What's Working In Marketing™: Balancing The Art & Science in Marketing with Fergie Cancade, Director of Global Athletes & Ambassadors at lululemon

What's Working in Marketing™ is a podcast where we uncover what’s working across the digital landscape by tapping into the world’s best data-backed research and through candid conversations with industry experts. Join us if you're ready to learn what's working when it comes to your marketing efforts.

On this episode, we spoke with Fergie Cancade, Director of Global Athletes & Ambassadors at lululemon, a technical athletic apparel company known best for its products for yoga, running, training and other sweaty pursuits. Fergie shares his his thoughts on the convergence of creative, data, and insights within marketing, lessons he's learned about linking marketing strategy to overarching business objectives, and why marketers should be more willing to fail.

You can listen to What's Working in Marketing™ – A Podcast by RightMetric wherever you get your podcasts — including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Tune In, iHeartRadio, and Pocket Casts.

Here's a full transcript of my conversation with Fergie:

Charlie Grinnell: On this episode, I'm joined by Fergie Cancade, Director of Global Athletes and Ambassadors at lululemon. Thanks for joining me today, Ferg.

Fergie Cancade: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Charlie.

Charlie Grinnell: I want to start by kind of taking things back to the beginning of your career. You've been able to work on some really, really cool projects over the years, but how did you get involved in marketing?

Fergie Cancade: I sort of got into marketing through almost just circumstance or fell into it, I suppose. I always was on the sports side of things growing up in Vernon. For those who don't know, it's in the middle of BC and there's not much to do outside of sport. There's a great ski hill, Silver Star, and there's awesome mountain biking trails, lakes, and whatnot. So, it's sort of breeded sport for a lot of us. For me it was skiing, and I thought that I would go down the route of being a professional skier, much like a lot of my friends did, and that would be my career. And I quickly started realizing that actually wasn't my core capability.

Fergie Cancade: I was a good skier, still am, but in comparison to the people I was hanging out with who went on to be the world's best, it was not even close. So my dad pushed me into going to university and I started that, but I knew that I wanted to always be involved in sport. If it wasn't going to be professional athlete route I wanted to somehow work within that space, so I went to school always with that in mind. Every case study I did was about sports or brands that work in sports or work with athletes. And as I was going through that, I just tried to keep my foot in that space. So I remember, I was in I think first or second year of university and I was working at the ski shop here in town and was invited to go to Vegas for the ski snow sports trade show and worked with a brand called Orage.‍

Fergie Cancade: My role was to literally model outerwear for buyers from stores, so I spent like 12 hours a day on the floor at this trade show in Vegas just putting on jackets, taking off jackets, walking around and showing people the features and stuff. That's really like where it all started. I started meeting people in the industry, different sales reps or marketing managers or athletes and it just sort of snowballed from there. I would get invited to go on catalog shoots here and there and do different things, and as I was going through this progression of school and trying to build my network. One of my best friends, TJ Schiller, who was the best slopestyle skier on earth for a long time, asked me to just help him out with a couple of emails. He didn't feel like he was set up to write emails back to his sponsors with a bit of a tough conversation.‍

Fergie Cancade: So, that's where it really all started. I started out helping people write emails and put together a proposal and that sort of thing. So we did that for a little bit, just kind of doing it, just helping out. Eventually TJ said, "Hey, I've been dropped from my eyewear sponsor, I need to find a new one. If you want to just take that on and go find me a new eyewear sponsor, I'll give you a commission." So I was like, "All right, that sounds like a cool project." Took it away, ended up signing him to, I believe it was Dragon at the time, and that kind of kicked off this agency idea of an action sports agency based in Canada, which at the time didn't really exist but there was a lot of really talented athletes, especially in the action sports space, coming out of Canada, and people that I knew and had contact with.‍

Fergie Cancade: So third year of university, I really started digging into that and I was going to school and running my business, and it just snowballed from there. The more deals you sign, the more things you do with brands, more people you meet, and it just kind of continues on from there. So did that for a bit and I was managing Kaya Turski in like 2010, 2011 it was right when skiing was being included into the Olympics. So there was a lot of money getting injected into the sport, and I did a deal with Kaya for a Red Bull sponsorship and I started getting to know the team in the marketing department at Red Bull and started really getting an understanding of what that brand was like and really inspired actually by what they were up to. So in 2011 they ended up giving me an offer to go in house to take over athlete marketing for Red Bull Canada.

