Fifty episodes felt like a milestone worth marking. So I wanted a guest who was, well, obviously awesome.

April Dunford is the authority on positioning for B2B tech companies and the author of the updated and expanded edition of Obviously Awesome. I’m a huge fan of April’s work and frequently reference her book, her blogs, and her frameworks in my daily work as a marketer.

April’s premise is provocative: positioning cannot live in the marketing department alone.

She argues that if the CEO, sales, and product leads aren’t in the room providing input, marketing is left guessing about what makes the product special and who it is actually for. Without their buy in, marketing will inevitably lose the “battle of opinions.”

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Building on Ries & Trout: The positioning pioneers defined the concept in their 1981 book, but they didn’t give a how-to manual. April does.

• The death of the “positioning statement”: Why filling out a template is not a methodology.

• Blind men and the elephant: How sales, product, and marketing departments each hold a different piece of the puzzle.

• Skip the parts people don’t read: April discovered that CEOs don’t finish books, so she cut her manuscript in half.

April is one of the most persuasive and grounded thinkers in the field. Here’s my conversation with April Dunford.

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

Special Thanks to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity.

The Origin of April Dunford’s Positioning Framework

Andrew Mitrak: I have a confession to make. Every time I join a new company, among the first things I do is I visit aprildunford.com and I enter my new email address and I download one of your positioning templates. You probably have several of my old corporate email addresses cluttering your mailing list. Sorry about that.

April Dunford: I appreciate you jacking up my newsletter subscription numbers.

Andrew Mitrak: And a big fan of your work and I want to say congrats on the updated and expanded edition of Obviously Awesome.

April Dunford: Thanks. I’m super excited to get it out there.

Andrew Mitrak: For this conversation, I wanted to start back before you became the go-to expert on positioning, and when you were coming up in your career, when did you first encounter the concept of positioning?

April Dunford: That’s a good question. Pretty early, actually. My first real job in tech was at a little startup and I was brand new and junior, they assigned me to a product and the thinking was that product wasn’t doing very well and the plan was to shut it down. This is why I got assigned to it as the product marketer.

We didn’t end up shutting it down. What we ended up doing was looking at gathering some feedback from people that were using the product, and then we got an idea to reposition it. We didn’t know it was called positioning, we thought we were doing, we’re just doing a Hail Mary thing to see if we can make this unsuccessful product successful doing something slightly different.

We repositioned it, relaunched it, and it was super successful. Revenue started going up to the right, everybody’s happy, we’re making a lot of money on that product.

And then we got acquired by a big company in California and the big parent company assigned us a couple of products that weren’t doing very well and then said, hey, do that thing you did with the other one. I didn’t have really any idea what we did with the other one. I was worried about getting fired, I thought, okay, I better figure this out.

I did a deep dive into positioning. I figured out, A, this is what it’s called. B, I had a lot of conversations with smart marketers asking them about, how do you do positioning? If you were in this situation, what would you do? Do you have a strategy for that or a methodology for that?

I also read a bunch of books. There’s the classic positioning book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by these guys Ries and Trout, written in the early 80s, but even back then was considered the book on positioning. And then I took a couple of courses and some post-grad stuff at a couple of universities just learning about positioning.

I dumped into this whole positioning thing pretty early in my career, and I was really interested in this idea, could we get a way to do positioning in a really repeatable manner so that we wouldn’t have this problem of, we launched the thing and it didn’t work and then now we’ve got to try and change it. Could I get to a point where there is a process for us to follow to, first of all, maybe do a better job guessing at what the positioning should be in the first place, and then secondly, if we do need to change it, is there a nice repeatable step-by-step thing we could follow to do that.

Is Product Positioning Intuitive or Learned?

Andrew Mitrak: You initially positioned or repositioned a product without even knowing what positioning was or knowing that it was called positioning that you were doing. And then you went to look at the literature. What’s your takeaway from that? Does that reveal to you that the fundamentals of positioning are somewhat intuitive or can be learned, or do you feel it was just dumb luck really? Or do you feel there were parts of it where this is just obviously the right thing to do for the product? How do you overall think about, can positioning sort of just be an intuitive thing, or is it best to look at the literature that’s out there?

April Dunford: Sometimes it is really intuitive. I would say that’s true. I would say a lot of the time when I talk to founders, they’ll talk about how they built the product in the first place, and they’ll be, we saw this need, we had this idea, we could do this in a different way than the existing products that are out there.

And we looked at it, we understood what the competition was, we built a thing that was demonstrably different, we understood what the value of that thing was because it was solving our own pain, we understood what kind of customers would want to buy that, and therefore what market we position in. It’s just, it is what it is, it’s super easy. And I think that happens a lot in the early stages of a company. Not for everybody, but I do think it happens a lot.

However, what also happens a lot is if you fast forward two or three years, the market’s changed. Maybe your competitors caught up with you and the thing that made you really different isn’t different anymore. Or maybe the way people buy or what they want to do has totally changed. Or maybe your competitors did an acquisition and that changes the whole way everybody thinks about this market.

Or maybe you and your product have changed, and you now do a whole bunch of other stuff that you didn’t originally do, and that enables you to get at a different kind of customer to deliver a different kind of value. Now how do you position it? That’s where people get messed up. Sometimes it can be quite intuitive at the beginning, but then a whole bunch of things change and it’s, okay, now the positioning needs to shift. How do we do that? Because we didn’t do anything the first time, it was just obvious. I think that happens a lot.

The other thing that happens a lot is you have this thesis when you launch the product and you said, okay, we saw this problem and this is what it’s gonna be and these kind of people are gonna love us for these reasons and here’s the competitor. Then we launch it, and it turns out our thesis was incorrect.

We get out there and we’re, man, we launched this thing and we thought banks were gonna love it, but it turns out we’re selling to insurance companies, we didn’t really build it for that, but they’re buying it like crazy. Now we’re in the insurance business, hello. And they love it, but there are some things they don’t love so much, and they’re comparing us to competitors we never really thought about. How do we position this thing because we thought it was gonna be something else.

And this is not unusual, to be honest. We call that a pivot in lean startup language. It’s not unusual for a company to build something for one market and then get in the market and find out, whoops, the market’s a little bit different than we thought. People are looking at our product a little bit different than we thought. We’re getting pulled into another market, so how do we position for that? And again, that’s when having a methodology for this would be helpful.

The B2B vs. B2C Divide in Positioning

Andrew Mitrak: You did your positioning exercise initially and then went to the books, went to Ries and Trout and the others. Do you find yourself as you’re reading the literature on positioning, was it confirming what you did, oh, that’s what we did was called, or was it saying, oh, were there things that you’re, oh, I wish I had known that to start, or what was the discovery process for reading?

April Dunford: No. And I was so mad about this. Here’s how this went. I went and I’m having all these conversations with people, I’m talking to all these smart heads of marketing, right? And I’m saying, how do you do this positioning thing? What do you do? And everybody’s doing it the way we did it, which was a little bit of trial and error, a little bit of getting some feedback from customers, a little bit of, let’s try this and if it doesn’t work we’re gonna adjust. A bit of messing around until you get something that works.

And that feels terrible when you’re the head of marketing because your head’s on the block, man. And if you don’t figure it out fast enough, everyone’s gonna get mad and you’re gonna get fired. And that was unsatisfying.

And then I took some courses and read the Ries and Trout book, which does an amazing job of defining here’s what positioning is, here’s why it’s important. And then they give you a whole bunch of examples. But the examples aren’t tech, this thing was written before the internet, man. I think they have printers, HP printers or something is the closest thing in there, not even software. And I’m selling databases, and they’re talking about repositioning the country of Jamaica, and I’m, this is different.

Andrew Mitrak: It is also very B2C oriented. I think the examples are Avis or Coors or beer. Do you find that both because of the tech gap with it and maybe the B2C bias that you as a B2B tech company...

April Dunford: The B2C bias is killer in this stuff. I took a bunch of courses too, and it was the same thing in the courses. All the examples were shampoo and toothpaste and makeup, and I’m, again, I’m selling 200 grand worth of database stuff to really smart technical people. I don’t think this is the same. It’s selling a vacuum cleaner. And I thought the B2C bias is terrible.

The other thing that you get in B2B tech that you don’t get in consumer is think about it. If I got toothpaste and I’m selling that toothpaste or hair shampoo to people that have dry hair or people that have dyed hair or something like that, right? And then if I decide I’m going to do a shampoo for babies or a shampoo for old ladies or a shampoo only for people with very, very curly hair, usually what you’d do is you wouldn’t take the same product and try to evolve it into that market. You would launch a whole different product and say, I’ve got this other thing, and that’s for the curly hair people, and this one’s for babies, and this one’s for people that dye their hair, whatever.

Whereas in tech, it is very normal for us to launch a product in one market and then reposition it a whole bunch in the future. Let’s take Salesforce. When Salesforce first launched, they were aimed at the very, very bottom end of the market. Their initial deal was they were focused on companies that had sales teams of less than 10 people and the first three seats were free. And why were they doing that? Because the top part of that market was absolutely dominated by a great big competitor, and they didn’t want to go compete there. So they started at the bottom.

But guess what? They inched their way up, and by the time they got to the mid-market, the big competitor had self-destructed and they were gone, and the top end of this market was wide open. And if you look at Salesforce right now, would you say that’s a product for very, very small businesses? No way, man, too expensive, too complicated, too everything. We just don’t have that in consumer products where you’re, it used to be this thing and now it’s this other thing and now it’s this other thing.

The other thing that you’ve got in B2B is that the positioning matters a lot because the stakes are really high. Especially if I’m looking at enterprise software, the stakes are huge. You’re going to make a recommendation to your boss to buy 200 grand worth of software. You make a shortlist. You don’t just walk into the store and pick the thing off the shelf and say, oh well, if I got it wrong, I just won’t buy that one again. You’re going to get fired if you make the wrong choice. You got to make a shortlist, and it’s positioning that makes or breaks whether or not you’re going to get on that shortlist.

And then once you’re on the shortlist, you got to survive long enough for them to take a real good look at your stuff. And if you get eliminated because often the shortlist is five, six companies these days or more, depending on whose data you believe. But let’s say there’s a shortlist of six, seven companies, you got to make it to top two. Otherwise, you don’t get considered. Your positioning is really important in that because the company hasn’t done a big deep dive into all your stuff yet. We just don’t have this in consumer. We don’t go out and buy a pair of shoes and make a shortlist and have a six-month process to figure out which one we’re gonna buy. We go out and we buy it and if it stinks, we just don’t buy that one again.

Navigating the B2B Buying Committee

Andrew Mitrak: One of the other elements as well from B2C versus B2B is often in B2B the buying decision maker or the buying committee is not the end user of the product, right? And there’s this abstraction between that. And that’s the other element is how do you market to both the end user and the decision maker.

April Dunford: Yeah, that happens a lot in B2B. The economic buyer is often distinct too, right? What you have is this committee of people and you’ve got someone who’s what we would describe as the champion. And that champion, usually it’s their boss or someone that said, look, we gotta buy a new accounting package, buddy, go figure it out. You go figure it out, look at all the accounting packages and tell us which one to build, which one to buy. And then that champion is gonna go do their homework, so your positioning really matters for that person.

But the champion also has all of these stakeholders around them that have to agree, otherwise the deal doesn’t get done. If the champion, let’s say the champion is on the business side and we’re buying technology, usually they got to go to IT and make sure IT is okay with it. IT can’t make the deal happen because they’re not in charge of selecting, but they can kill a deal by saying, oh I don’t like it, it’s too hard to manage, it doesn’t integrate with the stuff we have now, it doesn’t meet our compliance regulations, whatever, whatever, right?

Same thing with end users. Often the end user is not an end user making this purchase decision, but they can have a big influence in that. If they look at it and say, well the UI is this and this is terrible, we’re never going to get people to be able to use this thing, we’re going to kill it. Or sometimes they’ll do a pilot with some end users, and if the end users give it the thumbs down, then it’s no good.

And then you got to run it up to the economic buyer, which is generally another person too. And a lot of companies get really messed up with that and they’ll say, well the person that signs the check is the CRO, so that’s the buyer. And it’s, yeah, but the CRO assigned the whole purchase process figuring out who to buy to somebody underneath them. So you better figure out who that is because the CRO just says yes to whatever that other person suggests.

We don’t have that again in B2C. This isn’t it. Sometimes in B2C stuff where it’s complicated, let’s say you’re buying insurance or you’re buying a car or you’re buying a house. Maybe there’s a spouse involved, maybe there’s a financial planner involved, maybe you get a little advice, but it’s nothing like what a typical enterprise B2B purchase process looks like. It is way more complicated.

The Critical Distinction Between Branding and Positioning

Andrew Mitrak: When you write about positioning, you make a hard distinction between branding and positioning, and you’ve written that you’re not a fan of the term brand positioning, which is a phrase you hear sometimes. Why do you draw a line between the two or how do you make this distinction?

April Dunford: Well, here’s what I think. I think marketers like to make stuff up. I think marketers like to just redefine something for the sake of redefining it. And branding is probably the most poorly defined marketing term I can think of. When you say branding, you really gotta say, okay, what do you mean when you say branding?

At most of the enterprise B2B companies that I worked at, when we talked about branding, the brand of the company was a lot about how we showed up in the market in terms of, what was our tone of voice? What was our iconography look like? It was a bit like what was the vibe of us when we showed up? What were the fonts and the colors and the pictures we used, and the way we did messaging and text, tone of voice stuff. That was all kind of branding, which is very different from positioning.

Positioning is an input to that. If the big value of, let’s say I sell security software to banks, right? My branding should convey a lot of trust and solidness and authority because that’s what we’re trying to convey. If I’m selling software for daycares, maybe I can get a bit more playful because I’m talking about kids and moms and things. And I could use different colors and more playful images and maybe a bit more casual tone of voice and all that kind of stuff.

And so in my opinion, positioning should inform what the branding looks like. But now I’ve seen other people define branding in a way that it includes all the things that I would call branding, and it also includes positioning, and we’re going to just kind of munge those two things together. That’s okay, if that’s the way you want to define it, but I still see those two things as being distinct. You got to do the positioning thing first, and then the branding thing flows from that.

Why Positioning Must Go Beyond the Marketing Department

Andrew Mitrak: And is this somewhat related to how you argue that positioning should not just be a marketing exercise? That if the CEO and sales leads aren’t in the room, that the positioning won’t stick. Is that tied to why positioning is different than branding, is that it’s beyond marketing?

April Dunford: Definitely, it’s definitely not just marketing, right? What we’re trying to do with our positioning is we are trying to define why should a customer pick us versus the other guys. And we need to think about, first of all, who are the other guys? What’s the alternative to what we do? And we should all be in agreement on that. Sales should understand that, marketing should understand that, CEO, product should understand that. We should all understand what makes us distinct and the value we can deliver to a business that no one else can.

We need to get that in marketing, product management needs to understand that, sales needs to understand that. And then we all need to understand who’s a good fit for that, which is what are the kinds of companies we’re trying to target and therefore what’s the market that we intend to dominate. That is a strategic set of decisions in a way, and it’s very easy for teams to get out of alignment on that.

It’s very easy for sales to decide, we’re just going to sell to these big companies because we like doing these big deals, man. We need to decide, is it worth chasing those big deals? Are we actually going to win them? Or are we more likely to win if we’re chasing a deal in the mid-market, for example? Again, I think this is, we get this distinction between B2B and B2C. In B2B, when I’m selling a big ticket thing and there’s a shortlist of companies to look at, we really need to understand what makes us stand out and what makes us different so that we can help the whole buying team understand what that is and move this deal along.

If I’m just selling toothpaste, or makeup or a T-shirt, it often has nothing to do with the product and it has more to do with pure branding, right? This thing is going to make you look rich or, the Kardashians wear this thing so you should too or something.

Whereas, it’s not like it’s all totally rational when we’re buying enterprise software, we don’t, there’s often quite a bit of irrationality in there in that the champion is worried about making a bad choice. The champion will often default to a really safe choice because it’s not going to get them in trouble. Or if the champion has an opportunity to look like a hero, they might take that too because it’s good for them personally.

It’s not like it’s all totally rational, but at the end of the day, they do have to make a case to their boss. And that case has to say, look, we looked at the other things and we picked this thing for these reasons, and the reasons are narrow. This is either going to help you make money or is going to help you save money and that’s about it. We got to make that stuff super, super clear. Whereas, you’re buying a T-shirt with your own money, it’s fine. Maybe if you’re a teenager you gotta complain to your mom, but… [Laughs]

Andrew Mitrak: [Laughs] Totally.

The Conflict Between Sales, Product, and Marketing in B2B Tech

Andrew Mitrak: So I’ve also spent most of my career in B2B tech and on marketing teams, and whenever I run through positioning, I do find that there’s this issue where we have a number of stakeholders in product, and they tend to be biased towards product-led growth or if there is some land-and-expand model or some freemium model, they are biased towards what product can influence as far as growth is. And sales almost always is not interested in land-and-expand. They want big-ticket deals. They don’t hit their quota—

April Dunford: I think it feels good to land a big deal if you’re in sales. I think that feels good.

Andrew Mitrak: Exactly, exactly. And they want marketing to support that positioning. Marketing, we have our own ideas and customer research as well on what we think.

April Dunford: Well, we like the ones—we like the market that’s the easiest to respond to our marketing stuff, which is often terrible leads too.

Andrew Mitrak: Right. That’s an issue.

April Dunford: We love time waster leads. We love those. It looks good in our metrics and we’re like, I don’t get what’s wrong in sales. They don’t ever convert any of our beautiful leads.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, exactly. I feel like a lot of dynamic can be summed up to either:

Sales wants more leads, okay, then marketing will get more leads.

But then sales says, “No, not those leads. We want better leads. Those aren’t high quality enough.” And then marketing adjusts and then gets fewer leads.

I feel like that’s a cycle that a lot of companies find themselves trapped in.

April Dunford: It really helps to have a clear definition of what a best-fit customer is and why. Not just that we think this is a best-fit customer because we wish we were doing deals like that. It should be: “This is a best-fit customer for us because we are the only ones that can deliver this specific value.” If you look at us versus the other things that a customer is going to compare us with, we are the only ones that can deliver this specific value, and these are the kind of people that really care a lot about that. That’s what we really need to get at the root of. And it shouldn’t just be that we like those companies because they’re bigger and they have bigger budgets. Well, guess what? If they’re bigger and they have bigger budgets, then that means we’re going to run into these competitors that can handle that. Do we actually serve that customer better, or are we better at something else? And so getting everybody together in a room to get really clear on that is going to help us with all those problems when sales says, “Well, we don’t like these leads.” It’s like, let’s sit down and talk about what an excellent lead looks like and why. It should tick these boxes because we are very likely to win those deals for these reasons.

Andrew Mitrak: In the dozens or hundreds of companies you’ve consulted with that have implemented positioning successfully, is it an equal split between partly marketing, sales, and product? Are they all like equal one-third owners of the process? Is it usually best if one is the owner of it and the other two are stakeholders? Does it need to be the CEO who is on top of it on the exercise? What’s the best model, or is there one right solution or ways to make multiple versions work?

“Marketing Never Wins the Battle of Opinions”

April Dunford: This is actually a great question. So I’m a big fan of doing a cross-functional exercise because, just in my own experience when I was in-house and working as a head of marketing, if I didn’t get everybody in the room together, I couldn’t go have a conversation with sales and think I had it and then take it to product because then they’d rip all that stuff apart and say, “No, that’s all wrong, it’s this.” Then you take it to the CEO and the CEO has got their own opinions and you end up with something else. So it’s just way more efficient to get everybody in the room together.

But if you’re going to get everybody in the room together, we can’t just have everybody in the room together just say, “Okay, why does everybody love our stuff?” then that’ll just be a battle of opinions, and marketing never wins the battle of opinions. So the way my process works is we start with this conversation around competitive alternatives. Now, what’s funny about that is the question is: if we didn’t exist, what would a customer do? At that step, I think sales’ opinion on this matters more than anybody else’s. But it doesn’t stop everybody else from having an opinion, but everybody else’s opinion is generally wrong.

Sales vs. Product Perspectives on Competition

April Dunford: So I’ll give you an example. Often what we’ve got, like when you go to product management and you say, “Who do we compete with?” they generally give you a way longer list of companies than sales does. Because product management is living a little bit in the future, right? They’re thinking about the roadmap, they’re thinking about where we’re going, and they’re looking at the superset of who could compete with us and who should compete with us. What they are not looking at is who does. Sales knows that. Sales knows that.

Now, if I go to sales and I say, “If we didn’t exist, what would a customer do?” they can tell me exactly who lands on the short list. They can tell me who’s causing us pain out in the market right now. They generally won’t consider the status quo as a competitor because a good salesperson, if they lose to status quo, they will say, “We lost to no decision.” And in the minds of a good salesperson, that is not a no; that’s a “not yet.” We’re going to get them someday, just not this week, man. And so if you’re doing this exercise, you have to pull that out of the sales team, but it’s very important for the product team to hear what the sales team has to say. Because the product team is thinking about a different set of competitors, which is fine, by the way. Because they’re building for the future, they need to be looking at that.

But when we’re talking about positioning right now, if the competitor is not causing us any pain, they may never cause us any pain. We don’t do a very good job of predicting the future that way. And the reality is if they do cause us pain next year or the year after, we’re going to adjust the positioning to take that into account. So step one, when I’m talking about competitors, I think sales’ opinions matter more.

And then we didn’t even talk about marketing. Marketing, if you say to marketing, “Who do we compete with?” they’ll list the people that are spending the most money on marketing. That’s who they worry about because that’s who they’re fighting for keywords and everything else. And they go, “Oh my god, these guys, they’re everywhere! We see them everywhere. Oh my god, they have the biggest booth. Oh my god, they’re all over the place.” But again, if they’re not causing us any pain in sales, well, maybe you’ve got some competitors burning a lot of money on pretty shit marketing that isn’t doing anything.

The other thing you get is the CEO will have this opinion. Often the CEO was really involved in sales at some point, but maybe it’s been a couple of years. Or maybe they only see certain kinds of deals in certain situations, so they’re biased towards that. Again, sales understands the reality on the ground. So when we go to step one, personally, sales’ opinions matter more, but we’ve got to get everybody on the same page.

Then we get to step two: okay, if we didn’t exist, this is what a customer would do, this is what we’ve got to position against. Now we get to step two, and step two is all about: what have we got that the other guys don’t have? Who knows that the best? Product management, by a mile. Sales doesn’t know. They don’t even pitch stuff they don’t understand. Marketing doesn’t know because there’s lots of stuff the product does that marketing thinks is useless or they don’t understand or whatever. The only people that can really give you the straight deal on “what have we got that the other guys don’t” is product management. A good product management team knows all about that. So again, other people in the group might think they know the answer to this; product management knows the answer to it.

Then we get to the third step, which is value. This is where marketing comes in a little bit because only marketing understands even the concept of what value is. So they’re helpful in that respect. But here it’s a little bit interesting. Sales knows what a customer thinks is valuable and what they don’t. So they’re a good litmus test. If we come up with a value prop, sales is a good litmus test: does this sell? Sales can tell you generally because they know customers, they’ve been selling to customers, they know what flies and what doesn’t. Marketing understands what value is, so they know what a good value prop looks like and what it doesn’t. So this is where we see a lot of sales and marketing. But again, everybody’s got to agree on what this is.

Then we’re going to get to this segmentation, which is: okay, we’re the only people on the planet that can deliver this value, but not everyone cares the same about it. So what are the characteristics of a good-fit account? And that is kind of a little bit of everybody chiming in on: okay, if the value looks like this, what needs to be true about the account in order for that to resonate? Are they bigger accounts or smaller accounts? Is there something in their tech stack that makes them more likely to make that more appealing to them or not? Is there something about their business model or something about the team we’re selling into that’s different? That’s a group conversation with everybody. So we have this team together. We obviously need the CEO in the room, and the CEO needs to believe that this is important work and sponsor this thing. But when I run one of these exercises, everybody needs to chip in, and everybody’s opinion is important at different steps in the exercise. This is why this is so difficult to do when it’s not a team exercise. It’s like that old picture of everybody wearing a blindfold and they’re all touching a different part of the elephant. The guy on the tail says, “It’s a snake,” and the guy on the leg says, “It’s a tree.” It’s a bit like that. Sales knows something, product management knows something, marketing knows something, the CEO knows something, support knows something. We’ve got to pull all of that out together and then synthesize it into something we can all agree on, and we’re all singing the same song, and then we move forward.

Evaluating Positioning Success from the Outside vs. Inside

Andrew Mitrak: As an outsider, I like to evaluate a company’s positioning or try to understand their positioning. But if positioning is this strategic foundation and it’s not branding, it’s not messaging, it’s not even just marketing, how do you go about evaluating somebody’s positioning from the outside? How do I tell if a company’s positioned well or if they just have a really talented copywriter?

April Dunford: I’m glad you asked this because sometimes what I’ll see—and this bugs me a lot—I think I’ve been guilty of doing this in the past when I didn’t know any better. But sometimes what I’ll see, and I see this a lot on LinkedIn or social media, a random person like me will pull up some B2B website and say, “Isn’t this terrible? Who could understand what this is? Look at all that jargon! Look at all that stuff. Oh, this is terrible. This should be more B2C-like. This should be really easy and it should be exciting.”

And the first time I saw one of these that I thought was really funny, this was a company that was growing 200% year-on-year on about $100 million revenue. And I’m like, my dudes, it is working just fine. So here’s the thing: it is very difficult for you to assess how good copy on a homepage is working if you are not the target buyer and you don’t even know who the target buyer is. If I’m selling something to—I was working with a company that does this stuff with airlines and I’m selling a very technical thing to people that do maintenance on airplanes—like yeah, man, you’re not going to understand what that website is talking about. And that’s okay. What really matters is: is it working with a customer, and is it doing the job we want the website to do? So that’s one thing.

The second thing is, like you say, there’s copywriting and there’s positioning. If I look at a company’s copy, I don’t necessarily understand the strategy behind it. I don’t know exactly how they’ve defined a best-fit customer, for example. So I don’t know exactly who they think their competitors are. Therefore, I can’t tell: is it doing a good job of differentiating them from those competitors? Because I don’t know them, I don’t know their competitors, I don’t know who their buyers are. It would be very hard for you from the outside to figure this out. And so I don’t think doing a homepage teardown is a particularly good way to understand someone’s positioning. I get this a lot where a company will send me a link to their homepage and they’ll say, “Can you just tell us if our positioning sucks or not?” and I’m like, “No! Because I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know who your target market is, I don’t know who your competitors are, I don’t know anything.” And so it’s really hard from the outside to assess that.

Identifying the Signs of Weak Positioning

April Dunford: Now, on the inside, poor positioning shows up in a set of very distinct ways. So the way I used to assess it—let’s say I got hired as the Vice President of Marketing and then everybody wants me to just spin up a bunch of campaigns, and I’m like, “Okay, but let’s make sure the positioning is good before we do that because otherwise I’m pouring water into a leaky bucket.” So let’s have a look at positioning.

How I would assess that is I would walk over to sales—because I’m always working with enterprise companies that have sales people—and I’d be listening in on first-call conversations. Now, this is really easy because everybody records it with Gong, so you just listen to the Gong calls. But first-call conversation, weak positioning shows up like this: the customer shows up, the rep is there, and the rep’s doing their thing and they’re saying, “Hey, let me tell you something about us, and we’re this, that, and the other thing, and we do this and that for companies like you, blah blah blah.” And you can see the customer just getting super confused, like making this face: “What the heck are you talking about, man?” And usually what you’ll get is a few minutes in, and the customer will go, “Stop, stop, stop. Just back up. Back up. Go back to the beginning. I’m not sure I got it. Go back, say it again.” And the rep’s got to go back and repeat it again. Or they’ll get halfway through and the customer will ask a question, and the rep will be like, “Oh my god, the customer didn’t understand a thing I was talking about.” If you’ve got happy existing customers but a new customer is coming in that confused, that is usually a positioning problem.

The other one you’ll get is prospects comparing you to things they shouldn’t be comparing you to. That is a clear sign of bad positioning. So they’ll come in and say, “So you’re like a CRM, right?” and you’ll be like, “No, no.” Or they’ll be like, “Oh, so you’re just like Workday?” “No, we’re nothing like Workday, what are you talking about?” And then the rep has to back up and do it again. So this idea that the customer thinks they know what box to put you in, but you’re actually living in a different box, that’s a sign of weak positioning.

And then the other one you’ll get is a customer coming in and saying, “I get it, I get what you do, I get it. But I just don’t get why anybody would pay for that. Can’t I just do that with my accounting package? Can’t I just do that in a spreadsheet? Why would I just hire a couple of teenagers to come in and do that? That doesn’t seem...” and then in that case, what the problem is, your value is not clear and compelling. So inside we can assess it; outside, I don’t know.

The Pitfalls of Tech-Forward Positioning

Andrew Mitrak: It’s very tempting to be one of those LinkedIn people from the outside, but on the other hand, I was at a unicorn B2B freight tech startup. It was in the trucking industry and won a bunch of awards, raised a whole lot of money, and our marketing was great—everyone thought our marketing was great. But at the underlying thing, the positioning was often wrong. It was very tech-forward: AI, automate your freight, Uber for trucking type messaging. Everyone was like, “Oh, this is a no-brainer, let’s do this.” And I’d listen to Gong calls in sales and hear somebody pitching all this tech to a supply chain manager at a company in the Midwest, and it’s like speaking two different languages. The startup ultimately folded in a pretty dramatic way. But underlying it, there was just the wrong positioning. It’s easy to say this looks bad or great from the outside, but really you have to get inside the company before you really pass judgment on it.

April Dunford: Fundraising’s not revenue, right? Fundraising’s not revenue. But we are in crazy times right now where there’s so much excitement about certain parts of the market where things are emerging, like all this AI stuff is so cool and the potential for this stuff is so big. We see this with pricing models changing, and now we’re looking at usage-based pricing versus subscription pricing. It makes it a lot more difficult to figure out if this company is actually successful or not.

Positioning During Rapidly Changing Markets

Andrew Mitrak: Do you have principles for running a positioning exercise through a period of rapid change? It can feel like you’re building the foundation with positioning, but it’s moving so fast it’s like building the foundation on quicksand.

April Dunford: I have some opinions about this. Stuff is changing really quickly, but I think companies are going to have to be very clear in their messaging and positioning about what’s real and what we can deliver today versus what is vision and a direction, and where we want to go, and frankly, hype. We’re building the market. Because I think if you’re building an AI company right now, you’ve got to do both. You’ve got to hype the hell out of stuff that doesn’t entirely work today, that doesn’t do exactly what we know it’s going to be able to do in the future—and we might not even be sure when—but we also have to sell what’s on the truck that a customer can buy right now.

Those two things are often different. If you look at the one I think is the most remarkable to look at, it’s the vibe coding tools. If you look at what influencers from these vibe coding tools are talking about on LinkedIn and social media, it is super inspirational. You’re like, “Wow, that is so cool. Look at all the stuff we’re going to do.” Right now, there’s a bit of panic in the markets, like, “Oh my gosh, are we just going to be able to vibe code accounting software? Why should we even have accounting software? We’re going to vibe code a CRM. Sell Salesforce, man, that stuff’s just going to go away.” But then you go to their website, and their website doesn’t say they do that at all. Their website says, “Build a nice prototype,” because that’s what they’re actually selling today.

Now, they’ve got investors and whatever, and right now it’s very difficult to be heard in the noise without being super hypey about this stuff, so they’ve got to do the other piece too. They’ve got to show the vision. They’ve got to show where this is going. They’ve got to show it in order to justify the valuations. They want people to be mucking around with it now with the idea that we should start doing some stuff with this now because in the future we’re going to do way more stuff with this. So there’s this balance, I think, between where you’re at and what you can sell today, and being clear about that when you’re in a sales process. You’ve got to balance that with this other half, which is hyping the hell out of it. When I say it, I mean the future, So, I’m hyped hell out of where this is going and what it’s going to be able to do and what’s happening in the future and all that stuff. The hype stuff changes very rapidly. What we’re selling and what customers are actually doing with it changes about the same as everything else. You’re going to have to check in on it in six months and see if it’s different or not, but in less than six months, your positioning’s probably okay. If I look at the vibe coding tools, those sites haven’t changed much at all in the last year.

Andrew Mitrak: So overall, the act and the role of positioning doesn’t change in a period of rapid technical change. There might be new vectors for positioning; there might be new ways you can position within a new category.

Balancing Today’s Reality with Future Vision

April Dunford: What you should expect is to be very careful, and you should be watching your positioning, and you should be very ready to adjust it when it needs to be adjusted. In a normal market, when I was in-house as the VP of Marketing, we would do a check-in on positioning every six months. That was more than enough, and it was rare that we would check in and have to change it if the positioning was less than a year old or even less than two years old. It’s pretty rare we would do the six-month check-in and say, “Whoops, need to adjust something”. These days, especially if you’re in this AI world, you might want to do that quarterly, and you should be very ready to make the adjustment if you think that it’s needed. But do I think your positioning’s going to change quarterly? No, I don’t. But it wouldn’t surprise me if you changed it within a year. That wouldn’t surprise me at all.

Applying Positioning Principles to Your Career

Andrew Mitrak: I want to ask about how you’ve positioned yourself and positioned your own book. It feels like you’ve been very deliberate about your own positioning. You focus primarily on B2B tech, which is where you have your experience. Do you think that marketers should be applying these same positioning rules to their own careers?

April Dunford: Maybe. I don’t know if I’m a great person to give career advice, but it certainly worked out for me. When I was working in-house, you’re applying for jobs as the VP of Marketing and you’re up against everybody else, and you’ve got to answer the question, “Why me and not the ten other people you’re interviewing?” In order to have a clear answer to that, you have to be able to say, “What am I better at? What have I done more than the other people? What’s my edge over everybody else?”

For me, because I had done a lot of positioning stuff early, that kind of became my edge. I could talk about that in a deeper way. By the time I was at a company and then we got acquired, I had positioned a bunch of things at the acquired company. So by the time I came out of that one, I had positioned five or six products. That’s a lot, really. A senior marketer could go their whole career without repositioning anything if the positioning is working. So I thought I had that as an edge. In the later part of my career, if you hired me as the VP of Marketing, you hired me because you thought maybe you had a positioning problem. I could talk intelligently about how we were going to fix it, and that’s why you brought me on.

I wouldn’t be applying to jobs where what they were really looking for was something really outside of that and it wasn’t really in my deep skill set. Yeah, I know a lot about lead generation, and yeah, I know a lot about email marketing. Yeah, we’re doing SEO and whatever; I know a lot of stuff about that. But am I going to get that job versus the person that comes in and says, “I managed this ginormous Google Ad budget at the last thing and all we did was SEO and I’ve been doing SEO for 15 years, I’m going to yak your ear off on that”? I’m not going to win that job. So I’m trying to focus on applying to jobs that are a fit for my stuff and then making sure I’m positioned in there as the best person for that job.

That’s worked out pretty well for me. As a consultant, I’m trying to do the same thing. I’m trying to stay in my lane. I get tons of calls from companies that are B2C, or they’re B2B but they don’t have a sales team, or what they actually do is professional services. I’ve done a few services companies, but only if they tick the boxes. I’m pretty serious about who makes it through my filter, and that’s because I want to make sure we’re really, really successful. If it’s outside of my wheelhouse, I don’t know, I’m just kind of guessing. So I try to stay right in my zone of excellence so that if you make it through all my filters, then I feel pretty confident that we’re going to get a good result because I’ve done 300 other companies that look just like you. And you’re probably going to pay me more money to do that because I’ve done 300 companies that look just like you. Everybody else you’re talking to has done a little of this and a little of that, and it’s not like they don’t know what they’re doing, they do, but they don’t quite have the experience level in the little box that I do. So I try to stay in my little box where I can look you in the eyeball and say, “I’m probably the best person in the world to do this.” Not this, not this, not that, not this other thing—just in this little box right here. I think I’m the best in the world.

The Strategy Behind Positioning “Obviously Awesome”

Andrew Mitrak: Did you apply your positioning frameworks and methodology to your own book, Obviously Awesome, and could you share a little of that process?

April Dunford: Yeah, so I was really clear when the book came out on what I was positioning against. What I was positioning against was, first of all, the old positioning book, which is the book that came out in the ‘80s by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Again, I love that book, and I think that book’s really good at defining positioning. What it doesn’t do is give you a how-to: step one, step two, step three. So I positioned mine against that and said, “Look, we are very much in alignment, Ries and Trout and my stuff. We agree on the definition of positioning, we agree what it is, we agree why it’s important. I’m giving you the how-to; they are not.” That’s why you need my book and not theirs.

I was also positioning against the “positioning statement,” which was a common sort of folklore way of doing positioning inside a company. A lot of companies, if I went and said, “Have you done positioning?” and they said, “Yes,” what they’d done is filled out a positioning statement, which isn’t a methodology at all. But it was just kind of the thing that everybody did. So I was positioning against that as well. In the book, there’s a mention of the Ries and Trout book and the reason why I was frustrated that it didn’t have a how-to, and then it talks about the positioning statement and why I think that’s not a good way to do positioning. So I’m positioned against that.

When I look at what I’ve got that the other guys haven’t, it’s a methodology. It’s one, two, three, four, five, six. Nobody else has a methodology. I’m going to give you a methodology. I am sure there are other ones now but one, two, three, four, five, six. The value of that is being able to do it in a repeatable way. Even if you’ve got to muck with the process, even if this is just a starting point, you at least got something.

Designing Content for the CEO Mindset

April Dunford: Then the “who it was aimed at” was primarily CEOs of companies, but also, I would say my primary audience was the CEO of a tech company, but also at a secondary level, heads of product or heads of marketing. I did a lot of research with CEOs as I was writing the book about how they buy books, how they find out about books, and how they read books. That was super fascinating. The actual product of the book looks and feels the way it does because of that research. I talked to 50 or 60 founders, and here’s what I found out.

How do you find out about books? You find out from your friends, other CEOs. It’s all word of mouth. Nobody goes to the bookstore and says, “What am I going to read today?” and browses the stacks. That never happens. They get a recommendation, people start talking about it, it’s word of mouth. So you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to spark some word of mouth on this book.

The second thing that I thought was surprising is the CEOs don’t actually read books; they read half-books. Almost everybody told me this. I said, “How do you read?” and they’ll say things like, “Well, I’ll get on the plane, I’ll do my email for an hour, and then I’ve got two or three hours left in the plane ride, I’ll pull the book out and I’ll read and get to the end of it.” They’ll basically say, “I pull the book out and I read.” And I said, “But wait, you only got two or three hours, that’s only half a book. What happens?” And they say, “Well, if there’s bits I can skim, I’ll skim it and skip forward. You know, these business books are full of fluff. Sometimes there’s a whole chapter I can skim, or if they have a case study or something, I’ll skip that. You more or less get the gist of it in the first half of the book anyways because these books are so fluffy. So basically, I never read the back half of a book.”

So I decided, “All right, I’m not writing a typical business book that’s 80,000 words or 90,000 words that takes you six, seven, eight hours to read. I’m writing a book that’s half that, and you can get through it in three or four hours.” Then I’m going to make the bits that you could skim, like the case studies and things like that, very obvious. I’m going to put them in a shaded box so that if you want to skip it, skip away. So it’s obvious what the core stuff is and what the stuff is you could skip. We’re going to make it like In-Flight Magazine—that’s what I kept telling the book guys “This is the inflight magazines”. I thought that worked pretty well. The number one feedback I got on the book after I put it out was CEOs would come to me and they’d say, “Oh my God, it was so good. I finished it in one sitting.” And I loved that. Part of the reason they finished it in one sitting is my original manuscript was like 70,000 words and we hacked at that thing until it was half the size. So yeah, I did use my process for that book.

Andrew Mitrak: That’s so cool. Well, thanks for taking me behind the scenes of that. Congrats on the book and its success, and congrats on the updated and expanded edition of Obviously Awesome. I hope listeners, if any listeners enjoyed this conversation, they definitely enjoy the book; it’s available to order right now. Also, I highly recommend your podcast, Positioning with April Dunford. I’ve been listening to it to catch up and research prior to this interview and enjoyed it a lot. It’s super inspiring. I already mentioned your website, aprildunford.com, which has a lot of great resources as well. Is there any other place you’d recommend where people should connect or follow you? It seems like you’re everywhere.

April Dunford: I feel like I used to be everywhere and now I’m not. I don’t do a lot of social media these days, for example. Occasionally I’m inspired to post something on LinkedIn, but it’s not very often. The best way to follow my stuff is the newsletter, the podcast, the books—these are the main things. If you go to aprildunford.com, you see links to all that stuff.

Andrew Mitrak: They’re all great. I’ll link to it in the blog that accompanies this post. April Dunford, thanks so much and congrats again.

April Dunford: Okay, thanks.

Have you ever stood in front of a 500-year-old painting of a father devouring his son and asked yourself, “Who paid for this?” Me neither. Until I met Peter Van Wijnaerde.

Peter is a CMO based in Ghent, Belgium, and the writer behind a Substack that connects art history to modern marketing.

Rory Sutherland recommended I speak with Peter (which is as high a compliment as you can get in this field) after seeing his presentation on medieval branding.

Peter’s premise is provocative: art was the original marketing department.

Patrons funded paintings, statues, and tapestries not for beauty’s sake, but because they needed to project power, build legitimacy, and sway public opinion. The separation of fine art and commerce is a relatively recent development.

Peter brings a perspective that’s part art aficionado, hobbyist historian, and marketing strategist. He shows us that “stopping power” has been central to persuading the masses for a thousand years.

Here is my conversation with Peter Van Wijnaerde.

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

Quick Update: Thank you to the thousands of marketers from around the world who have played The CMO Game! It’s been amazing to see the response and I’ve had a few marketing professors reach out to request using it in their classes.

