Bonnie Feigenbaum and Ron talk about her lecture series on Basic Marketing hosted by Learning Without Scars

Why don't you give us a little bit of your background so that the audience can understand who you are, what you do, where you come from.

It's a varied background.

You know, life is never a straight line. So it's kind of intriguing. This lecture series is important to me. We want to cover the six fundamental areas of life, parts, service, selling, marketing, finance, customer service, and have specialists like yourself do the work. Now, we've slated, you and I have talked about four different lecture series. We've started with the basic marketing. It's now available on the site.

It is live, baby. And every one of the 10 lectures are there. So tell us what you were trying to do with the basic marketing program.

One of the things that's interesting to me is that your lecture series. are generic in tone. They apply to anything. Well, yes. And it's, it's well, and that's, you know, the marketing goal is to anything and everything that has to do with getting a customer or consumer to buy your product or to interact with you.

I think we, you know, a pandemic, COVID, whatever you want to call it, has given us an interesting lesson relative to marketing. Governments have become marketeers.

And we also have case studies now where you've got different approaches that were taken to COVID. to see, you know, the end result of it. So, you know, if you go back and think about fundamental things, like you said at the beginning, what song gets stuck in your head? You know, we have a theme song that goes with everything we do. Everybody wants to rule the world, which is kind of a cynical take on my part. But with changing people's opinion, we run right up against the fact of people resisting change. So the story, you know, the story I like is we had a furniture store in Alberta when I was living there called The Brick. And they did unbelievable pounding advertising. The volume on the televisions went up, radio everywhere. And they proved the frequency of the message gets there. The company went away, but the guy that did the advertising, the promotion. He ended up owning the damn company.

His role became so important to the success of that organization.

Yeah. And it appears recently anyways, that there's much more attention paid to loving the commercial than there is in quote, quote, hawking the product.

And, you know, in our world, the frequency of the message, we sell parts at dealerships, equipment parts, engine parts, whatever. And we should have everybody at the counter, everybody who answers the phone, having a message that's consistent so that that frequency of message happens naturally. We don't take advantage of things like that. Yeah.

So also what I noticed in the lectures, the individual lectures, is you use examples of multiple brands, multiple industries, multiple areas, which is perfect. And I think they provoke people to think a little bit about their area. The change resistance that I'm seeing and that my daughter sees, and probably you do see it as well in education, is we don't have very many good teachers. No disrespect to teachers. There's a lot of very smart, talented people. And we seem to be degree. We have a degree fantasy. And part of that is why we don't have enough blue collar jobs today, because everybody had to have a university education. But my feeling is, and talking to educators, the candidates that come to us from high school aren't prepared for the university experience.

theater school.

Well, one of the things that I wanted to be able to show with the podcast is the passion you bring to the job. It comes so naturally. You're a typical Quebecer. You talk with your hands.

We got everything covered.

One of the things that I believe, and I think you've seen this in how we write and put things out, is the Socratic method. I don't answer questions. I provoke people to come to their own conclusions. And like you say, we've got different, all the voices are important. But the thing that seems to be happening recently is that we're not, if your voice isn't the same as mine, I become disrespectful of you. And that's hurting the college, in my view, that's hurting the college or even the education model as a rule. It's almost indoctrination. And that bothers the heck out of me.

Yep, yep.

The old debate principle, you know, it was, I was talking to the chancellor of the university a week and a half ago, and he's got a doctorate. He's older than I am, so he's been around a while. He's a two-tour veteran of the Marines. Then he became dean of a school for the deaf and blind. And now he's chancellor of... a university that's in 75 different countries. And I asked him, and we talked about this before we started, but I asked him, okay, what's the challenge now? He said, well, people coming into university today do not have critical thinking skills. And that's a byproduct of how we're taught, I believe. They don't have analytical skills. They struggle with communication skills. And he says, as a rule, we have a year of remedial work. In a four-year degree, if it's a four-year degree anymore, more than a five, but we have a year of remedial work putting the students in the position that they should have been coming out of high school.

Right.

Yeah, I agree with that. I've got a granddaughter who's in Hawaii now taking her master's degree in animal science, which is a very complicated, her specialty is genetics. was what I used to call a diploma guy. School, I took mathematics and physics, and you might have heard the story. I very quickly realized that unless I was going to get a master's or a doctorate, that education was much too specific for me. And teaching, I think, requires the teacher to be able to communicate especially well with the audience. Because the students are at different levels of understanding. And if you cannot interact, as opposed to, it's, you know, the term dialogue is Greek for flow of meaning. Too many professors stand in the front of the room, what I call the sage on the stage, the bro, you listen to me, I know everything. And they can't interact because they couldn't defend the position.

