informs the other. And in my case is when I, my, my old self was that I had way too many theories, but I never practice any of the theories. So I didn't really understand what the theory means, right? So the theory is mainly at the conceptual level, I didn't know how to apply. So on the other hand, if you are only a practitioner, if you don't have any theoretical grounding, and I think it is very hard for you to grow and scale, you know, you and I were talking about how important it is to develop a pathway of methodology, your own theory, so eventually, it's now me that run the business, right? It is this model. This theory actually does the work so I could remove myself from the business. Anyone who I understand the theory, anyone who understands how to apply this can do their job. So I'm slowly removing myself. But if you don't have that, you know, like peeler or like foundation series, I think it's just very hard to even for you to explain what exactly do you do? And how do you facilitate that transformation? So I think both are important. It's like hard skill and soft skills. You need both to succeed in life.   Peter Sumpton  11:30  Yeah, I can completely agree with you. Like, if I the one thing that I always say about my education is if I could go back and start again, well, I do a whole lot of things differently. But if I had to rerun it, if you like, and I was at university, I would take that gap year I would take that year out in industry, I would take as many opportunities to be in a business, running a business or starting my own business while learning on the job.   Dr. Ai Addyson-Zhang  12:01  point I think even if you feel like uncomfortable, oh my god, I have never run a business before. I don't know how to get started by this way social media and technology, you can discover those people, you can have conversations with them by I'm an advocate of launching a podcast for you, when you launch your podcast, you can interview those people, you can actually ask them about the ins and outs of this particular a potential profession that you are going to, you know, devote four years in college, maybe a few years in graduate school to study. But before that I think you should at least know he says even for you, and why are you even interested in this? And what do people actually do on a daily basis about this particular profession? Very few students actually had a conversation like that before they declare a major right. So by the time they graduate or by the time they're in their senior year, they're like, Oh my god, this is not running for me. But they have already invested in so much time and their parents money, like to lead up to to now play the game anymore. You just have to do it. That is that's how people got stuck in their life. Time their 40s they're not happy, they're stuck.   Peter Sumpton  13:19  So, Seth Seth Godin on his podcast akimbo many, many podcast episodes ago, he did one about sunk costs, and saying that you get to a certain stage and you've put so much money into something that the money you have invested so far, you you cannot see past. Just keep going. Because you've invested that money and if you leave it, it seemed as a waste not seeing the rest of money as a waste because you're going to be unhappy. But seeing it just as a, you have to go because you've already sunk that cost into your education into becoming a lawyer into not making you happy, basic. Huh,   Unknown Speaker  14:00  yeah,   Peter Sumpton  14:01  I feel great. Lance isn't a robot. And it's actually 3:36am on a Saturday for him, but lunch, he must be a robot if you're up at that time. And he also went straight into work after school in 1968, and I think he's been up ever since 1968 by the looks of it. And then, Christina, thank you for joining us. She agrees a balance is good. But she also says that there was a comment, she agreed and something in terms of a balance between business and marketing, in terms of degree and how you're learning it is hugely important, which again, thanks for joining us.   Dr. Ai Addyson-Zhang  14:45  I'm going to show I I'm just reading Christina's comment and she said that, you know, like having as much as I think she said that once she has that degree, she was Howard in it. I think that is definitely the case. I don't know how old you are like whilst looking for jobs. You know, I think people are looking for that piece of paper, looking for that the grey, but I think that is changing. Like weeks ago, I posted on my own social media that Google, they announced they are launching their own career certifications to replace the traditional college four year college degree. And think about why Google jumps into this. I think they are there are going to be a lot more. But you see that in social media marketing, right, a HubSpot Academy. They have so many social media certifications, powered by practitioners. So if I were student learning social media marketing, I would be investing in HubSpot Academy. Yeah, and going to a traditional college degree. I learned from a professor who has never run any social media marketing campaign before so I learned a bunch of theories as to Don't know what to do. So the reason for Google and so many other companies to be involved in higher education is because one of the reasons is how expensive it is to onboard a college grad, like my husband works in the nine to five job. He's constantly complaining about the students, you know, they don't know anything, they don't have the skills. So they still have to spend so much time and so much money to train those students. Right. So why do I have to do this, you know, to train the students to unlock or what they were taught. Why don't I directly get involved in their education? Yeah, four years ago, there's education futurist from Harvard University. He predicted in 2018, that 50% five zero 50% of American colleges and universities will go bankrupt in the next 10 years and I've seen called rate has definitely accelerated that and my friends are losing their jobs, smaller colleges, they are just being bought by bigger ones. So I think you know, the value that we put on that piece of paper to answer Christina's comment, I think is becoming less and less valuable and more companies are going to realise that and I can't wait for that day to home.   Peter Sumpton  17:24  Yeah, completely. It's interesting how things are shifting and I think this this year 2020 has shifted things a lot and accelerated things a lot like online learning. And I was listening to a podcast that before we dived on this live and it was Mark Ritson talking about his mini MBA which is which is purely online and it lasts 12 weeks or something. And I think their their net promoter score NPS is like in the 80s or 90s or something, it's unreal, but it's because Causing value. And what he was saying on the podcast is that there's there's a lot of rubbish online that gives you bad information or bad learning or bad education. And it's the same in universities. There's a lot of bad education and bad learning. And it's, I suppose it's making sure that whatever you choose, and like you said previously, if you've got a professor that's teaching you how to do something, and they're not doing it. Well, I wouldn't want to go to a dentist or even a hairdresser. And I've had my head on. Had to get that in, was waiting for the comments, but no one said anything. So I have to say it myself. No, but I wouldn't even go to a hairdresser that hadn't been qualified to cut hair in in some way. I learned something along the way. And it was weird because I had this conversation with my hairdresser and he said, Yeah, but Pete, you could you could study for for 12 months. The Art of hairdresser dressing. If you've never caught somebody's hair practically, you're not going to know what you're going to do. You're not going to do know what to do when things go wrong. And I suppose that really hit home to me that that is a really good point because anyone can run anything, as long as it's going well, but when it goes wrong, things change. What do you do?   Dr. Ai Addyson-Zhang  19:20  Amen. And Peter right,   you have been hosting my show,   how can you host my show? I don't even know for like so long. But even today,...