Fergie Cancade: Jumped on that, thought that I'd do it maybe for a year or two years, get to know a bunch more contacts and then come back to running my agency with a lot more ins with different brands and be able to really blow it up. Ended up staying there for I think seven and a half years with Red Bull, which was great. Then just was looking for something different. Started chatting with the team over at lululemon and getting an understanding of what the brand was up to. It was always a brand that it was up to really interesting things and had a really unique capture on their market and their guest. So after about a year of conversation with lululemon, ended up coming in house with them and taking over their athlete marketing side. Then have evolved since then to now I oversee all of their ambassadors and athletes and sport partnerships and a few other random things that sort of come across my desk day to day.

Charlie Grinnell: So you've done a little bit, is what I think we're hearing here, but I think one of the things that sticks out to me, which is so interesting was how everything that you've done has been rooted in sport. But with what you said about writing emails for TJ or working in other aspects of the business, you've built skills across communications, digital, PR, strategy, whatever it is. Can you talk a little bit more about how that kind of came to be, why you did that, has it helped you, that sort of thing?

Fergie Cancade: I've always really been interested in so many different pieces of different businesses. There's so much to learn about all the different functions of a business and what actually keeps the lights on. So I think at the core of it, it's like the general interest to be a know it all. That can be self serving a little bit. I think about whether it be informing digital strategy or making movies or whatever it might be. But I always just informed myself on all of the brass tacks of those different functions because, one, I was genuinely interested in it and, two, was that I knew that if I was able to understand it and speak the language, I would be able to influence it more as well.

Fergie Cancade: So if I wanted to get my priorities done and the projects off the ground that I felt passionate about, I knew that I had to understand what maybe in some cases what that channel needed. So thinking back of like the Red Bull days, to propose a mountain bike movie that I wanted to go do. In order for me to be able to make that happen, I had to be able to speak the language of the media house folks, the production partner, the athletes, the social media team, and understand what all of their priorities were. Because, if I could layer in their priorities into mine, things just get green lit. But if you're trying to push against a brick wall and you're trying to force your priority into someone else that actually that's not their priority, you're never going to get anywhere and you're not going to make any friends along the way.‍

Charlie Grinnell: Yeah. It's interesting to hear you talk about this idea of translating, and it's almost like ... it kind of like sounds like it's internal sales almost.

Fergie Cancade: Yeah, a little bit, right? You have to get people excited about what you're excited about really. So that's sort of like, yeah, it's like internal sales are almost the internal marketing. You have to be able to go lobby the folks that you're working with in order to get your dream projects, or in some cases it might be really creative ideas that sound pretty weird out of the gate, and if you can understand what they need, much like you have to understand what your customer needs to market them, then you can sort of package that up and make it work. Right? But that's the first step, is getting them bought in. Then on to the next step of actually how do we get our customer or our consumer bought into what we're trying to do here.

Charlie Grinnell: That makes a lot of sense. I'm just thinking about with your background and where marketing kind of is, this idea of balancing art and science, right? If we think of marketing as a pendulum or the that goes kind of back and forth between the two of them. Over the last few years with the rise of digital, we've kind of seen that marketing pendulum swing back and forth from brand focus to performance focused. Why do you think that's the case, and how do you think we got here?