If you can't do that, when you get out into the real world, you're dead meat.

And, you know, I stopped doing that a long time ago because my forehead starts here, but it ends there. You know, so if I'm in the back, it's just like you got a smiley face in front of you. It's, you know, but the teaching, and I believe that's why. What we're doing with the lecture series is the way of the future. As I mentioned to you, there's a guy at MIT who teaches a class, The Secret of Life, and everybody has to take that class if you want a degree from MIT. He has a class online for free worldwide. He has the same exact class. He's got three cameras. He's a wonderful teacher, and he's a brilliant scientist. When you can get that, now we're going to get into a different world where here's the expert. And everybody's going to be craving that class. And any place that's got access to the internet, which is becoming more ubiquitous every day. Absolutely. It's going to be able to get this education for free.

Talk about leveling the playing field across the world.

Of course.

I agree with you. And what we're up against is this change notion. It's been. Since the 60s, I think that governments have been pushing that if you want your children to succeed, they've got to go to university. And somewhere in the range of 50% of the technical schools in America have shut over the last 15,20 years due to lack of interest. And if you want to try and find a plumber, an electrician.

Yeah, it's going to be interesting as we transition. And I'm in a quote, the baby boomer side. And Peggy Noonan from the Wall Street Journal just put up something about the problem that working from home is causing to society. You know, you've got to get back to the office because that's where you meet your wife or husband. That's where you find your enemies. That's how you learn to overcome different things. That's how you learn the political game at work. And what you just said, plumbers, electricians, most of the people that make the world turn don't have the option of working from home. They've got to go to a job site. Absolutely. And so what we're talking about, again, is the elite big business circumstance. And I don't believe that they understand that robotics and analytical intelligence and data analytics are going to replace a lot of big businesses work. Robots are going to take over a lot of jobs.

They can't displace the guy that's got to go or the gal that's got to go to the, to be a barista. You got to be there to make the coffee, to sell something at a drugstore.

So these people that make the world turn, they don't have access to learning experiences until now, where we can have these lecture series. Somebody who's interacting with the public. Wouldn't it be wonderful if they knew what marketing was? Wouldn't it be wonderful if they knew how to overcome objectives? Wouldn't it be wonderful if they could influence the people they interact with? Nobody does that now. I believe this is a trailblazer.

No, I agree with that 100%. And what really appeals to me is creating the platform for those people to have access to something that heretofore they haven't had. You talked about. professional certifications, doctors, lawyers, yourselves, teachers, having to every two years. We've got a lady by the name of Barbette Culpepper that's working with states across America to get our classes put into the curriculum so that it would qualify for those. And she's going to be successful. We're working with workforce development companies trying to provoke. you know, a car dealership or an engine repair shop to engage their employees more in continuous improvement because that has gone away.

Yep, it's absolutely true. And, you know, Wall Street Journal just did a survey maybe a month ago or Gallup. 41% of the workers in America right now are currently considering leaving their employment. It's an interesting transition period. COVID has compressed a lot of change into a very short period of time, which is very traumatic. It's caused all manner of, oh my God.

I'm going to go even further. We're building the plane as we're coming down the runway. We're not sure that we're ever going to take off.

You're up there with a wing.

So what becomes also, I think, really interesting is now the results come in as to the level of learning during virtual education. And if that doesn't expose the skills of the teacher, I don't know what does. It's it's this this transition is is very painful. I don't know if you see it down here, but the teachers unions and some of the labor unions are really pushing back on adapting and changing to the marketplace. Marketing is all about adapting to the audience and the audience is constantly changing.

Yeah. My granddaughter, who's now 21, you know, they both, my grandson and granddaughter, had birthdays at the end of June, beginning of July. So they're still, in my view, Neve's 20 and Declan's 16. And you're absolutely right that some people went. With virtual learning, that's just perfect for my grandson because there's no distractions. He did incredibly well. My granddaughter, who's a maniac, she got her degree in three years because when the pandemic hit, she went through two years of university and one year at home. Fine. So it worked for them. But a lot of the kids, you know, my daughter teaches in a very distressed area and having Internet connections is not common. And so if we seem, unless you are able to get out of your home because you don't have enough money to have a computer at home and go to a library or go to a common space, you're being left behind.