Special Thanks to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity. And thank you to Rory Sutherland for introducing me to Peter.

The Intersection of Art History and Marketing

Andrew Mitrak: You’ve written about so many topics connecting history, marketing, mythology, and art, and branding, and merging the past with the present in our work as marketers today. So how would you describe the content of your Substack and your perspective that you bring?

Peter Van Wijnaerde: I like to stretch out the history of marketing a little bit to before the 1950s. And I love art and I love looking at art and I love using those art pieces that were made to compel people to have stopping power. I use those to explain how marketing is really one of the oldest professions there is and what we can learn today of marketing. So not that there’s no surprises anymore in the current time, but my blog is about widening the scope of the time frame of marketing.

Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned one of the oldest professions. It is funny when Pompeii was uncovered – the ancient city that was covered by Mount Vesuvius. They discovered brothels but also they discovered artwork that would point people to the brothels. Right. So if prostitution is the oldest profession, there seems to be types of advertising to get people there. So they were very interconnected. So advertising does seem like an old profession.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: Exactly.

Andrew Mitrak: So what was your initial spark? How did you start connecting the past to the present?

Peter Van Wijnaerde: I was always a very visual person, liked to engage with things that are visual. But I think the spark happened my first time in Vienna in the Belvedere. I started to appreciate medieval art. And normally medieval art is something we laugh about. You have the memes with the medieval cats and there is full Instagram feeds full of that. But actually we should not laugh with medieval art, because it’s very communicative. Because it’s very symbolic. It says there are two guys and a child and the child is just a little human and this is happening, right? And so it’s basically like a cartoon. I started to appreciate it, started to look at it and then started wondering, that must have been expensive and difficult to make. Why were people making this?

Uncovering Medieval Marketing in the Bayeux Tapestry

Peter Van Wijnaerde: The moment that it clicked was when I was doing medieval travels through Europe. And I was in France and I was in Bayeux. Have you ever heard about the Bayeux Tapestry?

Andrew Mitrak: I don’t know about the Bayeux Tapestry. I’m not too familiar with tapestries in general.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, it’s a 70-meter long tapestry that was embroidered in the year 1080, let’s say. They don’t know precise but it was embroidered there. And it’s a tapestry about the Battle of Hastings, about William the Conqueror kicking out the Anglo-Saxons out of England and putting in Nordic rule in England. And this guy, his brother, yes, this one.

Andrew Mitrak: For listeners, most people listen to the audio, but I am going to, because this is a visual conversation, I’ll pull them up on the screen, because I find it useful to hear and see what you’re talking about. So I’m sharing my screen and showing the Bayeux Tapestry.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: So what’s so interesting about the Bayeux Tapestry is that it’s a scroll of 70 meters, it’s about 40 centimeters high or something. And it tells the story about why William the Conqueror thought he had the right to conquer England and what the deal was and how they prepared for it and who they talked to and the whole story from beginning to end is on that tapestry. And it was made...

Andrew Mitrak: So it’s a really wide tapestry. Cause it’s like frame by frame. Cause it’s... wow, okay. Yeah.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: And you can roll it up too. And it was made by his brother, the Bishop Odo of Bayeux. And what’s so interesting about it, it was not a painting, it was not a statue, it was a tapestry. And there is actually really no other tapestry of that kind. But if you think about it, it was mobile, you could roll it up easily, you can transport it easily and put it out somewhere else also as easily. So it was actually a bit of a prop of a PR tour for William the Conqueror by his brother the Bishop of Bayeux. And then it clicked. And I thought, oh my god, they should give this Odo guy an Effie Award or something because he invented a completely new way of storytelling to convince the people that this king is their legitimate ruler. And you don’t do that by building a cathedral because a cathedral is only in one place. So I thought this is a 1,000-year-old marketing campaign in front of me. So this is when it started clicking even more.

Andrew Mitrak: It’s, and you mentioned medieval art almost looks like a cartoon sometimes because it’s a little more two-dimensional, they didn’t quite have the same sense of perspective and lighting and depth that you convey that you’d later see in the Renaissance. But and then also medieval art sometimes you see it in memes today. Like you see it in internet memes and you see it kind of translates kind of because it’s cartoon-like. And in a way memes are such a huge part of internet culture and the way people communicate now. And this artwork, this tapestry kind of reminds you of a comic book almost, or a frame by frame and it sort of takes that type of visual storytelling and it seems like it communicates that to the masses who mostly would be illiterate but would still appreciate a story.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: If you walk in front of it and you just go, it takes half an hour to see the whole thing. And there’s action scenes in there and little jokes in there. There’s a warrior showing his bare ass to another warrior, things like this. So it’s also made to entertain. And I think that’s beautiful actually. It’s not just, this is history, this is also, also very interesting fact: the guy who made it gave himself a very prominent role in the history as well. But he was the guy who commissioned it right? So he could embroider himself into history.

Andrew Mitrak: Okay, yeah, so sort of the marketer, the marketers being a little self-promotional in a sense, or at least the patrons being self-promotional. That’s great.

Inspiration Everywhere: Learning from the Past

Andrew Mitrak: So I originally heard about your work from my conversation with Rory Sutherland, and he mentioned that he loved your presentation on medieval branding. Which is a very high compliment. I mean, take that win because if Rory Sutherland complimented my work, that would be wonderful. So very cool. So that was my initial spark for reaching out to you. And you’ve already talked a little bit about medieval history or medieval artwork and how it relates to branding. So was this part of that presentation? The Bayeux Tapestry, was this part of the presentation or could you just share what the presentation was that Rory was speaking about that seemed resonated with him?

Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, the insight that, so this was not about the Bayeux Tapestry. This was about some tactics that some brands do today that you can also see that kings and queens did in history. So it was actually, I think the title was ‘Medieval Marketing Lessons for Modern Marketers‘. That was the thing. And it all starts from this, the reason that if you are in power, you need to stay in power. And there are several ways that you can stay in power. And one of them is fighting. But that’s not a good thing for your resources, because you will lose a lot of men and you will lose the belief of your people if you lose too many men. So for efficiency reasons, the kings and queens looked for different ways to keep their power or make sure no one started fighting them. If people believed that it was not worth fighting you because you were stronger, because you had better allies, or you would end up in hell because this guy has the blessing of God. That’s also an important one. So they started making up all these stories. And what I did in this talk was picking apart some of those stories and translate how they are actually being used today. Just to show, not to tell people this is the way you should do marketing, but more to tell people, like, if you’re in marketing, if you’re in branding, open your eyes. Ideas are everywhere. That was more, and I look for them in history. Other people can look for them in kindergartens or whatever, because I assume a lot of real human behavior also happens there.

Andrew Mitrak: It is one of the professions where I feel like you can become a better marketer by opening your eyes to just about anything.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: Yeah, I really like Rory’s point. He said if you’re a, what was it, not an attorney, but something else...

Andrew Mitrak: An accountant.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: An accountant.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, this was actually coming back to the Rory presentation. He said if you’re an accountant, I doubt that you can get much better at your job sitting at a coffee shop looking at the world. But if you’re a marketer, you certainly can. Of course Rory said it in a more eloquent, witty way than I did, but...

Andrew Mitrak: He does.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: But also what he also did, like after he referenced me, he immediately started talking about Attention Deficit Disorder. So that started to worry me as well.

Andrew Mitrak: Oh yeah. Who was that guy who was all over the place at that conference? I’m sure that was just a coincidence.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: But he brought of course the example of Charlemagne to the topic. Like he was the first king to be coronated by a pope. That was a masterful move. No one would attack him after that, or you end up in jail or in hell of all places. Yeah.

The Medici Family and the Power of Storytelling

Andrew Mitrak: Great. So yeah, that’s right. So let’s talk about some of the specific examples in your presentation. You mentioned Charlemagne and being coronated by the pope and sort of a, I don’t know what you call that, a partnership marketing or influencer marketing or just aligning yourself, positioning... it’s a lot of elements of marketing to that. What were any other examples from that presentation from the medieval presentation?

Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, we talked about the Medici Family. The Medici Family, if you walk... have you been to Florence? If you walk around in Florence, you see a lot of marble statues. And if there is a common theme among most of those marble statues that the Medici Family has commissioned, they liked their Greek heroes who liberated cities. Like how Hercules won against the monster Cacus, or The Rape of the Sabine Women. Also a story about how Rome came to power. So they really liked those stories. And one of the stories I like most about them, and this is the one that I put in the presentation as well, is the story of Judith, which is actually a biblical story from the Old Testament. And Judith was this woman who, her city was besieged by General Holofernes. And no one was doing anything about it. And Judith went to the tent of the general. He was drunk. She seduced him and then she beheaded him. That’s actually a very horrific story. Now I’m telling it.

So they had this statue with a lot of stopping power, actually, because there is a woman and she is beheading a man. So this was in the middle of their garden where all the rich people came, where all the influencers came. They were... by seeing this, there was a plaque on the bottom of the statue telling the people, this is Judith, this is what she did, and she is a bit like us, because we also freed the city. So they used all these stories of Hercules, of the Sabine women, of Judith, to remember the people that they were the ones who freed the city. The funny thing is, however, when other people took over Florence, they used the same statue and just changed the inscription on it. They said, the Medici are like Holofernes and we decapitated them. Right. The Medici, of course, they came back and they put the statue again in the middle of the square with another inscription: We freed the city from the revolutionaries, whatever it was. So yeah.

Andrew Mitrak: The danger of how you position your enemy is that later you could be positioned as the enemy by your replacement.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: Yeah.

Recontextualizing Art: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith

Andrew Mitrak: And on Judith slaying Holofernes, I was always more familiar... when I took art history class, this one, the Artemisia Gentileschi, I think painting of this one. And I always find it interesting to see the same scene compared in two different ways, right? The Donatello statue Medici one. It’s big, it’s public, it’s proud of it. And this one, it’s this painting, it’s happening kind of in darkness and it seems almost more secretive when it happened. And it’s funny to just kind of compare similar scenes and how they’re represented.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: But I get the chills when I see this painting. Because this painting was painted by Artemisia Gentileschi. And she paints a completely different Judith than all the others did. Because actually, if you want to know, and this might be a triggering subject, the guy that Judith is beheading here is actually a portrait of the guy who raped Artemisia Gentileschi when she was younger. So this is not a biblical story. This is a true story, or at least how it happened in the head of Artemisia Gentileschi.

Andrew Mitrak: Oh wow. I never knew that background to this. That brings a new perspective on it.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: Yeah, she is one of the biggest Baroque painters, and maybe the only female one we know of. And in a lot of her paintings, she brings a female perspective to a topic that was painted by a lot of men. So, but that’s going off topic, of course, but it’s...

Napoleon Bonaparte: Master of Public Relations

Andrew Mitrak: One of the other figures of history that you’ve spoken about or written about is Napoleon. And he is sort of a widely recognized figure in history. And I’m wondering what could Napoleon teach a modern marketer?

Peter Van Wijnaerde: Also to learn from history. Because Napoleon also had himself coronated by the Pope as the Emperor. He brought in Pope, who was it, Pope Pius VII. I’m not sure. To witness him coronating himself. That was the big difference. But he brought in the Pope. So that’s one thing. So he took a trick from the old books. And he did that a lot. Because he brought in all the neoclassical style, like the Roman coding of power he did. So he used a lot of old coding of power. He used a Pope for his coronation. He also, and this I think is the most interesting thing, not the most interesting, but the thing that I find very interesting about him, is during the French Revolution, there was this painter, you might have heard of him, Jacques-Louis David. And he is the guy who painted the coronation of Napoleon. It’s a really big painting. It’s huge, it’s detailed, it’s amazing, it’s theatrical, it’s...

However, Jacques-Louis David was maybe the star entertainer of the moment. Having your portrait painted by Jacques-Louis David was like having your face on Person of the Year on the Time (magazine) cover. So that was the impact that that guy had. This guy was commissioned a lot by Napoleon. He painted Napoleon over eight times. A lot of people when they think of Napoleon, they see Napoleon on a stud riding his horse over the Alps with the big wavy cape in red in the background. That’s the image that a lot of people have of Napoleon. That was also painted by Jacques-Louis David. So he painted him over and over and over again.

And what was so interesting, why the Pope was there, and this is not confirmed by academics, this is just my thought. One year after the coronation of Napoleon, Jacques-Louis David painted Pope Pius VII. So that Pope that was there. So probably that was part of the deal. I’ll catch you on the cover of Time (magazine) if you attend my party.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. So there’s kind of who you choose to be painted by is another layer of status that a figure like Napoleon or the Pope in this case would think about. Is sort of obviously there’s a lot of stature, you’re an Emperor or you’re Pope, but even further cementing it is I’m being painted by the most popular artist of the day. And therefore kind of I’m assigned a certain stature. I’m trying to think of who the equivalent would be today. Like who you choose to have your portrait painted by or your photograph taken by. I guess there’s Annie Leibovitz or somebody like that.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: But maybe you should take it in modern ways. It’s not having your portrait painted by, but maybe imagine having your biopic done by Ridley Scott. Or Steven Spielberg doing your biopic, you know?

Andrew Mitrak: Although I don’t think Ridley Scott’s biopic was the most flattering or frankly even the best movie he’s done.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, there were statues made by Napoleon trying to flatter him that he had destroyed or put away in closets and stuff like this. There’s a lot more artwork of Napoleon going around that he didn’t want us to see.

Investigating the Money Behind the Masterpieces

Andrew Mitrak: So you said that when you stand in front of a painting, you’re asking different questions. You’re asking who paid for this? Why did they pay for this? And so could you talk about, we were talking about the artists behind the paintings, but could you talk about the money behind the paintings and sort of what were the motivations of patrons and how is that akin to funding a marketing campaign?

Peter Van Wijnaerde: Yeah. So when you are standing in front of a painting that is like a murder scene or something, then it’s a very healthy question to answer who wanted this made and who wanted to have this above the fireplace. Because by today’s standards, that would not fly. Your wife would say, “Andrew, no, we will not have this above the fireplace.” Right? So that’s the kind of dialogue that goes around in my head when I look at a painting that has a big murder scene. But I made a little series about horrific paintings and who wanted them painted and why. And Spanish kings were very good at collecting horror paintings and that had more to do with telling people something about yourself. Like if you believed in violence, because the stories you pick are the ones that you associate with. So people would see, damn, this guy, Philip IV, I think, he had Rubens paint Jupiter devouring his son. Why would you want to have that? It’s about power, it’s about destroying future power, it’s about punishment, it’s about all that. You don’t mess with a guy who hangs that above his fireplace. And he had this hunting lodge and it was full of these horrific paintings. Just telling the people that came into his place, this is how I look at punishment, this is how I look at power, and this is how I look.

Andrew Mitrak: Was this the Goya one, the Goya with Saturn devouring his son, or was this a different one?

Peter Van Wijnaerde: No, no, no. The Goya one was painted for private reasons because he was a bit mad. It’s the Rubens one. The Goya one is true horror. Rubens is still better actually, I guess.

Andrew Mitrak: That is pretty horrific too. But yeah, that is funny because when you think of Rubens, this is not what you think of, right? You think of full-figured women and happier scenes than this. I guess there is eating in this one, so there is that.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: Yeah, that’s true. But there’s also, this was Baroque time, right? So it was stopping power, shocking people, and whatever it took to get people’s attention was okay. Naked women, cannibalism, it was all good.

Andrew Mitrak: And just for comparison, the Goya one is also truly horrific. When I’m sharing these, sometimes art history really takes you to very dark places.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: It does. And that’s maybe why it’s good to ask why it was painted. You know, about, I think, there is this painting by Caravaggio. It is David beheading Goliath.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: And the reason why he painted that was because he wanted to get pardoned for a murder he did by a cardinal. So he painted that as a gift for a cardinal to get pardoned. And actually, he uses his own head. So the head of Goliath is actually a self-portrait of Caravaggio. And on the knife, there is an inscription on humbleness. So this was painted as an apology for a man in power. So imagine if you’re one of the most popular painters of the time to get something from a cardinal, a pardon, you send him a biblical story in this format.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. So if I’m ever in trouble as a marketer, I’ll see if I can do a marketing campaign for someone. You make a free campaign to get out of it. I’ll feature you on my podcast. I don’t know if that will work. I’ve got to get more sway.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: They need to pardon you. Yeah.

The Separation of Art and Commerce

Andrew Mitrak: So one of your arguments that you talked about is how the separation of art and commerce is actually sort of a recent invention, that it’s only from the last hundred or 200 years maybe that most of art history that art was commercial and that there’s a very clear relationship between the patron and the artist and the commercial nature of the art. So when did you come to this realization that for most of human history that art was a marketing department, so to speak?

Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, it becomes very obvious, for instance, during the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. When painters like Cranach the Elder was painting biblical stories but from this reformist point of view for Martin Luther, right? And you see a completely different way of looking at things like Adam and Eve or a completely different interpretation of the Three Graces, stuff like this. And then it goes back to Rubens again, who was a Counter-Reformist, and he paints it completely different, the same story, and when the same story gets told in a very different way, then there is someone who wants to sway you in one way or the other. So this is just one example of when it becomes very obvious you can put two times the same theme together right next to each other, and it becomes a completely different story because another brand is telling the story, the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation.

So that’s one thing. But it’s just like what I told you before with Judith or with Charlemagne, it’s all been marketing. It was the biggest visual thing that you could hang somewhere. People would look at it, you could tell a story about it, it was a conversation starter. So it had attention, and where there was attention, there are people wanting to do something with that. When there is a point in time where art freed itself from advertising in a way, or from marketing or branding in a way, I think that was at the point of the Secessionists in the turning of the 19th into the 20th century. You had artists in Munich, in Berlin, in Vienna, in Paris, in Brussels, and they were kind of fed up with how the powerful, the kings and the princes and the regents, were actually deciding what was art and what was not. And they wanted to paint because everyone was commissioned by those people. So you could only paint what you were commissioned for to paint at that point, or you could only show what the prince allowed you to show in the salons of that time. So you had the Munich Secessionists, the Vienna Secessionists, and the Berlin Secessionists, and they basically made a new business model around art because they lost their funding. They made a new business model, and that’s actually the point in time when art freed itself a lot from branding influences. But anything before that, the person who paid for it had a motive. And that motive was a lot of the time in the statue or in the painting or even in the architecture.

Addressing Skeptics: Is connecting art history and modern marketing too much of a stretch?

Andrew Mitrak: I’m sure there are listeners who’ve enjoyed this conversation like, oh, that’s really interesting perspectives on art, but maybe they’re still a little skeptical. Like, is this really marketing? Is it a bit of a stretch to call that marketing? Have you ever encountered anybody who pushed back on this or said, this is all interesting, Peter, I like your ideas, but marketing requires a market. And this is pre-capitalism, this is pre-mass production, and that there’s something different about a patron funding a work of art prior to that era versus somebody commissioning an advertisement today. Maybe there’s lessons, but it’s just too much of a stretch. Like, have you ever encountered that or how would you respond to somebody who had that perspective?

Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, I have not encountered that question, but probably people were thinking that. A lot of people. First of all, I would always say don’t take it too serious, it’s a game you play in your head and you can learn a thing or two from the game that you’re playing in your head. So don’t take it too serious. But on the other hand, the need, like I said, marketing is one of the oldest professions. Even before capitalism, there were moments when people needed to gain trust of other people to get something done. Like the Tapestry of Bayeux, when William the Conqueror was taking over England, he did not spit out the Anglo-Saxons that were already having thriving businesses there. He embraced them. And actually, when you look at the tapestry, you would think that they would make fun of the enemy. No, no, no, the Anglo-Saxons are very much respected in the tapestry. So that’s kind of proof that this is a piece that was there to sway people into your way of thinking, into your direction actually. So as long as someone had to influence masses to get something done, I think this counts as branding. And this could count as marketing. Even though there was not a market, then it will have another word. Then call it public relations, which is basically maybe also fits in the marketing realm, right?

Andrew Mitrak: No, that’s right. I think it’s public relations. I think there is sort of a funny line when I did my episode on this man named Edward Bernays. He wrote a book called Propaganda and he also coined the term public relations counsel. Or, sorry, counsel on public relations. And he kind of popularized, I’m not sure if he invented the term public relations, but he definitely cemented and popularized public relations and sort of positioned it against propaganda. But there is a very fine line between the two. And if I was to think of the political advertisements of this, most of the ones that you cite are somebody in power cementing their power and reclaiming their power. But it’s different than when you think of a political ad today, like vote for me because I want the power, right? It’s more of an asking permission for the power, it’s helping anoint me to the power, and I guess it’s sort of pre-democracy somewhat, or sort of pre-political campaigns as we think of them today. So I’m sure there were political ads that were older, but it seems like a lot of them are more an authority figure confirming their authority, sort of persuading the masses so otherwise I don’t have to use violence to persuade you and less of used on their rise to power to build consensus.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: Or think of Napoleon who basically promised Pope Pius VII to be on the cover of Time magazine if he attended his coronation. So Napoleon also needed funds for his wars and people also needed to pay for those wars. So a lot of what he was doing was campaigning to get the power as well, but it had a bit of a different mechanism.

The Dangerous Myth of Progress

Andrew Mitrak: One of the essays that I think encapsulates maybe not your entire worldview, but a certain perspective that you bring is this dangerous myth of progress. I think this is something we fall into a lot, where, and this might be why marketing history is underappreciated by modern marketers, is that we think, “Oh, we’re so wise and know so much more today, and people back then, they have nothing to show us.” And so I think this essay really resonated with me. Can you talk about the dangerous myth of progress?

Peter Van Wijnaerde: Yes. It’s a big topic, because it’s also a dangerous topic. Because it’s all based on John Gray, which is a British political philosopher. And he just claimed that there is no such thing as human progress. We’re not better than the people in history. We’re just the same, in his words would be the same barbaric animals. We have lust and everything we do is motivated on lust, on gaining power, and this is John Gray’s way of putting it. It’s a very pessimistic way. I find it easier, I accept the idea that there is no such thing as real progress. I think that we are exactly the same human beings like our ancestors. I’m a romantic and I believe that people fall in love and people want to be loved and those are very strong drivers for people to do stuff, to get together, to make groups and stuff like that. So I also believe that, by just the idea that those people in history were just as complex as us, we don’t throw away history just like that. We don’t think of medieval people as people who were praying all day and being dirty all day. No, they also wanted to be someone and they also wanted to express themselves. They’re just as complex as you and me, which makes you look different at the people in history, which that strategic thinking was not invented in the 50s. It’s way older. It’s just a pair of glasses you put on, look at history like this, and then you start learning because those are just not previous versions of what we are. We are not the beta to their alpha, they’re the same. We’re just the same but we have Google and we have OpenAI.

Andrew Mitrak: And so the idea is that technology compounds, our ideas compound on each other. There are things that grow, there are systems that grow, there’s culture that grows. But we as individuals are sort of born at square one and have the same fundamental flaws or the same underlying desires that somebody from a previous era has.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: Yes. And John Gray would then argue that everything compounds. So we might have better health, we might live longer because of science. But then again, in the year 1000, there was no way to push on a button and to kill an entire city of people. So not only our wisdom compounds, but also our ways to destroy compounds as well. So to him that’s a bit of an equalizer. And maybe that’s why he has more of a pessimistic view on the whole thing.

Embracing the Messy Reality of Human Nature

Andrew Mitrak: I think that part of this myth could describe why marketing becomes more sterilized and almost too reliant on data, that maybe we think of consumers as rational actors, that we optimize for efficiency, and that sometimes we forget that human nature is irrational, it’s messy, we have desires, we want meaning, we want connection. And some of that gets lost. And is that kind of why you partly bring up this idea of, because when you look at some of the examples of artwork we’ve seen, they’re so primal, right? They’re violent, they’re lustful, there’s naked people, you know, there’s all these things. And...

Peter Van Wijnaerde: And that’s a bit of a different thing. But as soon as you start to embrace the fact that good things are messy, the world becomes way more beautiful. I was going through this personal crisis, I think, walking through Berlin and I went to the Berlin Wall. I’ve been in Berlin, I cannot count how many times I’ve been in Berlin. But at that point I was, no, no, Peter, you’re going to walk to Checkpoint Charlie, you’re just going to look at it. And there it struck me that I was very angry about all the noise in the news that I hear every day and all the opinions that you read everywhere, even about marketing, about our profession. It’s going to be ruined because of this and it’s going to be ruined because of that. And then I thought, like, you’re standing at Checkpoint Charlie and then you know that when you’re standing on the US side of Checkpoint Charlie, you know you’re standing on the good side. That’s what we learned to think, and that’s still true. You’re standing on the side where you are free, and that’s the noisy side. When you step over and you cross the no man’s zone and you go to the other side, that’s the silent side. And we think that peace should be silent. But peace is messy. We think that people should be structured, but people are messy. They have desires, it’s what drives them.

And as soon as you start looking at people as messy beings, then it becomes way more fun. You don’t look at people as a data set. That’s, I guess, it helps when you’re looking at a lot of people at the same time. But in most cases, you’re making a billboard not to address a thousand people, you’re making a billboard to address that guy in that moment or that woman in that moment. And it should appeal to them, and then it should also appeal to their lowest common denominator. Like, what is it that drives these thousand people? And that’s going to be something very primal. And that’s also the same with art history. You see cannibalism, you see naked flesh, you see the things that attract our eyes. We are attracted to two things. Pure biologically, we’re attracted to beautiful things, and we’re attracted to horror because when somebody yells “tiger”, you better pay attention and run, right? And that’s about it. And that’s why I think that primal is good, and messy is good, and this idea that we are progressed does not help us a lot, I think.

Andrew Mitrak: Well, thanks for talking about that visualization of being at Checkpoint Charlie and going from point A to B. I only visited Berlin for the first time in my twenties, but I remember when I first learned about the Berlin Wall, probably early in high school, I think. So I was probably 14 or 15 years old.

And when I saw pictures of it or I saw a video of it or I saw slide projectors in class and that there was a side with all the graffiti on it, where all the people had spray painted, and I thought, “Oh gosh, that was their side.” Then I learned, “No, that was our side. That was the side of freedom.”

That was probably the first time that I realized, “Oh yeah, that graffiti, that messiness, that thing that’s undesirable at times, that’s a sign of freedom and liberty and personal choice.” For all of the downsides of that, I think it’s still the choice that I’d make. I choose to live in, and the place I’d prefer to be is the side that has some of those downsides where people can spray paint a wall and not get executed for it. And that’s good.

I think that was among the memories I have in a classroom, probably among the bigger ones that actually stuck with me in a way. So I think it’s an important, instructive lesson somewhere.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: I remember also next to Checkpoint Charlie, there is a McDonald’s. And the other day I would think, “Did they really have to put a McDonald’s here?” But I think that’s the most important McDonald’s there is in Europe. So I went in and I got myself a burger, and I think it was the best burger ever.

Andrew Mitrak: You know, there is something about McDonald’s. McDonald’s in Europe are usually actually a little nicer than the ones in the US. Because I’ve gone to a McDonald’s close to midnight and had a coffee in Europe, and you don’t do that here. Pulp Fiction has a whole riff on that.

Applying Art History to Modern Marketing Campaigns

Andrew Mitrak: You personally, aside from your Substack, which is great, have you applied this historical perspective to your work? Are there pieces of art history or broader themes that you as a marketer or as an advertising person have brought to your commercial work that you can speak to?

Peter Van Wijnaerde: I think yes. I bring it up every day, I guess, because we work with a lot of people that bring in all the modern stuff, and I like to be a bit of a contrary. So I bring in the old stuff. And I will be the one that addresses that this is people first. That we should be talking, if you make an ad, are we listing the features, or then I’m going like, “Maybe we should talk about the aspirations of the people, and what are the aspirations of the people?” That’s one side, the subject you talk about, this is what you bring in from the old. What you also bring in from the old is make sure you keep having stopping power. Because if you would look at some people, they would put three USPs with a little V sign next to it. It has no stopping power. So what you also learn by looking at art is that you look for stopping power. So inherently it’s been baked in always. But I remember it was before Corona somewhere, I was working on a campaign to promote the Masters of Belgium, and those are Peter Paul Rubens, Jan van Eyck, and Hieronymus Bosch. Which is technically not a Belgian, but at least a lot of paintings in Belgium. And I was trying to promote Rubens museums and places where you can see Rubens in Belgium on Facebook. But my campaign got banned by Facebook because of nakedness on there.

Taking on Facebook: The Rubens Museum Campaign and “Titty Riot”

Peter Van Wijnaerde: Andrew, I got so angry. I remember I was in a meeting with the client, and it was the third time that we had to report no results because Facebook kept banning our campaigns for Rubens. And I got so angry, and I remember in the meeting just saying, “You know what we need? We need a titty riot.” In Dutch I said “tittenrel,” which is basically a titty riot. “Guys, we need a titty riot, and we’re going to do it.” And I took my stuff, I stepped out, and that was that meeting. A few weeks later we were at the office, we were like, “Okay, now we need to think of something.” And we thought of a campaign. Basically very simple because we were angry, right? We wanted it to be very simple. If you had a Facebook account, we banned you from certain rooms in our museums where there was naked people. If you were an American, you were banned. If you had a Facebook account, you were banned. Because according to your rules that you signed, this is inappropriate, you shouldn’t be looking at it. And we made videos of that. There was even an old woman flashing her boobs out of protest against the gatekeepers of the room. That really happened. And we released that video.

We made a statement with the museums, and Fox News picked it up. They actually sent a delegation to Belgium. We talked about it, and the rules were changed about naked paintings on Facebook. So I think that’s the closest that art and my daily job came together at that point.

Andrew Mitrak: That’s incredible. That’s a great example. By the way, this podcast has a clean rating, so I have to bleep. With Rory Sutherland, I bleeped a lot of his profanities. I’m going to keep in “titty riot” though. I’m going to see whether “titty riot” gets us an explicit rating or not.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: Sorry for the profanity.

Andrew Mitrak: That story though also is just incredible, that you kind of take something where nothing creates scarcity or gives you more desire than saying you can’t come in, and turning what could have been a failure into a big public relations win, and actually a great content win, and actually changing Facebook’s policies, which is a pretty rare thing to do. That’s just incredible. So that’s great. I was thinking though of when you bring in, if you’re riffing on ideas with other people on an advertisement, on a campaign, sometimes I feel old school bringing up the Pepsi Challenge or a campaign from 20 to 50 years ago. Or I feel very old school if I bring up a David Ogilvy quote or something. But I imagine you sometimes bringing up medieval art as a reference point in a brainstorming session and getting strange looks from your colleagues. I’m just wondering if those kinds of things ever come up.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: They are quite used to that. They are quite used to me. I also know, I have developed a skill that I can quickly see when people’s eyes are glossing over when I’m doing another of the medieval stories, yes.

Why Marketers Ignore History and Chase Trends

Andrew Mitrak: So I think we have a lot in common that we’re both unusual for marketers. I think we both take different types of looks at history and marketing and certainly try to learn from the past. But the industry overall is very obsessed with what’s trending at this moment right now. Most marketers don’t look to history. In fact, as I was making this podcast, one of the reasons I made it is that there wasn’t really one that was a podcast dedicated on marketing history. And I also do love what’s recent, but the fact is there’s a thousand podcasts or more just about marketing and artificial intelligence. And it’s a topic that I like, I just think that it’s so saturated that it would be difficult to break through. And I thought let’s look at history, because it’s important and nobody’s talking about it. But why do you think it is that nobody talks about it? Why do you think it is that we’re rare for marketers? What could it be?

Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, first of all, the marketeers are the weird people here. Because if you look at the non-fiction book sales, history is always on top of it. Not like number one, but like for sure number three, number four. People just love history. And it’s just marketeers that don’t, I guess. So we are not the weird ones, we’re actually the normal ones, and all the other marketeers are weird. Let’s just agree on that.

Andrew Mitrak: On that point actually, Apple for 2025 named a podcast called The Rest Is History as their number one podcast of the year. And it’s a history podcast, right? A lot of people listen to podcasts. So you’re definitely right on that. Anyway, I didn’t mean to interrupt, but just wanted to reinforce your point.

The Shift to Digital Channels and the Loss of Historical Context

Peter Van Wijnaerde: So normal people love history. Marketeers are not normal people. And I think it’s normal, right? In the last 20 years, marketing has changed so much. So the internet came up, digital marketing came up. And marketeers were, instead of sitting next to your old creative director and learning from that guy, because sadly it was mostly a guy, learning from that guy how advertising worked, how it was to be appealing, how it was to be desirable, what people were desiring, right? So you would learn that skill from someone you were working with. But in the last 20 years, we were a bit distracted by learning about new channels and how to master those new channels. And there was new, new, new. First there was internet, then there was Facebook, then there was Twitter, then there was Instagram, then there was influencer marketing, which is basically, as we already agreed, a very old concept but that is happening again. So you have all these marketeers who actually just needed to handle a few channels, but a lot of thinking about people, and now they flipped it around. They have to think about channels. They have to think about technology. That’s one thing. It’s always the new thing, the new thing to follow. Also, marketeers are very biased to putting “new” on something. And putting “new” on it makes it important, right? Pay attention, this is new. And this is just how marketeers are trained to function in the last 20 years. And it’s not that it’s a bad thing. A lot of good things have come from it. A lot of things are more efficient now. But if you ask why marketeers are not busy with history, it’s that they’re always very busy with something that is possibly tomorrow or missing out on today. There is nothing more exhausting than trying to follow AI trends, right? But that’s what they are doing.

The Democratization of History and Storytelling

Andrew Mitrak: Sometimes I feel cautious about where I step as a historian because I don’t have academic credentials as a historian. And I in some ways am even more cautious than you are because I mostly just ask questions. I haven’t published too much of my own opinions on marketing history so much, at least not yet. But I’m always cautious to do so just because I know that there are academics out there who really study the history. And I don’t want to in some ways undermine their credentials or feel like anybody can be a historian. Because I don’t necessarily know if it’s true that anybody can be. But I guess I wonder if you have any feelings or thoughts on academia as gatekeepers of historical records and how you react to that, or why you felt brave enough to say, “Hey, I’m just going to step out and talk about history and that’s fine.” What’s your overall perspective on this?

Peter Van Wijnaerde: History is something, if you live where I live, I live in a medieval city called Ghent. History, first of all, is everywhere. So you grow up with history. There is a medieval castle in the center of my town. And you know that little boys, they all adore knights and fights with knights on horses and all that stuff. Well, we had the set for that in the middle of the city. So first of all, that’s already something different, that you like grow up with history. That’s one thing. So history is not just a thing that lives in books, it’s a thing that lives around you. However, academics are very boring because they list facts. And that’s good. There should be someone who’s listing facts. But the problem with facts is as soon as you start chaining facts, you create a story. And it becomes a curation of facts becomes a story. And there is this old saying that history is written by the victors. That was kind of happening. That was happening all of the time. Now today, thank you Google, thank you the internet, everyone has access to research papers. Everyone has access to a lot of stuff. Also, a lot of people who studied history have a place to tell their story. They’re not in dark rooms anymore with a lot of dust. No, they can tell their story on the internet and they have been doing that. So people have been chaining these facts into more interesting stories. And when only academics are doing it, you get a very clean version of history, which is true. But for instance, did you know that Belgium, where I live, once had a king that was a bigger monster than Adolf Hitler? A lot of people don’t know about it. At least, I never learned about it in school. I only learned about it maybe 10 years ago. That’s maybe being very generous to myself, maybe it was only five years ago. When other people who were not in the dusty rooms, but people of minorities were doing their own research in history, and they had means to make those stories popular. And telling them, “Hey guys, we have a very dirty colonial history in Belgium and we should know about this.” So this is not to roast the people at the academies, but this is just to tell that more people can tell the stories now based on the facts. Because whatever you do, it should be true. You can’t say that Jesus was sitting on a dinosaur, right? That’s just simply not true. But as long as you work with the facts, you can give parts of history that people were not thinking of. Just like what I did with you with the perspective on the Artemisia Gentileschi painting. By just giving you five more facts, your whole image of that painting changed.

Confronting Colonial History and the Power of Hidden Stories

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that’s right. You bring up Leopold II and sort of the Belgian Congo. It is something where I knew that story and I kind of knew it, but I had to look it up. Because I read Heart of Darkness back in the day. But in some ways that story hasn’t been told in the same way that resonates in the same ways that, say, so many stories about World War II. It’s sort of the defining global moment of the 20th century where that really influenced sort of the second half of the century’s media and art and film. And some of the best films of all time are World War II films or talk about The Holocaust. But because the stories that are written about the Congo, of course Heart of Darkness is a great work of literature, but it’s not sort of a popular book in the sense that even the adaptation of it is Apocalypse Now, which isn’t about the Belgian Congo, right? And not about Leopold II. So it’s kind of a story that because of the era or because of the documentation of it, or I don’t even know exactly why, it just hasn’t translated completely. But it just because the story is not told, people don’t know that history as well. So it is sort of incumbent on not just the fact-finders, but also the storytellers who can create something that really resonates with people, is that’s how the story becomes better known and how people better know their own cultural history.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: That more people can start telling history stories, and I think that’s amazing. That’s just more perspective on life.

The Future of History and Where to Find Peter’s Work

Andrew Mitrak: Any other thoughts on sort of the future of history?

Peter Van Wijnaerde: The future of history. You know what would be amazing? If let’s just assume that fact-checking will become more easy, and searching for facts will become more easy. Then I think a lot of history will be more personal. Because when people find themselves or recognize themselves in history, it gets a certain validation. “I’m here because I was always here,” or “I have a right to be here because I was always here,” you know? For instance, immigrants. History tells the story about the value of immigrants in a certain country. It validates them. So I think history can cure a lot in the future.

Andrew Mitrak: I think that’s a good note to wrap up on. Peter, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Where would you point people online to read more of your work?

Peter Van Wijnaerde: I would love it if they took the time to check my Substack. It’s peterVW.substack.com. That’s where I release my stories. They’re quite long sometimes. You have experienced that, but yeah.

Andrew Mitrak: They’re well-researched, well-articulated, and they’re full of great pictures as well.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: One of the things that I try to do on my blog since a year was never use artificial images, only art. And that’s a fun way because sometimes you have to look for a long time to find the right picture. But that’s also how I always get to the other subject that I want to write about.

Andrew Mitrak: Absolutely. That’s great. Well, yes, I will link to peterVW.substack.com in the blog that accompanies this post as well. So I hope listeners check it out. If you’ve listened to this podcast, I’m sure you’ll appreciate Peter’s work. So Peter, thanks so much. I had a lot of fun with this conversation, so I really appreciate your time.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: Thank you. This was also for me a lot of fun to do.

This week, I’m joined by Scott McDonald, who spent three decades in the research trenches of America’s biggest magazine publishers before becoming president of the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), an organization now celebrating its 90th year of trying to separate marketing science from marketing spin.

Scott led consumer research departments during the Golden Age of Magazines. His insights helped launch Martha Stewart Living, tripled The New Yorker’s subscription price, and he saw the internet disrupt the business model he’d spent years optimizing.

Along the way, he picked up insights that still resonate. Including:

• The Strength of Weak Ties: How a core sociological concept explains networking and provides a framework for go-to-market efforts.

• The Power of Print: Why Steve Jobs insisted that every new Mac launch campaign include an ad in Time Magazine.

• Cultivating Authentic Brands: Behind-the-scenes stories of using qualitative focus groups when launching Martha Stewart Living.

• Scientific Marketing via the ARF: Including the empirical rule that cutting your share of voice during a recession will reliably cost you market share.

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

Now here is my conversation with Scott McDonald.

Special Thanks:

Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity.

And thank you to Bill Moult, whom you may remember from episode 23 of this podcast, for introducing me to Scott.

Connecting Sociology with Marketing Research

Andrew Mitrak: You got your PhD in sociology from Harvard University, and then you got into a career in media and advertising. Sociology is such a fascinating topic. I always enjoyed my sociology classes in college. At a broad level, how did sociology influence your career?

Scott McDonald: Well, my interest in sociology went back to undergraduate days really, where I was mostly in the historical comparative wing of sociology and interested in social movements and things like that. And then when I graduated, I graduated from University of California, Berkeley and was totally broke by the time I got out of school. I needed a job. I went to the job board and found a job that involved program evaluation, just kind of project work, evaluating educational programs for the California Department of Education. And it ended up being quite fascinating because it was the first time I’d actually thought about how you would address structured applied problems using the skills of social science. So I cut my teeth on that, doing projects for the Department of Education, for Bay Area Rapid Transit, for all these sort of public entities. And that drove my desire to go to graduate school in sociology to learn the quant side, which I had not really studied as an undergraduate.

So that’s really the main throughline to the work that I’ve had in advertising and media because I approached it very much through a background in studying statistical modeling, pattern recognition. I was particularly interested in graduate school in demography. And so demography sits at the border between sociology and economics. There are other borders in anthropology and psychology and other things like that. But I was mostly interested in the border between sociology and economics. And that carried through, I’d say, through my entire business side career. But also I had really fallen in love with doing applied work as opposed to sitting around theorizing at a university. So I was much more receptive to those job offers.

And one came to me when I was just rehearsing for doing job talks, going around to campuses and presenting myself as a soon-to-be graduate of a PhD program. And quite randomly, a good example of the sociological theory of the strength of weak ties, that a job at Time (magazine) came up where they were looking for an academic social scientist to try to crack a problem that they found intractable. Because a guy at Sports Illustrated in the Time Inc. portfolio had gone to high school in Chicago with the wife of my thesis advisor. The weak tie led to the referral. I went to New York and hit it off and decided to move to New York and work for Time Magazine instead of joining the faculty at the University of Arizona as a starting tenure track professor.

Andrew Mitrak: Can you define more so the strength of weak ties? Like what is that idea? I haven’t actually come across it.

