Daddy, what do you do for a job?

Have you ever asked your kids what they thought you did for a living? If you haven’t recently, try it out. You may discover that by figuring out how to explain it to them, you’ll figure more out for yourself. My kids now ages 10, (soon to be) 8, and (soon to be) 6 asked me that a couple of weeks ago and it caught me by surprise.

Lately, the kids have been very interested in economics. Sometimes it’s simply their concern that I’m not spending their iTunes gift card balances (Ok, I did once but I had to have Pudding Monsters…). Other times it’s making sure they each get equal reading/story time with my wife and I. 3 kids with 2 parents is difficult to keep “fair”. On a more serious note, however, whey have been very interested in understanding about careers, jobs, paychecks, and going to work. This has no doubt come up as we continue to talk about the issue of hunger in our area with them. The Hungry Kate campaign was certainly the catalyst. If you haven’t seen or learned more about it you totally should…like now.

So during dinner a couple of weeks ago, they asked me:

“What do you do for your job Daddy?”

Before I could answer Boo (5) said, “He’s the Frozen Food Master!” and was quickly corrected by E (10) with, “That’s not his job, that’s his other job. Two things about those quick 2 sentences: Yay for branding myself well enough that my son knows my professional title and word up! to my daughter for identifying that Freezerburns is in fact a job too.

G Man (7) said, “Daddy works on a computer all day.”

E: “I thought he’s in meetings all day.”

Boo: “Remember last time we went to Daddy’s office, we got Jelly Belly’s!”

E: “That’s not his job Boo.”

Boo: “And then we played ping pong!”

E: “Daddy, I got to draw on your whiteboard!”

G Man: “And watch movies on your iPad!”

This went on for a few minutes before they realized they should just ask me again. And that’s where things got a little stressful. The reason for my stress is I couldn’t explain it easily. I’m the CMO of my company and I spend hours tweaking our value proposition statements and I realized none of it made sense to my kids. Or maybe I was afraid to explain it all.

Terror.

Maybe that’s a problem with our value proposition statement. “Naw, it’s fine. We are talking to professionals in a very specific niche market! If they don’t understand it then they aren’t our target!” “You are an idiot Greg, if you can’t go all Denzel in Philadelphia and explain it like you’re a 4 year old then you ain’t a good marketer.”

What if I explain what I do: The thing that I’m passionate about, spent my whole career crafting my expertise and they think it’s boring? What if they instantly realize my superhero cape is just a pillow case?

In a nutshell, I punted to buy time for me to assess my offensive scheme for the next scoring drive. I said “Daddy does work on computers but that’s not what I do. I work with people and companies. I help them sell things better.”

Pardon the vagueness and simplicity of that statement. I know it’s less than stellar. But remember, I needed to punt. No one cares how good the snap was as long as the receiving team has to run back to get the ball.

After spending the night thinking about the best way to approach explaining it I resorted back to the fundamentals of what we do in conversion optimization. And that is the scientific method. I did an Ignite Talk on our scientific method approach to conversion and I used a school lunch lady example to explain it. That was the approach I took.

I explained that sometimes people like to buy things on their computer.

G Man: “Instead of going to the mall or Target”

E: “like on Amazon?”

Me: “Yes like on Amazon. But sometimes they think they are going to buy something and for one reason or another, they don’t. They may put something in their shopping cart but then leave it in there. There are tons of reasons why they may do that. It could be they found it cheaper somewhere else or they got distracted and did something else instead. It could be they were scared they wouldn’t get it on time or that when they got it, it wouldn’t fit. They could be thinking they could get t faster at the store or that there are different colors of the same item at a different store.

What we do at work is try to figure out why people don’t buy things and try to get more people to buy more things. So we split the list.”

E: “What does split the list mean?”

Me: “Sorry, too technical. What that means is we cut the customers in half.”

Boo: “Cut in half like what Obi-Wan did to Darth Maul?” [Ok, he didn’t really say that but that would have been an epic comparison.]

Me: “What that means is if there were 100 people that put things in their shopping cart and none of them bought stuff, we would take 50 of them and send them to one checkout line and the other 50 we would send to a different one.”

E: “Oh! So you run an experiment!”

Me: “Yes! exactly like that! Then if we see that the people we sent to one of the checkout lines actually buy more stuff then we send everyone to that checkout line until we think of another kind of checkout line to send 50 people to.”

E: “How do you think about what to put in the lines?”

Me: “We start with a hypothesis of what people want and then we put it in the line to see if we are right!”

G Man: “Wouldn’t that line get long?”

Me: “Yes it would. So sometimes we’ll make a faster line to see if that makes more people happy. Sometimes, we give them different ways to pay to see if that makes them happier.”

And in that instance, I knew that I had finally explained to them what Daddy does for a living. You see, on paper (and on my LinkedIn profile) it will say strategic marketer, relationship marketer, optimization expert. But what I truly do for a living is help people understand things. Sometimes that’s helping them understand their purpose in life, the answers to their questions, or the niche they want to own. Other times it’s understanding the best friction-less path to conversion.

My kids are showing their school science fair experiments tonight. In each of their experiments they used the scientific method. And with each hypothesis created, data point captured, and analysis given they got one step closer to understanding what daddy does for a living.

Do they think it’s cool? I’m not sure. But they do know I love what I do and that’s the only takeaway they need. That, and the Jelly Belly’s at work.

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