And the dilemma we have as a society, this is a fine experiment, but the results are going to come in 10 and 20 and 30 years from now when the generation that's going through virtual for the last two years or wherever the time period was. They've lost a year of schooling. Yeah. And the studies are in. It's very clear they've lost a year of learning. Now, what's that going to do to their incapacity in 20 years? They'll be back a year. They won't have the same curve. And how does society respond to that? It's the education is critical, but not just university. I agree with you on the need for a campus, but I think that's like a finishing school. not the primary school.

But I do believe that

It almost becomes an assessment of skills, needs, learning profiles, personality profiles, so that people, like when I came out of school, it was a tough time economically, and I wanted to work for IBM in programming or whatever, and they weren't hiring, so I had to wander around. One of our neighbors, where I grew up, offered. He ran a big company and I spent a week with their human resources people doing tests. And it said that I would be perfect as a firmer, which is kind of an interesting aside. But, you know, in high school, people need, children need, parents need to start having an understanding of what turns their child on. What are they passionate about? And we don't do that. The guidance counselors are a really, really critical job function in life today, much more so than ever before. And let me give one other little example that, you know, that interaction, that experience on the campus.

If you look at society and you go back, that's the European squares. On the weekend, everybody was in the square, sitting down, chatting with their neighbors, chatting, the socialization. You know, there's an old joke in Italy that the men would go in a clockwise. and the women would go on counterclockwise and they were flirting as they went by. And that's how you met your wife or husband.

Sure. We've got to create what that new one is. We don't know what it is yet, but it'll get there.

Yeah. So let's talk about your lectures specifically. At the end of the lecture, you've got a five-question quiz. Yes. Do you think there's a place for a more comprehensive assessment or not?

Yeah. And that's the penalty that most people don't see about teaching. You know, the amount of time that you have to do outside of the classroom, both class prep and then exams and grading papers. But one of the things you and I talked about a little bit earlier on is how classroom teaching and virtual teaching require different preparation and skills of the teacher.

Maybe when I'm class out of it, when

Yeah. No, it's very valid, maybe. And one of the points that I want to make is the content that is out there from Bonnie. We had nothing to do with. Bonnie was a complete free agent. We didn't interfere. We didn't edit. We didn't, you know.

Well, no, I think it's important that the audience understand this is your education. Yes. You know, in virtual learning, what they're saying, in classroom learning, too, is that if you can break the lecture term down. you increase learning and retention. So what we've done is we've segmented all of our classes. We have videos and the classes now have between four and 10 segments that are all videos. And they end with a quiz. And professors are doing that now in the classroom because we've got this technology. We've got tablets, we've got phones, we've got laptops. Everybody can communicate with me now. So we put up on the board. Here's a question. And we wait a minute for people to get the answer. And the professor can see the results right now.

They would have caught me, I'll tell you, because I was a very rare attendee to classes. I was too busy doing other things.

Yeah. It's, you know, I used to tease nobody would fall asleep in the classroom with me. It's impossible. On the virtual side, it's easy. And one of the things that we're trying to do with the way we structure things and the way you structure things, too, is somebody can start the lecture. and they get interrupted, a phone call or somebody comes in, they can pause it and they can come back to exactly where it was that they left. You know, life is pretty nice now, if you think about that. Sunday morning, it's quiet time for somebody. Boom. Our podcast, people driving, listen to the podcast. This one will go up on Vimeo and it'll go up on YouTube and it'll be the same thing. So it's, I think it's a very, very exciting time, but really challenging for learners. Yeah. It's hard for...

Yeah, it's hard for people to understand where the resource is. You know, we can do these searches with the golden age of information. We can find the answer to just about every question, but the real deal is what are you going to do about it?

Yeah, not just that, Bonnie. I agree with that 100%. Not just that. It's the competing views. We're having dinner last night, five of us, and we're talking about the World Trade Center, the before and after and the effect of religion. And the comment was, well, it was mostly Muslims that died. And it was my granddaughter's comment. And I said, well, where the heck did you get that from? Oh, that's pretty common knowledge. I said, really? Have a look and see what it was. And she did. Bless her heart. She's open-minded and is curious. And there were 47 people that were Muslims and the folks that died at the World Trade Center. And I said, what does that tell you? She said, obviously, I needed to do more research before I came to any conclusion. But individuals aren't challenged on the development of their conclusion. Which is also one of the things that in education we've lost.

Like you were talking earlier, the view that a lot of children have or people have at school is the back of their teacher. Because they're on the whiteboard or blackboard or grayboard or whatever the heck it is. Teaching and learning have to evolve. And when you leave school, that's truly when learning begins.