Fergie Cancade: Well, it's sort of the natural ebbs and flows of everything as things modernize and change over time, but if you think about marketing or advertising way back in the day, there wasn't a lot of insight available. Probably the most data or insight available would be like, "Okay, we roughly know that we're distributing X amount of newspapers in X amount of regions and our readership based on subscription is this demographic," whatever it might be. Right? Then advertisers or marketers just have to do their best to be above the fold, ideally close to the front before people get bored. So there was some sort of like nuance to it that people understood, but there was no real way to measure it.

Fergie Cancade: Yes, I can the on the front cover of a newspaper and it roughly hits this many people, but I have no idea how many of those people actually like our product, like our brand, would have a propensity to buy, have bought before. There was none of that insight. Right? We didn't even know what their interests were other than newspapers. So now as things shift, have shifted into digital over the years, now we have all that hard data. We know exactly what our demographics our targets are, we can target them more with paid. All of those things are at our fingertips, so now we've gone from what was very much gut informed. Like, "Okay, I think being above the fold is going to be better than being below the fold." Those types of things now have shifted to very hard data of like, "No, I know exactly who this person is that's consuming this content or engaging with an ad." So as a result of that, trying to be efficient with budgets, things have swung very far into that realm where no one wants to spend a dollar unless they can see two coming back.

Charlie Grinnell: Yep. That makes a ton of sense. Talking about that brand and performance focused, do you think that with the pendulum swinging more towards that performance thing, do you think this has created a fear within marketers about making mistakes? And if so, if you agree with that, why?

Fergie Cancade: I don't necessarily think there's a fear about making mistakes, but I think there's a fear of not performing. Because now what you have is when you have something that is fully performance marketing focused and then you have a creative idea that is informed by gut or experience or innovation, let's say. If you're going to invest the same amount of dollars into those two things, you have one that is unproven and untried, then you have one that is, and I know that if I want to hit marketing executives in Vancouver named Charlie who are male, I can do that right now versus the creative idea where they say, "I don't know, you're investing the same amount of money. Is it going to work? Are you going to actually reach the intended audience? How's it going to the perceived?"

Fergie Cancade: So I think that's one piece of it. When everything is measurable, I feel like the propensity to fail is stripped away from people in creative marketing positions. And I think that failure is such an important piece of innovation and modernizing things, because without failure you don't learn, and without failure you don't try. So if you want to be creative and you want to do things different, you have to have an ability to fail and not have fear of that. So it sort of is a fear about making mistakes, but it's calculated mistakes, calculated risks where I know that if I have the backing of my leadership team or my bosses to go out and try something regardless of whether it might fail, then I know I can try and I know I can learn and I know I can innovate.

Fergie Cancade: If you look at a lot of the things that you know are really innovative and cutting edge today, there's a super high propensity to fail. And in fact, probably a lot of people did fail trying to get to that point. So we need to instill that culture back into marketing of don't go and try to fail, but don't be afraid to fail when you're trying something new.

Charlie Grinnell: That makes a lot of sense. Another guest on the show was talking about, he made the reference towards gambling and how it's like when you're gambling you can throw it all down on one number, if it's say roulette, or you can make strategic bets and be somewhat informed about it and then take things and learn things as you go from there. So it's interesting to hear you say that as well. I want to talk a little bit about the different aspects related to the pendulum of marketing. So if we're talking about marketing itself, the creative aspect and data, how do you think all that stuff fits together?‍

Fergie Cancade: My feeling is it's all about taking each one of those pieces to inform your plan. Insights and measurement is amazing. All the data that we can capture now is amazing. So I don't want it to sound like I'm against performance marketing or I'm against measuring things, because I'm not. But I just know that it's only one piece of that puzzle and you need to have other pieces of the puzzle like creative, like innovation, all of that, like gut instinct in order to create a really good plan.

Fergie Cancade: Actually creative is a good call out there because if you look at insights and creative, those are two pieces that you don't fit that well together. They're actually probably on the two opposite sides of where the pendulum is swinging, so you need to be cautious about how you pepper those things in. But what we know is that an insight might say, "A really good, engaging creative looks like this," but your brand might actually tell you otherwise because that insight doesn't match up with the recognition of your brand or where you're trying to take it. So I think it's nice to have the insight and you still have to have the opportunity to say, "Actually that doesn't fit for us, we're going to go this way because it makes more sense."