Scott McDonald: It was popularized as the six degrees of separation concept. That it isn’t so much who you know immediately, but it’s who people that you know know. That’s one degree of separation or two. So most jobs actually come to people through those kinds of referrals. Not exactly the person that I know, but someone else that I might be able to help them actually discover an interesting job. The exception usually in sociology is recent immigrants. Why do you have Haitian taxi drivers or Indian newsstand owners or something like that? Because their networks are small and they’re very specific to immigrant communities. But once you kind of move out of that, and of course universities themselves are super important as drivers of social networks, and they allow people to expand their networks a whole lot. There’s a whole field of economics now that has to do with the life chances that come to someone just as a function of whether they grow up in a well-networked place like say Austin or a poorly networked place like Waco. Geographically they’re not that distant, but they have very different social networks and different opportunity structures. So sociology, you know, again this is like demography, pattern recognition. When you think of the way that you would discover some of these theories and test them, they’re similar to analyzing the influence of say a magazine compared to a social media influencer. You can graph that stuff.

Andrew Mitrak: It sounds like a concept that’s really applicable to marketing in a lot of ways. And we tend to as marketers think of it as just social networking or your second-degree LinkedIn connections or your alumni network, or how you might build an audience through reaching out to influencers and connectors. But it seems actually useful to look at concepts from sociology that have probably studied this in a more rigorous way and come up with things like the strength of weak ties to frame some of your go-to-market efforts.

Scott McDonald: I’ve always thought of sociology as being very, very flexible partly because it overlaps with all these adjoining fields. And it’s always scrambling to try, it doesn’t have one unifying theory as economics does. It’s got a bunch of theories. So—

Andrew Mitrak: Sounds kind of like marketing.

Scott McDonald: It is, exactly. Exactly.

The Golden Era of Magazine Publishing

Andrew Mitrak: So you got to Time.

Scott McDonald: My first big post-graduating job.

Andrew Mitrak: And this was in the early 80s or so?

Scott McDonald: Yeah, 1982.

Andrew Mitrak: So what was the portfolio of Time magazines? Obviously everybody knows Time Magazine, and you mentioned Sports Illustrated...

Scott McDonald: Yeah, so the big moneymakers were the weekly magazines. It was Time, Sports Illustrated, and People (magazine). And they all made boodles of money. It was sort of the heyday of the magazine publishing industry. There were also a bunch of monthly magazines as well. And of course, Time Inc. owned a bunch of other things. Book of the Month Club, a publishing imprint. I forget exactly which ones they had, but they had a lot of things. And importantly, HBO. And so there was already kind of a media empire. They owned some cable systems and stuff like that. And then a couple years after I joined, they merged with Warner Communications, which brought them a movie studio, a music company, and a bunch of other of those assets, the Turner Broadcasting System, and CNN, and all that. So it became more and more of a media conglomerate while I was there. A very interesting place to work.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, we’ll talk about your time there, your work there, and how it evolved while you were there. But before we get into that, I thought this might be an opportunity to talk about magazines more broadly. You kind of called this the Golden Era of magazines. And they were such a huge part of American media and culture in the 20th century. And we haven’t really discussed magazines at all on this podcast aside from occasionally we reference an iconic ad that would have appeared in a magazine. And iconic ads are so critical to the medium of magazines. Do you have any thoughts on the rise of magazines in the 20th century and how it impacted the way brands marketed themselves?

Scott McDonald: Well, a lot of magazines are aspirational. And people kind of put themselves into that. Many are vertical. Time was an example of a fairly broad magazine, and it competed with other leading news sources. But it was much more in-depth than say what you would get from broadcast television news or something like that. Much more the middle-brow intellectual version of news. It wouldn’t be The Wall Street Journal necessarily, but something that was very, you know, they broke stories and competed in news. So a high-brow, well-heeled audience at a reasonable amount of scale that provided, say financial companies, any company that was trying to influence opinion would be a reasonable target. So like Microsoft when it launched, Apple Inc. when it launched. As a matter of fact, Steve Jobs always insisted that any new campaign had to include Time Magazine. So he was from a generation that viewed this as a super important, influential medium.

And magazines actually were that. They were criticized sometimes as being gatekeepers. Editors had a lot of power in setting agendas or anointing. I worked for Condé Nast. Vogue (magazine) is famous for anointing a new designer. Someone that Anna Wintour likes gets featured in Vogue and they’ve made it. It’s like they’re on the blotter. That’s less true now because you have competing sources of influence, but the appeal to advertisers in part was always that. And when you do consumer research, you would see that very often the readers of those magazines believed that the ads were really part of the value of the magazine. So a September Vogue was evaluated partly by how thick it was. Well, the thickness wasn’t editorial copy. It was a lot of ads for September Vogue, and consumers would actually think that Anna hand-selected the ads.

How Brands Measured ROI on Magazine Advertising

Andrew Mitrak: Can you take us behind the scenes of who are the players when it comes to marketers at a brand? Let’s say Apple, Steve Jobs wants his ads for a new Mac launch in Time Magazine. There’s Time, there’s the publisher, there’s advertising agencies, there’s Apple and the in-house company. What is sort of the relationship between how an ad actually gets into a magazine?

Scott McDonald: Okay. So the publishers, and of course since I worked for Time Inc. and then WarnerMedia and Condé Nast across 30 years, my view is a bit, the lens that I apply is from the publisher side more than anything else. Publishers very much wanted to have a direct relationship with the brand, with clients. And a lot of the communications were direct there. So at Condé Nast, I would go present directly to L’Oréal, for example, one of the bigger cosmetics advertisers for the house. And this was somewhat in conflict with the agencies. Agencies were supposed to be planning media across the board, but they often were really confined more to managing the television side and later on the digital buying. So the publishers preferred that because sometimes they didn’t compete with more mass media like TV on reach, but they were more influential. Very similar to what we look at research now, podcasts don’t usually have the same amount of reach as some other media, but they’re much more influential. They’re persuasive to the people who listen to them. And so they have a traction that is in some ways very reminiscent to me of what you would emphasize in conversations with publishers about the value, why they needed to be in Vanity Fair (magazine) or whatever.

Andrew Mitrak: How were the brands measuring their Return on investment on their magazine advertising? As we’ve looked at this era of marketing metrics and analysis, a lot of it tends to be around TV, and it feels like there was a lot more scanner panel data and things like that that were almost tied to television sets and stuff. But I haven’t actually heard it brought up on how it applied to magazines and such.

Scott McDonald: It was harder to justify magazines in terms of bottom-of-funnel metrics because they don’t work that fast. They are much more about building Brand equity and upper funnel. So the big studies of that era needed to take a pretty long timeframe. They needed to be in field for a year or more to actually be able to demonstrate the value, and the value often was a brand equity value. It wasn’t pushing product. Newspapers worked fast. You know, that form of print media, you’d have the inserts before the weekend. It was mostly promoting sales, so eroding your profit margin in the same way that other in-store promotions would, and ultimately undermining brand equity. The point of good magazine advertising was to build brand equity and pricing power.

So like a classic campaign that ran for over 20 years, the Absolut Vodka ad, was to me a great example of what’s different about print advertising compared to television or digital in most cases because it’s not interruptive. It works by invitation rather than shouting. It’s like, you want to put yourself in the picture? Oh, I want to be on that beach. I want to take that vacation. Or by being clever and witty, there’s a puzzle to solve. What have they done with that damn vodka bottle now? And, I mean, vodka is vodka, you know. But to be able to charge a couple of extra bucks because it’s Absolut is hugely valuable to that marketer. And so the game is a long-term game there. It’s not, and thus much harder to measure. And I think to the disadvantage of many advertisers that rely upon that kind of pricing power, it’s harder to sustain those forms of marketing these days because there is such a pull toward transactional bottom-of-the-funnel short-term metrics because they’re easier to measure. And they tend to be misattributed sometimes to shorter-acting forms of media that might have been, why did I search for that brand? But the search engine will get more credit than the advertising that made me type that brand’s name in the first place when I decided I wanted to buy something.

Driving Brand Equity and Subscription Growth

Andrew Mitrak: I want to come back to where we were in the story. You joined Time in the early 80s, and you continued to work at Time Warner and Condé Nast, and always in consumer research and insights leadership roles. And so what was your role in doing market research for major magazine publishers? Was it more looking at their own metrics, or was it looking at metrics for the advertisers, or what was your job there?

Scott McDonald: I set up the first consumer research department at Time Inc. And so the focus was almost exclusively on the demand side, on stimulating demand for magazines, working with the consumer marketing function and with the editors. And so a lot of work in magazine development, starting titles like Martha Stewart Living, Real Simple. Those were some of the ones that I worked on at Time Inc. And then there was a lot of magazine development work at Condé Nast as well, along with cover testing and developing forecasting models. You know, you have a couple different ideas for what you might run on the cover of Vanity Fair, which one will sell more. And so that was a key part there.

Condé Nast also had The New Yorker probably, a super influential magazine, one I still read all the time, very loyal to it. But the job there involved reducing its dependence on ad revenue and building up the consumer side of that business. So it really involved gradually getting people used to paying $150 a year for it instead of $50. And that was strategically vital to a magazine like The New Yorker, which isn’t a behemoth in terms of reach. And so it requires kind of a different mix in the business model. But yeah, at Condé Nast I had responsibility for the advertising side, but they hired me primarily because of my reputation doing work on the editorial and consumer side.

Andrew Mitrak: I make a lot of The Simpsons references on this podcast because I grew up watching The Simpsons. And I remember one of the first ways I ever heard of The New Yorker was a Simpsons joke where Marge is going through her mail and one of the envelopes was a rejection letter from The New Yorker subscription department. And I was basically a little kid, I was like, I didn’t even know what The New Yorker is.

And I looked it up like, oh yeah, seems like it’s this magazine for rich smart people. And it’s funny to think of how a magazine sort of segments itself. The New Yorker is different than Time, but there are some overlaps, right? That Time is on every newsstand, it has broader reach, it seems like it’s more ubiquitous, and The New Yorker wants to be big and everybody wants to know the name, but not everybody necessarily reads it or pays for it or subscribes to it. And I guess can you speak to the different approaches you had for how growing market share and maintaining market share for a very large widely circulated publication versus increasing the brand equity and justifying price increases and higher subscription costs for a more niche publication like The New Yorker?

Different Approaches to Managing Print Media Brands

Scott McDonald: Well, to some extent, I mean, some of it really is respecting the editors that you’re working with and trying to find a way to help them with the particular problems that they face. So a demand problem for Time (magazine) really involves something like newsstand. The New Yorker didn’t depend upon newsstand sales; it was a subscription magazine. So it’s partly just kind of understanding the differences in those businesses. And Time was probably in more need in some ways of the kind of research help that I could make because it did depend on newsstand sales. And that’s something where the forecasting tools can be of greater use and a testing program, particularly if you’re out every week, you get a lot of data points that you can then reconcile to how it actually sold and refine your forecasts.

So, but then a whole lot of times there’s a lot of news that happens. It’s not debatable what will be on the cover. It’s like what was the big story of the week. So your point of influence is more a slow news week where there’s what we would lovingly call a thumb sucker article. Just something that’s a bigger, in-depth piece that’s been cooking for a while and they’re looking for the right opportunity to run it. And for those they would really want to know some, it’s risk management. Like, how much will this appeal to people?

Andrew Mitrak: Did the business interests of increasing reach of say Time Magazine for instance influence editorial decisions as like who would be on the cover? Because I could imagine that there might be certain figures that you put that person on and it’s more likely to buy news, more people will buy it, right? Or you might have data like, oh when we put handsome people on the cover, we get more than... Did that ever...

Scott McDonald: It always is the editor’s choice. I’m just giving information. So there never was pressure from the corporation to, you know, just do what Scott says. It wouldn’t work well. It wouldn’t be good for the working relationship with the editors. It’s their remit. And so the principle of church and state was pretty much intact all the way along, and that would be, that wasn’t something that it was useful to challenge.

But there’s a lot of financial, a lot at stake. Or at least there was during that golden era. I mean the advent of this thing, completely changed the game because attention moved entirely to the phones. It hasn’t really left there yet. And people were no longer killing time at a checkout stand kind of browsing a magazine rack to figure out something to amuse themselves for the three minutes, the 2.7 minutes that they were in line waiting to be checked out at the grocery store. Yeah, so the forecasting became less valuable as newsstand just as a category declined.

Surprising Insights From Magazine Cover Testing

Andrew Mitrak: Are there any general insights or truisms that you’d be able to share about what are the markers of like, say who’s on the cover of a magazine and like this type tend to lead to a larger spike? Like what’s the type of insight you would share with an editor that they would choose to use or ignore or...

Scott McDonald: I’d say the things that are sort of durable truths, they didn’t need me for. I mean, put a Kennedy on the cover of People (magazine) and you’re going to sell. You can still, you can run JFK’s assassination 40 years later and it’s still going to sell. So I mean they don’t need me. They know that. But of course, if People magazine does this all the time, it’s not a good thing. They’ve got to find new things. So and Princess Diana, same thing. So there are cover subjects that for People or Vanity Fair (magazine) are pretty timeless.

The I’d say the better examples would be the ones that were surprises. Where they had some other strong options, but there would be a surprise that came out that they wouldn’t have automatically assumed. And so a test that would highlight that would encourage an editor to take a chance on something. And this would be true even for just an unusual shot that doesn’t look like the usual cover of Vogue (magazine). So a model or an actress in an unusual yoga pose or something, would be, or pregnant. Just something that is startling and feels a bit like a risk. And then you give the editor some idea of what is the level of risk and the probability of success for something that is out of box. And so I think it was used more for encouraging innovation and risk-taking than moving always back to something that was kind of a hardy perennial or too predictable.

Andrew Mitrak: So there were the truisms that were obvious, the JFKs and Princess Diana’s of the media. And then the things that were non-obvious that were unique insights that you were providing, were those sort of more temporal where you do that trick and then it sort of fades? I’m kind of almost likening it to people who analyze what’s trending on TikTok and social media trends and sort of seeing what are the types of stories that are this week. But you can’t, you kind of gotta hop on it now and it’s, this isn’t necessarily useful advice five years from now. Was it kind of like that type of thing?

Scott McDonald: One example I can think of from Vanity Fair was Heath Ledger. So it was like a year after he died. And they put him into the mix on a cover test. It wasn’t my idea, it was the editor’s idea, but it was against some other things that going into the test you plausibly would say, well these other ones have a pretty good chance as well. There’s no particular reason to think that people are still that interested in Heath Ledger. But they were, and it was quite evident. Now doing it a year later, it probably wouldn’t be the same. So these are kind of timestamped and the value of them is in being able to do that probe at the moment and fit it to a model where you’ve got other data on other covers and you’ve studied the competition and you know what their newsstand sales were. And so you can get that data back from the distributor. So you’re able to build a more sophisticated model because you’ve accumulated more data. And it was all great until the whole newsstand business collapsed in response to this more transformative launch of a smartphone and major change in consumer behavior. It’s part of what interests us right now on AI of course, and trying to get an early bead on this next transformative change.

Building Martha Stewart’s Brand with Consumer Research

Andrew Mitrak: I’m going to ask you about the smartphone and the internet and AI. I have one more magazine question before I do though. Because you mentioned Martha Stewart Living. And I think Martha Stewart might be one of the greatest marketers of all time. And I actually haven’t discussed her that much on this show yet. And just that there’s a magazine title with somebody’s name, Martha Stewart Living, there’s not that many of those. It’s not that, and to build a whole, and it seems like a unique thing at the moment to build a whole magazine around her brand. And do you have any stories of the creation of Martha Stewart Living or what was that about?

Scott McDonald: It was fun. The most fun part of it really was doing qualitative work, we did Focus groups with Martha in the back room. And it was of a genre of qualitative research where we decided that we really wanted to study the fans. So like this had worked very well for Warner Bros., so my confreres out at the Warner Bros. Studio, had this property Superman, that had been kind of damaged by this campy TV series in the 60s. And it wasn’t, they wanted to bring out a Superman movie that really worked, and they did it by studying the hardcore fans of the comic, of the original thing. So that was the approach with, and they managed to succeed in reviving the franchise for the movie.

That was our approach with Martha Stewart, we really tried to identify the people that just loved her. And that we studied what was authentic about Martha. So my favorite exercise from it was asking Martha to just from her, come from her house in Westport and bring us some stuff that’s in her house, that we mixed in with other things that were expensive, or utilitarian. I was like gardening gloves, or a little trowel, or just stuff that from her house, random stuff, compared to other stuff. And we threw it all on the table and asked people to pick out which things were Martha’s and why they thought that. And they could do it. They could do it. They understood her taste, some of which might be Shabby chic, but it was her taste and they were spot on. And it kind of helped the editors because here was a situation where Martha hadn’t made a magazine before, so she’s contracting with Time Inc. to boot up this magazine. And she’s got some professionals in magazine design and editors and things like that that she’s working with, but it’s a new venture. And that really helped to refine understanding of what the secret sauce was and this sort of passion for Martha. And I think it was a good example of, again trying to provide some information, but respectfully. I’m not a magazine editor, and you just set up the occasion as an opportunity to understand and refine the description of that brand and what’s the flavor of that magazine.

Andrew Mitrak: Right. Yeah, it seems like part of the core insight is really doubling down on the core fan base because if you’re making a magazine, you could sort of take it in different directions. And you can expand, if you have a lot of pages to fill, you could sort of dilute it and add a lot more stuff in. But instead, be like no, let’s really focus on what does this core group care about and try to get it to be the essence of Martha.

Scott McDonald: You know, and it’s interesting too because as we discussed before, the ads in a magazine are a pretty important signal of who’s in the room, who’s allowed into this club. So if you’ve got tasteless ads in a Martha Stewart Living or in any Condé Nast publication, you’ve got a problem. And it’s an editorial problem. I remember once at Condé Nast, the corporate sales department did a big deal with McDonald’s. And they ran McDonald’s in like all of the Condé Nast publications. And we got consumer complaints. “This doesn’t belong in my magazine. How dare you.” So there is an interesting balance that takes place that just has to do with the signaling about what’s appropriate for this particular environment.

The Early Days of the Internet

Andrew Mitrak: When did you first realize that the internet was going to be a big deal?

Scott McDonald: Right off the bat. The World Wide Web itself, which became I know was invented in 1989, but the first real operational browsers and effective implementation of the Web was in ‘95. And it immediately created a sensation, even though we were dealing with 300 baud modems and screeching sounds and all this stuff. Just the reality of having that amount of sort of global access to all these documents, was very bewildering. And for about four or five years, there was just a whole lot of experimenting taking place across all media.

Time Warner at that point had already been investing in Broadband and trying to pilot Video on demand. So they basically switched video systems, and it was they were too early. The technology was too expensive still, but I got to sort of play around with that. But there was recognition that something big was afoot, and people just didn’t know exactly what to do about that. And that was, that was a pretty fun ride.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, I imagine. It’s quite a ride. And so as a publisher, as the internet comes along, you know it’ll be a big deal, how does that impact your role as a researcher?

Scott McDonald: In some ways it led to just some interesting new things I had to figure out how to do. So again, because I came out of academia, I would constantly look back to see how certain methods, for example, for doing analysis and or forecasts, might apply in this situation. So my job at Time Warner kind of morphed into trying to understand the internet and the effect it would have on businesses. And so part of what I was doing was studying like what there’s a lot of complexity and chaos and difficulty finding things, and there were no good Search engines. So you’d start studying how people were actually using the available tools, AltaVista for example. And so it introduced me a lot to usability testing, user interface diagnostics, because internally people were designing things like more complex remote controls for TV for cable systems. And for proliferating channels of content. You’d start studying the dynamics of search and what led to satisfaction with a search result or not.

Time Inc. was experimenting with a satellite model that said, okay, we’re going to provide simplification, kind of like what AOL was at the beginning, where it was simplified into some aggregate content areas and you relied upon AOL or Time Inc. to filter all this stuff and make it simpler to find things because you’d aggregated content into kind of a hub. And part of my frustration was I wasn’t able to effectively convince the management of Time Warner that that was a mistake, and that that wasn’t actually going to win. That people wanted, they liked the freedom of all of those of being able to pull in documents from everywhere, and they didn’t really place enough value in that filtering design and structure. So Google would win. And as soon as Google showed up, Google didn’t even have a business model yet, but it was clear from day one when you’re studying that space that this is a significantly better search result. And you could see immediately that this is where Time Warner should be focusing its attention and not Pathfinder or something like that that was. Or, and it was the AOL deal, when that was announced, the merger with AOL, that was when I decided I was going to leave Time Warner. Because it seemed to me to be completely contrary to what I’d been learning.

Andrew Mitrak: Seems to have been a prescient choice.

Scott McDonald: Yeah, personally it was fine. I had a lot of options that became very valuable in that transaction and I could exercise them and walk away a happy camper. But it seemed like a very bad business proposition.

From the Walled Garden to The Open Web

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, for sure. And it seems like the Time Warner AOL merger and sort of their Walled garden approach as opposed to sort of embracing the open Internet it seems like it also kind of ties back to their own business interests in being gatekeepers. And that if there weren’t gatekeepers that has sort of knock-on effects that might be bad for the publishing industry that sort of played out over the next couple decades.

Scott McDonald: It’s the Innovator’s dilemma.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, exactly. Did publishers start to see the writing on the wall there or when did that, when did because I’m sure there was a moment where the internet’s like, hey this is a huge opportunity, this is more, you know, free distribution, we don’t have to pay for paper, things like that. But then there seems to be like, oh but what if anybody can blog and what if people stop going through the gatekeepers? Like when did that turn or did you see that turn?

Scott McDonald: That was more in the 2000s. So it was really when I was at Condé Nast, and Condé Nast was wrestling with the same issues. In some ways it had a pretty big portfolio of brands, but it ended up pruning those to the most distinctive brands that could be defended and that could operate as digital properties on a global scale. So they kind of shifted scale and integrated their international, like they used to license Vogue (magazine) in a bunch of different countries, and they kind of consolidated and it became a global brand more. And would be sold, the advertising would be sold on a different basis thus. So there were different forms of adaptation, they all needed to figure out how to do what they were doing on a lower cost basis because the impressions became more commodified in that market. Particularly once Programmatic advertising took place.

And you know the, I mean the big change, the biggest change in my view was that advertising was severed from editorial content. Ads came from Ad serving. Advertisers bought an audience, they didn’t buy a placement inside a medium. And so the whole model and the kind of special relationship that I described where I’d be going over to L’Oréal and talking about our view of their customers, trying to share insights about customers that are gleaned from studying them in the context of Condé Nast magazines, was irrelevant because everything was much more commodified through that digital model of advertising insertions. The same issues are with us now with AI and you have different companies trying to decide do I license, do I make a deal with OpenAI right now or do I try and sue them, you know like The New York Times is doing, and require a different payment model for access to my content. And these are still commercial and legal questions that are not yet resolved but they feel familiar because they’re just a different iteration of the same business issues that developed in response to the Web.

Applying Lessons from the Internet to the AI Era

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah absolutely. Are there any other lessons that you’re drawing or thinking about from having navigated the internet’s disruption to the publishing industry and as we’re now entering or in the midst of this AI era, what that means for advertisers and marketers? Like are there any lessons that you’re thinking about that apply?

Scott McDonald: Yes and no. I mean I think the in some ways this feels somewhat different. And I don’t know, you know the question of whether AI dramatically changes the consumer the labor market, and the ability of people to earn incomes that supports the advertising system is a fair question. Even though the history of all these tech innovations is that they generate enough new jobs to replace the ones that have been rendered obsolete. But I don’t know at this point whether whether I believe that this time around. So that’s a fairly big unknown that would be different in terms of the consequences of the innovation.

If I was still working at a magazine publisher and or a publisher in general, it could be a TV channel that calls itself a publisher now, or any content engine, then I’d still be wary of how I monetize that content when it becomes Disintermediation. My advice still would be pay a lot of attention to trust and pay a lot of attention to the shifts in consumer behavior because advertisers always follow the consumer behavior. And consumers don’t always do what we as publishers want them to do. So you’ve got to be realistic about that and keep your eye on the consumer. That’s certainly a lesson I think from my Time Warner days where I don’t think they did that sufficiently. So.

Andrew Mitrak: I don’t know if this is a lesson, but something to draw from the golden era of publishing is editorial taste, that as a marketer that uses AI products, the AI products don’t always have good taste, right? Or they kind of have sort of a median internet quality taste and like, you know, obviously they’re very powerful and all that but like there is an element of if everything kind of looks the same, and you can’t differentiate your AI output from my AI output, somebody’s editorial taste on refining and coaching and directing it kind of becomes more important. And I wonder if there’s sort of people embracing their inner editor and developing taste to sort of know what’s good and not...

Scott McDonald: You know, this remains to be seen but it’s my observation that as AI improves, which it continues to do with breathtaking speed, it depends partly on you as the user to tell it what you want. It wants to please. So if you, so like in the context of say marketing applications or insight extraction, if you just ask a simple question, you’re going to get a pretty simple answer. If you actually feed it say peer-reviewed academic articles that you want a theoretical framework to be incorporated into the answer, you’ve raised the bar a lot. If you tell it that you want it to pretend that it’s a McKinsey & Company consultant, it’ll do it. It knows what you mean, and it will change the answers in response to your inputs. So I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t do that with regard to some matters of taste. If you could train your chatbot to be like those focus group respondents in the Martha Stewart Living example. And it seems in principle that you should be able to cultivate that.

The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF)

Andrew Mitrak: So I want to ask you about the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF). You’ve been president of the ARF for about ten years or so. What is the ARF for people who have are not familiar with it already and how has it evolved over the years?

Scott McDonald: Okay. So the ARF is the Advertising Research Foundation. It is celebrating its 90th birthday right now. It was founded in February of 1936. As at the behest of the two founding members, the Association of National Advertisers, the ANA, and the American Association of Advertising Agencies, otherwise known as the 4A’s. And it was set up from the beginning as an independent foundation dedicated to furthering through research the scientific practice of marketing and advertising.

So from the beginning days it wrestled with the kind of public facing questions of how advertising works. What’s the best way of measuring the audience of a Life (magazine), you know? Of not just the circulation but all the readers per copy and the people who look at it in barbershops and whatever, you know. What’s the best way of measuring the audience for a radio program? We know how many radio sets are in American households, but how many people actually heard a particular show? And then in terms of advertising, what makes some ads successful and others not? What’s the optimum frequency? How long does it take to burn in or to burn out? Those questions have been with us from the beginning, and they’re still with us today, it’s just a much more complex and fragmented media landscape.

And so to some extent you need to update that all the time. And that’s still the kind of role of the ARF. It’s the power according to its bylaws, the power over the organization is distributed among marketers, ad agencies, media companies, and service providers, which would include all the measurement companies and everybody from Nielsen Holdings to little Neuroscience consultancies or brand consultancies or attention measurement companies, any of those things. And so ARF is kind of the Switzerland in the middle of that ecosystem that conducts research on basic questions of how advertising and marketing work, trying to stay as close as possible to the values of scientific inquiry. And that means, that doesn’t mean anything goes. And you’re in an environment where people make a lot of claims. All these campaigns do really well. You go to a lot of conferences and they’re all just like success story after success story. And you know not everything works, you know? And so trying to separate wheat from chaff and kind of build a body of knowledge about how to think about these things is the mission. To try to improve practice through the application of scientific methods. So.

Andrew Mitrak: How do you, how do you deal with that at a conference or just in marketing in general? Because I think every marketer wants to say that they’re scientific. They want to say that they’re data-driven, but also every they want to say that their campaigns are working, right? They want to say yes and our campaign was great and there’s sort of a grading their own homework type thing. And there are ways where you can cherry pick your numbers, like “oh, our reach was great,” even if your conversion was bad. Or “conversion was great,” even though you paid too much. And I guess how do you sort out navigate that?

Scott McDonald: Yeah, it’s difficult. Partly because, you know, the association itself, it’s a membership organization. So you don’t really want to offend your members. But on the other hand, at some level you might have to because not everything can be equally true. So that’s why the north star remains. And you try and set up... I mean a classic ARF study, we just did it around different aspects of attention measurement. This is a growing field. And you have different approaches, some of which rely upon academic understandings of cognition and memory and things like that. And others that really kind of just follow the development of tools that might plausibly be used as proxies for attention. So eye fixations, because we have Eye tracking and good cameras on our digital devices, on our phones, on our laptops. You’ve got information that’s used for ad verification purposes that would indicate that yeah, there’s a human there. There’s a hand on the mouse. You know? So that’s a proxy for some level of attention that is a signal not very expensive to collect because you’re already doing all this ad verification work, but how closely can we establish that that relates to any sort of formal definition of what we mean by attention? And by that are we talking about, you know, just eye fixations and Saccades? Are we talking about evidence of memory and recall around an ad?

So there’s a lot of tests around that. And the ARF exists kind of to help sort out the quality of those. We have an academic journal. We connect to people who have, you know, where they’re peer reviews. There’s competition to get on the stage for our events. So people have to compete before a jury to even get a slot. And so it’s, it’s sort of through that process, which is similar to how it works in the other sciences. I mean, the best examples, if someone really wants to make a strong claim for their research, then they would, we’ll do an audit for them. We’ll run through and see whether we can replicate their numbers. We’ll see whether they did cherry pick. We will, and then we’ll take their data and host it on our website and make it available for anyone in the world who wants to have a go at it, to anonymize the data and, which is the same like if California Institute of Technology wants to make a big claim in the physical sciences, they got to make their data available to the team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build legitimacy around it. It’s a very similar concept. So that’s the space that we operate in. It’s geeky but it has some value in this ecosystem.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. If I was to draw an analogy back to earlier in this conversation of you and your publishing days recognizing “hey there’s truisms that JFK assassination and Princess Diana, that always sells magazines at newsstands.” But like the real insights are sort of the non-obvious things that are more unique or maybe more time-bound. Could you draw parallels and find like what are sort of the truisms that the ARF has helped establish or that you’ve sort of recognized over the years in your role there, versus some of the more unique, non-obvious things that research is uncovering?

Scott McDonald: There are a lot of them, I would say. We codified some of them in our, so the ARF acquired the Marketing Science Institute, which is a more academically oriented entity. We did this a couple of years ago. And MSI has published something they call the Empirical Generalization series, which only will, so it will formulate like “X causes Y.” And here are the estimates of effects, within this range and these categories, you know that might be covariates. But it’s reduced down to things that we think there is compelling enough evidence. And their filter on it is wherever there’s been a meta-analysis in like the top three or four marketing journals. So very high level of peer review scrutiny. And only where there have been 60 or more studies confirming this generalization that would allow you to talk about say the if you’ve got like a budget to spend and you need to spend some of it on advertising and some of it on price promotion, for example, in-store promotion, like what are the trade-offs and how do we think about that?

So but I think for the ARF itself, probably the thing we’ve studied the most over the years, is anytime there’s a recession or a big disruption in the economy, the pandemic, September 11 attacks, any of these things that suddenly just have a big dramatic effect on markets and consumer behavior, there’s a tendency to cut marketing spend. Short-term marketing spend gets cut. So what’s the effect of that? Since we’ve studied it like from the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, any of these things that have these kinds of shock effects. And you’ve got a pretty good record of it. And the answer to it, I call it an empirical generalization, is that when you cut your share of voice, so you withdraw from the advertising market and don’t spend, so you’re not really getting a share of voice within a category, you lose share. And you lose it fairly quickly, and it takes about five years to recover, if you can recover. We have had whole brands that just kind of go away because they lost their position within a category.

That’s connected to another generalization and truism that I think is there and is likely to remain there for a long time, that being the dominant brand in a category, which usually involves at least 20% share of market, although in some cases it’s a lot more, leader in the category. That leads to all kinds of benefits. Any advertising that’s done for the brand leader in a category has stronger coefficients of impact, both short term and long term. And to the dismay of the second and third or fourth participants in a category, their advertising is probably going to actually benefit the category leader. It’s an unfair world, but people just mistake it. And a lot of, it’s another sort of truism that I think remains, a lot of creative ads that are so creative that they don’t tell you who the brand is, people love the ad and they assign credit for it to the wrong brand. Because that truism was ignored. It might have won an award somewhere in an ad creative competition, but it didn’t really work for the brand because they didn’t integrate the brand, make it clear enough to the consumer what brand was being advertised. So there are a lot of regularities and it’s hard to not be like a broken record sometimes when you’re responsible for the catalog of those things. But there are mistakes that we shouldn’t be making over and over again. And I think MSI in its most recent iteration of the Empirical Generalization series had like 175 things that rose to the level of, okay these are generalizations. There’s like enough evidence, there is consensus around it. And that’s kind of how in my view science works. It still doesn’t mean that those won’t change and evolve over time as other situations develop, but you build it on the back of a lot of evidence that’s been objectively evaluated and critically evaluated. So.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. That’s great. It’s great that your foundation is able to advocate for this research, make it available and share it. So let’s learn from science, let’s learn from history and not repeat the same mistakes over and over again. So Scott, I really enjoyed this conversation. For listeners who have enjoyed it as well, where would you point them to online so they could find out more about your work and more about the ARF?

Scott McDonald: thearf.org and msi.org.

Andrew Mitrak: Scott, thanks so much. It’s been a real pleasure.

Scott McDonald: Thanks Andrew.

You have 12 months and $5M to launch your product and climb from Director of Marketing to the C-Suite. But your CEO has aggressive goals and if you don’t meet them, it’s game over.

It’s like The Oregon Trail, but for marketing (and with less dysentery).

You can play it right now at cmogame.com.

Why Make a Marketing Game?

One thing I keep coming back to is how hard it is to teach marketing. Books, lectures, and podcasts are great resources, but I really learned marketing by doing.

By making bets with incomplete information. By investing in long-term brand while hitting this quarter’s target. By navigating pressures from sales, finance, and the CEO.

I designed The CMO Game with this in mind, creating an active simulation that complements other resources for marketing education.

Like this podcast, it’s free and designed for marketers who want to get better.

How The CMO Game Works

You start by picking a product: soda, shoes, skincare, or software. Then you lock in positioning: premium, value, lifestyle, or disruptor. Each combination has unique marketing channels and tactics that work best.

Next, you hire your team and make your pre-launch investments. And every single choice is a trade-off.

Skip PR, and you’ll be caught flat-footed when a crisis hits later in the year. Over-index on data, and you’ll get great insights and better projections—but you’ll have way less money to actually run campaigns.

Then comes the launch itself. You have to decide your strategy: Do you go for a massive, splashy launch to grab immediate market share? Or do you hold back, preserving your budget for a steady drumbeat of campaign spending over the next 11 months?

Over the next 12 months, you face unexpected challenges, respond, and adjust your budget. Every decision has tradeoffs.

The game models the tension between brand and performance marketing.

Brand equity grows like compound interest, it’s invisible early but pays dividends late in the game. Performance marketing is efficient and immediate, but growth is linear and lacks long-term payoffs.

Strategy, Luck, and the Messy Reality of Business

Not everything is in your control. Some months you get lucky. Other times you face a crisis. How you respond matters as much as how you plan.

Premium skincare, value sneakers, and enterprise software all require different approaches. The game rewards players who grasp this, and penalizes those who treat marketing as one-size-fits-all.

And yes, the CEO can fire you. If revenue stalls, if brand equity craters, if you make too many bad calls in a row... you’ll end up #OpenToWork.

What Marketers Are Saying

I shared early builds of The CMO Game with marketers, professors, and friends who work in gaming.

Elton X. Graham, CMO of Sur La Table, put it well:

“Mitrak’s game sparks the right conversations by not giving you marketing answers, but better questions to ask... which is where real learning starts.”

Brian Marr, a marketing executive and professor, plans to use it in his Advanced Marketing course, describing it as a “great way to break the ice in the first class.”

This is what excites me most: that people might learn timeless marketing principles while having fun playing a game.

Play It and Share It

The CMO Game is 100% free. No login. No email capture. No in-app purchases. Just cmogame.com.

A full playthrough takes 10-20 minutes, depending on how much time you spend considering your strategy.

If you’re happy with your results, you can submit your score to the “Hall of Fame” leaderboard. If you think you can do better, play again with a different strategy.

If you like The CMO Game, the best thing you can do is share it with someone: a colleague, a student, or a friend who’s curious about marketing.

If you’re a professor, you are more than welcome to share the game with your class.

I’d love to hear what you think, and I appreciate feedback on how to improve The CMO Game. Email me at hello [at] marketinghistory.org or find me on LinkedIn.

Thanks!

-Andrew

In 1967, a 30-second spot at the very first Super Bowl cost roughly $37,500. This Sunday, for Super Bowl 60, brands are paying upwards of $8 million. That is a price increase of over 20,000%.1

So… Is it still worth it?

For Professor Tim Calkins, who’s spent 22 years studying this exact question, the answer is an emphatic, ‘Yes.’

Since 2005, Calkins has led the Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review, where MBA students evaluate every ad that airs during the big game. It’s easy to say which ads are funny. It takes more work to determine which ads will be effective.

In this conversation, we dig into how Super Bowl advertising has evolved: why brands now release their spots weeks early, why the creative has gotten safer as the stakes have climbed higher, and what the tone of these ads reveals about the American economy and political climate.

If you’re planning to watch the game this Sunday (or just the commercials), this conversation will deepen your appreciation for the work that goes into making every second worth $266,667.

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

We also talk about Tim’s years managing Kraft Mayo and Miracle Whip (two surprisingly different marketing challenges), and the most common mistakes that marketers make when delivering business presentations. As you’ll hear, Tim is an excellent speaker.

Now here is my conversation with professor Tim Calkins.

Special Thanks:

Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity.

The Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review

Andrew Mitrak: Professor Tim Calkins, welcome to A History of Marketing.

Tim Calkins: Well, thank you. It is great to be here.

Andrew Mitrak: We will be publishing this right before the 2026 Super Bowl, which is Super Bowl 60. I had a lot of fun preparing and researching some of your work and also watching some old classic Super Bowl ads. The reason I wanted to have you on for this conversation is that you started publishing the Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review in 2005, so over 20 years now. Can you introduce this project for listeners?

Tim Calkins: This is our 22nd year doing this event. Back in 2005, we began the Super Bowl Ad Review, the Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review as we call it. I teach at Kellogg, I teach marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Before I was at Kellogg though, I was at Kraft Foods, and I worked in marketing at Kraft Foods for a number of years. When I was at Kraft Foods, now Kraft Heinz, with my team I would sometimes do an exercise where we would look at Super Bowl ads and try to think about what we could learn from what had happened on the Super Bowl.

When I came over to Kellogg, I thought there was a similar opportunity there to do something around the Super Bowl where we get the Kellogg students evaluating these Super Bowl spots. So the event has now been running for 22 years. The format is always the same. We pull together a panel of Kellogg MBA students. Nowadays it is about 70 or 75 students. As the Super Bowl unfolds, as it plays, the students evaluate all the ads that run.

What makes our panel different from a lot of other panels that are out there is that we are very focused on efficacy. We are trying to think about: will these spots, will these Super Bowl ads, build the business and build the brand? Ultimately that is what Super Bowl advertising is all about. A lot of panels, and a lot of Super Bowl rating things—there are lots of these—they will look at likeability, humor, which one did you like the best, which one was funniest. Our panel, we don’t really do that. That’s not really the question. The question really is, using sort of an analytical framework and process, how do we think about which ones of these will be most effective?

Every year we come up with our ratings. We give a handful of advertisers As, and then Bs, Cs. On occasion, we give out an F if somebody really misses the mark. It is a really fun event, but it also is a lot of work because what you realize being part of it is that there are so many ads that will run on the Super Bowl. There are probably 75 official Super Bowl spots, but then there are all these other things that show up. You have local spots, you have network promo spots for different shows. It is a lot of evaluation that the students do. It ends up being a very draining experience.

Andrew Mitrak: Can you walk me back to the beginning? You mentioned Kraft, which later became Kraft Heinz, which I will follow up on because I want to ask you about that too. When you first started paying attention to Super Bowl ads there, this might be an obvious question, but what stood out to you about Super Bowl ads? Why did you want to pay special attention to Super Bowl ads?

Tim Calkins: Super Bowl ads are really unique things in the world of marketing. What is amazing is they become more and more unique as time has gone by. Even if you go back 25 or 30 years ago—so we are now at Super Bowl 60, so you go back to Super Bowl 25 even—the advertising that was running was really different than normal advertising. What happens on the Super Bowl is a few things. Number one, it is expensive, so the investment is high. Number two, you have a huge audience, so there is a lot of people who are watching it. But also, the expectations are different for a Super Bowl spot.

You can’t turn around and run an ad that you are running on Survivor. You can’t turn around and run that ad on the Super Bowl. For most advertisers, you are creating a special piece of creative just for that event. People expect to see amazing Super Bowl spots. That is the expectation and companies are under a lot of pressure to deliver.

The Framework Behind Super Bowl Advertising

Tim Calkins: The reason it is really interesting to study is that you know that for each one of these advertisers, they are putting forward their best thinking, their best creative talents. This is the pinnacle of their work. So much scrutiny is on these things. Given that, it is fascinating to see what they decide to do. Sometimes they do brilliant things and other times they really miss. But to understand what is happening there and really think about it as a marketer is a really unique opportunity and you can learn a ton.

Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned how Super Bowl ads are kind of this unique thing. They are a little different than other ads. When you think about this project of analyzing Super Bowl ads, how does it connect to your broader work in brand and marketing strategy? Do you see these as really closely related where a Super Bowl ad is just the epitome of a brand and a marketing strategy wrapped into 30 or 60 seconds? Or do you feel like this is just a little bit of a different, kind of like a fun side quest that’s related to a brand, but it is a slightly separate, unique, different thing than the rest of the brand itself? How do you frame this work?

Tim Calkins: I think a Super Bowl spot is very much at the heart of everything that I teach. I teach marketing strategy, I teach biomedical marketing, I teach influencer marketing, branding. Across all of those classes where I really spend a lot of time is trying to think about the strategy. What are the choices that companies and brands are making? Are they going after new consumers, for example, or are they going after their current consumers? Are they trying to skew younger? Are they trying to go older? Is it about repositioning a brand, getting people to think differently about it? What are all the choices that companies are making?