It's the Japanese philosophy of Kaizen. Every day I'm going to do my job a little bit better. It might be 100% doesn't matter. It's better. And learning curiosity is an attribute that I think everybody's got. Yeah, I'd like to say that everybody in life, everybody, everybody on the planet,8 billion or whatever it is, people have three shots at a brass ring. And I'm going to say the brass ring is a life altering experience. It has nothing to do with money or career or status. It's your life changes. And, you know, my granddaughter. she's a bit of a geek and she works really hard. And one of those brass rings for her was in high school. She did a project at UCLA in science and it allowed, she was in her junior year. So the second to last year of high school in Quebec, that would be grade 10 before CIGEP. And she's down at the university campus away from home, couple of weeks working with.

There were qualifiers to get in, but working with people that were equally as diligent, intelligent, whatever you want to call her. And she realized, oh, I'm okay in this environment. Number one. Number two, they had to do research and stand up in front of 500 people and make a presentation. And at 16, that altered her life. Yeah. You know, so, wow. And everybody has them. The trick with these things, though, Bonnie, is not everybody can see them or recognizes them. So we don't have the opportunity to deviate. We left Quebec in 77, left my family. My wife left her family. We went 3,000 miles away. Now,100 years ago, if you did that, you would never see them again. Yeah. You would never communicate with them again. It was now you can FaceTime.

Yeah, yeah, it's unbelievable. I got, you know, I don't know what the number is, something over 8 million miles in airplanes. I don't need to do that anymore. I can do this. Yes. So I don't have to go through 12-hour time zone changes to talk to Europe. I can do it here. I'm in the morning, there at night, and away we go.

Yeah, I think, I hope most people during the pandemic had the opportunity to re-examine their lives. and find out what's truly important to them.

And that's also, you know, having, having a, the lifelong learning platform has got all manner of, of things to do to make it complete. And, you know, we're kind of early adopters, aren't we? Of some of this process. One of our. Yeah, no, it's, it's there. One of our early adopters is or the contributors is Sarah Hanks, who was an engineer at General Electric and got all of the lean and Six Sigma and all of that training, data analytics, et cetera. And she she talks about in anything that she does, she looks for early adopters. As a teacher, we have the same thing and we kind of deal with that in the form of quizzes or in the real classroom, the discussion. In the virtual classroom, the quiz. Yeah. Where are you? Are you with me? And it's really hard to do that virtually.

It's an amazing thing. I think you've done a wonderful job with these lectures and the lecture series. I think the evolution, the basic marketing start, and then the market research second, and just keep on. pushing the social media marketing piece that you're going to do next year. I don't know that there's many people that understand how to approach that. Most businesses that have a website, how do they know whether it's effective or not?

Well, you're going to laugh at this. Okay. I was... I got involved with teaching athletics. So we had, I was skiing in the wintertime and swimming and tennis and golf in the summertime. But there's two seasons that are kind of dead meat, like spring. Skiing's done. We're not ready for the warm weather. Here's fall. Summer's done. There's no snow yet. So a group of guys and I would go to the same bar and we were all instructors in all of this stuff. The maitre d' at the bar took our car keys when we walked in. And he would not give us, and this is the 60s, he would not give it back. He saved my life, I can't tell you how many times.

hell yes. Unbelievable. His name was Fernando. He was wonderful.

question. And not just mine. I'm sure many, although he didn't take the keys. We were regulars every Thursday night. It's where I met my wife. A group of us went on Friday night, and that's where we met. You know, we don't need to go to the business to do these things, to interact. There's other platforms. But the democratization of education, having access, having everybody having access to the same products, same opportunities. That is such a powerful thing that 100 years from now,50, whatever the time period is, society is going to be the beneficiary of that.

Yeah, and the algorithms that people are creating that make those decisions, are being created by people that don't understand what the audience is that they're trying to appeal to. I got to have people that have 80% on this. Like you say, not 79. One of the guys I went to school with had a photographic memory. And I remember him sitting in the hallway prior to an exam, and he was just flipping pages because he could read fast too. He got 100% on the exam. We met again the next year. And I was talking to him about that subject and had nothing. There was nothing in his head about it. It's as if he never existed in that classroom.

Yeah, I think it's going to be successful. I think people are going to enjoy the learning process. I thank you for your contributions here and your energy. I look forward to seeing what happens. Is there any kind of coda, any wrap up that you'd like to put on this discussion?

Thank you very much, Bonnie. And thank you for those of you listening. We appreciate your attendance. We hope you got something out of this. And I look forward to having Bonnie back and you back at a future candid conversation. Mahalo. Thank you for listening to our podcast. We appreciate your support. Should you have any thoughts or comments? please don't hesitate to contact us at www. learningwithoutscars. com. The time is now. Mahalo.