Charlie Grinnell: Yeah, that makes sense. I think it's interesting to hear you say putting two things on the end of the spectrum, because if it's like data and insights and then creativity that kind of maps to okay art on one end and science on the other end, then you know the role of marketing kind of in the middle as almost like the conductor to use an orchestra example there of how it all comes together to make a nice sound to continue the analogy there.‍

Fergie Cancade: I also think too, and you know this sort of sentiment, but you can't be afraid to just do something because it's cool or because interesting or because it's new, and insights might actually tell you the opposite. Like, "Don't do that," but you still have to go and just ... like the main insight being, this is cool and it's the right thing to do. Let's just try it.‍

Charlie Grinnell: Yeah. I think back to time at Red Bull where someone said to us this idea of going through the right steps versus doing the right thing, "You can go through the right steps and do the wrong thing, but doing the right thing is always the right thing." And I know that's probably, that can be kind of perceived as fluffy, but I've kept that top of mind throughout my career and I don't necessarily know how to articulate it without sounding pretty dumb, but at the same time there have been aspects of it where I've definitely felt this, like we've gone through the right steps and we actually did the wrong thing.‍

Charlie Grinnell: But then there are some times where I'm like, "Yeah, we kind of threw process and organization to the side and we're doing this because it's just the right thing to do."‍

Fergie Cancade: 100%.‍

Charlie Grinnell: Let's switch gears a little bit here. Many marketers I've kind of talked to, whether it be clients of RightMetric or people who work in marketing who are friends of mine believe that this area of the business, marketing is kind of going to go under the microscope in the present to the future. Do you agree or disagree with that, and why?‍

Fergie Cancade: I guess it depends on how you define under the microscope. I think that there's going to be a lot more investment going towards marketing. Just recent data out of the States. They're saying the general role of the marketing manager is going to grow by like 26,000 jobs in the next 10 years.‍

Fergie Cancade: So just by that, that's probably at least 13,000 companies that are going to be focusing on marketing or having a focus on marketing, let's put it that way. So I think with that, with more investment, obviously the microscope gets a little bit closer, but I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with that, because I think having a microscope and having someone poke holes in your ideas is actually just a piece of the process and it's how we grow and how we learn and how we bring in diverse perspectives into what we're trying to do.‍

Charlie Grinnell: Yeah. I guess that goes back to what you were kind of saying earlier about having to kind of internally sell things and convince people of things, that comes with having this deep understanding of the business as a whole and how you play into it.‍

Fergie Cancade: Yeah, absolutely. There's one piece of internally selling it, but also I think too, just understanding if you want to be a creative marketer, you have to understand all the little bits and pieces of the business and how things work, because that's actually sometimes where the ideas come from.‍

Charlie Grinnell: So do you have any examples of that off the top of your head? I know I'm putting you on the spot, but that is actually really interesting when you say that.‍

Fergie Cancade: This isn't actually an idea that I've seen come to life, but in the age that we live in where the environment and being sustainable is really, really important or at least it should be to a lot of brands is I think that marketing can really help out stakeholders in that side of the business from like a supply chain and manufacturing and all those things. I think there's an opportunity to understand those things, and how can I say athlete, let's say in my space at work, help promote the sustainability of a supply chain around a brand or help people understand that? Because, what we know is consumer behavior is going to be shifted by the sustainability of a brand.‍

Fergie Cancade: I have a higher propensity to buy from a brand that cares about the environment, that's for sure, and I know a lot of people are like me, but there's a lot of brands that I actually don't know how sustainable they are. Without looking at, okay, maybe my e-commerce package got shipped in recycled plastic or recycled cardboard, but I don't know what their supply chain looks like. They might be terrible. So I think there's actually an opportunity for marketers start thinking about those things that normally we wouldn't think, Oh, a consumer really wants to see a cool story about our supply chain, but actually in this day and age they do, and you can't identify those opportunities as a marketing person unless you understand it.‍