So when we look at Super Bowl spots, and I look at a Super Bowl spot, I am really interested in pulling apart the choices that the companies have made. Your first choice: the decision to run an ad on the Super Bowl. Well, that’s a big decision. How is it that the company reached that decision and decided that was a good use of 8, 10, 20, 30 million dollars? That begins there. Then the question is, okay, well what products are they talking about and who do they seem to be going after and what’s the message they are putting forward? All of those are sort of strategic choices that the company is making.

Ultimately it does get down to some creative execution things, and those are fun too. But I think a lot of the heart of a good Super Bowl ad comes from the strategic choices that are made in the development process.

Andrew Mitrak: What is the first Super Bowl ad you yourself remember watching? Were you always interested in Super Bowl ads?

Tim Calkins: Oh, I’ve long followed the Super Bowl. Like everybody, I watched the Super Bowl. As I was growing up and came through college and all of that, I would watch the Super Bowl and you’d watch the advertising, of course, a big part of the event. It was really only when I got to Kraft that I began to look at it with a marketing lens. That is a very different way to evaluate a Super Bowl spot. Beforehand you might be looking at, you know, what’s one of the early ones I remember... the Coke Mean Joe Greene ad that ran, which was one of the great spots.

Or, of course, Apple’s spot that ran back in 1984, these old spots that ran.

But it was very different for me when you begin to think about these as marketing investments and marketing tools. That is where all of a sudden it begins to change how you watch a Super Bowl ad. It is one of the things I try to do as I talk about the Super Bowl, is to get people to look at them a little bit differently. It is so easy for people to pass a quick judgment on a Super Bowl spot. “Oh, that was funny. That was great. That was stupid.” People are very quick to pass judgment on it and nothing to stop them from doing that.

But when you really pull back and try to think about what is happening there, it totally changes how you evaluate it and how you think about it. You just have a lot more respect for the risk of these pieces of advertising and you have a lot of respect for how difficult it is to do. I think to do a great Super Bowl ad is really tough. It is a really difficult thing. So when somebody does it well, you have to have a lot of admiration for that team and really salute them.

When they miss, it’s not for lack of trying. It’s not for a lack of intent or trying and effort. It is something went wrong. Sometimes your heart goes out to them because you are like, “Shoot, I don’t know exactly the people who were working on this, but it did not go well for them.” So I guess it makes you much more empathetic about this advertising when you really understand what is happening.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, it is good to be empathetic. It is also kind of fun to dunk on the people who miss and all that, but you got to look at everybody trying their best, marketers taking a high-risk bet and kind of good on them for trying whether it’s a win or a bit of a dud.

Evolution of the Super Bowl Commercial Landscape

Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned a few famous ads that I want to ask you about because you mentioned Mean Joe Greene, the Coca-Cola advertisement, which is a lot of fun. And then of course the classic 1984 ad, which is probably the single ad that’s come up on this podcast more than any other advertisement. I kind of see that as sort of a watershed moment for the Super Bowl ad where it was a 60-second spot, big budget, directed by Ridley Scott, released in 1984 and obviously has the tie-in to 1984.

Do you see any other milestones beyond that one in Super Bowl advertising? If you look at moments as the stakes in the Super Bowl have gone up, the prices of an ad have gone up beyond 1984, do you see any other major milestones or inflection points for Super Bowl advertising?

Tim Calkins: People often ask, what turned the Super Bowl into this marketing extravaganza? I think what happened is that it has been a step-by-step process over the years that have really led to this. There have been iconic spots that have run over the years. Mean Joe Greene back in 1980. Apple, that was 1984. Then of course 1993, that was one of the great spots for McDonald’s with Larry Bird and Michael Jordan shooting baskets for a McDonald’s meal. That was one of these great iconic spots, celebrity, the whole thing. That was a really big spot people remember.

The Budweiser Frogs in ‘95. That was another spot that people remember that sticks in the mind.

What really happens here in the Super Bowl is that it is a step-by-step growth and increase in the importance of Super Bowl advertising. Part of what is happening with the Super Bowl growing, what is happening at the same time is that all the other media properties out there are sort of fragmenting. So if you go back 20 years ago, the Super Bowl was a big deal, but a lot of other things were a big deal too. The Academy Awards were huge and people would watch those. The Baseball World Series was huge and people would watch that. The Olympics was huge.

What has happened over the decades is that so many of the other big events, viewership has declined as audiences have fragmented and we have so many choices of things to watch. The one thing that has held up and even grown as the years have gone by is the Super Bowl. Which makes it then more and more important when it comes to companies and brands and when it comes to the advertising because now if you want to reach everybody in the US or a good chunk of people in the US, really the only way you can do that is on the Super Bowl.

The Surging Costs of Super Bowl Spots

Andrew Mitrak: I looked up the price of a Super Bowl ad when they started. A 30-second spot at Super Bowl I (1967) was $37,500 back in 1967 dollars. By the way, that’s from Wikipedia, so I don’t know if it’s 100% accurate, but let’s say that’s the ballpark cost of an ad at that time. Inflation-adjusted about 10x that is $360,000, so more expensive. But that said, today in 2026 the reported cost is about $8 million. So that delta between $360,000 to $8 million, that’s the increase in cost.

That would mainly be attributed to there being no other option. If you want to reach all of America, there are not many other places where you could do that. Would you say that scarcity and the breadth of that reach is what justifies the higher costs that advertisers are paying now versus then?

Tim Calkins: There are a lot of things that go into the price, but certainly the price escalation has been extraordinary for Super Bowl spots. But you know, if I could today buy a Super Bowl spot for the 2035 Super Bowl, if I could do that, if there were a market that would allow that, I would do that because I don’t think the Super Bowl is declining anytime soon.

Why do companies pay so much money? Partly it is the sheer reach of it. It is, if you want to get to a big chunk of the population, the only place you can go. But it is not just that. The other thing that has happened is that a lot of people when they are watching the Super Bowl, they are there, they are watching the advertising. Viewership of the Super Bowl, you might have 110 million people watching the Super Bowl, but the vast majority of those people, they don’t care about the teams and they, in many cases, don’t really care about football either. You just have to watch the Super Bowl though because that’s what everybody’s doing that night.

Nobody counter-programs against the Super Bowl. You are not going to have a piano recital on the night of the Super Bowl. People would say, “What are you doing? You can’t have like a Scrabble party on the night of the Super Bowl. You are not going to do that.” No, everybody’s got to watch it. So people show up there, they are looking forward to seeing the advertising. That’s what they are paying attention to.

The other thing though that is happening is that Super Bowl ads are very symbolic. That is an important aspect of this. If you are a company and you are going to go buy a Super Bowl ad, what happens now is you are going to put of course a big PR push around that and you are going to do all these other activities. You want everybody to know that you are buying a Super Bowl ad. Because what does that say? Well, that says that you believe in your business, you are investing in the business, you are an important company, you’ve got resources. All of that is really valuable for branding and it’s got this symbolic nature to it that is hard to quantify but is very real. So there is lots of stuff that brings people to this moment.

You know one other thing that helps Super Bowl advertising is that the Super Bowl is early in the year. It’s in February. Which you would think, well who cares? But in a way that is really important because most companies, if you are on a calendar year fiscal year—January and February, what do you have? Budgets. You’ve got money. At the beginning of the year. In November, your money was either spent or cut or something happened to it, the money might not be available. But at the beginning of the year, all these companies have big budgets. In many cases they say, “Let’s get the year off to a good start. Let’s get on the Super Bowl. Let’s run this advertising, really give the business a jump start.” And that is going to propel us through the year. That is another factor that kicks in here to make it so valuable for firms.

Andrew Mitrak: That’s a really good point, that timing within the year itself. Because also it sets up a campaign or an idea that you can build on throughout the year as well. If I think of the 1984 ad, at the start of the year, that’s great, 1984. If it was at the end of the year, maybe 1984 is kind of a lame pun. Like, “Oh, we’ve heard 1984,” it just happened over and over. So I think the ads themselves are fresh, it’s a new year, it’s a new idea. This is a campaign that you launch big and can iterate on or call back to throughout the year. So it’s kind of a nice big upfront investment in your brand spend.

Tim Calkins: Well, and you’ll see that a lot of advertisers will use the Super Bowl to launch new campaigns. So that is when they bring out the new advertising. And then they follow it up. Either they take that Super Bowl spot and run it again, either as is or in a shorter format, or they extend the campaign idea and bring other executions around the same creative look and feel. You sort of put it in the mind originally on the one Super Bowl, the one big event, and then come back to reinforce that and to get some repetition. They do that in the subsequent months.

Andrew Mitrak: Do you think that companies measure the impact of their Super Bowl ads differently than they do other ads? Do they measure ROI in terms of different types of uplift versus some other type of ad? Any thoughts on, you know, they spent $8 million on these ads, how are they measuring the ROI on that?

Tim Calkins: Measurement of Super Bowl ads is really tough. It is really difficult to do. What happens is that every company is measuring the impact. You are not going to go invest 8, 10, 20 million dollars and not try to figure out the impact. The problem is that it is not easy to measure the financial impact of a Super Bowl spot. Some things are easy to measure. You can measure website traffic and you can figure out if anybody came to your website. You can look at search terms, did anybody do that. If you are selling an app, you can look at how many downloads did you get and what happened there. If you’re relying on influencers, you can see what kind of activity. So you can look at a lot of these diagnostic metrics.

You can also ask people, do they remember your Super Bowl ad, did they like it? All of those, that’s all easy to measure. But financially, it is very hard to put numbers around it. The big problem is that valuing a brand financially is... people try to do it, but it is a very imprecise science. So in theory, if you get out there and run an ad on the Super Bowl, and if it’s a great piece of advertising, at the end of the day people will think better of your brand than they did before. They will have more positive associations with your brand and they might either know of it for the first time or have some... but it helped the brand.

The problem is you can’t quantify the financial value of that. I can quantify how many people came to my website and things like that, but that’s a very small part of it. You are never going to justify a Super Bowl ad based on those kind of metrics. You are going to do it for the brand value and for the long-term impact that it is going to have.

I have come to believe there is one way to know though if a company is happy with their Super Bowl ad. The one way you know for sure is whether they come back to do it again. Because you know that if a company runs an ad on the Super Bowl and then the next year they don’t, well then you know that clearly they didn’t think or they had questions about the efficacy of that. But if they come back and they do it again, then you know something.

Sometimes you’ll see advertisers, they will run on the Super Bowl for a number of years and then they don’t. And then the question is, what happens next? Somebody like WeatherTech. They ran for many years, but then they took a year off. And then they came back. What that tells you is that they clearly thought that they were benefiting from the Super Bowl spot. And when they stopped doing it, they saw the problem.

Andrew Mitrak: Sorry, which company was that? WeatherTech?

Tim Calkins: WeatherTech. Yeah, so WeatherTech, they do floor mats. Very strange company. It’s a private company. And they have been running on the Super Bowl though for many years. They are back in 2026. They ran in 2025. I believe they did not run in 2024. But they ran ‘23, ‘22, ‘21, ‘20. But then you know.

Some brands have been back and they have run for just many, many years. TurboTax has run, this will be their 13th year running on the Super Bowl. And you are like, wow. Squarespace, 12th year coming up. Michelob Ultra, 9th year. What you know is that these companies have clearly thought about this and have clearly decided that the Super Bowl is a good investment for their brand.

Why Major Brands Left the Super Bowl

Andrew Mitrak: I’ll keep a closer eye out for WeatherTech; I hadn’t heard of that brand, but I’ll be watching for their ad as well. Are there any certain brands that you’ve noticed that left and stayed out? Do you think there are brands that said, “Hey, the way we win is by not playing,” and just chose to opt out of the Super Bowl? Are there any examples that come to mind of not because they went out of business or aren’t a successful company anymore, but they just choose to opt out of the Super Bowl?

Tim Calkins: Oh sure, a lot of companies have. They come and go as Super Bowl advertisers. One of the great Super Bowl advertisers for many, many years was FedEx. FedEx eventually stopped running on the Super Bowl, and we haven’t seen them in recent years. They made the decision not to do that.

Then there are other brands that really found magic on the Super Bowl and then stopped. Somebody like CareerBuilder. You might remember them; they ran some Super Bowl ads that were really distinctive with chimps. They had these chimpanzees, and it was these very funny spots about the workplace environment and, “Do you work with a bunch of monkeys?” I think was the thing. Maybe you should get a new job, and CareerBuilder was going to be a place to go find your new job. They eventually stopped running on the Super Bowl. There were a lot of reasons why.

It is interesting, though, for a brand like that, you stop running on the Super Bowl, and then you do begin to see an erosion in brand awareness. Clearly, I haven’t seen their numbers, but clearly, that brand was top of mind when they were a big Super Bowl advertiser, and that is not the case at this point.

Andrew Mitrak: I wonder which one preceded which. For CareerBuilder, it’s interesting because others have taken up the space, like Monster.com or obviously LinkedIn and other tools are massive within it. I wonder if CareerBuilder, if they don’t advertise in the Super Bowl because their budgets went down because of their impact, or if they stopped advertising in the Super Bowl and then therefore they kind of lost some market share and it was sort of a downward spiral from there. I wonder which one preceded which.

Tim Calkins: My understanding of the story on that was actually sort of interesting. They were using the chimps, which were super memorable and distinctive Super Bowl ads, but then they got a lot of pushback from the animal rights activists who said it’s totally inappropriate to be using the chimps. They were very targeted. Some of the activists were very targeted and went after some of the senior executives at the company. The company eventually said, “We can’t really use the chimps. We’ve got to do something else creatively.”

When they did that, though, what they found was that it was very tough to come up with a great Super Bowl spot. So they ran a couple of years, but they did not get anywhere near the distinctiveness or the lift that they had before. Then I think they said, “It’s a lot of money, the creative doesn’t seem to be working here, doesn’t make sense to keep doing this.” And then they backed away.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, I guess if you’re going to use the animals, use something like frogs that work better as puppets or CGI or whatever Budweiser uses versus the real chimps.

Tim Calkins: Yeah. I mean, the good news now, I guess, is Generative AI can create whatever we want right now.

From Single Super Bowl Spots to Integrated Campaigns

Andrew Mitrak: Exactly. Aside from the advertisements getting more expensive, over the course of the last 20 years since you’ve been—22 years now since you’ve been running this—have you noticed the ads themselves change themselves or the nature of Super Bowl advertising? How has the nature of Super Bowl advertising evolved since you’ve really started paying attention to Super Bowl ads?

Tim Calkins: So it’s changed a lot. One of the big things that has changed is that more and more Super Bowl advertising isn’t just about the Super Bowl ad; it is about the whole integrated campaign. I think there are two factors behind this. One is the investments have become enormous, and so companies want to maximize the return on investment to make the most of the opportunity. The other thing, though, that’s available is now there are so many other digital tools that are available.

You go back 20 years ago, and we didn’t have Instagram and Facebook and TikTok to play with. All of that has emerged over the years. Now what you see is companies put forward incredibly elaborate, integrated marketing campaigns around the Super Bowl. For most of these companies, it becomes a three-week—really a two-to-three-week—marketing push where they try to hit every lever during those two or three weeks. They pull out the PR campaigns and the influencer efforts and all of this different activity to try to make the most of it. So that’s, I think, really different. That’s one thing that’s changed.

Why Brands Release Ads Before the Game

Tim Calkins: Related to that, another change that we’ve seen is that more and more of these companies now release the spots ahead of time. It used to be that the vast majority of Super Bowl ads would run on the Super Bowl, and that was the first time you would see them. Now, the majority of advertisers—the vast majority—will release the ads ahead of time. They’ll release them either the week before the Super Bowl or maybe two weeks in advance, but they get those spots out there ahead of time. There are lots of reasons to do that, by the way. That is the best practice. That’s a big change that we have seen. There’s a lot behind that we could go into.

Andrew Mitrak: What are the reasons you would release your Super Bowl ad before the big ball game? You’d think like, “Hey, I want to make a big splash all at once. Let’s kind of hold the dry powder and go big all at once.” But is there some strategy to releasing beforehand?

Tim Calkins: Oh, there are a lot of reasons to release a Super Bowl ad ahead of time. One of the big ones is that there’s just more time. So if you put your spot out there a week in advance, you’ve got a lot of time to generate viewership and to get views of it before the Super Bowl even happens. The Super Bowl goes by really quickly.

The other thing that happens is as an advertiser, the Super Bowl is very unpredictable. You don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe it’ll be a blowout and you’re running in the third quarter and nobody’s watching anymore. Maybe what happens is a different advertiser runs a spot right in front of you that is uproariously funny, and that overshadows your spot. Maybe the creative idea that you’ve embraced is copied by another company, and they’ve got the same sort of idea.

These are all unknowable, unpredictable things. How do you hedge that? You get out ahead of time and try to get some viewership before the game even begins.

Another big one, and maybe I think the most important one, is you know ahead of time if you have a problem. So on the Super Bowl, there is so much attention and viewership that it’s terrifying for companies because if you make a mistake and you run a spot that people find—even a small group of people—if they find it inappropriate or offensive or something like that, it can turn into a massive problem for the company. How do you avoid, how do you minimize that risk? If you release the spot early, there is time for people to come back and say, “Wait, that doesn’t look right,” and then you can fix it before the Super Bowl goes and before you offend millions and millions of people.

So there are lots of reasons at the end of the day to get that spot out there. Holding it back for the surprise, you’ll see some advertisers do that, but that is not a common approach anymore. The stakes are too high. It’s too risky. There’s too much money involved. It makes a lot of sense to release it ahead of time.

The Rise of QR Codes and Digital Calls to Action

Andrew Mitrak: The other change that I’ve seen probably in the last 5 to 10 years or so is the ads themselves having more distinct calls to action or digital experience within it. The QR code... I can’t remember which company it was that just had a kind of bouncing QR code on their ad for 30 seconds.

Or ones where there’s also one from a year or two ago where it was just a big long URL or some secret code to enter in an app, and you had to find all the letters and type it all in.

So it seems like there are more and more—in addition to being aware of the digital surround or pre-releasing on social media or on YouTube in advance—there’s also on the ad itself having more direct calls to action and making the ad more interactive itself. Is that kind of a trend you’ve been paying attention to?

Tim Calkins: Well, there’s no question that companies are trying to leverage technology and take advantage of that. Whether it’s the QR codes that you see on some of these spots or on other platforms, you see that I think more and more.

Super Bowl Ads as a Mirror of the US Economy and Politics

Tim Calkins: There are two other really interesting things to watch for, though, on the Super Bowl. One thing is who shows up and who advertises. And that’s a really interesting question. It tells you something about the economy. Because to go on the Super Bowl and run an ad, that means that you’ve got resources and money and you have a certain amount of optimism about the future. If you’re worried about saving money, if you think your company is going to be having some hard times, you wouldn’t run a Super Bowl ad. Those are the companies that are feeling good. So it’s very interesting to watch that and to see who shows up.

The other thing is to watch the tonality of the Super Bowl spot. I think you can really learn something about the US economy and how people are feeling if you really look at Super Bowl ads. Because all of these companies, they study the environment, they study how people are feeling, they come up with creative design to resonate with people. So what these companies see is a really interesting look at what’s happening within the country. And you can really see that happen in many ways.

You know, actually if you look even when it comes to politics, you can see trends develop there. So if you go back, what was it now, a year and a half ago to the... Was it a year and a half ago? Before the election. Yes. But if you go back and if you... The question was who was going to win? Would Joe Biden pull it off and his group and the Democrats, or would Donald Trump come back?

But you go back and you look at the advertising that was running on the Super Bowl that year, and there was a real tone to some of the spots around people feeling that it was tough in the economy, it’s tough to move forward, it’s tough to get ahead. What you could see there, there was a real sentiment that people were not feeling good about how things were going. They weren’t feeling good about their futures.

And when you look at that in hindsight, you’re like, “Shoot, there it is.” If people are really feeling that way, that is a very difficult time for an incumbent or an incumbent administration, an incumbent party, to get the win. And you just look at it and you’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s interesting.” So it’s always fun to watch what’s the tonality.

Last year on the Super Bowl was interesting. We saw a lot of traditional values on the Super Bowl. What did we see? People in traditional families. People at the cul-de-sac. What did we not see? You don’t see people at the club. You don’t see people in an urban environment. You don’t see super diverse groups of people. Last year we saw this real sort of pivot to these traditional kind of values, which again, I think just reflected a little bit of where the country is at the moment. So the Super Bowl, it’s really fascinating to watch what people run and what’s the tonality.

Are We Past the Era of “Peak Super Bowl” Creative?

Andrew Mitrak: Do you think that we’re past peak Super Bowl at all? I mean, you mentioned how you’d still... if you could buy an ad for 10 years ago at today’s price, you would do it. But also if I look up lists of the greatest Super Bowl ads of all time, there aren’t that many that are from the last five years or so that make the list. Like I looked up one that had a hundred or so ads, and the most recent ones were kind of clustered around 2010.

There was “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like“ from Old Spice.

There’s “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry,” the Snickers one that really revitalized the last decade or so of Betty White‘s career.

Then there’s “Parisian Love” from Google, which is an ad that I love.

And those were all from around 2010, I think, which was 16 years ago at this point.

Do you think that’s maybe just bias against recent ads and they just need more time to sort of marinate and be part of the culture? Or do you think there was something from, you know, 15, 16 years ago that made ads more memorable than they might be today?

Tim Calkins: So I don’t think we’re at peak Super Bowl because the trends that have made the Super Bowl so powerful are still very much intact. You’re seeing the Super Bowl as an event remain incredibly important, and viewership is solid—viewership has been up in the past few years—and other options are beginning to fragment.

It is true that some of the most memorable Super Bowl ads are older ones. I think that’s true, though, for a couple of reasons. One, I think, is that there’s no question that Super Bowl advertisers have to play it pretty safe. And more and more it’s become true that taking a big risk on the Super Bowl, creatively or otherwise, is really pretty dangerous to careers. And not sure you want to do that. So that may be one reason.

But the other reason, I think, is that the overall standard of the Super Bowl spots is getting better and better. So when we began our whole journey on the Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review, each year there would be some that were just really not good pieces of advertising. And now that seems to be less the case. It just feels like the overall average quality of this advertising is getting better and better.

But I will say one thing you can be very confident of—I’m going to make one prediction for the Super Bowl this year—afterwards, people will say, “You know, the advertising just not as good as I remember.” And they’re going to say that. But they always say that because what happens? In our minds, we remember a few iconic spots. We remember Larry Bird. We remember the first of the E-Trade babies. We remember that Apple spot.

What we forget is that there were like 500 other pieces of advertising that ran over that period. So our memories, we’re picking out the highlights of the past 20 years and comparing this year’s collection of advertising to the highlight reel. That’s not a fair comparison. It’s a little bit like having a football team play the All-Star team. I mean, it’s just not...But people will say that because they always say that.

The one thing that might be a problem though for Super Bowl uh as a as a platform I think is streaming and how that unfolds. So you know right now there’s sort of the network broadcast you can stream the Super Bowl. The interesting thing is it’s not a given. My understanding is it’s not a given that the same advertising will run. And if I were in charge of the Super Bowl as a media property, I would insist that the same spots run on both because that way the advertising is seen by everybody and it can be the basis of conversation.

Where the Super Bowl begins to lose its punch to fragment like everything else is fragmented. And then instead of getting this big pop of a hundred million viewers, you start getting, you know, 20 million that maybe saw your spot on streaming or 60 million that maybe saw your spot on the network broadcast. And then I think you begin to ruin the Super Bowl as a big event that advertisers are worth really focusing on. That’s the biggest watch out. I have to think people will be smart enough not to get caught in that, but I do I do wonder if that could be a problem longer term.

Are High Costs and Risk Aversion Killing Creativity?

Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned a lot of great points there, and one that I want to come back to is that advertisers are somewhat risk-averse with a Super Bowl ad, that you want to avoid being too controversial. I wonder if that’s partly just because of getting more expensive as well? Or it also is somewhat mirroring the phenomenon that we’ve seen in the movies, where movies are more and more—as movie budgets get more expensive—you see more Avengers type movies that try to appeal to everybody. You try to see the superhero movie that appeals to everybody, relatively inoffensive.

In the meantime, comedies—there’s almost no comedies in theaters anymore. What is comedy? It’s somewhat controversial in a way. And if I think of “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” the Old Spice ad, kind of a weird ad. Really funny, but kind of a strange ad and pretty risky too. Or “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry.” People tackling an old 90-year-old Betty White, also a pretty risky ad in some ways, pretty funny. And I don’t know if that ad would get greenlit today or get approved today in the same way because it’s kind of weird. It’s kind of risky.

I wonder if some combination of needing to appeal more as the prices get higher, really wanting to avoid too much risk if that kind of is all playing into why some of the ads might be a little less funny today as well. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Tim Calkins: I think there’s no question that companies are very careful with what they’re running right now, and that does impact the creative. It’s partly financial, but I think it goes way beyond the financial aspects. The thing to remember is that Super Bowl ads get so much scrutiny, and everybody knows they’re expensive, and everybody’s got an opinion.

So if you’re the CEO of a company, you know what you don’t want to have to deal with on the Monday after the Super Bowl? Is having to explain to everybody why did your company run that really either offensive, ineffective—call it what you will—piece of advertising. And I think a lot of companies and marketers will say, “We don’t want that kind of scrutiny. That’s a reason not to go on the Super Bowl.” You’ve got to be pretty brave to advertise on the Super Bowl, to be honest. And I think if you are on the Super Bowl, there’s still a desire to play it safe.

I mean, I guess the advertisers, I suppose, it’s not that different than the players on the teams. And the teams always have to balance how risky do you want to play and how conservative do you want to be. And the advertisers are working with that same set of questions.

Andrew Mitrak: It’s a really interesting tightrope to walk because you need to be risky enough that you’re able to break through and justify your spend and not be too boring. But also, if you are too risky, you can wind up really shooting yourself in the foot. I empathize a lot with these advertisers and everybody behind the budget and the approvals on it because you don’t want to make the wrong choice there.

Tim Calkins: Just imagine the process of developing a Super Bowl spot and how tough that is to navigate. Begin with the fact you have all these hierarchies within companies. If the vice president likes something, but the senior vice president doesn’t, you have that dynamic. But then they are all working with the outside firms as well. So an advertising firm will come in and say, “This is going to be just an incredible idea. This idea we have is so creative and unexpected. It’s going to be the best.”

But then the brand leader has to say, “Is that really the case or not?” If they don’t think it is, then you have to tell the creative person that it is not the creative idea they think it is. And the creative person is like, “No, I’m the creative person here, and you are not thinking big enough.” Then the brand person is like, “Yeah, but it is my brand and I don’t want to run something that creative.” But then the senior person says, “Oh, I think we should.” Just the complexity of it all is really tough to figure out. How do you end up with the creative idea that is going to run?

Andrew Mitrak: It’s almost a miracle that anything gets shipped at all.

Have You Ever Purchased A Product Because of a Super Bowl Ad?

Andrew Mitrak: So just wrapping up with the Super Bowl, I wanted to ask you, have you ever made a purchase or changed your buying behavior because of a Super Bowl ad influencing you?

Tim Calkins: The answer to that is yes, of course. Now, if you want me to pick exactly the example that I had, that is more difficult. That is a tough one. What did I buy? I did love the Kia Telluride spot that ran. That was an amazing piece of advertising.

Andrew Mitrak: I was going to bring Kia up because I have an anecdote. I have a Telluride that is sitting in my driveway right over there. I had never heard of a Telluride before, and I had never even considered buying a Kia before. But I saw that super bowl ad and thought, “Wow, that actually looks like a pretty cool SUV. That is a Kia? Telluride?”

I was driving a Prius, and then my second daughter arrived some time after the Super Bowl. I tried to drive my whole family home and thought, “Wow, this car is really cramped. I’ve got to upgrade.” I just started looking at reports of SUVs and I thought, “Oh, Telluride. That is well reviewed. Oh, I remember that Super Bowl ad.”

I didn’t just see the ad and go to the dealer the next day, but it certainly made it cool. It gave Kia a little more brand equity where they used to be a punchline of a car manufacturer in some ways. In fact, I think The Simpsons and Principal Skinner would drive a Kia and it was a joke. It was kind of disparaging.

Now it is a lot cooler. I think part of that—not the only thing, it is not a silver bullet—but part of that is that they advertise in the Super Bowl and they really try to use that as a mechanism to build awareness and reposition their brand.

Tim Calkins: I think it is an example of just a really effective Super Bowl spot they ran. Very risky. That was one, “We are not heroes.” We are an amazing Super Bowl ad. You look at the spot and all of a sudden, shoot, maybe I should think about a Kia. Maybe I should think about a Telluride. That is the power of it.

It is one of the things in marketing that I think people in general have to be careful of. When you ask people, “What brought you here today?” or “Why are you buying this product?” or anything like that, it is important to remember that people will never tell you it was the advertising. They will never say that. Or very rarely they will say that. They will say, “Oh, it was word-of-mouth marketing.” Or, “I saw something else.” Or, “I heard about it on...”

People say that partly because if you say, “Oh, I bought this product because of the advertising,” it makes you look like somebody who is not thinking fully. You can be persuaded by advertising. Who is persuaded by advertising? So people don’t volunteer that. But there is no question that advertising done well has an impact on how we make decisions and how we evaluate products and services. Absolutely.

Lessons from Managing Brands at Kraft Foods

Andrew Mitrak: With our remaining time, I wanted to ask you a few questions outside of just the Super Bowl. You mentioned Kraft Foods. You managed brands at Kraft Foods. I’m wondering just broadly, what did you learn from working at Kraft Foods?

Tim Calkins: Oh, I learned so much about teams, businesses, consumers, and marketing. It was just a terrific training ground for marketing. It really launched my marketing career. Even now when I teach at Kellogg, I look back to those days working on these brands to try to think about it.

What were some of the big things though? One of the things was just the challenge of delivering business results. Until you have been there and see the pressure of it, it is hard to quite understand exactly how that works. Just the need to bring in the results.

The other thing that is really interesting is trying to understand your consumers and figure out great communication—figure out how to talk to them in a way that will resonate. That is just really interesting and complicated. It is really fun because to do that well, you have to get in there and try to think about what is important to people. What are their values? What are the insights that motivate their life? When you do it well, you can come up with advertising and marketing efforts that really are incredibly powerful. They connect with what people value, think about, and care about.

But it is all hard because people don’t necessarily tell you what they care about or what they think about. Often people don’t even know what they really care about. It is interesting; people can’t express it sometimes. So that was fascinating, to understand and think about how you develop great pieces of communication. That was a big one as well.

Then there was a huge piece around working cross-functionally. On all those businesses, there are a lot of different things that have to come together. There is an operations side of things, a sales effort, a finance effort, market research, advertising, and promotions. Pulling together the team and getting the team organized, aligned, and working cohesively is really fun, but also challenging to do. That is the key though for any business. Unless everybody—all the different functions—are working together, it is really hard to get things moving forward in an organized fashion.

Brand Management: Kraft Mayo vs. Miracle Whip

Andrew Mitrak: I noticed on your CV you went from being brand manager on Kraft Mayo to senior brand manager on Miracle Whip. It just seemed like kind of funny consumer bases to market to back-to-back. I’m wondering if there was anything that you noticed jumping from one product to the next, advertising Mayo versus advertising Miracle Whip? Because they are brands that are so familiar. You see them in the grocery store every time. I see these. I imagine that there is probably some passionate consumer bases behind them. So do you want to kind of compare and contrast marketing those two products?

Tim Calkins: One of the great things about working on these products is you realize once you get in there just how different they are. You think about Kraft Mayonnaise and Miracle Whip and you are like, “Well, how different can they be?” They are both viscous products that come in the same jar, sold at a similar price point with similar usage behaviors.

But then you get in there and you realize they are totally different. Kraft Mayonnaise is a decent mayonnaise. But we were going up against Hellmann’s and Best Foods. At the time it was Unilever. Huge company, huge budgets, dominant market share. So we were sort of the scrappy little brand. Didn’t have a lot of resources. We had to find some way to scratch our way to some market share and try to keep that business going well.

But then you move over to Miracle Whip. Miracle Whip is totally different. Miracle Whip is this powerhouse of a brand. In certain parts of the country, it is a super high market share. The big thing about Miracle Whip is that it has no competition to speak of. No direct competition. There is a little bit of private label, but Miracle Whip is Miracle Whip.

So that is a totally different marketing challenge. It is around how do you activate your customer base? How do you resonate with people who really like Miracle Whip? It is a super polarizing product. But people who like it, really like it. So you just have to tap in to that consumer group and try to motivate them and try to get them fired up. That becomes the challenge for Miracle Whip.

It’s a really interesting piece. One of the interesting things about Miracle Whip that really helps that brand a lot is it is very tough to define what it is. What is it? You are like, “Well, it is a mayonnaise.” But then people will be very quick to say, “Well no, it is not mayonnaise.” It is a really different flavor than mayonnaise. If you like mayonnaise, you are probably not going to like Miracle Whip and vice versa. So you can’t call it a mayonnaise.

It is technically a salad dressing. That is the technical standard. But what is a salad dressing? What do you do with salad dressing? You put it on salad. So if you wanted to compete with Miracle Whip, I guess you would launch a salad dressing. But what do you do with salad dressing? You put it on salad. And what do you do with Miracle Whip? Well, you put it on a sandwich. So then maybe you are going to launch sandwich dressing. But what is a sandwich dressing? I don’t even know what that is. So Miracle Whip is just a totally interesting product. Makes a ton of money. No real competition. But so different than Kraft Mayonnaise.

Becoming a Better Business Presenter

Andrew Mitrak: I also want to ask you about presentations. You’ve spoken a lot about this. You are obviously a great presenter yourself. You wrote a book called “How to Wash a Chicken,” all about presenting. My question to you is, what do marketers most often get wrong about business presentations?

Tim Calkins: Presenting well is so important in the world of business because that is how you have an impact. That is how you get your recommendations put forward. What marketers get wrong about presenting, I think, sometimes they make things just way too complicated.

The thing about the world today, especially in marketing, is that there is so much data. There is so much information that is available. So it is very easy to end up with a presentation or a recommendation that is very clunky, full of studies, full of data, full of analytics, full of all of this information. But ultimately, that doesn’t lead to a really strong recommendation sometimes.

I think the challenge today is: How do you take all this information that we have and figure out which information really matters? And then, how do you lay it out in such a way that people can really follow the story? They can see the narrative and they can begin to understand what is happening on a business.

Marketing is all about action, all about moving forward. It is about recommendations: “Here is what we should do next.” To get there, you have to take people on this journey from where we are today to how that plan forward is going to be the best path. To do that, you really have to think about all the results we are looking at today, all the information, all this data, and how does all of that get us to the recommendation of where we want to go forward? That, I think, is the role of the presentation.

Andrew Mitrak: One of my tactics for presentations is I try to keep my presentations themselves pretty short, like 10 slides or fewer, but then I have a really long appendix. I kind of preempt because when I present—especially if I think of ones where I am presenting to a cross-functional team, we might have to influence somehow, or an executive I need to persuade—often they might even interrupt and start asking questions immediately. I want to show that I am prepared and jump to an appendix, but also not have all that information upfront because then, to your point, it becomes cluttered. There are too many different things.

Is my thinking about that the right way? Of just showing my homework in the back end but keeping it tight upfront? Or do you have any other tactics or tips along those lines?

Tim Calkins: The question I would always ask is: What will your audience need or want to see? So anytime you are doing a presentation, one of the first things you have to do is think about who are you presenting to. You think about what do they like and what are they going to want to see. If I am presenting to somebody and if I know that they are going to want to see a five-year P&L for the business, well then I am going to proactively go ahead and put that in because I just know they are going to be looking for that.

So I think that is a really important step, to think about your audience and then make sure you deliver against what they are doing. Ideally, when you are doing a presentation, you don’t end up going to the appendix. Ideally. Because if you have really done it well, I think you have a sense about what is going to be the next question they are likely to ask, and then you try to address it there.

An appendix is good to have though, in case you do get questions from out of the blue. Especially sometimes with cross-functional people who might ask something, and then some of that stuff might end up in the appendix. So I think it can be a really useful thing to have along with you. The bulk of the presentation though, that is always the question about: Okay, what do I need to put in here and what is all the stuff I can take out?

The Importance of Narrative Over Delivery

Andrew Mitrak: In my work as a marketer, I would say I spend more time making business presentations and presenting them than I do on actual creativity or actual strategy on marketing. Sure, there is strategy that sometimes comes up in the course of making a presentation. If you are presenting the strategy, you have to have done the strategy beforehand. But I spend a lot of time in slides and making them and presenting.

But also, if you look at the time I spent in school sort of learning presentations versus the time I spent on all the other stuff, I probably underinvested in learning presentation skills upfront. Is that a pattern that you see as a professor? That generally speaking, we underinvest in teaching marketers presentation skills?

Tim Calkins: Well, I think it goes beyond marketers. I think generally speaking, we do a very poor job in the world of business preparing people to put together good presentations. And there are lots of reasons for that. Part of it is that that doesn’t fall into anybody’s responsibility area. It is not the finance department’s—the finance department isn’t going to teach people to write a presentation. And the marketing department isn’t going to teach that. And the accounting department is not going to teach that. And the leadership group... Nobody really teaches it. Or few people. There are some communications folks you will see who work on it.

The other thing I see is though that very often when we do teach people how to put together a good presentation, we end up focusing very much on the delivery. We spend a lot of time teaching people how do you use hand gestures appropriately, and how do you move around a room, and how do you speak in a forceful voice, and things like that. It is the execution, the delivery. Which in my mind is fine, that is good, I think that is all great stuff.

But the real opportunity is before that. It is: How do you put together the recommendation? How do you lay out the story? How do you work with your data and turn the data into a logical story that leads to your recommendation? That is the part that is not really taught very well, in my experience. And it is something that doesn’t come naturally to people.

It is also something that generative artificial intelligence doesn’t do well. Generative AI will produce a list of pros and cons for you, and it can create a PowerPoint page showing a list of points or bullets, but it doesn’t really build a great narrative that leads you to this recommendation about where we want to go. That is the value add.

I actually think if you write—if you put together a great presentation—the delivery becomes really easy. Because the presentation almost does itself. Back when I was at Kraft, I would remember sometimes we would put together this really complicated recommendation presentation. And then we would send the summer intern up to go deliver the presentation. And the summer intern would be like, “What? I can’t.” You are like, “No, it will be fine.” The slides were good enough and the story basically just goes through it. It is just going to tell itself.

But all that work gets done before the meeting begins. And I think that is the opportunity for people, is to really think about how do you put together these stories, how do you lay out stuff that makes a lot of sense. If you do that well, the rest of it is going to take care of itself.

Andrew Mitrak: Professor Tim Calkins, I really enjoyed this conversation. It was so fun to revisit Super Bowl ads. I know I am much more prepared for the big game on Sunday. And also it inspired me to brush up on my presentation skills as well. So as we wrap up, where can listeners read more and find you online?

Tim Calkins: My website and sort of my blog and my newsletter, timcalkins.com. Also on TikTok, you can find me at marketingprof_tim. So I’m out there posting a little bit on TikTok these days around Super Bowl spots and presenting and all of that.

Andrew Mitrak: That is awesome. We will be sure to paste links to those in the blog that accompanies this post. So Professor Tim Calkins, thanks again so much for your time. I had a lot of fun.

Tim Calkins: All right, Andrew. Thank you. That was great fun.

David Reibstein has spent his career straddling disciplines that don’t always talk to each other: quantitative analysis and behavioral science, academic theory and management practice, marketing departments and finance teams.

As a Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the UPenn and the co-author of Marketing Metrics, Reibstein is a world-renowned expert on how to measure what marketing actually contributes to a business.

We discuss what David learned while under the mentorship of Frank Bass, a pioneer of bringing quantitative analysis to marketing and half the namesake of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Then we trace David’s early analysis on brand switching through his current research on nation branding and cryptocurrency confidence.

Along the way, we dig into why brand equity rarely shows up on balance sheets, why CMOs still struggle to justify Super Bowl ad spend, and what the Finance Minister of Saudi Arabia wanted to discuss over a private lunch.

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

A few highlights from our discussion:

• How Frank Bass transformed marketing from “think like a customer” intuition into a data-driven discipline

• Why brand equity should account for both price premiums and volume gains

• The surprising reach of nation branding research (and the heckler who said his data were wrong)

• What crypto and meme coins reveal about confidence as currency

Special Thanks:

Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity.

And thank you to Bill Moult, whom you may remember from episode 23 of this podcast, for introducing me to Professor Reibstein.

The Influence of Frank Bass on Marketing Science

Andrew Mitrak: I thought I would start at the beginning of your career. One of the names that I saw you collaborated with and worked for was Frank Bass. I’ve interviewed a professor from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, and we’ve talked a lot about their work on the podcast. We haven’t actually talked about Frank Bass himself, so I thought I might just start there and ask you about Frank Bass and what you learned from working with him.

David Reibstein: It’s a great place to start because that really is where my academic career began. He was known as basically one of the key people that was bringing quantitative aspects into the field of marketing. He was bringing meat into the whole category. He contacted me while I was in a master’s program. Frank started talking to me about, “You don’t need to finish that master’s program. Why don’t you come join the PhD program now?” I was three-quarters of the way through my master’s program, and I went and joined the PhD program, thinking if I go into academia, I don’t need that master’s. And I’ve never needed that master’s.

Andrew Mitrak: So Bass was a pioneer in bringing this quantitative side of marketing to the field. Could you just describe the field before him? What was the status of quantitative analytics and taking more of a data-driven approach and measuring the impact of marketing at the time? Can you give us a picture of the before and after?

David Reibstein: So if you think about what was marketing practice, it was “think like a customer.” There were a lot of consumer behavior aspects that were to it. Actually, when I was in my PhD program, I worked a lot with Jacob Jacoby, thinking about that. I had a minor in consumer behavior, but that was sort of where marketing had been. It’s now a major sector of the field of marketing.