Charlie Grinnell: That's super, super interesting. And I guess that kind of ties nicely into the thing that I wanted to talk about next, which is this power of brand and community within marketing. Obviously lululemon is a brand that's known for creating an incredible sense of community. Given the current climate that we're in, why does community matter so much right now? And not saying that it didn't matter before, but I feel like that's something that recently has bubbled up to the top again during this global pandemic.‍

Fergie Cancade: Community is a bit of a buzzword in marketing right now, for sure. I think most businesses have some sort of a community or field marketing aspect to their brands, and I expect that that will continue to grow. But community is really just like the physical sort of interpretation of your brand. It's like the relationships that make your brand matter. It's sort of like you are who you hang out with a little bit, so that can have incredible power for brands from the landscape of giving you feedback on campaigns or products or innovation ideas, they can be great advocates for you.‍

Fergie Cancade: All of that is amazing, but I think what's really important in the community and what we're seeing really powerfully today given the current climate is that community is what you need to invest in, in the good times and in the rough times, and businesses in the current state that have invested or talked about community a lot in the good times and then they're divesting in the bad times, that's over for them because people aren't going to forget. And those that have invested in the good times and now are investing more in the tough times, those are the brands that I think their communities are really going to rally behind them and support them because it's just like any community, communities we live in, it's a push ball. They support us and we support them. And if it's not both ways it doesn't work.‍

Charlie Grinnell: I really like what you said about it being a fluffier buzzword in marketing, because I completely agree. I kind of have a followup to that. So how can marketers effectively communicate the power or the value of community up the chain? Because if it is one of those things that is perceived as buzzwordy or fluffy in marketing, do you have any pieces of advice for marketers who are trying to communicate the value of it? I feel like you do such a great job of breaking things down, so I'd love to hear anything you've got on that.‍

Fergie Cancade: My perception of it is that because at the core of community you have to be doing the right things for the community it really is that mix of the measurable and the unmeasurable. So yeah, so you can look at your community and how they drive in sales. Maybe your close community has a discount code or a trackable link or some way in which you can show commercial value to your community. That's one piece of it for sure. But then where the power in community comes from doing the things that you can't measure. How are we supporting our community while they're navigating the tough times of Covid-19? That to me is the things that you make decisions about doing the right thing versus the measurable thing. And together it makes the perfect sort of pie.‍

Fergie Cancade: So right now I think it's prudent of brands to invest in communities in whatever way they're able to and just do the right things to support people. To me, that's what people should be doing. However, in good times where maybe it becomes a little bit more commercial and a little bit more transactional, maybe that's where you measure a little bit more, like, "How is our community driving people to come into our restaurant?" Or whatever your business might be I think you can start measuring and engaging the community to create that engagement with your brand a little bit more, but it's a fine dance of doing the right thing and doing the commercially viable thing.‍

Charlie Grinnell: One of the things that came to my mind was an excerpt from a book by Scott Galloway, The Algebra of Happiness, and one of the things he says in that book, which immediately just kind of popped into my head, was he talks about this idea of fighting unfair, and basically what fighting unfair is like what are you willing to do?‍

Charlie Grinnell: It's a book that's tailored towards professional career development, that sort of thing, but he talks about fighting unfair. What are you willing to do that nobody else is willing to do to set yourself apart? It's almost like what I heard there was like, it's like that for brands. What are brands willing to do that no other brands are willing to do to set themselves apart from a brand affinity perspective or a community perspective?‍

Fergie Cancade: Yeah, absolutely. And those things do pay dividends later. Doing those things that support your communities or it could even be supporting your internal communities, your staff, right? Like it's right now it's challenging times and people both within businesses, entrepreneurs in the communities, like everyone is having a challenging time. So what are you willing to do that actually doesn't make business sense will make sense later, and you just have to trust in that.‍