The Evolution of Data and Econometrics

David Reibstein: But the quantitative side, if you think about the availability of data, it was 100% survey data with quarterly, at best, Nielsen data. We didn’t have a richness of data. Bass was looking at some time series data, how sales changed quarter to quarter. That’s sort of the field as it was at that time. He spent a lot of time, and some of the classes that we took with him—I say we, my fellow doctoral students—was thinking about econometrics as it applied to marketing. How sales changed over time with changes in marketing expenditures. That’s sort of where it is. If you think about where we are in 2026, the nature of data has exploded. You don’t need me in this session to talk about big data, but the abundance of data and moving away to a very large degree, but not entirely, from survey data has certainly been a prevalent part of how the field has evolved.

Andrew Mitrak: Once you left your master’s where you were three-quarters of the way through and got started working on your PhD program under the guidance of Frank Bass, what did you learn from him? What did you collaborate with him on?

David Reibstein: We spent a lot of time looking at brand switching behavior. It’s sort of related to brand loyalty issues versus just random behavior that happened to be there. He talked a lot about the stochastic man, that it’s all a stochastic process. There’s a probability of you buying certain brands, but what you bought last period doesn’t have an impact exactly on this period. There are different theories about how people switch, but a lot of what it is that I was working on with him at that time was looking at that switching behavior from consumers. That obviously would relate to frequently purchased goods (fast-moving consumer goods).

Current models and thinking about customer lifetime value and how long you think they’re going to stay with you over what period of time—some of that early work really feeds into trying to think about customers and how long you’re going to have them as customers over time. We were trying to change the probability of choice. It moved from being deterministic, “Here’s what they’re going to choose,” to “Here’s the probability that they’re going to pick these particular items.” Predicting probability of choice, we’re much better at doing that than predicting specific choice.

Andrew Mitrak: So this area became a thread throughout your career, tying marketing activity to measurable business impact. This is something that you worked on for decades afterwards, and it started back under your work under Frank Bass. Why did you see that this was the area to focus on for so long? Did you feel like there was a gap in this area where you could be the person to carve out your career here? What did you identify there?

David Reibstein: I’m going to go back to your previous question and tie it to this question. A lot of what I learned from Dr. Bass, from Frank Bass, is really methodologies. Econometrics was a major part of that, but certainly how to deal with data, structural equations, and trying to think about all of that. But it turns out that rather than just be a methodologist, what I thought was important was to spend some time trying to think about actions that management takes and then relating that to particular outcomes using the appropriate methodologies.

Bridging Methodology and Management

David Reibstein: So when I left Purdue, I joined Harvard. I wanted to spend some time trying to think about, “So how do we use this stuff? For what purpose?” So as I’m at Harvard, it was all “Just think about management,” and less thinking about the methodology. I viewed myself in a position to try and think about relating these together. I wanted to look at actual management behavior in marketing and how that relates to outcomes. So I wanted to know how it relates to profit because that’s what they really care about. I wanted to use quantitative statistical methods in a rigorous way to try and address that particular question. I think that gets to your specific question.

Andrew Mitrak: When you were studying under Frank Bass, would you say that the type of activity you were doing was more sort of large-scale, macro style—the quantitative side of marketing—or were you also working on some of the behavioral science, the micro, and the psychological side as well? Or did that come later?

David Reibstein: So the answer is yes and yes. Which is, originally working with him, it was looking at all the macro. And then what I evolved to, and what I ended up doing my specific dissertation on, was looking down at individual customers and seeing what their specific behavioral patterns were. Could we predict what those individual behavior patterns were? Which is why thinking about... you can’t look at brand switching on the macro level. We’re going to get market shares and sales, but not down to the individual behavior. What I started getting into in my dissertation was trying to think about indeed that individual level behavior and how people switched, and could we predict what those probabilities of behavior would end up being.

Andrew Mitrak: Really hard to do both. To be able to do both the large quantitative analysis and what I imagine to be lab work or very individual type of work with individuals and understanding psychology.

David Reibstein: Actually, what’s interesting in today’s world—today, 2026—most doctoral students as they’re coming out, they declare “I’m quantitative” or “I’m behavioral.” We sort of ask them, “Which group do you really fall in?” I’ve always been a straddler. And it’s like, how do we take what we could think about on the behavioral side and quantitatively analyze that? So I’ve published in Marketing Science and the Journal of Marketing Research, but I’ve also published in the Journal of Consumer Research, trying to think about those two.

The Role of Marketing Strategy

David Reibstein: But I’m... most people will agree I’m an anomaly rather than a norm or a model that one should follow because you sort of are expected to fall into one of those buckets, one of those two buckets. And then I’m going to complicate it a little bit more because I also thought about the management side of that. So that sort of got me into marketing strategy, which is a lot of what I end up teaching now at Wharton, thinking about the marketing strategy side of that. So I’m going to add three legs to that stool.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, exactly. Is that a mistake of marketing academia in general to put people into one bucket or the other? Does the world need more straddlers? Do you need the understanding of the micro to be able to interpret the macro and vice versa? Do you need a strategy angle to be able to actually put it into practice? Is marketing shooting itself in the foot by focusing on everybody? Or is that just a practical thing that we need where people are specialists to some extent and we excel with specialists?

David Reibstein: So obviously I’ve got a biased perspective, right? As a straddler, I clearly have a biased perspective. But I think the argument could be made: you need to have depth. And it would be great if you had depth in some area. People generally don’t have depth as a straddler. So I was probably too shallow as a quantitative guy and too shallow as a behavioral guy, that the natural place was somewhere in the middle.

Andrew Mitrak: Or you might just be being too modest right now.

David Reibstein: Well, I’m rarely accused of that, but okay. But it turns out that I think we do need people that are quant jocks. And we need other people that are behavioral jocks. And I’m hoping that we need some people that can connect the pieces. There are several people that do that, but most are clearly within one particular camp. And I think we also need people to think about, “So how do we apply this and what’s the overall strategy of this?” I think those are important components as well.

Andrew Mitrak: Was there a time when you first started taking what you were learning in a lab or taking what you were learning from data analysis and then working with companies and practitioners and putting it into practice in the real world? What were the first elements of that happening?

David Reibstein: One of the things that we end up doing is we end up teaching executive education. And we end up being asked to work on particular consulting projects. And it’s like, “You’re great at doing that analysis. Help us with this problem.” And I go, “Hmm.” I actually think getting academics to do some consulting, or at least in the classroom with executives, is a really important thing. It’s not just we should shun it and think, “Oh, they’re just doing that rather than their academic stuff.” It really is asking people to be very focused on how do we apply this stuff.

And I think because of having some of those consulting clients and having some people in the classroom say, “Okay, I understand this methodology that you’re talking about or this behavioral theory that you’re talking about. How would I use it to apply this particular problem?” I think that’s a very, very healthy thing. And I think that external exposure helped guide a lot of the research I ended up doing and some of the work that I continue to do.

Defining and Publishing “Marketing Metrics”

Andrew Mitrak: Jumping ahead a little bit, you published the book Marketing Metrics in 2006, and it’s now in its fourth edition. It seems like this type of external work—working with practitioners, getting their feedback, seeing how marketing theory works in the real world—would be really informative for which metrics to prioritize, which metrics matter, how to implement them. Was that part of what helped inform this book?

David Reibstein: So some of the impetus for that book... and I have to give a lot of credit to one of my co-authors, Paul Farris, who was a major driver in all of this as well. But one of the pieces that was an impetus to that was I’d hear some people talk about one measure and some other people talk about that same measure but mean totally different things. And so, wait a minute, we need to have really clear understanding of what these particular measures are and to think about how could we use those. That was an important aspect of what needed to be done.

So that sort of led to, “Okay, could we come up with...” And the title of the original version was 50 Metrics Every Marketing Manager Needs to Know. We wrote that book with, “Here’s the 50 metrics.” And then the next thing we know is people are coming back to us saying, “That’s great. That really was helpful and you helped us understand how we measure that and how we would apply that particular term. But what about this other measure? And what about these new things over here?” And so it was like, “Oh, so 50 seems like an excessive number, but there’s more and more aspects.” And we wanted this to be something broad enough that could be used in .com spaces and industrial goods and frequently purchased goods and durable goods and used across different contexts. Before you know it, we took the number off of the title because it started to mushroom as we continued to develop that.

Andrew Mitrak: That’s right. And what’s funny, this book is very much the definitive book on marketing metrics and terminology. As I was researching your work, I actually saw a lot of Wikipedia pages where this book showed up as the top source for an entry into a given marketing metric. And for what it’s worth, I mean, that means a lot of people are using it. What does Wikipedia cite? It’s citing this book as sort of the definition of it.

And I’m wondering, you talked about how there would be the same metric used for different things. I’m also sure that there were a lot of duplicative metrics or there were metrics that were sort of passing fads and didn’t actually matter. I’m wondering what your process is for assembling a book like this. Is it sort of a matter of curation, kind of seeing what’s out there and then running that against industry and seeing what sticks? What makes the book and what doesn’t? What was the whole process behind it?

David Reibstein: I think you described it really well. So in spending time with organizations, with companies, what are the major metrics that they’re using? And in particular, what are the major ones they’re abusing or misusing was another thing. When they say one thing versus another. By the way, I ran into more than one industry, but people would say, “Here’s what my market share is.” And someone else say, “Here’s what my market share is,” in the same industry. And if you look at all the different competitors, those market shares would add up to well over 100%. And I’m going, “Wait a minute. Market share cannot add up to more than 100%.”

Defining Market Share and Brand Value

David Reibstein: Well, they could if we define it differently or if we have a different denominator. My favorite example is thinking about one company that always would talk about their market share in the inkjet printer market versus somebody else thinking about their market share in the dot matrix market and someone else thinking about laser printing. And someone else talking about, “No, I’m talking about printing.” And it’s like, wait a minute, we need to be really careful defining nothing else with what that particular denominator is.

And then huge confusion about the value of a brand. One of my favorite measures is trying to think about brand equity or the brand value. And often when I ask people, “So what’s the value of your brand?” they think, “Well, I’m able to charge a 10% premium over my competition.” And I’m thinking, “Okay, well that’s nice. But how much extra volume do you also get?” It’s skipping that part of it. Everybody wants to think about the value of their brand, but then coming up with a specific metric for that and a way to measure that, and thinking not just about price but also thinking about volume—I don’t see that very much. And so it’s a major component just to illustrate that there are different measures that people are using and thinking about it differently and some of it being, as I say, incorrectly applied. But to get back to your question, because I did wander off for a second. A lot of it comes from trying to think about what it is that people are using. And then also trying to bring some of my own insights into it, and that of my co authors thinking about. So what could be some of the measures that they should be using and trying to think about?

Andrew Mitrak: You brought up how brand equity can be measured in price increases—charging 10% more because I prefer the Kleenex versus the Kroger whatever, the generic brand. Or it could be used for scale. I think that’s a really interesting way to articulate it because there are a lot of brands, say like Coca-Cola, a very well-known brand but doesn’t actually increase its prices because of its brand. It increases its scale. Or Nike as well. Nike maybe charges a little more than a generic but not as much as you think they could. They could probably go way, way higher end and even more luxury than they are given the brand equity they have. So what do people usually get wrong about brand equity? Can you speak to some of the trade-offs between scale and price increases?

David Reibstein: So first of all, some of what they get wrong is because of academics who refer to brand equity in all sorts of different ways. “What is the purpose of the brand?” or “What’s the essence of the brand?” “That’s the brand equity. This is what it is that we’re known for.” So we as academics use the term brand equity in a variety of different fashions. And so I think I don’t want to just look at management and say that’s where the problem is. It’s right there. It’s within academia that we have some of that.

But from my perspective, I sort of think of it as there’s a demand curve. And as you develop that brand, it shifts that demand curve outward. And so I want to look at any point on that curve and how much extra price can I charge and how much extra volume can I get. And so there are some brands that take it clearly in terms of a price premium. And there are others that take it only in terms of volume. So Coca-Cola for a long time was the number one brand in the world and took very little of it in terms of price. But they had a huge market share. And that market share was clearly attributable to their brand. And people would choose Coca-Cola over RC Cola. Do you remember RC Cola?

Andrew Mitrak: I remember RC Cola. I’m not that young.

David Reibstein: It may even still exist, but they would choose Coca-Cola over RC Cola and certainly over “Dave’s Cola” because it was Coca-Cola. And it wasn’t necessarily because of price because Coca-Cola wanted to have their price there and be competitive. But boy, they had huge market share relative to their competition because of that. And so we often leave that part out of trying to think about what that particular value is.

Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and Finance

Andrew Mitrak: This is a bit of a tangent, but I think it all kind of fits into that thread of linking marketing to financial consequences—in this case, brand equity. And then also having marketing speak the same language as the CFO and CEO. I think that marketing metrics help with this, so a standardized set of metrics can help equip CMOs to speak to other executives and counterparts. Do you think that this standardization of marketing metrics helps elevate the role of marketing within organizations or gives it more political clout within orgs?

David Reibstein: I would hope so. I would hope that if we had a common understanding, then there could be some communication not just marketer to marketer, but within the organizations as well. Since you used that particular title, “linking marketing metrics to financial consequences,” which was the title of an executive program that I ran here at Wharton for more than a decade. When I first started that program out, half the participants were CMOs, or at least from marketing, and the other half of the participants were CFOs or coming from the finance side.

Finance was saying, “I don’t understand why marketers are wasting our money this way.” And the marketers were saying, “How do I communicate to the finance people the value of what it is that we’ve got going?” That sort of is what led to a lot of that particular effort, to try and get the two groups talking to each other so that they could understand, “Here’s what the value to the organization is.” Because many organizations today still look at marketing as something that we do, but I’m not sure what value it is that it produces.

The Bias of Short-Termism

David Reibstein: Actually, there sort of is this bias towards anything that generates short-term consequences. “Boy, I run a promotion and you saw sales go up.” But spending on anything that produces long-term consequences, people don’t think about what that particular value is. And that’s somewhat understandable because you don’t see it immediately. So part of what happens is when there’s an economic downturn, one of the first things that gets cut is marketing because, “What does marketing contribute? It’s what we do if we’ve got excess money.” And that’s a concern.

Andrew Mitrak: Coming back to marketing metrics, I published a few podcasts and had a few conversations with CMOs and academics on some of the unintended consequences of metrics. Usually, the general gist of it is that marketing teams get fixated on the wrong goals. You alluded to short-termism and promotions, and that there’s a temptation to game the system that drives the metrics but doesn’t always drive the long-term value. Everybody wants to be data-driven as an executive or leader, but have you seen companies sort of take the wrong message or take the wrong approach to being data-driven? Are there common themes where people who intend to be metrics-driven and adopt marketing metrics wind up missing an important piece of the puzzle?

David Reibstein: I think I was just alluding to that. I think what happens is I look at those short-term consequences and I put my weight there, on the short term. I run a digital ad and I look at that click-through rate and I look at, “Oh, that spending was good.” If I have another digital ad that helps create brand—oh, I’m going to start thinking about that brand, it’s going to be in my consideration set, and that over time I’m more likely to be buying it—that sort of gets washed out. People don’t give credit to that when maybe it’s contributing a huge part, but in a longer-term consequence. I think that gets way overlooked.

Does Brand Equity Matter for Small Businesses and Startups

Andrew Mitrak: I think also—I’ve worked at a mix of smaller startups and had my own business, and now work at a larger tech company. I think especially at smaller companies or startups, that the investment in brand is especially hard because it’s existential. If they miss a quarter or a year, it could be existential to the business. There’s no brand equity for a company that’s gone out of business. But then at some point, you kind of go from zero to one on your brand where brand equity doesn’t show up on the balance sheet, and then all of a sudden it is there as an asset. Do you have a sense of when companies on their journey sort of start to have brand as an asset where they should start to care about brand equity? Is it only for the Fortune 500? Is it for the mid-market companies? Do startups have that if they’re at the right scale? How do you think about that?

David Reibstein: Lots of people think, “Well, brand is only important for that Fortune 500.” And actually, let me narrow that down, for the Fortune 500 consumer goods companies. And I would say no. It’s not just consumer goods. For a long, long time, Intel was able to charge a huge premium and get incremental volume because of the “Intel Inside” campaign and the image of Intel. People were more likely to buy a computer that had an Intel chip versus not. Intel has run into their particular problems. But more likely to buy Cisco or more likely to use Salesforce.com. So let’s start with it’s not just consumers. That’s part of it. What was the first part of that question that you asked?

Andrew Mitrak: You answered another B2B component of it. Yes, it matters both for a B2C and for B2B brands, but also just the scale of a company itself, like as far as how large the company is.

David Reibstein: So it doesn’t have to be Fortune 500. Thank you for bringing me back to that. I would argue that my local florist—one shop—that my local florist has a great brand. She always has the best flowers. She always delivers on time. She is so good on that. And so if I’m going to order flowers again, I think, “Well, I could order them from any one of these different companies. Let me see what their prices are. I’m going to send a spring bouquet or a dozen roses.” No, I want to get it from this local florist. Really small company—I wouldn’t even call it a company, a really small shop. Does she have brand equity? Absolutely. So we don’t have to just think about it for a Fortune 500 company.

I don’t know what it is today, there were Amos’ Cookies or David’s Cookies. They started small. They really developed a great reputation. Great cookies. You’re catching me after meals, so I’m sort of thinking about cookies. But oh my gosh, that guy who was selling those cookies or that woman who was selling those cookies really developed a brand and it started to spread. That’s what we’ve got.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that’s right. And if your local florist chose to retire—I hope she doesn’t, she sounds like she’s got a great business—but if she was to sell her business, the brand equity might show up in the price of her sale. So even if it’s not something that’s helping to pay her bills week to week or shows up as some publicly traded company stock price, it’s something that she might be able to use to her benefit at some point in the company’s life cycle.

Does Brand Equity Show Up on the Balance Sheet?

David Reibstein: Now I do want to address one of the questions that you raised, which is: when does that brand equity show up on the books? And I think the answer is most of the time it doesn’t. We’ve got this weird accounting system which says if you buy a company, you can put its brand value on your books. If you build a brand, you can’t put it on your books. And it’s like, seriously?

I’ll give you a dated example now, but when Procter & Gamble bought Gillette, it said, “Here is the plant and the equipment and inventory that we’ve got, and here’s the value of the brand.” And that brand shows up on the Gillette books. Tide, Crest, Head & Shoulders—go through the list—they don’t show up on the books. And those are great brands. Those are great, great brands. And they don’t show up on the books.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that’s really interesting. It’s funny and a little bit of an aside, one of the startups that I was at—and I actually named the company when it went through a rebrand—wound up not working out. It basically went under, sold to private equity for less than the money they had raised. But the brand and the domain name wound up getting licensed to another company. It actually wound up being one of the most profitable parts—or not profitable, but of the things—the brand actually showed up and got some money for the private equity company where they actually got a pretty good deal on the brand and buying the company. So even for startups that fail, somebody can extract value for a brand and a name and a good domain name.

David Reibstein: That’s a perfect example. And it started off, I assume it was a relatively small company.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, it reached a peak of like 80 employees or so. It was software SaaS, so pretty small in the scheme of the global economy. But it had its moment. It could have been big, but it didn’t work out like most startups don’t. But the brand was still worth something.

David Reibstein: Right.

The Economic Impact of Nation Branding

Andrew Mitrak: I want to ask about Nation Branding as well. This is a thing where you started publishing the Best Countries list in 2016, and this will mark the 10th anniversary of this project. Could you talk a little bit about this project and the background of it and what the impact of it has been?

David Reibstein: So it’s been one of the things that’s near and dear to my heart. I went to New York and I gave a presentation at an ad agency there where I was saying, here’s some of what my thoughts are about the brand of a country and how it contributes to the economy of that country. Thinking about a country that’s got a great reputation, people are more likely to buy products from them. Companies might be willing to build plants there and make other foreign direct investment. A country that’s got a great reputation might have more tourists that are there.

I tried thinking about how the brand of a country contributes to the economy of that country. Just in the same spirit as we were talking about for cookies or for florists or for Intel or Coca-Cola, there’s some financial return to a country based on the image of that country. So my theory that I presented in New York was: it’d be great to go and measure the image of these countries across a variety of dimensions and then to see how related that is to the GDP of that country. Where foreign direct investment, foreign trade, and tourism are three major components to the GDP of a country. And sure enough, I see that the image of a country is highly related to the GDP of that country.

The Country of Origin Effect

David Reibstein: Let me just, you know, if we think about you got two pairs of shoes and one of them is made in Italy and the same shoe—looks the same, the materials the same—happens to be made in Bulgaria. Which shoe are people more likely to buy? And which shoe are you more likely to pay for and pay a premium for? The answer is clearly Italian shoes would be better than—and I don’t mean to be negative about Bulgaria, I could have picked any other country. Italy is right up there. French wine, right up there. So more likely to sell some products, particularly fashion-related products, because of the Italian brand image that’s there.

David Reibstein: There are other countries that have negative images. And so if I told you there was a car—again to date me—there was a car called the Yugo. Do you remember the Yugo?

Andrew Mitrak: The Hugo? The Yugo. No, I don’t know the Yugo.

David Reibstein: How far back does this go? It came out of Yugoslavia.

Andrew Mitrak: Okay.

David Reibstein: Totally died. Totally died.

Andrew Mitrak: Sounds like a fun name, Yugo, like “you go.” But yeah, I understand. The Yugoslavian car, you think of sort of the Eastern Bloc, probably not having the same appeal as say a German car or even an Italian car or something like that.

David Reibstein: So actually, just thinking about that, I have a former student who started Harry’s Razors.

Andrew Mitrak: Amazing.

David Reibstein: Do you know Harry’s Razors?

Andrew Mitrak: I think I’ve seen them at stores. I’ve seen them advertised online. So yeah, familiar with them.

David Reibstein: You should know them better than me. But Harry’s Razors, if you look at their advertising, they don’t say “closer shave.” They don’t say “fewer nicks.” They don’t say “longer lasting.” Their advertising says: “We bought a German manufacturing plant. And that’s where we make our blades.” And it’s like, boy, Germany has got this great reputation for precision. Their trains run on time, supposedly. They’re actually known for some of their precision cutting and manufacturing. “We bought a German manufacturing plant. You should buy Harry’s Razors.” And so because of that image of that country, they’re selling those particular products.

I gave a presentation in front of a group of 40 ambassadors to the United States. And it was about Nation Branding. The Swedish ambassador stood up and she said, “Come on, this is just a beauty contest. It’s just, who’s on the red carpet? What are the particular rankings?” And she said, “Why should we care about this beauty contest that you’re running?” And my response is related to what we were talking about: “You should care because how you are perceived relates to the economy of your country. And if you are perceived on these particular dimensions, you’re more likely to have people buy products from you. You’re more likely to have people invest in your country or come visit your country. You should care about your external image because it affects what people do with their money.”

Nation Branding and the Automotive Sector

Andrew Mitrak: When it comes to how countries have marketed themselves, you mentioned Yugo as the Yugoslavian car that I hadn’t heard of. But if you asked me also 20 years ago when I was first getting my learner’s permit and driving, “Would I ever want to buy a Chinese car?” I probably would have said no. I don’t really associate that country with cars. But I just was reading that BYD is now the best-selling electric car on the market. And I’m like, I’d kind of like to test drive a BYD. Those look pretty cool and pretty affordable.

And that country, China, has obviously had a lot of changes there over the last 20 years, and automotive is one of them. And I’m wondering, should countries think about this as far as where to invest and turn around and build a market against all odds? Or should they sort of just focus on—if you’re Italy, just focus on shoemaking and lean into your strengths? How do you think countries have shifted their brands or how have they used tools like your Best Countries research and data to help change how they invest and market themselves?

David Reibstein: BYD, what does that stand for?

Andrew Mitrak: I don’t know.

David Reibstein: I think it’s “Build Your Dream.”

Andrew Mitrak: Oh, wow. Okay.

David Reibstein: It’s in English. So in fact, BYD, those letters don’t exist in Chinese. Those are English characters that are there. Yet I’m still willing to bet that when BYD comes into the United States, there’s going to be hesitancy to buy the car because it’s Chinese. And actually, they want to have an English name and they want to disassociate that they’re Chinese because that’s going to have a negative impact on what the particular sales are of that particular product.

David Reibstein: Actually, Lenovo. Lenovo is the number one PC in the world. They changed their name from a Chinese name to call it Lenovo. I hear the name Lenovo, I think, “Lenovo, what country is that from? Oh, Lenovo. It must be Italian or something.” I don’t know. But that’s because that country had a particular image and needed to overcome that.

In contrast, by the way, look at what South Korea has done. South Korea has really, on the backs of Samsung, have developed a changed reputation of that country. We used to think products that come out of South Korea, they’re cheap and not reliable. And Samsung has come out with great products and have been able to help change the image of South Korea. And so we’ve seen Hyundai that has come—they again had this low price, low quality image. And they’ve got a great car now called the Genesis. And originally it was called the Hyundai Genesis. And they couldn’t sell very much relative to the quality of the car. They now just call it the Genesis and they’ve dropped the Hyundai name. And many people think of, well, Genesis, that sounds like an American car. It doesn’t sound like a Korean car. And they’ve been able to ratchet their price up. But in general, South Korea, off of a number of different dimensions, has been able to raise the quality image of their country and have been able to do really, really well with that.

Global Reactions to Nation Branding and the “Best Countries” Project

Andrew Mitrak: Through doing this Best Countries project, I’m sure you’ve gotten to meet leaders from a lot of countries and they’ve asked you questions about marketing and branding. What’s most surprised you? Are there any specific interactions you’ve had with countries or world leaders who are thinking about their brands? What are some of the most surprising interactions you’ve had as a result of this project?

David Reibstein: I was giving a presentation in Israel. And I had a heckler in the crowd. Not unusual, but I had a heckler in the crowd who said, “Your data are wrong.” And I had to stop and I said, “This is what the data are. The data say this is how people perceive you. You have dropped the ball. And you need to change what those particular images are. If your product is better, if your country is better than the perceptions, then that’s an issue that you’ve got. It’s not that the perceptions are wrong. People invest or go on tourism trips based on what their image is, not necessarily what the particular reality is.” So that was one that really caught me by surprise.

One that really surprised me was I’m at a conference at NYU and I get a WhatsApp call from some number I don’t know. And I pick up the call and the guy said to me, “Professor Reibstein?” I go, “Yeah.” He said, “I’m the Finance Minister of Saudi Arabia. Could you meet me in Washington, D.C. next week? I’m going to be there.” I have no idea why he wants to talk to me. But I thought I’m intrigued by it. I went down to Washington and I met him. And he has a private lunch for just the two of us. And here’s the Finance Minister wanting to talk to me about “Brand Saudi Arabia.”

So first of all, you talked about marketers and finance. Well, here’s the Finance Minister of a country who’s worried about the brand of that country. And well he should be. And Saudi Arabia is doing a lot to try and change what their global image is. And I think they’ve done a pretty good job of helping change what that image is.

Well, that was another huge surprise for me. The Minister of the Economy of Serbia just contacted me last week and asked me to come speak in Serbia. It’s like, gee, I’ve never been to Serbia—formerly Yugoslavia—and they want me to come talk about nation branding. So I’m really surprised at some of the reach, how far it’s gone, and that people do care about what the image of their country is. And I wish the United States cared a little bit more about it as well. I had to throw that in.

Andrew Mitrak: No, I hear what you’re saying.

Cryptocurrency as a Brand

Andrew Mitrak: Another one, this feels like it couldn’t be any more different, but the Best Countries and nation branding, and then the Wharton Consumer Cryptocurrency Confidence Index and crypto branding. How did you get into cryptocurrency? What was the spark to start tracking the brand and consumer confidence of crypto?

David Reibstein: Well, here’s this industry. You talk about, could small brands develop a brand? Bitcoin. It did start small. And boy, has its brand really grown. But again, by the way, it is a blending of consumer and behavioral science and looking at some quantitative methods. So what I’ve been doing on the crypto side is I’ve been looking at: could we measure consumer confidence in crypto? And then how that’s related to crypto prices.

David Reibstein: There’s been crises that have happened. There’s been this person indicted in this currency that’s just going to hell. And then we have a President who’s endorsing it. All these different things that lead to this huge volatility. Well, has there been that volatility in consumer confidence? And is that related to the prices? And one of the things the quantitative side has sort of led me to do is: is confidence a lagging indicator or a leading indicator? Do people have confidence in crypto which leads to its price going up? Or as its price goes up, that people gain more and more confidence in it? And not to hold that behind the curtain, the answer is yes, it’s both. And then trying to parse those two apart of how much is leading and how much is lagging, I’m diving deep into some analytic methods to try and get to those distinguishing characteristics.

Andrew Mitrak: It seems like something that would track pretty close to one-to-one, right? Like very, very positively correlated because if there’s no confidence in it, there’s no value in it. If you won’t accept my Bitcoin, then my Bitcoin has no value. Or that if I can’t exchange it in some way and there’s no confidence. You see a lot of this with the meme coins that are out there, that they’re basically entirely a brand, right? It’s a meme, they slap a thing on it, there’s no underlying technology that differentiates it. They claim it has a value, there might be a spike, and then everybody loses confidence and it basically drops to zero. Is that sort of the behavior that you see with it where it’s almost just the value is the confidence in a way? Those are so tightly coupled together.

David Reibstein: So they are pretty highly correlated. But the question is which is leading which? And by the way, we refer to crypto as a currency. It’s not treated like a currency. We call it a crypto coin, right? And think of it as a currency. That’s not at all how people are thinking about it. People are thinking about it as a risky stock investment. It’s like, “I’m going to invest in crypto.” We don’t often as consumers say, “Oh, I’m going to invest in the dollar,” or “I’m going to invest in the Pound sterling.” No, it’s like this is not a currency. This is an investment. I ask people, “Do you want to get paid in crypto?” No, don’t pay me in crypto. That’s too risky. I want to get paid in US dollars.

David Reibstein: And so part of what’s happened is as we hear more and more about crypto... the paper I want to write, I know the title, which is “Crypto Creep.“ That it continues to expand and creep and more and more. And as it creeps more and more people... I’m seeing crypto ATMs. And it’s like a crypto ATM? I want to get my crypto dollars out. But as we see this crypto creep, that contributes to confidence. And I think there are some people that are saying, “Boy, I keep hearing about the crypto prices going up. I don’t want to be left behind. And so I need to invest in that stock that’s going up.” Even though it’s got that volatility that we talked about.

Andrew Mitrak: We’re veering a little bit away from the history side of marketing, but I’m going to ask you about stablecoins. Is that part of your research as well? Because there are USDC coins where people, I think also for foreign exchange or for remittances or things like that where it might be useful to bypass other foreign transaction fees and things like that. Where it’s pegged, it’s not supposed to be like Bitcoin where it’s going up. It’s hopefully pegged to the US dollar. And that seems like one where if there’s ever a gap between consumer confidence and that stablecoin, it might not be so stable. And that might be a bad thing. I’m just curious, I think they’re also one of the largest buyers of treasuries today now or something too.

David Reibstein: That’s right. That’s right.

Andrew Mitrak: So I guess, has that come up? Is there a risk that the unsavory parts of crypto might have brand damage to the stablecoins that are trying to be more legitimate?

David Reibstein: The question you’re asking goes beyond what I’ve currently looked at so far. But I think I’m going to end up having to look at that. And I think any of the unsavory part or negative aspects of crypto, as you were just referring to, will spill over and have an impact indeed.

The Challenge of Measuring Marketing Impact

Andrew Mitrak: I’m going to ask you a selfish question. You hosted Measured Thoughts for several years. This is a radio program where you interviewed CMOs and marketing leaders from across the world. You recorded this over many years so you have dozens if not more than 100 interviews. I’m just wondering, what did you learn from talking to CMOs around the world? And do you have any advice for a fellow marketing interviewer?

David Reibstein: So my advice is when you’re talking to those CMOs and other senior marketing executives, push them. Because they all want to talk about, “Oh, this is what we’re doing and these activities.” The whole theme of Measured Thoughts was really sort of inspired by the book. And so I had this SiriusXM radio show where I wanted to know: how do you measure? What are your thoughts about how you measure the impact of your marketing? And we’d like to believe that in, again, 2026, that we’re so much better at measuring the impact of our marketing. And my response and what it is that I’ve learned is we’ve got so far still to go.

One of the things I liked really doing was taking people, CMOs that had invested in Super Bowl ads, and say, “So you just spent $7.4 million on that 30 seconds. How do you justify that? And to hear all their flowery talk about, ‘Oh, it’s just wonderful and...’ How do you justify that to your CEO or to your CFO? That you just spent... That’s what the airtime cost. How do you justify that financially?” And it is shocking how in today’s age we still haven’t gotten there.

Now, while I say that, I do this Facebook ad or I buy this on Google and I can see what the conversion rate is and ching-ching, I can count it. Does that mean that that’s more valuable? So I’m not saying Super Bowl ads are not worth it at all. What I am saying is, do we have a way of capturing what that value is? And we still have a ways to go. And trust me, it’s not an easy problem. But it is amazing to me how far we are from getting our hands around being able to say something concrete about that.

Andrew Mitrak: I love that advice and that type of questioning because you’re just asking them to justify it, which they should be able to do if this is a highly paid executive who spent a lot of money. It’s not saying that it’s wrong, it’s just asking them to explain why. And also it’s a good note for someone like me because as a podcaster, I think podcasting is generally a friendlier conversation, right? I want to learn and I want to have a professional relationship. And it’s not like I’m a 60 Minutes investigative journalist trying to ask gotcha questions. But also, it doesn’t mean that we should just totally let people get away with saying anything either, right? That we should be able to ask hard questions. And we all benefit from debate. We all benefit from critical thinking. And it shouldn’t all just be kind of the glossy veneer that marketers are prone to do sometimes.

David Reibstein: For sure. For sure.

Andrew Mitrak: Professor David Reibstein, I really enjoyed this conversation. For listeners who have enjoyed it too and want to learn more about your work, where should they find you online?

David Reibstein: Actually go to measuredthoughts.com and you can see a whole bunch of stuff that I’ve been doing and working on that. Or go to my Wharton web address as well.

Andrew Mitrak: Absolutely. I’ve visited your website and your Wharton address and there’s a lot of great material on there. So I encourage people to go visit and listen. So thanks again so much for your time, David. I really enjoyed the conversation.

David Reibstein: Andrew, thank you very much for having me on the program. Good luck with this. I think it’s great and you do a wonderful job. So appreciate it. Thank you very very much.

Today marks exactly one year since I hit publish on the very first episode of A History of Marketing. I wanted to do something special for the anniversary, so I’m happy to share my excellent conversation with Rory Sutherland.

You may know Rory from his Ted Talks which have been viewed by millions, or his TikToks which have been viewed by tens of millions. He is the Vice Chairman at Ogilvy and the founder of their behavioral science practice.

I’m a big fan of his book, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life. As we discuss on the podcast, Alchemy is all about how marketers think, rather than just what we do.

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

We also cover:

• The real David Ogilvy: Rory shares about meeting David Ogilvy, and the parts of Ogilvy’s life you won’t find in his books, like his stint as a British spy in Washington during World War II.

• The “Capital M” vs. “small m” marketing mistake: Why the industry got marketing wrong by turning it into a department rather than a way of thinking.

• Behavioral science and business: How to practically apply behavioral science and “nudge” to marketing strategies.

Rory has a way of using history and behavioral science to reveal “unseen opportunities” that most traditional data misses. This conversation changed how I think about the role of marketing, and I hope it does the same for you.

Special Thanks:

Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, who volunteers to review and edit transcripts for accuracy and clarity.

And thank you to Paul Feldwick, whom you may remember from episode 30 of this podcast, for introducing me to Rory.

Espionage, Aerophobia, and the “Hidden” Psychology of David Ogilvy

Andrew Mitrak: I wanted to ask you about David Ogilvy. I wanted to start with him because he’s such a big figure, and I love his books. I haven’t actually discussed him that much on the podcast, and you’ve worked at Ogilvy since the late ‘80s. I’m wondering if you have an element of David Ogilvy’s success that you’ve learned from working at Ogilvy that I wouldn’t have learned from reading one of his books.

Rory Sutherland: I only met him once, and I can date it more or less exactly because it was after the Eurostar opened—the tunnel train tunnel between France and the UK. David was absolutely terrified of flying. In fact, in later life, he crossed the Atlantic by ship in preference to flying. He was absolutely paranoid about flying. I’ve met people who met him off flights, and he kind of emerged down the jetway as a kind of physical wreck. So, he was only really prepared in later life to travel to London after the train service opened. Consequently, I only met him once. I knew his wife, later widow, quite well subsequently because we used to have Ogilvy events and WPP events indeed at the Château de Touffou where he’s in fact buried.

I think actually there’s a part of his life as well where he will emerge actually even more interesting than he’s believed to be at the moment. Part of his life, which was effectively with British Intelligence in Washington, D.C. during World War II, when he worked with, for example, Ian Fleming and a few other people.

Andrew Mitrak: There’s the book about this called The Irregulars. It’s fantastic.

Rory Sutherland: The Irregulars, which is absolute—yeah, which I think I might have actually discussed this with the author. Of course, he was, whether it was just discretion or he was actually D-noticed or had signed the Official Secrets Act, but I’m fairly sure that during his lifetime he wasn’t really allowed to talk about this period of his life. A large part of which, I think, was effectively persuading the US to enter the war in the very beginning of 1940-41, pre-Pearl Harbor. He was engaged in persuading the US to enter the war, and then presumably also persuading the US to enter the war in Europe before they fully embarked on the war in the Far East. So, a large part of that was probably involved with his previous experience with Gallup; he would have been effectively gauging public opinion and working out the right strategies for getting American support, which was by no means, certainly in terms of the war in Europe, by no means automatic, certainly before Pearl Harbor. It’s very similar to World War I, in fact, where obviously Woodrow Wilson—who bizarrely is my fourth cousin twice removed—where Woodrow Wilson effectively fought an election on the whole basis of isolationism and then had to do an about-face. So, I think there’s a whole part of his life which he couldn’t write about at all, which, being a showman, which he was—and I make no apology for that—he would have undoubtedly loved to have written about, but simply couldn’t.

Ogilvy’s Psychology of Leadership

Rory Sutherland: When I said I met him the once, he presented his work and gave a talk. Interestingly, we’d sort of heard rumors that he was slightly losing his marbles because this would have been—he would have already been in his 80s at that point. But he was completely lucid and fantastically clear in his presentation. I always remember a detail, which is that he’d pinned up a lot of his work, which was then laminated and stuck to the walls. Of course, he then needed it collected, and you had that little awkward social moment where nobody wants to be seen doing the—in a large group of people, no one wants to be seen doing the menial work of collecting the drawing pins and putting everything back in a bag. He simply made the point that he said the work has been pinned up on the wall by the European chairman of Ogilvy, so it shouldn’t be beneath anyone’s stature to help me take it down. So, there was that psychological astuteness, a very, very clever bit of behavioral science. Look, if the second most senior person in the room has pinned this work to the wall, none of you should feel any diminution of status by removing the drawing pins. So, he was clearly that sort of very astute psychologist even in his—I’m trying to work out the date, he was born in 1911, so he would have been in his sort of mid-80s, I’m guessing. He died in ‘99 [sic], I think, if I’ve got that right.

The Limits of Traditional Market Research

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. So, you mentioned how he has this intuitive behavioral science sort of understanding. He also worked for Gallup, and he really preaches about research, research, research in his books. A lot of your work is sort of where does research fall short, right? A lot of your insights are about what is intuitive or psychological where people aren’t stating their preferences? Marketers are being intuitive and uncovering revealed preferences through behavior. I’m wondering, do you have a heuristic for where research falls short, or where you might disagree with Ogilvy on his take on marketing research?

Rory Sutherland: I mean, we can overstate this, because it’s often taken, my view, that market research is a terrible thing because people don’t know why they do what they do, which is to some extent true. Now, this is not to say that a lot of research can’t be both useful and accurate. If people really hate something and they say they hate it, it’s undoubtedly worth taking that on board. You could learn an awful lot about what you’re getting wrong by simply researching your customers. There are also, which David didn’t have to the same extent, completely free sources of information like call centers, which I always think are a massively underutilized resource because they’re the place where you learn what you’re getting wrong, or what your customers can’t do online, or all manner of things. So, don’t get me wrong. He never said this famous phrase often attributed to him: that the trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say. That’s somebody else who said that. I don’t think David would have said it because he was undoubtedly a research advocate because he preferred the discipline of research to what he called sort of random creative self-indulgence.

Tacit Knowledge and Entrepreneurial Arbitrage

Andrew Mitrak: It’s funny because I want to pause on that line real quick because it’s in your book. It’s in Alchemy, but you say in Alchemy that you don’t think he ever said that, or you can’t confirm whether he ever said that. So you found out that he did not say that?

Rory Sutherland: Well, certainly nobody, and several colleagues of mine had tried to find an accurate attribution. I think if you go to something like Quote Investigator online, it has been attributed to other people, possibly earlier than David. And by the way, I mean, that’s not completely true. A lot of the time we do actually think what we feel, and we say what we think, and we do what we say. What is important, though, is that the tacit information is disproportionately valuable because it’s there that you can find yourself either under a massive illusion about what people really want because it’s what they say they want. Lower prices would be an example. It would be very, very dangerous to take that literally because people always say it because it’s a rational-sounding answer. “I’d do this more often if only it was cheaper.” Well, that’s both true and not true, and in any case, there will also be a chunk of people who will never tell you that they’d do something if it were only more expensive. So, around price, for example, there’s an enormous amount of misinformation. Also, information that’s tacit, which therefore isn’t in the public domain, is disproportionately valuable because it’s a source of kind of entrepreneurial arbitrage. And you know, I mean, okay, if you—nobody when Steve Jobs came along was really actively saying, “I’d buy a computer if only they weren’t so f**king ugly.” Okay? Nobody was really saying that. And so, an awful lot of entrepreneurial activity involves a bet on something which you assume to be felt but not said. Because the things that are said are already in the public domain and there’s no competitive advantage to be gained. It’s a bit like the stock market; it’s already priced in.

I’ll give you an interesting example of this because I’ve been campaigning recently that hotels should provide monitors in the room. Because my argument is, I spend much more time in hotel rooms working than I do watching TV. And so, if either you had a USB-C cable which enabled you to connect reliably to the 4K TV, or you had the option of paying for a monitor in your room, I think a lot of people would go, “That’s great.” What’s weird about that is that until I said it, which was a hypothesis, nobody else was saying this. Because it’s one of those things that’s obvious in retrospect, but because the consumer doesn’t expect there to be a monitor in their hotel room, nobody complains about there not being a monitor in the hotel room. So, you know, all these weird things. I’ve mentioned other things like it really annoys me when I travel with my wife that most hotel rooms either have naught or only one inadequate desk. So one of you always ends up trying to work by propping up a laptop on the bed or on some woefully inadequate table or having to sit outside on a balcony. And the interesting thing about these things is that there are these unmet needs out there in the marketplace, which are really unmet because they’re unsaid, and they’re unsaid because they’re unthought, and they’re unthought because they’re unfelt. However, if you provide these things, my hunch is—and we can disprove this very easily by just charging 20 quid a night for a monitor and seeing what happens—it’s very easy to test that hypothesis.

Why Data Without a Hypothesis Fails

Rory Sutherland: Quite often, I think what we’re trying to do, and Roger Martin is the real guru on this—what we’re trying to do is use pre-existing data as the basis for making a decision. And the problem is pre-existing data is not representative; it’s often completely wrong, or it’s miscategorized, or it’s misunderstood, or it’s simply inaccurate. The proper way to do business is to develop a hypothesis, design an experiment to reliably test the hypothesis, perform the experiment, analyze the data to see whether it refutes or confirms what you believe, and then rinse and repeat. Or act on the information that’s derived. But that starts with a hypothesis, which is an act of imagination. So, David would argue completely—and I wouldn’t disagree for a millisecond—that if the data you already have basically rubbishes a hypothesis, then that data’s really valuable. Or if it likely confirms a hypothesis, then that data could be very valuable in helping you decide what to do next. What isn’t a safe thing to do is this idea of kind of theory-free science where you just rely on the data to tell you what to do.

Rory Sutherland: I have a wonderful story about this. On the basis, someone told me this very lunchtime, fantastic person who works for The Times—that’s the proper Times, not The New York Times. And they invested a huge amount of money in a science publication because they had very reliable data that told them that their readership loved reading things about science, and all the most read articles in The Times were about science. So they went and spent a fairly large sum creating a new sister publication and creating an app for it and publishing—and it went nowhere. And it turned out when they investigated it, that what had happened was that all articles about sex and relationships had been tagged as though they were effectively science articles. Because nobody knew how to define them, so they defined them not as social science, I think they defined them as sort of human science or whatever it was. And so all the articles like “Sex in the Olympic Village,” which was the most read article of ten years, which was talking about sexual practices at the Beijing Olympics, were tagged as being science articles. Brilliant informants said that based on that information, we would have probably been better off launching a pornographic magazine than a science publication. Because people are very interested in sex.

Andrew Mitrak: Especially among Olympians.

Rory Sutherland: Particularly Olympian sex is, of course, massively—you can imagine, that’s the most click-baity, fantastic title imaginable. By contrast, she said, we had a huge success launching a thing called Sun Bingo. And the simple insight was from a single journalist who said, “As soon as they ban smoking in bingo halls, the demand for the online bingo is going to go sky-high.” Now, that was a single anecdotal hypothesis which made them a fortune. And so this idea, I think, this is a product of defensive decision-making. And this is something which is also attributed to David, which he didn’t say, but I’m sure he quoted a lot. It was, funnily enough, originally said by another Scotsman, which is, people use statistics the way a drunk uses a lamp post: for support rather than illumination. And I think what we’ve got to be very careful of is there’s this massive tendency to go, “If you start your presentation with ‘the data tells us...’” Does it mean you’re going to make a very good decision? No. It might help, but I mean, it doesn’t certainly. On the other hand, does it mean you can be absolved of any blame in the event that things go wrong? Yep, absolutely.

Research vs. Showmanship: Hopkins, Ogilvy, and Feldwick

Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned how David Ogilvy was a showman, and of course he’s a showman. We talked to Paul Feldwick about showmanship; that’s a big topic of Paul Feldwick. We also talked about Claude Hopkins and his book Scientific Advertising.

Rory Sutherland: Which Feldwick is less sympathetic to that book than I am, I think. And that’s because he comes from above-the-line advertising, and I come from below-the-line advertising, even though we went to the same school.

Andrew Mitrak: I want to get your reaction to this. This is the thing about why he’s sort of dismisses it partly, is that the book is Scientific Advertising and the book would be like: give facts about the product and don’t be frivolous. But then you look at what Lord & Thomas did at this time, and they were doing big publicity stunts like baking the largest cake in the world, which had nothing to do with the product, and they were doing showmanship, and preaching on the one hand facts and scientific advertising, and then doing very unscientific things in a way it was sort of using science as a way to kind of sell your agency, because that’s what your buyers wanted.

Rory Sutherland: He tells this wonderful story about Sunny Jim, which is the character that was used to promote Force cereal. And the bizarre thing is they went away from absolutely jingle-led entertainment in the US because Lord & Thomas, I think it was, told them they had to be more scientific and talk about the product. In the UK, the marketing department clearly went rogue. In my own childhood, we had a—and by the way, that was not just an advertising campaign, it was a branded merch campaign, because you could send off a certain number of box tops and £2.50 and have your own cuddly Sunny Jim, who was a weird kind of 18th-century roué character whose sunny disposition came from eating large quantities of the product, presumably. And he makes the point that the brand absolutely succeeded in the UK where it continued with its entertainment-based jingle-led platform, whereas the imposition of scientific advertising in the US was something of a catastrophe for the business.

Rory Sutherland: So it ended up being one of those weird things which survived much better in the UK with what you might call a looser advertising regime than in the US. Now, Claude Hopkins, a lot of what he says is absolutely true for bottom-of-the-funnel advertising, direct response, which is before someone can send off a coupon. Okay, it’s very boring to say this, but putting “allow 14 days for delivery,” telling people when to expect their product. In many cases, someone can’t actually buy a product without—they can’t buy a car without knowing how big it is, because they need to know whether it fits in their garage. So at the point of final irreversible commitment, there is a whole lot of factual stuff. And I don’t apologize for this. And by the way, I don’t think internet advertising is always very good at it. A lot of online advertising seems to fall between two stools; that it is neither entertaining nor informative. It’s just transactional. Quite often you go, “Is this thing dishwasher proof?” would be the kind of thing I might want to know before I spend 200 quid on an ice cream making machine. That’s the kind of thing which is really, really important.

Rory Sutherland: So Claude Hopkins wasn’t wrong, by the way. He was just talking about a very particular kind of advertising which was off-the-page, which was obviously—but was Lord & Thomas based in Chicago or New York?

Andrew Mitrak: I think they were Chicago.

Rory Sutherland: Well, you see, there you go. Because Chicago is the world capital of direct marketing. All those great direct marketing powerhouses like Montgomery Ward and I think Sears Roebuck started as a direct marketing house. Chicago, because it was the rail hub, was the direct marketing capital of the US. And so it always had a kind of slightly more Midwestern practical, pragmatic tone of voice because its target audience was farmers. And also it was often doing off-the-page sales or direct marketing of some kind or another, where at that point in the customer journey, there comes a point in the deal where you go, “Okay, I’m happy to buy this car, but when will it be delivered? What color can I get it in?” All that sort of specific stuff. You can leave out of the upper stuff, upper-funnel activity. But at some point, you need to absolutely be clear: okay, what is the deal in which I am now engaging? What am I signing up to? What’s the absolute deal here? What’s the worst-case scenario? Because there’s the creation of desire at the top, you might argue, and there’s the elimination of anxiety at the bottom. And Hopkins was quite largely right, I think, about what you need to do to get someone over the line. There’s a point where you’re looking around a house and the estate agent can crack gags, but when it comes down to the fine print, even someone as frivolous as me would go, “Okay, we do need to get a bit serious about whether the washing machine’s included.”

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that’s fair. I think also what I’m just putting together now is Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, and you, I think all started in direct response, right? And I think that’s a certain—

Rory Sutherland: Claude Hopkins and David Ogilvy didn’t actually, but he always said that it was the best place to start. That’s what he said. He always said that the best place for an account person to start was Procter & Gamble, and the best place for a creative person or copywriter specifically, I think, to start would be to spend three or four years working in a direct marketing agency where you learn what works. And where also, by the way, you learn one of the things you learn which I think Hopkins is probably right about as well, I think all good creative people understand this instinctively, is that really small things make a huge difference.

The Behavioral Economics of “Small Fees”

Rory Sutherland: I was just reading a piece of behavioral economics by the great George Loewenstein at Carnegie Mellon. It’s a famous paper from quite a few years ago, and he’s identified the population basically divides into unconflicted spenders who spend basically pretty sensibly. Then there’s a group of people which is probably 30% of the population who are skinflints. They find the pain of parting with money at the moment of purchase so agonizing that they don’t even buy things that they should buy that would make them happier in the long term. And then there’s a 20% of people who are spendthrifts. Now, here’s one of the most extraordinary findings, which amazed even me, which is they did an experiment where people had basically won or were given as a reward for some piece of work a box set of their choice. It was kind of like Family Guy, The Simpsons, the first season of whatever it was, some DVD program like Breaking Bad or something of that kind. I can’t remember the details; might have been The Sopranos. And then they were told, “We’ll send this to you free within a month, but we can also rush it to you overnight for a fee of $5.95.” Now, that basically put off the majority of the skinflints; they went, “No way am I paying $5.95 to get it four weeks earlier.” However, if you phrased it as, “We can rush it to you overnight for a small fee of $5.95,” then a large number of the skinflints were actually happy to pay. Brilliant, brilliant experiment. To an economist, they would be pained by that because $5.95 to them is $5.95, but if you refer to it as a small fee, then mean people go, “Okay, it was only $5.95.” If you say a fee of $5.95, “No, I’m not paying that.” Now, that’s even by my enthusiastic adoption of behavioral economics, that struck me as pretty goddamn weird. But nonetheless, it may be that a certain group of people find paying for things really painful, and you have to almost mentally prepare them for the act of parting with $5.95 by saying, “It’s almost, I think the implication is, this isn’t the market price, it’s just obviously it’s just a mere bagatelle.” But I find that so interesting.

Why Marketing is Fat-Tailed

Rory Sutherland: By the way, I think that we’ve got marketing wrong because I think marketing is fat-tailed. We’re judging particularly performance marketing as if it’s thin-tailed, as if one unit of expenditure delivers a unit of value. Every quantum of cost has to be matched to a quantum of incremental value; otherwise, you’re not allowed to do it. That’s just marketing now defers to finance. And my argument is, I don’t think it’s like that at all. I think the reason you do marketing is because one time in 10, 15, 20—if you’re getting it right—every now and then, you just stumble on something which is a complete game-changer. And I would argue that the way to judge—not all of it, but the way to judge a portion of your marketing expenditure should be very close to, well, for example, a Silicon Valley investment fund, a film studio, a pharmaceutical research laboratory, a publisher, an A&R man in music.

Andrew Mitrak: The big hits pay off for the duds, right?

Rory Sutherland: The big hits render everything else irrelevant. But whereas if you’re in music A&R and you’ve signed The Rolling Stones, that’s basically your career taken care of. In marketing, if you do the equivalent thing and you sign the Rolling Stones, well, you just get to work for another six months, and then the credit for all subsequent revenue emerging from that breakthrough goes to somebody else. It’s just swallowed into the balance sheet under the line “revenue.” And so, as a marketer, you’re held responsible for every quantum of cost, but you can only claim a small part of the upside, which is exactly what Steve Jobs noticed when he first joined Pixar.

Why Steve Jobs Hated Making Commercials

He went into making commercials, because Pixar was too expensive to make a feature film using that technology. So he was making commercials. And very rapidly Steve Jobs went, “This is s**t. I don’t want to do this anymore because I can only lay claim to a small, finite and predefined portion of any upside I create. I create a commercial that sells $110 million of product, I get paid $300,000. That’s not the kind of business I want to be in.” And every marketer finds themselves effectively in the same position, and every agency also, by the way, finds themselves in the same position.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. It’s funny, you mention these Pixar commercials. They did these Chips Ahoy! commercials, you know, those terrible chocolate chip cookies and all that stuff. And I still think of, like, when I think of Chips Ahoy!, I think of those commercials. And those are from when I was a little kid. And it’s like, that’s still playing dividends today for that company, even though they paid Pixar once.

Rory Sutherland: If Jobs realized, “If I make a film, you know, if you make Toy Story, I’m still earning money from that bad boy ten years later—you know, they’re the DVD sales or the streaming rights and the da-da-da.” Whereas if I make a commercial for Chips Ahoy!, I get paid for making the commercial and the upside—well, actually, it doesn’t even go to the marketing function. It probably goes to the marketing department in the first instance for the first six months of uplift, but the fact that you’re still remembering that ten years later, no one’s getting any credit for that.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, I think it’s like 25 years later, 20, 25, something like that. Those were before Toy Story, which is like, what, 30 years old now?

Rory Sutherland: Crikey, you’re right. That is seriously old. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s really old.

Why Humanities and History Matter More in a World of AI

Andrew Mitrak: So, I want to ask you also about history, because a lot of your examples in your book, in your talks, they draw from history. Of course, there’s like the Frederick the Great potato example, and you have, you know, going through your book, there’s like pictures of a design of a fencing sword from hundreds of years ago. There’s the Parthenon, and you have a chapter called “There’s Nothing New Under the Sun.” I’m wondering, do you read history a lot to get marketing ideas, or is history underrated? What’s your interest?

Rory Sutherland: I think that you’ll find that people with a humanities degree become weirdly disproportionately valuable in an AI world.

Andrew Mitrak: Totally. I’d like to think so.

Rory Sutherland: And you know, I think that we’ve overvalued technocratic skills in relation to creative skills very, very badly in all the Western—and probably everywhere else—education systems. And actually, people who do hardcore degrees like engineering would probably come to agree with that. Einstein actually made exactly that point, which is that it’s the imagination that ultimately is the magical quality that makes us human. Therefore, if we can to some extent automate all the other stuff, what we’re left with is really a massive need for people who can ask better questions rather than get reliable answers, because the second part has already been done for us. You know, that’s taken care of. It’s a bit like, is there any need in an—just as you could ask the question: is there really any need for people learning log tables in an age of electronic calculators? Is there any need for people—I still, I did quite advanced mathematics, I still have no clue what a cosine is. I can’t remember. Okay? I’ve never had to work out the surface area of a cone. But on the other hand, statistical knowledge, I think, becomes more and more valuable because that’s more nuance-ridden. You know, actually, if you’re a statistician with a bad nose for statistics, you can make catastrophically bad errors while thinking you’re being perfectly logical. And so, as technology, in a sense, takes care of one thing, my ability at addition becomes less and less important—I probably need to understand the principles—but whereas my ability in other fields then becomes more and more valuable. So, AI will also sort of, if you like, further move the goalposts a little bit in terms of what we need.

Rory Sutherland: And also just general, by the way, the great thing about advertising—which I’ll defend working in advertising and marketing on this grounds alone—which is, if you’re an actuary, you don’t really become a better actuary by sitting outside a cafe and watching people, or going to see a French art-house film, or watching people in the pub, or having a chat with some friends. But as a marketer, anything counts. I mean, you seek inspiration from wherever you can find it. David Ogilvy himself said, a good copywriter is characterized by being an extensive browser in all kinds of fields. And it’s kind of pattern recognition at some level. So, the more parallel field—nothing excites me more than to meet a copywriter who’s into jet engines or trains, or indeed a brilliant copywriter I met in Belgium whose main interest is branding in the medieval era. So he’s absolutely fascinated by medieval history, creative director in Brussels. And he draws extraordinary inspiration from things like, you know, why Charlemagne the Great was the first king ever to be crowned by the Pope. Which was effectively a kind of branding exercise which meant that you no longer had to completely defend your position in combat because you were now effectively divinely sanctioned. And therefore, anybody who sought to actually undermine you was actually taking on God rather than—now, he was chatting to me about this. Now, this is the kind of thing which automatically I find wonderfully reassuring. To be honest, there’s probably a high degree of ADHD which you’ll find in a creative department. Because, funnily enough, being distracted—I mean, of course we mustn’t mischaracterize ADHD—it also makes possible extraordinary feats of concentration. But the capacity to be easily distracted is to some extent in that job, it’s a feature, not a bug. It’s more virtue than vice, I would argue.

Modernizing Ogilvy’s ‘Rolls-Royce’ Ad for the EV Era

Rory Sutherland: And people find creative people frustrating for all kinds of reasons. You know, they tend to miss deadlines or they start—more characteristically, they start work late because they’re waiting to get lucky or they’re waiting for inspiration. Or they change the subject, or they obsess about something which seems completely irrelevant. E.g., David Ogilvy is writing an ad, the Rolls-Royce engineers hated that ad because they’d spent a whole load of time improving the drivetrain and the suspension, and David was writing about the clock.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, the electric clock that’s quiet.

Rory Sutherland: I was saying a similar thing, which is my 21st-century equivalent of the Rolls-Royce “60 miles an hour, the loudest thing in the new Rolls-Royce is the ticking of the electric clock.” I was talking to a bunch of people involved in climate change awareness and particularly the transition to electric cars. I said, you can talk about efficiency till the cows come home. But the best ad for—I don’t know, have you gone electric in your car?

Andrew Mitrak: I’m still running on dinosaur juice.

Rory Sutherland: You’re on dinosaur juice. It drives, by the way, petrol-heads absolutely insane when you call it dinosaur juice. But I said the best ad I got for my electric car happened when it snowed, and I drove about a hundred miles, and when I arrived, there was still snow on the hood of the car. Now, in any petrol car—now, that’s an ad for the inefficiency of an electric car in a way that humans appreciate because there’s zero waste heat. I was astonished myself, because every time you drive anywhere, you’ve got snow on the hood of the car, and you drive for 10, 15, 20 miles, the heat from the engine melts it, it slides off, it melts, it liquefies, whatever. And then I found myself in a car park and you look at the car park and all the electric cars still have snow on the hood and all the petrol cars, it’s all melted. And that’s a wonderful ad for the extraordinary energy efficiency of the electric motor. But it’s an ad translated into human perception rather than scientific notation.

Capital M Marketing vs. small m marketing: How Rory became accidentally famous

Andrew Mitrak: Something that really resonates with me is this interdisciplinary thinking you bring. You know, you call it alchemy in the book, and really there’s psychology, there’s economics, there’s design, salesmanship, showmanship, culture, history, of course. And something about my podcast, “A History of Marketing,” people say, “Oh, that sounds really niche.” It’s like, well, marketing is kind of everything. It’s kind of all these things, and everything that happened before this moment is history. I’m wondering if you kind of also align with that?

Rory Sutherland: This is the big mistake that marketing made, is it became a department. And it defined itself by what it did. And so people think of marketing as crayons, or it’s the coloring-in department, as it’s often called. Or it performs services like producing marcoms or brochures or hosting exhibitions or doing PR. That’s Capital M marketing, which is a tightly defined discipline and function within an organization. Then there’s small m marketing, which is the application of psychology to wider problems. Which literally, the market for small m marketing is a hundred times larger than the market for big m marketing, and yet we’ve sold ourselves both as marketers and as agencies. And this is—this is why I became accidentally famous. I keep telling people this. I said the reason I became—and I mean accidentally famous, it wasn’t my own strategic genius or insight that led to this. It was simply that I ended up giving a load of talks to people who didn’t work in marketing, which marketers don’t normally do. When marketers talk to people who don’t work in marketing, they immediately adopt the language of finance, which is defensive. It’s the worst possible, I think, way in which to actually communicate the value of marketing, which is to say, “Honestly, some of this stuff actually works. Look, we spend X and we got Y.” And it’s a completely subordinated view of selling your discipline.

Rory Sutherland: Now, what happened is I ended up talking to a load of people, like, I’d talk at a bloody procurement conference or a compliance conference, or I’d go on a podcast which is all about engineering. And pretty quickly I’d go, “Well, there’s no point about talking about ads incessantly.” I’d show a couple of ads because they’re funny and illuminating and illustrate a point. But you know, if I just become a “how to make an ad” person, these people are never—99% of these people are never going to have to make an ad in their life and I become irrelevant; they won’t ask me back. So I just change—I just changed the script without really out of necessity, really, not out of inspiration, which was: let’s not talk about what we do, let’s talk about how we think. And suddenly—and that’s what the book is about—I suddenly realized that’s what Alchemy is about. This isn’t about what marketers do, it’s about how good marketers think.

And suddenly I discovered—I expected Alchemy to sell to, you know, people in, you know, creative businesses and marketing people and, you know, a few curious other people who wanted to get a job in advertising or whatever it might be. But instead, I got bombarded by, like, engineers contacting me, hedge funds, venture capital firms. “What the f**k’s going on here? Right, okay, I wasn’t—I wasn’t expecting this.” You know, I mean, I went on a radio show with Chris Evans, and the book was like, for the next three days, it was like in the top 30 books on Amazon. Not 30 advertising books, not 30 marketing books, top 30 effing books. “This is f**king weird, right?” My argument was it was an accidental discovery that the market for how and the, by the way, the strategic and corporate importance of how we think, which is to look at something as if you’re behind the pupils of a customer, with the mental apparatus of a customer rather than looking at something through the lens of a manager or a, you know, a business operator. Which therefore makes possible, because of the vagaries of human perception, this makes possible a solution to problems which seems intractable in the physical world can be solved psychologically by simply understanding the psychology of the consumer or the, you know, the customer, whoever it may be. Or indeed your own employees, by the way, or your colleagues.

Rory Sutherland: And so, what I—again, I’ll be absolute clear about this, it was a lucky accident, you know, it was born of necessity. And then I suddenly realized we’ve been total idiots because we’ve spent the whole 30 years defending what we are—our existence on the basis of what we do and what we’ve done. Whereas the real story here is how we think. And you know, I’ll give you an example. I think that government is increasingly hated by the population. Not because government is bad on policy or it’s too left-wing or it’s too right-wing or any of those economic or legal things. I think government doesn’t know how to relate to people. I think it’s become so tied up with sort of economics and law that it simply doesn’t know—I’ll give you an example. In London, in London, they introduced 20 mile-an-hour speed limits. Now, generally popular with cyclists, popular with pedestrians, popular with the residents of the road, very, very unpopular with motorists. Now, I support that decision on the basis of life-saving alone, and by the way, there are arguments which say that if you got rid of traffic lights and replaced them with small roundabouts—I know you don’t do roundabouts over there, although Florida has a few, actually—you could actually speed journeys. You could actually reduce journey time because although people are actually traveling more slowly, they’re able to interact with other vehicle drivers without the dirigiste intervention of a set of traffic lights. In other words, you could have much more free-flowing traffic over long distances.

Rory Sutherland: But I said, look, if you said two things, right. One, the fine and the punishment for going 25 in a 20 limit should be less than the punishment you get for going 85 in a 70 limit. That’s the first point. In other words, it’s ridiculous to find—and I’ve just been fined actually for going 25 in a 20 limit on a—on what was actually a dual carriageway. Now, if you said to me, “Okay, because it’s only 25 and because it’s in a 20 limit, you pay two penalty points rather than three and the fine’s 50 quid rather than 90,” what the consumer would go, “Okay, you’re meeting me halfway. You’re being reasonable.” Okay? The second thing I would have said is: we’re going to introduce these 20 limits but we’re going to get rid of speed bumps. Because, okay, look, Mr. Resident, you’ve already got your 20 limit, the cars are driving past safely, you know, the 20 limit’s being enforced. Don’t make people drive over f**king obstacles as well, okay? Now, if you’d done this quid pro quo, consumers aren’t so bothered by the size of the quid and the size of the quo as long as there is a quid—sorry, a quid for the quo. If you just impose a rule with no concession made anywhere else, I think for entirely understandable evolutionary psychology reasons, people view that as being demeaning. Nobody in a free market business would ever conceive of approaching someone with a deal in which the counterpart was only a loser. They might try a deal where you get not very much in return for quite a lot. They might try that on. But no one would try on a deal where you go, “You give me this and I give you f**k-all.” Right? I mean, even to the point where if you make a donation to charity, they give you a little sticker. Right? You get something. It signals. Yeah, I get a bit of signaling value and you know, I don’t get bothered by other charity people because I’m wearing the sticker.

Rory Sutherland: And yet government is basically institutionally autistic. In other words, it just imposes things that it decides are optimal without considering the emotional effect on the person who’s disadvantaged by the legislation or by the policy. It’s completely unlike every other form of transaction that exists between humans on the planet. It’s like Domino’s Pizza going, you know, “Pay us some money and we won’t s**t in your pizza.” It’s kind of like, what the ===? Right? That’s not—that’s not a deal, that’s basically an imposition, okay, yeah. Domino’s, “Oh, yeah, yeah, okay, I’ll have the express delivery. Oh, pay us four pounds and we won’t s**t on it.” Right? That’s basically how government behaves. And then they go, “Nobody likes us.” But—and by the way, I don’t totally blame politicians. I think politicians who are elected have quite a good eye for and actually are quite instinctive marketers in many ways, and some of them are certainly. I think it’s probably the bureaucracy with which they’re dealing which is institutionally autistic. That would be quite fun to do as the experiment. That would be really good fun to do as an experiment. “Yeah, pay us five pounds and we won’t s**t in your pizza.”

The Future of Tipping and Service Incentives

Andrew Mitrak: I sometimes feel that way when I’m offered a tip on a page, because everything offers a tip now, and I kind of think, oh gosh, if I don’t put the tip in, what’s going to happen, right?

Rory Sutherland: By the way, I’m unusual for a Brit in that in many settings I’m pro-tipping, because I think it does provide an incentive to provide better levels of service and so on. It also gives you a discretionary amount with which you can provide financial feedback and so on. Obviously, for reasons of total self-interest, I like to tip in places where I’m a regular, because I don’t want to be known as “Stingy Rory.” So, there are rational reasons. But in the US, I kind of go—like coffee shops—this is getting a bit weird. I am not the guy in the Reservoir Dogs.

Andrew Mitrak: The thing is, now with terminals, you’re presented with the tip option before the service has been rendered. I think it works well as an incentive after, like, “Hey, you’ve done a good job and I’m going to leave a tip after.” Even the Reservoir Dogs scenario is more about that. But now with these Square terminals or whatever, it’s before I’ve even gotten my sandwich from you, I’ve got to tip you 20 percent.

Rory Sutherland: And you haven’t even made the—so a large part of restaurant tipping, the reason you didn’t tip in McDonald’s is you hadn’t got your meal yet, so it was too early to decide whether the actual experience was tip-worthy.

And now as you said, you’re at the terminal and it’s kind of like.

Andrew Mitrak: Are they going to s**t on it? Is that the thing that’s going to happen if I don’t give the tip?

Rory Sutherland: I absolutely agree with that. I think there might be a really interesting technology around tipping which I’ve actually discussed with someone once. I would like a world where you could tip call center staff, because the best five to 10 percent of them are worth their weight in gold. And I think they deserve a lot more money and I don’t think they’re paid nearly enough. So, there are areas where I’d like a mechanism.

This is my idea, you actually have a load of cards with a QR code on them, and you basically hand them the card, which is for an indeterminate amount. Then when you finally check out of the hotel, you can basically apportion a reasonable amount of tipping to everybody in proportion to the value they’ve delivered in the course of your stay, rather than tipping the doorman when you arrive on the fear that they’ll treat you like s**t if you don’t. It also encourages perverse behaviors, like that business of insisting on taking your luggage up to your room. For crying out loud, I can manage a wheelie suitcase and an elevator. I don’t want you to take my laptop. Leave me alone.

Why Behavioral Science Struggles in Corporate Marketing

Andrew Mitrak: I wanted to come back to something that you brought up that was sort of a lightbulb for me, which is “Capital M” marketing, which is more like marketing organizations and how marketing presents itself, and then “lower case m” marketing, which is a little more marketing in practice and marketing thinking. I’m wondering if this is partly why I don’t see behavioral science and nudge really showing up within a marketing org. I feel like it’s somewhat at the margins. It might be a little experiment, it might be a pilot project, it might be something you hire a consultant for, but I don’t really see it embedded into individual roles or into org charts at a company. Do you see that as sort of why it’s a little at the margins of marketing?

Rory Sutherland: Well, I somehow think that I don’t think it’s salvageable with conventional corporate structure. I think the way to solve it in part—but I don’t know if this works or whether it would be any good—is I think businesses should have a customer board where you actually talk about value creation rather than cost control. Because at the moment, what is ostensibly a board meeting is really a kind of exercise in cost reduction. It’s not a proper strategic discussion because it doesn’t include either the customer or the future. You can’t really develop a strategy without considering those two highly nebulous variables.

Rory Sutherland: Of course, people who are certainty-addicted, typically like finance, who are basically variance-averse, they want to live in a low-variance deterministic world. Those people hate discussing those things because of course they are nebulous. It’s rather like I always think that cost reduction is immediate and quantifiable, which is why McKinsey & Company is an enormous business. Whereas value creation is non-immediate, it’s deferred, and it’s to some extent unpredictable. Consequently, people who are variance-averse overweight cost-cutting activity and are never held responsible for the opportunity costs that are incurred. There’s a trade-off between being efficient and being effective. There’s a trade-off between being short-term stingy and long-term rich. There are all these kind of trade-offs going on, but if you turn the thing purely to a kind of financial exercise, I think you’re killing a business in the medium to long term.

The Strategic Advantage of Family-Owned Businesses

Rory Sutherland: When I was tootling around Texas, every time I encountered a really impressive business, I’d make inquiries as to its ownership structure. Nine times out of ten, it was either founder-led or family-owned. I suddenly realized the family-owned businesses have this fantastic advantage over publicly held companies. Because one, they’re free to decide their own time frame. Two, they’re free to decide their own metrics of success. I don’t think you can be a brand unless you can design some of your success metrics that are actually chosen by you, not imposed on you by some investment analyst aged 27.

Rory Sutherland: In order to be a brand, you have to distinguish yourself or differentiate yourself in some way, or at least make yourself distinctive. You’ll only do that by following metrics which are unique to you. I’d apply that to your individual life. I think you’re only a free individual—I don’t know if you’re one of these people whose parents wanted you to become a lawyer or a doctor—you’re only really a free individual if you say, “No, I don’t regard being a doctor as a badge of success. I want to go into contemporary dance.” That’s the definition of a free individual, which is you don’t allow all your targets and metrics to be imposed on you; you devise some of them yourself.

Rory Sutherland: So, that’s a really important distinction. I think family-owned companies can play different time scales; they can play to a one-year, two-year, three-year time scale. They’re not fixated on the next quarter. They can define their own metrics of success and their timeline of success. Also, they’re focused on the customer and to some extent their own staff, more than the narrow preoccupations of not of share owners, by the way, but of shareholders, the institutions that hold the stock. They aren’t there to distract them all the time.

Why Observing Reality Beats Investment Statistics

Rory Sutherland: The final point, which Dan Davies, a wonderful writer who you ought to have on the podcast, makes is that the big advantage of being customer-focused over shareholder-focused is that your customers actually live in the real world. So, you are spending your time actually observing what is happening in reality rather than devising some artificial statistics to keep the investor community happy for the next three months. You are vastly better off devising your inspiration from reality than you are effectively pandering to a bunch of economic theories which were probably considered slightly dated at Harvard Business School in 1971, but which nonetheless pervade the general preoccupations of investment analysts.

Rory Sutherland: I went to Buc-ee’s and I went to H-E-B and I went to all these Texas companies. You go, “Wow, these companies are actually brilliant. What’s going on?” Fortnum & Mason in the UK is just a luxury store, but there’s something about it when you go there. It’s almost imperceptible—it’s not imperceptible, but it’s kind of something you feel as much as you can quantify—which feels that no, these people are actually interested in being themselves and helping me.

Rory Sutherland: The contrast is the economist and writer John Kay, Professor John Kay no less, went out for lunch with a friend of his at a lunch venue which they’d frequented regularly for some years. One day they turn up and he goes, “Something here doesn’t quite feel right. It feels like it’s been bought by private equity.” Sure enough, one of them gets their phone out and sure enough, four months earlier, private equity. Here we go. They’re going to build it up, looking for a way to offload it in a certain time frame, and the customer can go hang.

Why Big Ideas Require More Marketing Effort

Andrew Mitrak: I love your ideas. I love your book and I love your way of thinking. I’ve had a hard time implementing it at scale or getting it through at a large organization. Do you have any advice for marketers like me who work at large organizations?

Rory Sutherland: My contention is that what marketers understand that often tech people don’t is they think the bigger the idea, the faster it’s going to take on and the less marketing it needs. I used to think that. Then I suddenly, because I’m 60, I’ve lived through the mobile phone, I’ve lived through the air fryer, I’ve lived through all these kind of patterns of tech, the microwave oven, I’ve lived through the DVD player. What you realize very quickly is: one, actually the bigger the idea, the slower it is to take off and the more marketing it needs. That’s because the bigger an idea is, the more behavioral change it requires for its adoption. Humans find behavioral change difficult for all kinds of evolutionary reasons. We like doing what we’ve done before and we like doing what everybody else does.

Rory Sutherland: So, there are certain things which marketers are right about, which I think the rest of the business world is too influenced by mainstream economics, which is almost, “If you build it, they will come” stuff. Nah. Everybody quotes this phrase, “If we build it, they will come,” approvingly. But the film, Field of Dreams, was about a mad person who builds a baseball stadium in a cornfield to attract ghosts. It’s not really the basis for business wisdom, is it? I thought his business plan was terrible. You probably had a catchment area of 27 people and you’re the middle of bloody nowhere. Not where you build a baseball stadium, generally.

Andrew Mitrak: It’s an odd one where I think the quote is probably bigger than the movie at this point.

Rory Sutherland: Exactly, yes. Yeah.

Recommended Reading: Humanocracy and the Unaccountability Machine

Andrew Mitrak: Rory Sutherland, it’s so great to speak with you. I really enjoyed it. I love all of your work, all your books, all your podcast appearances, and talks. Is there anything that I could point listeners to? I mean, there are so many places. Where do you point people to?

Rory Sutherland: Oh gosh. There are a few books recently. Gary Hamel’s book Humanocracy, I’m going to plug. I like plugging really interesting books. I’m probably about three years late with that book, by the way; it’s quite old. Dan Davies and his book The Unaccountability Machine. Dan makes a really interesting point, which is not a bad point at which to end, which is: he said a business is an artificial intelligence. Once you create a structure for decision-making, you have created an artificial intelligence, which is not the same as natural intelligence within an individual human brain. It’s fundamentally artificial because you’ve done all these things where you’ve defined things, you’ve categorized things, you’ve tagged things, and so forth. Consequently, collective decision-making is artificial.

Rory Sutherland: And yet almost no thought is given to how those information flows are designed. In particular, Dan’s book is called The Unaccountability Machine because the primary motivation of people within an institution is actually career insurance and risk mitigation—reputational risk mitigation—not the success of the organization. To prevent that, you need to design decision-making very carefully. You need to have reasonable symmetry of upside and downside reward and punishment. We’ve often created organizations where if you make a small mistake, you get fired; if you come up with a billion-dollar idea, you get a pat on the back and possibly a promotion in two years’ time. I don’t think the way in which we’ve calibrated organizational decision-making is that good.

Rory Sutherland: My weird conclusion from years of behavioral science, which is supposedly about human irrationality—I mean, Amos Tversky met someone in, I think at Stanford, as it would be. And this person said, “I study artificial intelligence,” and Amos said, “That’s funny, because Daniel and I study natural stupidity.” Now, interestingly, my kind of hunch—which is a feel—having spent years looking at this stuff, is individual human beings, when they don’t have to justify their behavior, make surprisingly intelligent decisions. Which are surprisingly intelligent once you realize what they’re ultimately trying to do. What their ultimate, maybe unspoken, maybe unthought objective is in buying a pair of Balenciaga sunglasses; you actually realize that what they’re doing makes sense within the constraints of ecological rationality, even if it’s not economic rationality.

Rory Sutherland: The thing I also think is that collective decision-making is incredibly vulnerable to collective insanity. We’ve allowed, for example—I don’t know how this has happened—but we’ve allowed HR and finance to have the right of veto over almost any form of business activity. I don’t know how this has happened; it seems to be universal in all organizations. We’ve probably allowed, for example, within governmental decision-making, we’ve created these entities in terms of environmental sustainability or diversity or whatever it may be, which are actually massive opportunity costs. In other words, they prevent lots of things happening or even being tried or even being experimented on. We’ve allowed this to happen and no one really is speaking up.

Rory Sutherland: There’s another brilliant guy called Philip K. Howard, who’s written a book about “can-do.” Fundamentally, we need to get back to the idea of business as a discovery mechanism, not business as an efficiency mechanism. The efficiency tail has been allowed to wag the discovery dog. That’s a terrible analogy and an awful place on which to end, but ultimately the solution to these things has to lie in how we design institutional decision-making better.

Rory Sutherland: My hunch is that AI—okay, this is a kind of gag, but it’s nonetheless telling—what happens with all these people in finance and HR and everything else and IT: they never downsize themselves. There is no way of measuring how efficient they are or what contribution they make to the organization, and yet they are deeply involved in assessing the efficiency of people doing the real work. Often front-line service workers who aren’t even that well paid. Now, my hunch is: it’s those jobs that should be replaced by automation, not the front-line service jobs, because they’re specific to the brand and the business itself. Those are generic jobs which are a kind of internal corporate oncology all of themselves.

Rory Sutherland: The old joke used to be that the factory of the future will consist of a man and a dog. The man’s there to feed the dog, and the dog’s there to stop the man touching the machines. That was the old joke about automation. Now, my contention is: the factory of the future will actually be a man and a dog, then there’ll be four procurement people who are continually reducing the size of the food bowl. There’ll be three compliance people who are legislating about the safe use of the lead to which the dog is attached, and there’ll be five people in HR to make sure the man doesn’t misgender the dog. I don’t know how we’ve allowed this to happen in organizations, but it’s what I call Soviet-style capitalism. It’s a kind of command-and-control mechanism where almost the internal political—what you might call ideological purity—of the activity is more important than the value of the activity. How we allowed this to happen, I don’t know, and what caused it, I don’t know, but until we do something about it...

Why Video Conferencing Remains Underappreciated

Andrew Mitrak: Is history just a big sequence of over-corrections? That’s what I wonder. Are we just continuously doomed to be swinging too far in one direction versus the other?

Rory Sutherland: Is this even correctable? I don’t know. By the way, a separate talk I’d love to give one day is I don’t understand why we’re talking so much about AI relative to the importance of, well, Google Meet. Because video conferencing is an enormously important technology because it makes physical co-location unnecessary to a discussion. It massively reduces the costs of interaction. It means, for example, that your staff could move not to a low-tax jurisdiction but a low-rent jurisdiction, which would be far better off for them. Actually being able to move to affordable housing would make a bigger difference than a 10% cut in the rate of income tax in some cases.

Rory Sutherland: Now, what everybody’s doing is this stupid thing where they compare like with like. Just to take an analogy with electric cars: the reason I support electric cars is not because electric cars are better than petrol cars in 2025, although they are. Petrol—I think they are better, but we can debate all that. I’m totally happy to have people go, “I go on a skiing holiday once a year and there’s nowhere I’d get 600 miles.” Okay, I buy all that. But the real reason to support electric cars is that in 20 years’ time, electric car technology could spawn a hundred meaningful innovations, and internal combustion engine technology won’t do that because it’s run out of road.

Rory Sutherland: Now, what we’re doing with video conferencing versus physical meetings—which, by the way, is another form of transportation if you think about it laterally—is we’re saying: is a video meeting better than a conventional meeting? Maybe it isn’t quite as good. I don’t generally want to smell our clients; I’m perfectly happy just to talk to them face-to-face. But no, there are a whole load of incidental conversations and serendipity in the workplace; I buy all that stuff. But the point is that video conferencing in five, 10, 15 years’ time, if you reorganize your organization around it, has the potential to be transformative, whereas insisting on physical location does not have the potential to be transformative because we’ve been doing it for a hundred years and we’re not going to get any better at it.

Rory Sutherland: So it’s like evolutionary potential, effectively. That’s the way to look at those two things, not side-by-side comparison on the now. It’s what offers you the biggest optionality and opportunity to innovate. Not what is better right now. In the case of the internal combustion engine, not that much opportunity. Electric vehicles: you’ve got electric scooters, cargo bikes, you have micro-mobility, you’ll have driverless cars, you’ll have all this stuff, none of which could happen with a gasoline engine. So we should be optimizing for optionality, not optimality. Don’t look at short-term optimality; look at long-term optionality. The scope of what you might call the adjacent possible is much, much bigger for video conferencing than it is for everybody in the office in a bloody expensive bit of real estate.

The Failure of the Open-Plan Office

Andrew Mitrak: And also, I want to come full circle back to Ogilvy as well. He did all of his writing at home, right? He’s a work-from-home guy right from the beginning.

Rory Sutherland: Right from the beginning. There are certain things you cannot do in an open-plan office. The open-plan office was imposed; it’s in some ways catastrophic to all sorts of things. It’s neither sociable nor is it solitude. I think to work well, you need sociability and solitude; you want a pub and a library. But actually, what we get is something which isn’t a pub and it isn’t a library; it’s just this sort of weird hinterland sort of thing. It’s a no-man’s land sort of DMZ useless zone in between the two possible spaces.