Fergie Cancade: So that's one of those things that right now, no, we can't measure that. However, in three years you might see a bit of an upswing on your sales numbers and it could be attributed back to that. That's why it's important not to measure everything, because if you think about measuring that, that seemingly silly decision for the business to support the community, if you measure that, the data is going to tell you don't do it. If you don't measure it and you go with your gut and you go with what's right for the people that matter to your business, it will pay you back later.‍

Charlie Grinnell: I find it funny because the podcast is called Measure What Matters and we're talking about not measuring things or measuring doing things in a balance, so I do agree. I think one of the things that we talk about a lot internally at RightMetric is this idea of informed intuition and that balance, just because you can count things doesn't mean you should count them or just because things are hard to count doesn't mean you shouldn't count them. So I think that, yeah, it goes along the lines with what you're saying in terms of having that balance of art and science. So that makes a lot of sense to me.‍

Fergie Cancade: What I love always coming back to is insights inform the plan, and I think that's great. Insights do not write the plan. So to the name of the podcast almost it's perfect, right? Measure What Matters. If it doesn't matter, don't measure it.‍

Charlie Grinnell: Damn, that was smart. I do agree with that. Yeah, that's well said. Let's talk a little bit about the future. We've kind of talked about present, we've talked about your background. What gets you the most excited when it comes to marketing? There's a lot of stuff in marketing right now. There's new platforms, there's buzzword, there's kind of all this stuff flying around. What is the thing that kind of sticks out to you that you get most excited about?‍

Fergie Cancade: Something I've been reading a lot about recently, and this is not like a crazy new concept in marketing, but it's just that the concept of contextual marketing, and I think that it's actually a result of a pendulum swing is that people are talking about this a lot. The idea of the concept is generally just that you're giving your customer what they need when they need it, where they need it. So you're not blasting them with all kinds of noise all the time. You're being really conscious about what their needs are at any given moment and you're adapting your marketing or your content or your plan to suit that. And I think it's really smart and I think it's really timely in a time right now where we're facing a little bit of compression of the abundance.‍

Fergie Cancade: I think for a long time it was sort of like a winner's economy. You could start any business, you could launch any product. If you had a bit of a paid budget, you could probably get some consumers and start making money. Now that sort of scatter gun approach doesn't work or will cease to work as well as it did. So I think the idea of contextual marketing, especially around content is really, really interesting. It's actually the perfect marriage of insights and creativity where I need the insights to understand the context and then I need the creativity to create content or serve my consumer with that. It might be content in the form of moving images, but it might be content, like what are we delivering for our consumers at experiences or events?‍

Fergie Cancade: What do they need? When we get out of this isolated state of Covid-19 and people are able to safely gathered together again, what event do they need? You know? So that to me like really gets the juices flowing as to, how do I create the best possible marketing experience for someone based on what they actually need, not based on BS?‍

Charlie Grinnell: Yeah. Absolutely. And I have a followup to that. On the flip side of it, is there anything that you think is over-hyped or a distraction?‍

Fergie Cancade: I don't know if this is overblown. I don't actually have the answer for this and I don't know if anyone does. If they do, I'd love to hear it. But I'm really curious to see how people's behaviors change as a result of the current scenario that we're in. So I don't know that it's overblown. It could be perfectly proportionately blown. But, I'm interested to see, like the culture that we're in right now where we're on Zoom calls day in and day out, whether it be with our family or our colleagues, we're doing workouts over Instagram. We're buying stuff online, we're getting takeout food, all of these things.‍

Fergie Cancade: A lot of people have said this could be the new norm. We need to understand that people may not want to gather the way we used to before Coronavirus, and so we need to be thinking about how we do things differently going forward. I think an element of that is probably true, but I'm really interested to see what behaviors shift or if we just bounce back and our behaviors go back to the same, I hope they don't. I think there's a lot we can learn from this, but I'm very curious to see where we're at when the dust settles, and who knows when that will be. So I think that that dictates it a little bit as well, is how long does this go for people to actually form new habits versus just bounce back and get back into what my day to day was six weeks ago.‍