Rory Sutherland: So my argument is, look, I think what will happen is that if you’re McKinsey, say, 20 people internationally can form a consulting firm with the ability to draw on the 200 people in the world who know more about a subject than anybody else on the planet, and they’re going to out-compete you. Because they’ve got an access to talent that you haven’t got because you’re insisting everybody has to be based here and commute into a stupid building five days a week.

Rory Sutherland: So the point is you’ve got to look at what the technology makes possible ultimately, not what it does right now. And that’s why I find it weird that we’ve effectively invented teleportation and no one’s talking about it. We take it for granted. And that’s just because the technology was old. But all really important technology takes ages to reach its level of full adoption. The fact that the technology is old means we don’t talk about it because it doesn’t make us look very cool. But I mean, the fax machine was a hundred years old before it reached sort of 5% penetration.

In Praise of Paul Feldwick

Andrew Mitrak: Well, this has been great. I’m going to check out Humanocracy, The Unaccountability Machine, and your future talks on teleportation and AI and everything. So, Rory, I could talk with you for hours. This is a real pleasure to speak with you and meet you. Thanks so much for your time.

Rory Sutherland: It’s been an absolute joy. Paul Feldwick recommended you very, very highly. Good name-check. So let’s also mention, if he was too modest, all of his books, including Why Does the Peddler Sing?, are absolutely astonishing.

Andrew Mitrak: Yes.

Rory Sutherland: They’re a tour de force.

Andrew Mitrak: Excellent books, and anybody who enjoyed this conversation and enjoys your work would also certainly enjoy Paul Feldwick’s work because it’s excellent.

Rory Sutherland: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

When I launched A History of Marketing at the start of this year, I had a vision of exploring the origins of our craft. But I never imagined that 2025 would be bookended by “The Father of Modern Marketing.”

Dr. Philip Kotler kicked off the podcast as the first guest I interviewed. Now, it is my distinct honor to welcome him back to the show for our final interview of 2025.

The Year in Review: 69,523 Thanks
This year has exceeded every expectation I had. To date, this podcast has been downloaded and streamed 69,523 times across YouTube, Spotify, and various podcast platforms.

What started as my personal quest for knowledge has reached marketers on every continent (save for Antarctica).

I’ve received notes from a wide range of listeners: from global CMOs and Ivy League professors to high school students and interns; from entrepreneurs who have scaled million-dollar businesses to self-described Marxists and lifelong marketing critics.

To every one of you who has listened, shared, or sent a note: Thank you.

This show has been like the best possible version of a self-directed MBA. I’ve learned, I’ve made new friends, and I’ve become a better marketer because of it.

A Legend Who Listens

One of the most incredible moments of this year—and this interview—was learning that Dr. Kotler doesn’t just appear on the show; he listens to it.

Much of the success of this podcast is due to Kotler’s early support. Phil was my first-ever guest, and his recommendation opened doors to other legends like Jag Sheth and David Aaker.

As we wrap up 2025, I want to express my deepest gratitude to Philip for his mentorship and to you, the audience, for coming on this journey with me.

What We Cover in This Episode:

• The “Mount Rushmore” of Marketing: Kotler names the practitioners he admires most (and his answers might surprise you).

• Addressing the Critics: His refreshing take on those who try to build their names by opposing “Kotlerism.”

• The 4Ps vs. The 7Ps: Why Kotler sees “promotion” imoving toward a more expansive “Communication System.”

• Marketing’s Mathematical Turn: The tension between “people people” and “number people.”

• And much more

Enjoy the final conversation of the year with Dr. Philip Kotler. I’m looking forward to what we’ll discover together in 2026.

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

Thank you to Xiaoying Feng of Syracuse University, who reviews transcripts for accuracy, adds helpful links for readers, and gives me feedback to improve the show.

The Enduring Legacy of Philip Kotler

Andrew Mitrak: I’ve recorded more than 40 interviews with marketing executives, academics, and authors, and you are the single name that is most referenced across all of these interviews, across everybody. Do you ever think about why your work has endured? I’ve seen so many other marketing frameworks come and go, yet 60 years on, folks still reference Philip Kotler and your work. Why do you think that is?

Philip Kotler: Well, that’s a good question. I haven’t really thought about it until you asked it. By the way, I’m a watcher of all your programs, and I’ve learned a great deal about the history of marketing, and I tell others to also follow your work.

Your question is, why am I still around in the marketing world? I did some thinking about that. I think a lot has to do with my textbooks. I have three textbooks: Marketing Management, Principles of Marketing, and Marketing: An Introduction. All of them are already in their 16th, 17th, or 18th edition. So therefore, lots of people around the world—in fact, those are books used around the world—know me that way.

I’ve also published, besides three big textbooks, many other books on marketing like entrepreneurial marketing, transformative marketing, and so on. So I think that makes a difference. I have traveled a lot around the world, many countries, to upgrade them on marketing thinking. Particularly, it started with 12 annual visits to Sweden, 12 annual visits to Milan to say what’s happening in the field of marketing. And then I got a lot of honorary degrees. So for some reason, those all have added up to lasting in this field and enjoying it very much.

Andrew Mitrak: So it’s accumulated over time—all of these degrees, these textbooks, all this work. And today you are often referred to as the “Father of Modern Marketing,” but it wasn’t always that way. There was a time when you were early in your career; there was a time when you were midway through your career and you were just publishing your first books. Did it ever feel like there was a turning point when you started to feel like a major name in the field versus feeling like an earlier career professional trying to establish yourself?

Philip Kotler: What happened is every time I published a book, it had good reviews, and that meant getting more readers. I think that getting honorary degrees abroad—I received 22 honorary degrees abroad—in each case, I visited the university giving that award. All of that happened way before I was ever called the Father of Modern Marketing, and to this day I don’t know who first used that expression. It wasn’t that I created it and publicized it. So I’ve been very lucky to be recognized for my work in marketing.

Andrew Mitrak: It didn’t strike me that you would have bestowed that title upon yourself… that doesn’t seem like your style. [Laughs]

Kotler on Addressing Critics

Andrew Mitrak: One thing I’ve noticed since publishing this podcast and being, I think, more attuned to your work and how other marketers speak about you, is that there’s a common way that marketers will try to make a name for themselves or their ideas. They’ll define their ideas almost in opposition to Kotler, almost in opposition to you. They’ll say things kind of to the effect of, “Oh, Kotler’s principles, they don’t work in this segment,” or “They don’t work in this country, and you need my framework to succeed.”

It almost reminds me of a boxer who is kind of trash-talking the champion to get publicity for himself or something. It seems like, “Oh, because you’re the Father of Modern Marketing, they’re trying to elevate their ideas to your stature.” I’m wondering, not to dismiss, I am sure their ideas merit a lot, and the tactics they use, if you’ve noticed this over the course of your career and how you’ve responded to it.

Philip Kotler: Well, I relish those challenges. In fact, I’ve often said that I wish someone would replace my theory or system of marketing thinking with something better. One fellow from Ireland, he’s a professor in Ulster, Dr. Stephen Brown, really took to that position. He wrote an article saying that the specter of marketing is Kotler, or “Kotlerism.” It’s like Kotlerism is around too much. And he actually tried to explain my being visible because he thought I was following what Karl Marx did to become known. It’s a very interesting article.

He also wrote a whole book of a fictional marketing department, and it was really about Northwestern University and my role in the marketing universe. So I get those things, and I find that’s fine. Recently, someone just wrote a book called Marketing is Dead, which is to say that they have a better answer to what it should really be. I welcome those things. As a matter of fact, my complaint is that marketing doesn’t have enough debates. A good field is going to have some real opposition about concepts and theories and measurements and so on, and we need more of that.

Andrew Mitrak: That’s a great outlook. I’ll try to look up that article you were referencing and see if I can paste a link in the blog that accompanies this post. You mentioned how marketing doesn’t have enough debates. On this thread, what is your overall assessment of how marketing has evolved since you’ve been in the field? Let me ask in another way, if you’re, quote, “The Father of Modern Marketing,” how do you feel about how your child has grown up?

The Evolution from Mass Marketing to One-to-One

Philip Kotler: It turns out that I’ll start with the fact that the first big debate I really had with the rest of the profession is whether marketing is only a commercial subject of relevance to commercial firms, or it applies to all organizations and even groups and individuals. And I made the point that marketing is done by everyone in so many ways. A vote was actually taken on that issue by the American Marketing Association, and we won. That marketing is far more than just a commercial subject for firms.

Marketing started pretty much with mass marketing as an area because of the image of Coke and McDonald’s and stuff like that. But then along came segmentation, targeting, and positioning (STP), meaning that you got to focus your marketing on a group with a very specific need to be solved by your solution. And that ushered in several decades of work—interesting work—the whole idea of what is a segment and how do you target and position it.

Then the next stage, which we’re in now, is one-to-one marketing. We never thought that we need to have more than the geographical look of a demographic to not know the individuals in that demographic. But the fact is, now we can collect information on every individual, which allows us to customize and personalize our messaging so that it’s correct messaging at the right time and for the right purpose. So I’ve seen that happen.

Now, how many companies are really going to do one-to-one marketing? Because we are in that stage of celebrating it. Not that—well, it’s interesting. The smallest companies tend to be one-to-one marketers, if I mean by that the small pastry shop where the French consumer comes every week and says hello and is greeted. They are into one-to-one marketing. But what’s impossible normally for large companies is to know each individual and have a nice way to greet them. But now they’re trying to do that. So that’s an interesting effort to get close to individuals even though you’re a huge company. Something must be lost in that process, but that’s where we are now, and we’ll see how far we can go with that.

Andrew Mitrak: On that thread of something being lost in the process, do you feel like there were any inflection points over your career where marketing as a field took a wrong turn? Did the discipline ever get focused on what you feel is the wrong areas or the wrong priorities?

Vance Packard and The Hidden Persuaders

Philip Kotler: I thought that some people writing about marketing were possibly leading us in the wrong direction, particularly Vance Packard. Vance Packard is well known for writing a book called The Hidden Persuaders. And implied in the book that the great marketers have hidden techniques. The audience is watching a movie, and they don’t realize this, but there’s a message coming through about how good popcorn is. So they get up during the movie and automatically go and get some popcorn. We don’t have those techniques and don’t want to use them.

He went on to talk about that marketing creates a lot of waste. And by the way, he’s not wrong there. You remember the famous statement, “Half the marketing I do doesn’t work, I just don’t know which half.”

Andrew Mitrak: John Wanamaker.

Philip Kotler: Yeah, the department store guy. And he wrote a book, The Status Seekers, that we create classes by our marketing. Now, there’s some—it’s worth reading Packard, but if we took Hidden Persuaders seriously and found there are some messages where we could sell much easier by hypnotic effects on consumers, I wouldn’t want the field to go that way.

Andrew Mitrak: It’s funny how many times Vance Packard and Hidden Persuaders has come up in the interviews I’ve recorded. Inspiring both—one person I interviewed recently was Jean Kilbourne, and she’s sort of a longtime critique of the portrayal of women in advertising. But she was inspired initially by Vance Packard. And then another person, Robert Cialdini, who’s an earlier episode, he writes all about persuasion, and he mentioned that early in his career he was inspired by Vance Packard.

It’s interesting that you highlight that because I think it was written in the mid-1950s, and it really inspired a lot of people who didn’t necessarily replicate his work exactly or even went off and took it in different directions, but it was an initial spark and inspiration for them.

Philip Kotler: Yeah, sure.

The Rising Role of Math in Marketing

Andrew Mitrak: If you place yourself at the start of your career, do you think that there’s anything that would surprise you most about how marketing functions today?

Philip Kotler: Well, I think the thing that is a big surprise to everyone about marketing is that it is getting to be mathematical. What I mean by that is, in the business schools, students sort of divided themselves up between those who loved numbers and those who loved people. Those who loved numbers went into finance. Marketing was considered at least not formidable mathematically. Well, one big change is that it’s quite formidable mathematically now. We even have a journal, Marketing Science, and the articles are almost unreadable to the unmathematical person. Which means that they may have great findings, but they’re not going to reach the CMOs, the Chief Marketing Officers, for use.

I am often asked by students what field they should go into. I often say, well, if you really love being with people and want to help make lives better, go into marketing. It’s the best access you could have to be helpful in that regard. If you like numbers better, it’s still going to keep you busy in finance then.

Are the 4Ps still enough?

Andrew Mitrak: I want to ask you also about the 4Ps, which you popularized. I’ve also noticed as a marketer, marketing is overwhelmingly just focused on one of those Ps, which is Promotion. So it sounds like you would agree with that assessment. I’m wondering if marketing primarily being seen as promotion is sort of a missed opportunity for the field.

Philip Kotler: Oh, I think it would be bad for the field to be seen as only a promotional activity. It denies all the homework that was done by the marketer to understand the world he’s living—or he or she is living in—and how to make a good impression for the good in the world.

So here’s the thing. You’re talking really about what we call the marketing mix, which in shorthand is the word for the set of tools that marketers can work with to have influence. And known as the 4 Ps originally. Originally, my late friend Dick Clewett at Northwestern taught Jerry McCarthy that there are three Ps and a D: Product, Price, Place, and...

Andrew Mitrak: Distribution?

Philip Kotler: Distribution. Product, Price, Promotion, but he used a D for distribution. Jerry made it a P for Place. Smart move. Four Ps. Okay. Now, do you realize that originally Neil Borden at Harvard University many years earlier said there are 12 elements to the marketing mix? Okay. So down to four is good.

But I’m more comfortable today with seven. And I got to the seven in this way: When it comes to Product, you got to add a separate mix for Service. It doesn’t begin with a P, but if you have a good product and poor service, you don’t succeed. Then I also want Brand to be mentioned when Product is mentioned because you could have a good product, but it’s not a brand. It hasn’t attained a differentiation really—a value differentiation from other competitive offerings.

So and then I took Price and said, you know, you never set just a fixed price. It moves around with new situations. So I think we have to add Incentives. Incentives and disincentives, basically. Because most often brands are at discount too. So we got to use that notion.

And then I like to generalize away from the idea of the word Promotion. I really want to call it a Communication System. That marketers must manage a system where they can get to know and communicate effectively with people, which means knowing much more than what hot button to touch to get them to buy. It’s to really know what their lives are like and how to help improve their lives. So when your basic question was about promotion being the essence of marketing, I think it’s such a narrowing of what it’s all about.

The 4Ps: Is Marketing Too Focused on Promotion?

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. Just to clarify what I’m saying, I’m just thinking of my own experience as a marketer who works mostly in B2B companies. When another department thinks of the role of marketing, they think of marketing as just, “Oh, that’s the promotion person.”

There’s another product department, and of course marketing has to be aware of the product; there’s a field of product marketing.

But with distribution, there might be a supply chain team, there might be some procurement team, there might be other teams.

Pricing is often handled by some other strategy and operations group that’s outside of marketing. Hopefully marketing has a seat at the table, but if I think of the marketing organization I’ve worked in, there hasn’t been a pricing person who’s a marketer per se.

I’m wondering if marketing in practice sometimes is being squeezed in that promotion box. At least the perception of others outside of marketing sees marketing as being squeezed into promotion.

Philip Kotler: Well, you’re onto something. In the academic world, there’s been talk about how marketing should be in control of the 4 Ps, but they aren’t. Pricing is done by a financial guy.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah.

Philip Kotler: Product is developed by a group without the help of marketing, and then marketing only comes in when they now say it’s ready to be launched. At which point the marketers say, “We wish you had included us because you left out an important feature that would be attractive, and also your price is much too high to command that price for that product. So we won’t be successful with what you did by not involving us in the decision-making process.”

We’re going to change that. That marketers have to be present in the development of innovation. And innovation is so crucial. And to innovate without a marketing mind in the mix is wrong.

Are “incentives” underrated by marketers?

Andrew Mitrak: And one of the words you mentioned earlier that I want to come back to is incentives. And that’s something that within marketing, I feel like is a very underrated word. Or it’s under-appreciated. When I think of most of the problems that I encounter, well, maybe through life in general, but certainly in marketing or in business or in sales and relationships, it’s somewhat just misaligned incentives. And I find a lot of my job is just trying to identify where is there misalignment and how do I realign it to be better, and that fixes problems. So I think that’s an idea that I don’t hear talked about often enough, and I’m glad you brought that up.

Philip Kotler: Right. We need incentives is potentially a very strong pointing out of what else can be done in successful marketing.

The Gap Between Marketing Academia and Practice

Andrew Mitrak: I want to shift also to another thing that I’ve noticed. Over the number of interviews I’ve done, I’ve noticed a really wide gap between marketing academia and marketing practice. Several academics I’ve spoke to don’t seem that up to speed on how marketing is practiced today; they don’t actually seem all that interested in today. And a lot of them, frankly, I think they’re very critical of marketing—the practice or just the existence. And that’s fine, they can have their ideas, but it just seems like their title might be Marketing Professor, but it seems pretty removed—it seems very, very removed actually sometimes—from the marketing that I do in my profession.

And also many practitioners aren’t interested at all in academia. The folks that I’ve interviewed who are executives and entrepreneurs and other marketers, they very rarely mention, if at all, any marketing academic work that’s influenced them. And I’m wondering—you’re nodding your head—it seems like you also perceive this as a gap that exists. And so why do you think it persists, and do you think it’s a problem?

Philip Kotler: It is a problem. I encountered it at my university, and others have encountered it. The form it took is that our faculty was so—in the department of marketing—so incentivized to produce academic articles if they are to advance to—from assistant to associate to full professor—that they are needing to identify things where they can make an original contribution. And there is little time left to talk and mix with CMOs, Chief Marketing Officers, or other types of marketers who are in the real world.

And that explains why if you talk to a lot of CMOs, they won’t mention names that the academics just respect so much. That problem is still going to stay around. We got to maybe have meetings between some academics and some CMOs talking about all these—how to get together better.

Andrew Mitrak: Can I ask you a number of lightning round questions? Sort of shorter ones for you.

Philip Kotler: Okay.

Kotler’s “Mount Rushmore” of Marketing Executives

Andrew Mitrak: If you were to build a Mount Rushmore of marketing practitioners, what are some of the names that you feel like must be included in this?

Philip Kotler: Oh, okay. And we’re talking about the practicing marketers?

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, so entrepreneurs, executives, marketers themselves.

Philip Kotler: I think I would be more very careful answering the one about the best academic people because I don’t want to leave anyone out who is very good. But let’s stay with your question. Professional marketing, we know it when we see it, but there are some people who have done it so well. For example, Procter & Gamble has had many good leaders. One of them is just outstanding, his name was A.G. Lafley. And A.G. Lafley, you know, running a company that has so many brands and knowing all of them and knowing how to get the right response from employees is a big problem.

Now, the same thing happened at Unilever, which I consider a very great company. I remember when I was in India, Lever was known everywhere for their work in India. But in any case, it was handled by Paul Polman recently for 10 years. Paul did a remarkable job. People now know Unilever for their work with Dove and all women are beautiful.

The two things he did that made him exceptional is he said he doesn’t want to do quarterly reporting of marketing because that means he’s going to be either complimented or criticized if that quarter the results didn’t come through. He wants only annual reporting of marketing results. Very smart move because then he can be a long-range planner and get to do the right things.

And then he also said that of the seven groups that are stakeholders in marketing—with of course customers being the first group and employees the second group—he says the last group are the investors. In other words, yeah, think of all your stakeholders, but the one you can pay the least attention to is stakeholders because if you do the others well, the investors will get a good return too. So we love the storytelling about some people like A.G. Lafley and Paul Polman as leaders. And I can name a number of others as well.

Andrew Mitrak: I’m glad you mentioned those names because sometimes folks will go straight to Steve Jobs or maybe Walt Disney or David Ogilvy or some other name, but I’m really appreciative that you found names that you don’t see at the top of lists all the time. So that’s great.

Besides your own work, is there one book you believe every student of marketing should read?

Philip Kotler: I think that for inspiration, not only about marketing but about how to think well about the contributions of business to life itself, Peter Drucker is my favorite. And you could read in fact one of many of his books, but one is called The Essential Drucker. And it’s probably got marketing in it because—in fact, some scholar recently wrote how Drucker was the first marketer or major thinker in marketing.

Advice for Early Career Marketers

Andrew Mitrak: Is there a piece of advice that you most often give to people who are early in their careers in marketing or considering a career in marketing?

Philip Kotler: Yes, I first want to be sure that they love working with people as well as numbers. But I would say that to be successful, they should go toward studying a niche of some kind. You know, it’s just like in literary work, everyone is doing a dissertation on Shakespeare, but we’ve overdone Shakespeare. So find something that has rich possibilities.

Now, let me give you an illustration. I have great admiration for Hermann Simon, who is not only professorial but he also is engaged as a CEO. And he said that he noted—he was in Germany—and he noticed that there were a lot of companies that were not well known, but they were small, but they were specialized, and that they were making lots of money. And he says, “I think I’m going to study why should a small company make so much money? What’s the secret?” The secret is they’re making the best of something.

And he wrote a whole book about—and his reputation started on that basis—that we turned to him. He knew each of those dozen companies that he was talking about. And so you as a new person in the field of marketing, observe something that triggers your curiosity and get deeper into it because there is so much now—data is so available on so many things. I think you can be a head start person.

Andrew Mitrak: I’m going to ask you a follow-up on this one because a thing—I think that’s totally right focusing on a niche. If I was to modify it, ideally you can find a niche that can then expand. That you’re not going to be pigeonholed too much into a niche. Many companies, like Nvidia, which is a very big company today, started with the niche of graphics cards for video games, but then expanded to data centers and AI. Or Amazon started with books but then expanded to everything.

If I also kind of even think of my own interest in marketing history, one of the reasons I chose it is that marketing history sounds very niche, right? And not a lot of people cover it. But when you think about it, a lot of things can be considered marketing, and a lot of things can be considered history, and so it has the potential to expand in a lot of interesting directions. And that’s something that I’ve thought about as well. Would you agree or disagree with that idea?

Philip Kotler: Yeah, actually not only maybe study a niche, but study how a niche grew into a big firm. Because a lot of niches just die. So what was common to the success stories of niches that grew into bigger businesses? And there’s other ways to make a mark in marketing. Probably someone will one of these days list a set of problems that are still to be solved by marketers and get more people focused on those problems.

Is marketing still a good career?

Andrew Mitrak: Do you think that marketing today is still a good use of one’s career? If you were starting your career all over again today, would you still choose marketing as your place to work?

Philip Kotler: Yes, I find that there’s no such thing as a master of marketing because every marketer is going to continue to be challenged by changes that are occurring in this vast area. So I would choose the same career I had. I mean, I can think far out to entirely different careers. I could have been into literary works and commenting on Shakespeare and all that, or been into music, which I love. But I would say that one good field that is enriching and not tiring often is the marketing field.

I would say—now, you know, it’s interesting because when you take the field of law, I spoke to a lot of lawyers who are just tired of being in law, unhappy about having chosen—their father got them to become a lawyer. I’m not hitting lawyers because my wife’s a lawyer too, and she has her feelings about this. But the thing is, the field of marketing keeps changing and keeping you alive to new things all the time.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. I’m about, depending on how you count it, 10 to 12 years, maybe a little more, into my career in marketing. And something that I love about it is that I can learn about marketing if I keep my eyes open and really stay curious. I can learn marketing lessons almost everywhere or see it in practice in everything. And it’s something where—and also you can kind of talk to a lot of different fields because it’s a discipline of disciplines. My wife’s a therapist and is deeper into psychology, and I can obviously learn a lot from that. And speaking to anybody at the companies I work at—of course sales and product and engineering and finance and operations, everything—marketing has sort of something to learn and something to say and something to contribute. And I just find it very enriching.

Philip Kotler: Yeah, good. So you would choose the same field.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, marketing is great. I’m a fan, and I hope other people can find as much pleasure in the field.

Kotler’s Core Philosophy: “Customer is King”

Andrew Mitrak: When future generations of students read the name Philip Kotler in their marketing textbooks, is there a single most important idea that you hope they associate with your work?

Philip Kotler: I don’t know, but I would suggest they should think “Customer is King.” One possibility. Just to remember the focus of marketing: Customer is King.

And I would say a belief in the fact that marketing is about trying to improve the life experience of people by exposing them to new possibilities, new wonder goods and services, and all about increasing their well-being as people and their happiness as people. That much of my marketing is about trying to make a happier and a healthier life for people as a purpose of marketing.

Andrew Mitrak: I love the sentiment of those ideas. I think that in my own role when I market, I often think like I’m trying to advocate for the customer across the board. That different departments have different goals, and back to incentives, those goals may not be aligned with what’s in the best interest of the customer.

Sales might have some near-term target they’re trying to hit and want to do tactics that might come off as aggressive and off-putting to potential customers. And marketing, of course, you need to support sales, but you need to also support the customer, and you need to sort of advocate for what’s in the best interest of the customer as well. So I think that’s a really actionable piece of feedback.

Philip Kotler: You remember that some companies insist on putting an empty chair during their deliberations. And who’s in that chair? The customer. Just a reminder.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, we need to figure out a way to do that on virtual meetings too, of having an empty little tile on your Zoom or your Google Meet for the customer.

Andrew Mitrak: Do you have any advice for me as I continue my exploration into marketing history?

Philip Kotler: Well, I’ve watched all of your 40 films, and I learned a great number of things. We might ask you to identify some of the people who are CMOs, Chief Marketing Officers, who do have an academic background too. You might talk about how their practices have been very informed about the findings of people because maybe that message being watched by other CMOs might help bring them into more consciousness of what to look for in academic work that might be of interest to them.

The marketing that is done in different—quite different—countries would be very interesting. Especially if you find a country which says they do a very different type of marketing that is not mentioned. For example, the old idea is if I’m going to buy a rug –a carpet– in the United States, let’s say, there’s a price. If it’s in a department store, you don’t generally negotiate. But if it’s a carpet in Iran or somewhere else, it’s a game. You’re playing a game before you ever get to a price. So maybe a lecture or two on what is different about marketing in your country from what the textbooks say marketing is about. What is your marketing mix of tools?

Andrew Mitrak: That’s right. I once bought a rug in Istanbul, and the process that I went through buying that was so different. It was nothing you’d ever read in any marketing textbook. I went in, the person served me tea and snacks, and I sat and they brought them out. And I paid way too much for this rug, which is now stored away in my basement somewhere. But I felt so obliged just based on the experience. It was almost like I was paying for an hour of entertainment or paying for an hour of the tea or meal or like the way you’d overpay for tea at some fine dining hall or something. And so I don’t necessarily feel ripped off in a way, even though the price for the rug that I paid makes no economic sense at all, but the price I paid for the experience of it makes a lot more sense. And I think there’s something—and also there were still things like haggling and there was friction in the process—and it’s something that you just couldn’t—that doesn’t appear in any Western marketing sources. So I’d be really curious to dive into that.

Philip Kotler: There’s another thing that I noticed is they’ll show you some rugs and you say, “No, I can’t find anything interesting to me.” They’ll say, “Well, wait, we have another room here. We’ll show you some rugs.” And you get excited, but they’re more expensive. But still you don’t move. And then they say, “Would you really like to see the real rugs? I mean, just to show you what they are.” And they take you to a third room. And I’ve seen that technique work not only with rugs but that they take you—you really feel special to have seen the best.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, there’s a special episode coming just on rug marketing. [Laughs]

A Heartfelt “Thank You” to Philip Kotler

Andrew Mitrak: Phil, you mentioned that you watch the show, and that just means the world to me. If I was just doing this for a viewer of one, I would do it. And also that you were the first person to appear, you shared a kind note about the show with your network, and you also introduced me to some really amazing guests as well early on.

I just want to sincerely thank you so much for your support. You don’t need to do that, you don’t need to be as kind as you are. So I’m grateful to have met you through this project and to have your support throughout it and your viewership of it. I’ve learned so much from you. Thank you for everything.

Philip Kotler: Thank you so much.

Andrew Mitrak: As we wrap up, are there any recent publications or upcoming publications that you’d like to promote for listeners?

Philip Kotler: Yes, we’re putting out books on transformative marketing, which is much more sophisticated. And I’m working with V. Kumar, who’s one of our great researchers in marketing, on what we call transformative marketing. So we will be coming out with material on that. Thank you for asking.

Andrew Mitrak: Of course, yeah. I’m glad you’re continuing to collaborate with Professor Kumar. VK was a very fun interview to do and such a great thinker. So Dr. Philip Kotler, thanks again so much for your time. I really enjoyed this interview.

Philip Kotler: Andrew, thanks to you for what you’re doing. We’re all benefiting from it. Keep it up.

He co-authored Marketing Management, the all-time best-selling marketing textbook, alongside Philip Kotler. And with Strategic Brand Management, Kevin he defined how a generation of marketers understands brand equity.

As a Professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, he has spent decades bridging the gap between rigorous academic theory and elite corporate practice. He’s consulted for giants like Disney, Nike, and Ford, but perhaps his most interesting “field research” came from working with the Australian rock band, The Church.

This conversation is a rare treat for our listeners. Despite his massive impact and the high regard of his peers, Kevin keeps a relatively low profile and seldom sits for deep-dive, long-form interviews. This episode offers unique insights from one of the primary minds to shape modern marketing.

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

In our conversation, we discuss:

• The P&G Playbook: How he helped transform Pampers by connecting functional technology to emotional “brand mantras.”

• The Art & Science: Why great branding requires both a philosophical “philosophy of consumption” and disciplined data tools.

• Managing The Church: What he learned about marketing, fan engagement, and “continuity vs. change” while managing a legendary Australian rock band.

Now, here is my conversation with Kevin Lane Keller.

Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, who volunteers to review and edit transcripts for accuracy and clarity.

Collaborating with Kotler on “Marketing Management”

Andrew Mitrak: Kevin Lane Keller, welcome to A History of Marketing.

Kevin Lane Keller: Thanks for having me.

Andrew Mitrak: I’m so excited for this conversation because like a lot of people, Marketing Management was my textbook in grad school, and your name was on the cover there right alongside Philip Kotler’s. So, how did you get involved with becoming Philip Kotler’s co-author?

Kevin Lane Keller: It’s interesting. I actually used the textbook too when I got my MBA. I had the third edition, so it’s going back a ways. I think it was the fall of 1978. I have enormous respect and he is a legend, but was a legend back then when I was taking the course. But I had the chance to publish my own textbook on Strategic Brand Management. I had done that and that was really my area of interest, but I’ve always been a marketer at heart in a very broad sense. So the publisher was looking for someone to be a co-author, and because of my experience and some of the things I was interested in, it seemed like a nice fit. So I actually did the 11th edition. Phil and I worked together just to sort of try it out, kind of both sides, and it went well. I enjoyed it a lot. And so I think it made sense and starting with the 12th edition I was formally the co-author and have been a co-author ever since.

Andrew Mitrak: When you write a book like that, that is so widely read and is sort of the Bible for a lot of folks who are just getting into marketing—if a professional marketer reads one book, that’s often the one that they reference—is there a lot of pressure when you write a book like that to make sure it’s accurate and up to date? Do the stakes seem very high for it?

Kevin Lane Keller: It’s daunting. When you think about it, it’s an impossible task because you’re trying to capture all the richness and all the detail and manage to distill that down and package it and write it and source it and reference it and everything, and make it engaging and interesting. So it is difficult. I enjoyed doing that. I think the challenge of that. And you break it down. It’s a little bit like building a house. You think, “Oh my God, building a house.” Well, you’re doing rooms and within rooms there are certain things you have to do. So you really break it down. It is very modular in how to approach it. But the big challenge is really keeping it up to date and making sure that it captures what modern marketing is and, more importantly, maybe what it should be.

The Challenge of Keeping Marketing Texts Relevant

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, I have a question around keeping it up to date because there are probably certain core principles that you want to keep tried and true. Things like segmentation, targeting, and positioning, I think, were in my version of the book. I’m sure the Four Ps were referenced in it and things like that. But then there are a lot of things that change. So how do you think about what changes versus what doesn’t change?

Kevin Lane Keller: I think there is always continuity and change in marketing in general. I’ve worked with a lot of brands, I’ve worked with a lot of legacy brands, really strong brands, and that’s always the challenge: how do I move forward, but how do I move forward in the right direction and in the right way, at the right pace and all of that. It’s no different with a textbook. You are thinking about what are the new ideas and the new concepts. And sometimes new frameworks and new ways to organize and think about things. But yet at the same time, there are those core principles and segmentation and targeting in some sense, and positioning in some sense. It may change some how you think about those, but that notion and those concepts themselves at least at a high level are ones that are retained. But a lot of things change and especially with digital and with AI, we’re really trying to make sure the book reflects that.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, I was thinking just about that example exactly. Like I’m sure SEO is covered in a book, right? It’s a very big thing. But then even the language around it is changing. Sometimes it’s called Answer Engine Optimization with an AI. Sometimes called Generative Engine Optimization, GEO or AEO with AIs. And then it’s sort of just you might just call it LLMs. And the language itself, especially at this moment when we’re recording here in November 2025, is changing so much where if you committed to something in a book very quickly it could be outdated. If that version is used for years, it could just wind up being a thing where you’re like, “Ah, kind of missed the boat on that one.” So how do you sort of think about staying relevant without becoming outdated too much?

Kevin Lane Keller: Well, I think you think about updating more frequently. I think that is probably one of the answers because there is nothing you can do. You can only go and be as current as you can till literally the moment of publication. So you’re always having the final proofs and you’re looking at them and you’re literally making changes and edits to try to make sure everything is as up to date as possible at that point in time. But at that point in time, then you move on in some sense. It is a little more dynamic with publishing. You have more opportunities to do updates and bring that in. So that’s the advantage of the e-text and the more digital versions versus the hard copy, the kind of classic textbook version in that sense. But you are always trying to. And look, the AI, that is an area that is just exploding so much and changing so much that it’s going to be a moving target for a while.

Andrew Mitrak: Oh yeah, keeps it interesting.

Kevin Lane Keller: Yeah, it does. Yes.

Collaborating with a Marketing Legend

Andrew Mitrak: So what was it like collaborating with Phil Kotler?

Kevin Lane Keller: I had known him some through the years. He had actually tried to recruit me as a PhD student to Kellogg at one point in time, wrote a very nice letter when I was just first getting my PhD and through the years. He’s one of these guys. I joked when they had at one point an event to kind of honor Phil at Kellogg at Northwestern, and I joked that there had to be like three Philip Kotlers and we only actually had one of them in the room and the others were busy doing all the other things that Phil Kotler does because he’s just remarkably productive. I mean, unbelievably so. And the way he gets things done. But he’s the nicest guy. His ability, his radar to pick up on what matters. His ability to synthesize that, clarify it, put it into context. It’s just amazing. So for me, I’ve learned so much, which is great. But I’ve also enjoyed it so much. So he’s made it fun. So it’s just been great. And he’s still heavily involved with the book. So he definitely is still providing a lot of input, a lot of feedback. So he’s definitely part of the book still.

Andrew Mitrak: That’s amazing. Even into his mid-nineties. I think because he was the first interview on this podcast and he had a similar experience where he would just respond to emails so quickly and kind of be on top of things so fast. It’s amazing that he’s able to do it all.

Kevin Lane Keller: Well, there are three Philip Kotlers. I’m convinced. But maybe if it’s just one, it’s even more extraordinary. I’d be amazed even with three.

Andrew Mitrak: When you first started collaborating, him having this Father of Modern Marketing type legendary status in the field, were there ever any disagreements you had with him? Or did you feel like you could push back or evolve things? Or did you feel like because of that, his status, you had to be deferential to him and also he was sort of the original author? What was that dynamic like?

Kevin Lane Keller: That’s a good question because that’s a big issue. A lot of times it’s just people, you know, we all have that issue. We’re kind of territorial or we just sort of kind of want to stick with what we’ve done and for whatever reason. And he’s been always really flexible and open-minded about that. So that has just not been an issue, which has been great. I think there are certain topics he’s reluctant to give up in the book that sometimes, maybe they’re not as important now as they once were. They’re still important, and I get the reasoning, but that’s the one area is just sort of in that space where it’s just always harder. It’s easier to add than subtract. That’s always the hardest thing is subtracting. And you need to do both. That’s the challenge. Is what do you not include when you’ve included it before? And maybe there’s a reason to still include it, but if you do that for too much, then the book gets too long.

From Ad Retrieval Cues to Brand Equity

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that makes sense. So along with marketing management, you’re best known probably for your contributions to brand. And one of your early papers in 1987 I think, was “Memory Factors in Advertising: The Effect of Advertising Retrieval Cues on Brand Evaluations.” And so you were kind of early in working on brand and sort of connecting advertising, memory, around brand. So what led you to researching this area of advertising, memory and brand?

Kevin Lane Keller: That paper was my thesis paper. And that came out of my co-chair was Jim Bettman from Duke University. He wrote a paper on memory factors in advertising that had an example about Life Cereal and Mikey. It was a very popular ad, but people could not remember the name of the cereal so they weren’t getting the impact from that because the ad was working but not branding well. People liked it but didn’t connect. So they put a little picture of Mikey on the front of the package, framed it with a television set, and said “Try the cereal Mikey likes.” So I called those “ad retrieval cues.” And so I studied those. It made a lot of sense to me because it’s trying to make those connections that memory just aren’t strong enough in memory. You’re helping people out in retrieval.

But back door that got me into branding because the question was, “What did Life Cereal stand for without the cue and how did it tap into or remind people of the ads?” So I did a whole lot about memory and advertising and everything. But that’s how I got into branding. And then my most famous paper was in 1993, which was a paper I wrote about Customer-Based Brand Equity. And it’s a paper, 30,000 or some whatever Google Scholar cites. And it’s taught in seminars to this day. And I’ve written a couple follow-ups on that. I’ve written a ton in branding. But even on that specific paper, I’ve revisited it in some instances. But that’s really kind of... it all came down to understanding how brands work for people and especially in their memory and their knowledge and what they learn and how advertising affected that, but then how everything... how just brand in general operated.

The Explosion of Brand Equity in the 1990s

Andrew Mitrak: So it seems like in the late eighties to early nineties, brand was sort of the right topic at the right time. This is just as the idea of brand equity was really gaining traction. Can you talk about that transition that was happening with brand in the era? What was it before and then what was changing at this time?

Kevin Lane Keller: Yeah, I mean it was one of those things where it really came out of what was happening in the eighties—all the mergers, acquisitions. People were having to value, so the intangible value of brands. So people were starting to recognize that. Brands obviously mattered to the CPG, the packaged goods companies, the more traditional consumer products. But all of a sudden a lot of different people, services and different organizations were all starting to realize in different forms that their brands really mattered. And so it was an exciting time because all of a sudden people were thinking differently about their marketing and literally what they did. And so to be sort of at the front end of that, which I was with some others, and to be able to talk about it and work with companies and help them understand that, you know, was just a really exciting thing to do. So it really, really took off. And when I published my book in even ‘98, there was just so much interest. And so the book sold a lot in trade even though it was a textbook because people at that time, there weren’t that many branding books.

Andrew Mitrak: If you look at a Google Ngram of the mentions of the word brand, it really explodes in the early nineties or so. And that brand equity just led it to be a more elevated word within marketing and business in general. Did you see that wave coming and place yourself there because it was the most interesting topic area? Or did you feel like you were just interested in it independently and it happened to coincide with this? Were you thinking like, “Oh this is a big wave that’s coming, I want to be at the forefront of that”?

Kevin Lane Keller: A little bit of both. I was fascinated by the topic. I thought it was really interesting and important. And I certainly recognized that others were feeling the same way. Interestingly, and eventually it, where we are today, it’s like part of everyday vernacular. I mean everyone talks about brands now. That was not the case 40 years ago or even 30 years ago or 20. So it took a while for that diffusion. And there are still some industries that are a little still maybe not embracing brand as much as you might think. But it was a realization that this is something that’s really important. It hasn’t been studied much. It needs academic study. It needs rigorous research.

Comparing Brand Equity Models

Andrew Mitrak: I interviewed David Aaker twice for this podcast actually, and we talked a lot about this era of brand equity and his work in this area. Did you work with him at all?

Kevin Lane Keller: So Dave, I met Dave in 1985 actually when I was interviewing for my first job. And he was at Berkeley and on the faculty there. And that’s where I joined the faculty. And at the time Dave had been doing a lot... he was known more as a quantitative sort of marketing person, but he had been starting to move into strategy. I was somebody who had been studying advertising and, as I was saying, in consumer psychology and memory, moving into branding. And so it was a natural thing for us to work together. So he, some of his first papers, some of my first papers in branding were together. And they were on brand extensions. So which was at the time a big area. There were a lot of brand extensions that were happening and sort of but there hadn’t been much research. So we were developing models and running experiments and things like that. So we worked together for a good almost five years or so. And then we sort of went slightly different directions because he started working on trade books and going to a more practitioner audience. And I was at Stanford, you know, in the process of getting tenure and publishing research and writing a textbook. So I went a little bit more the academic route, although, you know, there’s obviously a lot of overlap between what we did.

Andrew Mitrak: That explains sort of your different models a little bit because I don’t want to frame it as competitive per se, but it seems like you’re both people in the field of brand who are introducing your Customer-Based Brand Equity model. He has his brand equity models. And I could see if I’m a marketer at the time wanting to learn about brand equity, I’m like, “Huh, which model do I use?” Was there ever sort of a competition for mind share among both of you in your models? Or what was that dynamic like?

Kevin Lane Keller: Well, I think they’re complementary in some ways. I mean Dave’s is much more of a strategy... it’s a little bit more asset-based in some ways. And mine is much more rooted in consumer and consumer behavior, consumer psychology and all of that, and to develop certain strategic principles that come out of that. But a lot of our recommendations are the same. Even though because some of his assets are ones that are consumer behavior related and my consumer behavior, I make sure I drive that into more outcomes and other things that capture sort of more financial and asset sort of based things. So there is overlap in that sense. So there really wasn’t... I see them as complementary in a lot of different ways.