Charlie Grinnell: Yeah. I feel like, just to expand on that, it's almost like Covid has been almost an accelerant to certain behaviors, and yeah, it's interesting to hear you talk about the idea of building habits, right? Because you can't necessarily build a habit overnight, but as we start to get in this kind of prolonged period, you start to form habits. Whether it be, like I think about delivery groceries, right? Some people who would typically go to the grocery store who have now been forced to get on an app or whatever, and now they've maybe had that experience and they're like, "Whoa, I really like this. I'm going to do delivery groceries as we go forward."‍

Charlie Grinnell: Or I think about Peloton and like their growth. That's been one that's widely reported where some people are like, "Yeah, I loved going to the spin class in a studio, but I also love doing Peloton classes." And yeah, what we're interested in I think is how to quantify that. That's something that we're trying to look at on an ongoing basis with our clients. But when all the dust settles, it's going to be fascinating to look back at pre-Covid what those behaviors were and those patterns were, and then like how this has shifted because there will likely be another pandemic in the future. I'm not a medical doctor, but I'm like in the history of humanity, there will be another pandemic at some point, as there has been.‍

Charlie Grinnell: What will be unique about this one is that we actually have data available to be able to understand that, whereas there wasn't the amount of data available back with the Spanish flu or whatever they were comparing it to previously. So yeah, I mean I'm the same way, and it's going to be fascinating to also see just how brands are navigating that.‍

Fergie Cancade: Yeah, and I think that there's things we're seeing already, like going to the grocery store once a week, let's say, or as little as you can and standing at least six feet away from people. To me, I was at the grocery store the other day I was like, "This is great. Why do I to be within 6 feet of someone else? What's so important to us about us being over each other's shoulders grabbing soup cans. It doesn't need to be that way.

Fergie Cancade: So that's just like a societal thing that actually I kind of enjoy, but an element that that is going to shift how people buy in a grocery store. So what implications does that have for not only the marketing folks, but the people running the business to understand like, "Ooh, actually we don't need a 18,000 square foot grocery store anymore because people are coming in a little less often and they're spreading out a bit more. We don't have that same and flow issue that we had before. So it'll be really, yeah, it's going to be really interesting. I'm super curious to see what the fallout is at the end of this.

Charlie Grinnell: Yeah. And how the world shifts, I guess, outside of marketing. Because it all is in interlinked, interrelated, however you want to describe it.

Fergie Cancade: Yeah. I mean marketing is just sort of studying people's behavior and trying to serve something up in front of them. So really, you need to understand those pieces of it to understand how you're going to get whatever it might be in front of them and have them engage with it.

Charlie Grinnell: Absolutely. So as we start to kind of wind down this episode, do you have any advice for marketers that they should be keeping top of mind? What's something that you've kind of been thinking about as we've been going through this, whether it be your career or this pandemic?

Fergie Cancade: I think, and we talked about this earlier on in the episode and I want to encourage people to go out and try to fail, and that sounds sort of dramatic, but go and be as creative as you possibly can. Go with your gut. Think of new ideas, and failing is totally fine provided that you learn from it, get up, dust yourself off, and move forward. So I don't say try to fail and that you fail on everything that you do, but go out and try to be innovative and try to push yourself and be creative and just go with those things that sometimes make sense even though you might not be able to quantify them or measure them.

Charlie Grinnell: Well said. What's the best place for people to find you online? Where can they get at you and ask questions if they have any?

Fergie Cancade: You can hit me on Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn. It's all just Fergie Cancade, one word.

Charlie Grinnell: Cool. Well, Ferg, thanks for taking the time to join me today. I appreciate you sharing your insights and we'll see you soon.

Fergie Cancade: Yeah, it sounds good. Thanks for having me. It was fun.

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