Constructing the Brand Resonance Pyramid

Andrew Mitrak: Totally, absolutely. Can you walk through... as you created this Customer-Based Brand Equity model in 1993, what is the approach to building a model? I’ve never built a model before. And it seems like a model you have to be sort of broad enough to encompass a lot of things and a lot of different industries, but also specific enough that it’s really meaningful and actionable and all of that. And of course grounded in reality and actual behavior. So what is the approach... where do you start with a model?

Kevin Lane Keller: You know, it’s funny. The model that I’m probably most well known for, there’s the Customer-Based Brand Equity sort of definition and concept. And then the actual framework is the Brand Resonance framework. And that’s one where it is very much the sort of looking at how to build a brand and thinking about the stages people go through in their development. But I think that that’s one where I really, I literally sat in the back of a room and tried to lay out sort of the questions that people would ask about a brand and sort of just really tried to be as comprehensive as I could be, but then as concise and cohesive I could be as part of that. And so I think that was really the key was to do that.

Andrew Mitrak: What I like about this is that this pyramid has very plain spoken language. It’s: Who are you (brand identity), What are you (brand meaning), What about you and what do I feel about you, and that’s brand response, right? And then What about you and what kind of association and how much of a connection would I like to have with you, and that’s brand relationships. And sort of it’s very a natural flow of like, “Hey, I need to understand this one to kind of understand the next one.” And was building it in sort of a plain spoken way where it’s kind of simple and logical, was that sort of part of your idea behind... or was that part of your approach to making it?

Kevin Lane Keller: Definitely. And I mean the goal with that, like I said, was to be comprehensive but also to be as clear and logical. And I was trying to capture everything that I knew about marketing and consumer behavior and how brands are built. You know, so there’s an awareness and image component which are fundamental to brand associations, fundamental to any model, including Dave Aaker’s model, my model, etc. So had that and then the judgments and feelings, the head and the heart. And then resonance where you actually the customer feels in sync with the brand. They really feel a connection. So deep, you know, sort of intense active loyalty relationships. But each level of that pyramid had a wrinkle that like salience at the bottom was about breadth and depth of awareness. It’s like how easily is my brand thought of and how often? Is it in all the right times and places and ways? And points of parity, points of difference the next level up, which is my positioning model that I developed with Brian Sternthal and Alice Tybout at Northwestern. A different way of thinking about how those that brand image level. So I tried to make sure it was comprehensive, covered the key concepts, but also was original in certain ways that I thought were important to kind of bring in.

Andrew Mitrak: That’s right. Yeah. It seems like a model also has to be original enough to merit a new model, right? While also not being so radical that it’s you have to throw everything else out, right? You have to kind of build on what’s already there. So kind of meet people where they are with their existing marketing activities and but also offer something new that’s actionable for them.

Kevin Lane Keller: That’s right.

Applied Branding: Transforming Procter & Gamble

Andrew Mitrak: Let’s talk about putting this into practice because you’ve consulted with a lot of really amazing brands: Accenture, Disney, Ford, Intel, Levi, Nike, many more, the list goes on. And are there any case studies from your career that you’re able to share about where you took this model and helped a brand implement it and had sort of real world outcomes?

Kevin Lane Keller: So the ones, I mean like I said, I’ve had the chance to work with an awful lot of the top companies and multiple engagements, you know, which has been great. And the one relationship I had that I think was one of the more productive was with P&G, so Procter & Gamble. And it was in the kind of the 2000s and Jim Stengel was their CMO. Brilliant guy, wonderful guy and very sharp. But he really wanted to upgrade the marketing there. And so it was a nice relationship because I worked with some of their thought leaders in improving their toolkits when it came to positioning. This resonance model I described became their tracking tool. It was called “Equity Scan” and they used that to measure the strength of their brands and their development of their brands around the world. So they operationalized this in a survey form. I helped them with brand architecture, like how to think of whether it was Crest or whatever brand where you’ve got this complex portfolio and sub-brands and extensions and how to think about architecture for growth. And it was just across the board. It was just a lot of fun. It really made I think a difference for them because it really helped to get them thinking in a rigorous, relevant way in many ways they’d done before, but it was as we were saying before, kind of bringing in some original thinking to put on top of that layer.

Andrew Mitrak: Procter & Gamble, this amazing, iconic brand, the originators of a lot of the original thinking about branding back in the 1930s, really long legacy of brand, but they have this big portfolio of brands that they offer. So were there any specific examples of where you applied your model or worked with them within their portfolio of brands?

Kevin Lane Keller: I had a chance to work with a couple different brands, but the one that was probably my favorite was Pampers. It was a really successful brand and they had a great team, so they were obviously doing really, really well. But they sort of embraced some of the thinking that’s reflected in the positioning model and the resonance model: the duality of a brand and especially the emotional and functional components and how to connect them. So coming up with a brand mantra, “caring for baby’s development,” which really took the functional benefit of dryness and absorbency and the fact that the baby sleeps better and feels better, but then learns and plays and develops. And so really made that connection functionally and emotionally, which is exactly what the model that I have talked about. And so we workshopped that some and got to a really good spot and business really took off. And all credit to the team because they had built this thinking and structure in place that allowed it to kind of go that next level. But it was just a great, for me, a personal experience where applying some of these models and working with a team and just seeing the outcomes in such a demonstrative way for their biggest and most successful brand to take that to the next level was quite a thrill.

Andrew Mitrak: I love it. I’m kind of smiling here because the brands that you have referenced, I have three daughters and I have one who’s six months old, one who’s three years old, and one who’s five years old. And the five-year-old is obsessed with Life Cereal, and you were talking about Life Cereal. That’s her favorite breakfast by far. And then yeah, we have Pampers in our house for the six-month-old. And it is, you’re right, it is actually amazing technology behind diapers as well, how they work. But also that I don’t necessarily buy diapers because of the technology per se. I look at price and a lot of things, but also Pampers, you just sort of trust it. If you see that on a shelf versus sort of a store brand or something, you’re like, “Oh gosh, is that going to cause an itch? Is that going to be worth it?” And it’s like, let’s just stick with what we know.

Kevin Lane Keller: Right. Yeah, no, exactly. Exactly. And it’s a great functional benefit, but there’s an emotional payoff that you always want to make sure people are aware of because it matters so much to their lives.

Bridging Academia and Practice via the Marketing Science Institute

Andrew Mitrak: So you also worked with the Marketing Science Institute for years. Bill Moult was a previous guest on this podcast as well, and he sung your praises as far as your contributions to the Marketing Science Institute. So can you talk about MSI and where an institution like that sort of fits into your work on brand?

Kevin Lane Keller: So they were really instrumental in so many ways. So I won the doctoral dissertation proposal competition in 1984, and I was just starting to work on my thesis and I wrote something up, submitted it, and I was one of the first two co-winners. And that was really important for me because I still wasn’t sure what direction to go. I had a math-economics background. So they helped point me in the right direction—as it turns out, the right direction. I got great validation. And then all the branding work, they were very supportive and gave that gave me a platform to work with others, to share my ideas. So they were a real catalyst for that for me and for the field of marketing. And then I got more involved after that. I became a trustee, eventually an Executive Director on the board for a long time. And it’s just a great concept. The organization is a great concept because it’s that bridge between academia and industry practice and bringing together thoughtful practitioners and practical-minded academics to talk about the most important problems and the most interesting and challenging decisions. So it’s just a great concept and great organization.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, for sure. It seems like we need more of that connection between academia and practitioner because it is a gap I’ve noticed on this podcast even when speaking to both people on the academic side and then folks on the practitioner side. There is a gap there, so we need folks to work on closing it.

The Art and Science of Branding

Andrew Mitrak: I want to ask about the phrase “Marketing Science” and how it relates to brand. Because I think, speaking broadly, when I’m at a company, the brand folks are a little more of the art folks. There’s a little more of a general sense that brand is something that’s intangible, a little more difficult to measure. You think of brand and creative as sort of going hand in hand. And then what I think of like the data scientists I work with, often they’re measuring individual channels or they’re doing ROAS, or they’re doing ROI of specific campaigns. And that’s a little more the science element. I guess, do you kind of agree that that characterization sort of broadly exists? Or do you have any thoughts about that?

Kevin Lane Keller: Well, I think there is some truth to that. One, it doesn’t have to be that way, and two, it shouldn’t be that way. And so I actually think it’s an art and a science. I think marketing, branding, anything. And I think the more you bring those together and celebrate those, appreciate that, and either do it in a holistic way across an organization, but even within individuals and those who are able to bridge that. But I think it’s really important. And I worry on the branding side, I don’t want it to be seen and licensed to be artistic and not feel that you need to have the rigor and discipline and other things to really make sure that you’re thinking things through in the right way, even while being creative, that you’re still mindful of other kinds of things.

So I always talk about having, when I talk about art and science, part of the art is having a philosophy of how branding works. So there’s creativity, but it’s like, how does it work? Because you’ve got to somehow, no matter what you do. And so having that philosophy. So I tell my students that’s the key to me for the art and science is: what is your philosophy? What assumptions do you make about consumers, about competition, about brands? How they work, how they don’t work, all that. And you build those over time. I’ve got certain philosophies. You grow brands through little steps. I have certain tenants that I have just learned through experience and research and etc. So that combined with the tools that you can apply, like the resonance model and whatever that might be, but you need the blend of those because just having the tools is not enough. Just having the philosophy is not enough. You need to have the two of them.

Andrew Mitrak: I’m going to take the bait. What are some of the tenants that you’ve learned? Or what are sort of the core things that you’ve learned personally that just seem to kind of apply across the board?

Kevin Lane Keller: I mean, just at the heart of a great brand is a great product. I mean, that’s one of the ones I fundamentally believe in. But not everyone does. I mean, there are people who really don’t think it matters as much and what have you. And so, that said, every brand contact matters, you know, because it all affects knowledge. It affects what people think and feel and learn. So you sort of develop these tenants of that kind. And balancing continuity and change, and innovation and relevance. Making sure you have innovation so you’re always moving forward at the right pace and in the right direction and in the right way, things we talked about earlier. So you kind of develop these and then they inform how you apply your tools.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, for sure. No, I think that’s a totally true tenant and it’s something I’ve actually thought about in marketing in general is that who are the greatest marketers of all time? They’re the people who work on the best products. If you kind of think of the Steve Jobs of the world or the Disney or the folks who have kind of changed marketing itself, there’s always a really great product behind it. And if there’s a great marketer and you can have a brilliant campaign, but if the product’s not there, you’re kind of going to forget about it and it’s not really going to have the mark it has. So part of it is having taste and choosing the right products to market as a marketer.

Kevin Lane Keller: Well, but also product is part of marketing. And that’s really important. When you think of the 4 Ps, everything about that. So all the marketing should inform and work with R&D and everyone else to design the product to satisfy customer needs and wants in better ways and all that. So that’s why I mean it’s just making sure you don’t take the product as a given and not constantly thinking, especially now where you’ve got these platform brands. Brands and products are platforms. And so the product is one part of that. So you got to really think about how you’re enriching it in different ways with services and information and whatever else you can experience, other things you can do.

Rock and Roll Marketing: Kevin Lane Keller & “The Church”

Andrew Mitrak: Changing gears here, you manage a band called The Church. They’re one of the biggest bands that’s ever come out of Australia. And it seems like such a surprising thing. I’m just wondering, how did you come to manage The Church?

Kevin Lane Keller: Well, “manage” is a little maybe overstated. I have to be careful with that. I’ve definitely helped manage them, so at different times. Less so now for sure. So I’ve been executive producer for them for a number of albums. And what happened, it was just a fortunate coincidence in 1998 where I happened to see them in San Francisco, in Melbourne, Australia, and then over in London. And it was just, as luck would have it, and some other things. And I kind of realized as great as the band was, the music business is incredibly unforgiving and they just needed help of various kinds. And some of it was financial. So I was a little bit of a patron of the arts, if you will. And this is before all the different ways now exist online where bands can do different things to try to support themselves. That didn’t exist back then. So really kind of stepped up and then also got involved in trying to help them financially and beyond financially—business-wise, career-wise, etc. Incredible band, very talented. I’ve learned a lot about the music business in the process. And it is a tough business. There’s just no question about that. A very, very challenging business. But it’s been hugely enjoyable and it was just pure luck that I kind of fell into this and then played this, took this role at that time.

Andrew Mitrak: Did you have any background in the music industry? Or was this kind of bringing some of your brand and marketing consulting to the table? What was it that sort of set you up to be able to help them out?

Kevin Lane Keller: Well, my background was hundreds and hundreds of albums and records and CDs and cassettes and everything. And I was just a huge rock and roll fan. I was, it was 1967, “Summer of Love,” I was 11 years old listening to a transistor radio. So I just always loved music and I loved the 80s music. I loved a lot of different decades and genres. But I especially loved The Church. I just thought they were an incredible band and were always special to me. And I always thought that they were a band I did not want to see go away for any reason. And so that’s why I stepped in. But I followed it some. If you’re interested in marketing, interested in business, interested in music, you can’t help but be thinking about—I’m the same way with movies—just all aspects of the marketing and business side of that. So I certainly had that armchair view, but I never actually worked with anybody before.

Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned movies. There was a, I think when I first heard them, there’s a movie called Donnie Darko that came out where the soundtrack was very popular. It had 80s songs and I think it had “Under the Milky Way“ on it. And I think that’s probably the first time I ever heard The Church. Were you involved with any of their placement on movie soundtracks or any of that?

Kevin Lane Keller: Not as much as I would have liked because that was something we always strived for. And it happened some, but we just weren’t, we didn’t have our act together enough. We weren’t organized enough at that time. It was a pretty grassroots effort. And so we were relying a lot on just the sheer talent and love and respect that people had for the band, and the brand I guess, if you will, to sort of move it into different arenas, which happened. There was one ad, it was a famous ad for Volkswagen “Drivers Wanted” going back in the day where it was literally supposed to have “Under the Milky Way,” which is one of their famous, most famous songs from their most famous album, Starfish. And at the last minute, somebody subbed in, and the person loved The Church, but subbed in a Nick Drake, who is an English folk singer, a song, I think it was “Pink Moon“ or whatever it was, into the ad instead. And it was just very disappointing because it would have been, it had got a lot of exposure, a lot of attention. It would have been a nice little nudge if you will. But that’s the way it works in this business.

Andrew Mitrak: It’s a missed opportunity. But at least they were replaced with Nick Drake, who’s pretty great and not some just kind of schlocky song.

Kevin Lane Keller: It was hard to complain for that very reason, but it still stung a little bit.

Marketing Lessons from the Music Industry

Andrew Mitrak: So did your expertise in marketing and brand, what did you bring from that to a rock band? I am sure a lot of things were brought in. Were there any specific things or surprising things that you were able to apply to working with The Church?

Kevin Lane Keller: It’s funny. It’s one of the things I see with other, even with companies. There are times they make things harder than they need to be. It’s always hard enough as it is, so the last thing you want to do is make it harder than it needs to be. And with bands, it’s a little bit of, just as an example, your setlist when you tour. Touring is important. But like what songs do you play? And you got to, there are a set of songs people want to hear. You may feel like you played them enough. You may feel like you’re kind of tired of them. Doesn’t matter. And it’s funny, the band went through a period, The Church, where they did kind of have that hit a wall with some of those songs. Didn’t really want to play them. But they’ve gotten past that now and I’m so happy for them. They really appreciate how much that means to people and they put their heart and soul into it and they put on these great shows with a balance of the old and the new. It’s back to what we talked about: that continuity/change. But you got to make sure you balance that. And that’s again a lesson I see for a lot of companies. Don’t make it harder. Don’t make it more difficult, you know.

Andrew Mitrak: They want to rebrand, have a new slogan, do some new messaging where it’s like, well, you’re seeing it all the time because you’re a marketer at the company, but your audience, they don’t see it as frequently as you do. So maybe stick with the campaign that works a little longer.

Kevin Lane Keller: Yeah, or just when you’re thinking of decisions, you’re just talking yourself into all these different things where, look, there’s just a lot of times just focus on what matters in different ways. And I think to be honest, that’s where the tools and the frameworks, because a lot of times the compliment I love from companies is when they say that you make it so simple. “You do it, it’s been great working with you, you just made it so simple for us.” And I’m always thinking, well, sometimes you’re making it so hard. I’m just providing structure and clarity and just trying to get them to see and then be able to make the decisions in the right way.

Andrew Mitrak: So did managing The Church or working with The Church teach you anything about marketing? Or were there any things you learned that you were able to kind of apply the other direction towards your work?

Kevin Lane Keller: I mean the one thing, music has always had a community and a fan base and everything. And obviously brands have embraced that in a much bigger way. But this was something that music was way ahead of in some sense. And connecting with them and letting them be the advocates, if you will, which has been so helpful for the band. So they benefit from the again, the love and support of their most devoted fans. So I think that’s definitely a lesson and just in general about how finding ways, it’s about engagement and the right ways to develop that and cultivate that. But recognize that not everybody’s engaged and so you’ve got a more casual fan base and they’re really important too. So that’s kind of one of the real lessons I got early on that was really helpful was just learning about that.

What Remains Constant in Marketing

Andrew Mitrak: Wrapping up, we were talking at the start about Marketing Management, all the updates that need to happen and AI and all these things that are changing in tech and in digital and in marketing. But I’m also curious, what are the things that aren’t changing? Are there any things that have stayed consistent and will continue to stay consistent for decades in the future?

Kevin Lane Keller: Yeah, I mean we talked before about segmentation, targeting, positioning. I think just the general strategy notion. I think the ways you execute and implement that obviously change. I think Integrated Communications. I think Omnichannel, integrated channels. The mixing and matching of how you go to market, both in what you say and where you sell kind of, or how you sell. It’s at that high level, but then there’s so many unique things that are changing underneath that about how you actually execute that, how you implement that, even how you plan a lot of that. So I think that’s where you see so many differences I think. But I think there’s some of those kinds of high level areas of marketing and tasks that have to be done that I think that are still sort of relevant today.

Recommended Resources

Andrew Mitrak: Kevin Lane Keller, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. For listeners who’ve also enjoyed it and they want to dive into more of your work, where would you point them?

Kevin Lane Keller: So I’ve got lots of articles and a lot of research that I published, but I’d have to go with my textbook. And I wrote it as sort of being and wanted it to be seen as sort of the Bible of branding, this authority. And it’s now co-authored with Vanitha Swaminathan who helped me out on the book. But I think that’s the one. It’s written to have the rigor and the relevance, to be comprehensive, lots of examples. It’s not too dense or too academic, I don’t think, in the treatment of the subject. And so I think that’s one. It is daunting because of length and all that kind of goes with that. But that would be the place I’d go for those who are interested in really diving into again, those more thoughtful practitioners who want to kind of get into different frameworks, different ideas, different concepts, different research advances, whatever. That’s captured in the book. But I think it’s packaged in as user-friendly way as I can. So that’s probably where I’d send people.

Andrew Mitrak: And this is your textbook, Strategic Brand Management, which is now in its fifth edition?

Kevin Lane Keller: That’s right. That’s right. And again, for those interested in marketing management more generally, just want to know the fundamentals, I’d go back to the Kotler book that has been around for decades and still I think is a really useful resource for what’s going on in marketing and how to think about different topics and providing structure and insight and all of those kinds of things.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, for sure. If you’re listening to this podcast and you made it this far, pick up a copy of Marketing Management as well and just keep it as a reference because it’s just, it’s worth just having just because even if you’re already familiar, it’s something that a lot of other people will have learned. So it’s worth just having as a reference guide. So Marketing Management and Strategic Brand Management. And Kevin Lane Keller, thanks so much for your time. I really enjoyed this conversation. I had a lot of fun. And so yeah, thank you.

Kevin Lane Keller: No, thank you. I enjoyed the opportunity to talk with you and good luck. I think it’s a great series that you have and looking forward to seeing who else you have on next.

Earlier this year, I spoke with students at Syracuse University taking an “Essentials of Marketing” course. I shared stories from my non-traditional career in marketing that’s spanned filmmaking, virtual reality, robotics, trucking, and technology. I framed these stories into “five rules of thumb” for early career marketers.

I’m releasing this as a “bonus” episode. I prefer to let the history and my guests be the star of the show, but regular listeners might be entertained by this personal detour and find some value in these takeaways.

I want to give a special thank you to Xiaoying Feng for the invitation to her class and for being such a wonderful supporter of the show.

Now, here’s the presentation.

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

Five Rules of Thumb for Career Growth

I had planned to do a presentation on marketing history, but then Xiaoying asked me to talk about my career and journey.

I realized you don’t just want to hear one thing after another. So I thought I would call it “Five Rules of Thumb.” So whether you are planning to be a marketer or just somebody early in your career, as you exit college and enter the “real world,” here are some things I’ve learned.

I didn’t want to call them “lessons.” That felt a little too formal.

So rules of thumb. For what it’s worth, they have worked for me, so hopefully, they work for you too.

👍Rule of Thumb #1: Don’t Get Comfortable

The very first rule of thumb I want to start with is what somebody told me once, which is “Don’t get comfortable.”

The story behind this one is that it was February of 2012, and I was going to a job interview. The job interview was with one of the biggest ad agencies in Seattle. I was 22 years old and feeling super confident. I actually had just won a Seattle ADDY Award for an advertisement I made for my university. I had also just released a 30-minute documentary that just won an audience award at a film festival. And I just graduated college a year early as well, and I was already producing videos for an investment company in Seattle. But I wanted to break into the ad agency world, which is why I was having this job interview. So I sat down for the interview, and the guy, who was the founder of this agency.

He said to me, “I watched the first 10 minutes of your documentary. I didn’t understand what it was about. That’s not good.” I thought, Oh gosh, this is a tough start to an interview. Then he said, “I also watched your ad. I didn’t like it.” And he said, “What else are you working on?”

I didn’t really have a good answer for him. I was like, “This is the toughest start to a job interview I’ve ever had.” I realized I wasn’t going to get this job. So, I just asked him what advice he had for a recent graduate who had a full-time job but wanted to get into advertising.

His advice was: “Don’t get comfortable.”

This guy was kind of a jerk, as you could tell, and I’m kind of glad that I never worked for him, but his advice was actually pretty good.

I think what he was trying to say was: “When you are comfortable, you are not growing. Growth comes from discomfort.”

The job I had at the investment company was a pretty comfortable job, but any growth I was going to have would come from pushing myself outside of my comfort zone. Even though this was someone I didn’t work with, I was grateful for the advice, and it stuck with me.

Jobs, Side Hustles, Startups, and Podcasts

To place my career journey on a linear timeline, I would say the first era was being an undergraduate and I started making videos for the student newspaper. That turned into a job with UWTV; I made the first-ever student-produced TV show. While I was an undergrad, I was making 30-minute episodes a week. I was 19 years old when I started doing that, and all of a sudden, I was managing a staff of 15 people. I was the worst manager ever because no 19-year-old is a good manager, but I got a lot of practice making videos.

Russell Investments reached out to UW and said, “Hey, who do you have can make videos? We need a video person.” And I got a job there. In the meantime, I was doing films and ads on the side as well. I always say I had a real job, and then that “don’t get comfortable” element was always doing side hustles or doing school on top of work or doing ads and doing freelance work on top of work. So that was kind of my “don’t get comfortable”. I was spinning multiple plates. I’m always doing a few things at once to try to learn more and more.

The second era of my career was being a startup marketer, and I shifted from investment companies to startups because I just saw that startups have a lot of room for growth, and I’ll speak to this presentation on some of the benefits and also some of the risks associated with startups as well. While I was at startups, I started a side hustle during the COVID years. I realized I could take a lot of tactics I was doing for some of the startups I was working with, and do those first as a side hustle and then as a full-time job at my own agency.

Finally, we’re at the present. I am now at Google, and it’s funny, I wanted to work at Google, right from when I graduated from college. I applied there when I was 22, 23 years old, and never got an interview. But then some of my startup opportunities, and some of my other networking and body of work, led to a role at Google. And I now lead demand generation for the SMB and startup segments for Google Workspace. It involves tools that I actually love and use every day. I’ve worked at companies where I’ve used competitive products, and I’ve used Google. I love Google’s products as well, so it’s really great to be at a really great company and then also marketing a product that I actually love and believe in.

That ties back to how I met Xiaoying. I started this podcast called, A History of Marketing, because I always wanted to learn new things, become a better marketer, and apply some of my creative and media production background. I wanted to take those skills and my marketing skills, and see who I could meet to keep learning and exploring new things. At Google, it’s an amazing company, but I am really marketing one product in a more specific role, not doing the whole suite of marketing. I am not the CMO at Google or anything like that, and I’m really focused on one particular area, but I want to keep learning a lot of different areas about marketing. This podcast is a great way to continue being a better marketer, to continue to learn things.

👍👍Rule of Thumb #2: Adopt Tech Early + Publish Your Work = Doors Open For You

This takes me to rule of thumb number two, which is a useful lesson in almost any industry: If you adopt tech early and you publish your work, doors just open for you.

This is true almost in anything that I can think of, if you are a young person, especially, you want to stand out. There are so many benefits to being early on the adoption curve of anything. There are so many benefits to publishing your work online or in some areas where others, your peers, future employers, other people on the internet, a PhD candidate at Syracuse, and people who can find your work. It’s just doors open for you. It’s something that I’ve tried to embrace over my career, and I almost just wish I had done even more of it over time. I’ll give some examples of this.

It wouldn’t be a marketing presentation without some frameworks. Has anybody heard of the book Crossing the Chasm? It is one of the best B2B marketing books, and basically the gist of it is that you have this early stage with very innovative people who adopt things on the bleeding edge, then early adopters, the second chunk here, and they are the early folks who will adopt your new technology.

And then there is this “chasm” that breaks from the early adopter phase to the early majority—or the mainstream public phase of adopting things is really hard, and a lot of products don’t make it there. You have probably seen products come and go that didn’t quite catch on. Virtual Reality might actually be an example of that.

However, because of this chasm, as somebody who is an individual, whether you have a technical role, a media or film production role like I did, or a marketing role, being an early adopter is your competitive advantage because for a lot of people, it takes them a while to catch on, and they are looking to early adopters to publish things and create things.

Especially in a B2B marketing role, I’d recommend it. But this is a framework, where once you see this pattern, you will see it over the course of your life, everywhere. You just gonna see, “That person is an early adopter. That person is a laggard. Or that product crosses the chasm and goes mainstream.”

Here are some examples of this. When I was a student in 2009, I was producing that TV show. There’s me when I had a lot more hair. But also, look at this giant camera that’s there and all those film equipment. And here I am working on this TV show, and there are these big cameras out there and big equipment.

What else was happening in 2009? I’m going to date myself here, but YouTube had just launched a few years earlier in 2006, and it was in 2009 that they started supporting HD (High Definition) uploads. Then, Canon released this product called the Canon EOS 7D. It was the first DSLR that was at a price point you could afford—maybe $1,000 or $2,000, expensive but still affordable, for a prosumer audience—that could record HD video in it.

Before that, it’d have been recording to tape, mostly doing standard definition, and you didn’t have these interchangeable lenses. This together was a magical combination and it changed the media and film-producing landscape. All of a sudden, companies could hire a college student for a thousand bucks to film a high-definition video and upload it to YouTube, instead of hiring a big camera crew with professionals with big, giant, over-the-shoulder cameras.

I was so excited to adopt this and it got me so many opportunities just by shooting these videos and publishing them to YouTube right in 2009 when these technologies were coming out.

I spoke about Russell Investments, my first full-time job and I was an undergrad when I got the job with them initially. I made all these boring investment videos for them. Sometimes we did branded videos like this one that I shot.They found me just because I was doing videos.

But what was cool about them, about Russell Investments, is that they let me use their camera equipment when work was over. I could use their lights, microphones, and DSLR cameras. What I did when I was at Russell, I learned about corporate culture and business and investing. But then on nights, weekends, and holidays, I would make videos.

I made a video with Bigfoot—the story was about a guy who falls in love with Bigfoot. I was like, all right, let’s just try this out. Let’s just take a camera and film this thing. I worked with a YouTuber to make comedy shorts. I knew some musicians that I made these really artsy music videos as well.

I experimented with things and with green screens and stuff like that. Sometimes the experiments got weird. I did this one by breaking the rules of a green screen. It was like green slime doing it.

By the way, if you are ever going to ask somebody to do green slime on them, you have to do it to yourself first—leading by example, getting slime all over yourself and testing things out. So I had a lot of fun with it as well.

One of the most fun projects was that I made a short film called One Way Single. We used those DSLR cameras to shoot it, but I got a whole crew involved - there were 30 people. I saved up my own budget and made it my short festival film. We actually built a whole train set, and there are Styrofoam seats and lighting. We built like a quarter of a train and filmed this video inside there, and then we destroyed it all for a crash sequence, so that was a fun project.

“Maybe I should become a marketer!”

Anyway, all those things I was doing while working at Russell and doing side projects. I was doing silly comedy videos of Bigfoot. I was doing experimental art stuff with slime and building a train. I also met a lot of folks who were in the Seattle advertising community, and I met marketers at Microsoft. I would do commercials and conference videos for Microsoft. So I was a producer on this one, which was at a big Microsoft Conference, and got to work with pretty big brands in the Seattle area and build a network.

I also noticed that the marketers at Microsoft made a lot of money and didn’t have to haul around a bunch of film equipment all the time. I thought, Maybe I should become a marketer! I realized that while I loved filmmaking, Seattle is a pretty small filmmaking hub compared to New York or Los Angeles. I thought maybe marketing was the thing for me.

The thing I was noticing is that these marketers at Microsoft made a lot of money, and they don’t have to haul around a bunch of film equipment all the time. Maybe I should become a marketer. Maybe their job looks pretty good.

So that was in my head as well. Down the line, I love this filmmaking stuff, and it’s great, but Seattle is a pretty small filmmaking place. Everybody who makes it big goes to New York or Los Angeles, and I love Seattle. Maybe marketing is the thing for me.
So that was in my head as I was making these videos.

From Filmmaking to Virtual Reality

This is the interactive part. Does anybody have a guess at what this is on the screen?

This is how virtual reality filmmaking worked in 2015. We are on the note of being an early adopter, you had to find GoPros, I am not even sure if you know what GoPros are these days, but obviously, these were the wide-angle action cameras, and they are relatively cheap. You would had to 3D print a mechanism for holding them all together. You’d have to film them all, you’d have to sync them all, you’d have to stitch them all together in the editing. That is how you did a 360-degree video.

On this note of being an early adopter, I had been an early adopter on DSLRs. A few years into that, they had gone mainstream. It was like “Oh, sure, you have a DSLR camera, you can do your filmmaking.” Everybody’s doing that now. What’s next? A VR was one of those things that I was looking at, thinking, “Oh, what’s next as far as emerging technology?”

One more interactive part: Any guesses on what is on my face in this one?

That is right, this is the Microsoft HoloLens, which was their augmented reality—they called it mixed reality—prototype. It was super early. I think they discontinued it a couple of years after this, but I was at a Seattle VR meetup. I was doing these 360-degree videos, going to Seattle VR meetups, learning about new tech, building a community, or being part of an emerging community, and getting to try out new tech. That was a sort of experimental augmented reality tool from Microsoft.

👍👍👍 Rule of Thumb #3: Startups can help you gain a lot of experience, fast.

This takes me to my next stage, which is rule of thumb number three: Startups can help you gain a lot of experience really fast, in a short amount of time

If you want to learn a lot of things about how a company works, a startup is a great way to do it because there is always more work than there are people to do the work. You get to do a lot of things. It is sort of a trial by fire.

I am going to shift to my VR startup experience. I was at these meetups doing 360 videos, and I met this young person from Seattle named Jake Rubin, who founded this company with a vision to build a full-body, fully immersive Holodeck-type system. That was a crazy, ambitious vision. He was envisioning a full-body exoskeleton suit and haptic feedback. The idea is that if a VR headset is through your eyes and ears, and immerses you visually or in audio-wise, the next missing thing is touch and full-body motion. He was building these systems to do that.

He was one of the sharpest people I have ever met. They had just hired Mark Kroese, who was the president of the company and had come from Microsoft. I thought, “Okay, ilet’s give this a shot.”

Learning the Power of PR

My VR experience got me into this startup called AxonVR. That was what they were called at that time. Initially, they built this box, and you had to stick your hand inside a box and you put it out of your headset, to simulate motions and sensations of touch. We found early on that the best way to demonstrate it was with little cute animals in your hand.

Because you could feel all four steps of a deer dancing around your hand or a spider in your hand, and if the deer rested and lay\id down, you could feel its whole body and things like that..

I started doing a lot of public relations for HaptX (which it was later renamed) because the best thing I could do was find journalists, share the demo with them, and have them write about it.

This is a really fun one. I was at this big conference called CES (Consumer Electronics Show). We had just built a new prototype, but also added warmth (hot and cold). The thing this journalist said about us was like the last day of the show, it was actually right as the show was closing, we got this journalist to come in, and I’m just gonna read this out loud. This is a really great piece of media we got.

“This is my 10th year at CES. Every year I spend much of the show wondering why I put myself through it. And then maybe once per show, I get reminded of why I’m lucky to be doing what I do. Last night AxonVR reminded me that technology can be so absolutely magical when a tiny deer took a warm and fluffy nap on my outstretched palm.”

He called it “absolutely magical.” We were the best part of the show, and it was spectacular. A lot of folks who haven’t tried our tech were really skeptical of it.

Even if I describe touch to you over this call, what does it do exactly? I can’t transmit touch over Zoom, and you don’t know exactly what we’re talking about, but if you demo it to people and get them to write about it firsthand, you get more authority by it. People start to believe you.

This is a journalist who’s spent 10 years covering this industry and has written a lot of skeptical pieces about tech. And here he is, like describing our stuff as “absolutely magical.”

Rebranding AxonVR to HaptX, Naming a Company and its Products

We were called AxonVR at the start. Within the first few months, we got a cease and desist letter from a company called Taser, which rebranded to call themselves Axon. They do police body cameras and things like that. So we had to rename the company. I came up with the name HaptX. The idea is that it is “Haptic” and then “X” for experience, kind of like SpaceX, and X sort of is just a cool letter. I got to name a company and name a product.

Then the things I also did which bringing back my storytelling and media production stuff. I worked with our game developers and software engineers to design a story as we were building our next prototype that showed off the best of the technology, hid all the shortcomings, and delighted anyone who tried it.

We had this demo where you got this virtual farm and a little fox jumps onto your hand, a little diorama, you can grab the moon from the sky, and at the end, aliens invade and you have to defend the farm. They try to abduct your little fox, your tractor and defend your farm. It’s called the “Farm Defense”. This demo we wind up using for years. This is kind of what it looked like.

This is one of the videos we did. This is where the person’s at the end of it, destroying these aliens that are invading as well.

From Tech Demos to Sundance

Something wild happened. Farm Defense, this demo that I helped make and wrote the story, work with the game developers, and work with the team on it, got selected for Sundance Film Festival.

It was so funny that after I had given up on filmmaking, all of a sudden I got into Sundance as a virtual reality marketer, exploring this new medium as part of this team.

I thought it would be fun because I got to meet bunch of celebrities there. Unmute your mics if anyone wants to guess who the celebrities are. I thought that might be a fun game for us.

(Class discussion ensues identifying celebrities)

That’s right, the bottom left is Usher. Any guesses for the big picture on the right? It’s not Daniel Radcliffe.The big picture on the right is Elijah Wood, famous for playing Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. He was one of the nicest guys I have ever met; he came back twice to do the demo and stood in line with people, even though some celebrities may jump in the line or do stuff like that. Up on the left is will.i.am from The Black Eyed Peas. They had a virtual reality experience at Sundance. will.i.am is both a musician, and he’s also a media and tech personality and did some investing.

So it was like a really fun experience that I could name out some other folks that we got to meet over the time, and it was amazing. I put so many hands in and out of this demo.

It was a really funny thing, but it was also a wild experience, because the way they treat you, even though I just had a virtual reality experience, they treat you like a filmmaker there. You get to go to all these cool things. This filmmaker I’m a fan of named Darren Aronofsky, who made the film Requiem for a Dream and The Whale, he was there, and he had a VR experience there as well. So it’s just like this amazing time to meet a lot of the folks that I really admired through my time in film and just got to have a taste of that experience up close.

But it was wild because I was in my mid-20s and there was this tech and it had to be demoed, and all of a sudden I had to travel the world and just show this off to people.

And this is a conference in Montreal, and this is a video for a YouTube channel called Tested that got a bunch of views and went to Japan and to Europe, and across the United States, and this was an amazing experience with this tech. It was so much fun.

The Jeff Bezos Demo That Changed Everything

I want to share the story behind this crazy demo to Jeff Bezos.

One of the things happening at the company was that we had just had a really big layoff event and I am going to talk about some of the downsides and stories as well. We thought we had some money in the bank coming in; we hired assuming that was gonna hit and close, but the investor pulled out at the last minute. We had to do a snap layoff. If you’ve seen the Marvel, which Avengers one was it? Was it Endgame where half of the people disappear? That’s what happened to our company, so we call it the snap.

The company seemed like it was going out of business, but we had just committed to this re:MARS event that Amazon was doing. We had put all this work into this really cool robotic project. If you can use gloves in VR, you can use them to control robot hands. There are sensors on the robots so you can feel what the robot feels.

We were selected for this conference, and we’ve been invited to it. We pulled some favors to get into it. We were like “You know what? We’ve worked so hard on this really cool prototype, and we had partners from this other company that makes the robot hands, which was based in London. They were flying in. They were counting on us, and we thought, “Maybe it will be a last draw and let’s have some fun at this conference in Vegas.”
And I’m like, “You what? Let’s go for it.” As long as we’re here, and we’ve shown up, and we have nothing to lose, we’re just gonna we’re gonna go for it.

I am testing the robot hands here, and as we were setting up, everything kept breaking. We couldn’t get it to control. There were no safety features on it, and these robot hands are like $100,000. If you smack it into the table, if you do that, they could break. The conference organizers were looking at us with these massive robot hands, and like, “Do we have to kick you out of the conference? Your stuff is not working, and we are about to open”. And I was like, “No, it’s gonna work, it’s gonna work.”

The organizer came to me and said, “Okay, I’m gonna try it.” I’m like, “Oh, gosh, the safety stuff is gone.” Not the safety of the person, but the safety of the expensive robot hands. What if she breaks it? So we do it, and she’s having fun with it, I could tell. “Okay, it’s actually working well enough, even though it’s not perfect.”
And she said, “Okay, hey, take my camera, and you’re gonna record me as if I’m Jeff Bezos, and I’m gonna send it to Jeff and see if he wants to do it.” So I did that, and she said, “Okay, I’m gonna send it, I’ll let you know what he thinks. And I got a text later, “Hey, he’s gonna come tomorrow at 5.

It’s a private demo, don’t tell anybody.” Of course, I find all the journalists, and I tell them, “Hey, Jeff Bezos is coming at five. You definitely want to be here.”

I got these journalists to be right front and center when Jeff Bezos shows up to do our demo, and I didn’t get a great picture of him. At that time, Jeff Bezos was still very involved with Amazon. He wasn’t just like going and partying on yachts or whatever he does now. He was more like a tech influencer or person than he is today. So he comes and does it, and it is awesome.

And then, the journalists that I planted there, they all cover it, immediately, they’re telling the stories, and all of a sudden it’s like trending on Twitter. He tweets about it, he Instagrams about it, and for years afterwards, that was like the top thing where I’d get notifications all the time, and he tagged us as well. He tagged us in his stuff, even though he didn’t have to.

Because of that, the next week we got a big investment deal. The company was saved, at least for the time being. It was an amazing turnaround. So that was a super fun story.

👍👍👍👍Rule of Thumb #4: If you are going to ride on a rocket, be sure to pack a parachute

There is a famous quote from Sheryl Sandberg, who is a big tech person, and she was at Google and Facebook and wrote the book Lean In. She says:

“If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on.”

I have been talking about the rocket ship part of the journey, but I’m going to go to my rule of thumb number four: If you are going to ride on a rocket, you should also pack a parachute.

You should be sure to pack a parachute because not all rockets are successful. I hinted at some of the stories with HaptX having a snap layoff, which was really brutal. It turned into a fun story with Jeff Bezos, but these people I worked with lost their jobs with no notice.

HaptX ultimately had more of those things, and I left shortly after the Jeff Bezos event in 2020. I had a really great four years there but also there were really brutal times where things didn’t work out, layoffs happened, and it was really tough. After HaptX, there was another startup in the Seattle area that was the hot rising star called Convoy. It was a trucking startup, an Uber Freight competitor. It got funding from Bill Gates. Then Bono joined Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates as investors. Al Gore was an investor. Google invested $185 million. They reached a $3.8 billion valuation.

I joined them after the Google one, before the $3.8 billion one, and they were on the upswing. I thought, “This is the place to bet. If I’m joining this company and Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Bono are investing, it’s a sure thing, right?”

Well, it wasn’t. It shut down a couple of years ago. It fired a bunch of people without notice. It totally collapsed.

I left before the collapse—that is the parachute thing. I was there for two years riding the upswing, but under the hood, especially as a marketer working with sales folks, you could see it was a weird deal. They were buying market share in a lot of ways and doing deals that weren’t good for them.

If you can see those things happening, don’t get wowed by the big celebrity names backing a thing. They are prone to making mistakes too. Get a look under the hood at what is happening.

The Power of the Startup Network

Andrew Mitrak: The startup I joined after Convoy was actually founded by early Convoy engineers. The startup was called Glue—originally it was called Mystery, doing “date nights out.” Then the COVID-19 pandemic happened, and date nights out became illegal. You couldn’t do date nights out. So, they shifted to doing virtual employee events. The pandemic caused a boom in virtual events for companies because companies needed to engage their remote teams to avoid “quiet quitting.”

It was a smart move, basically riding the pandemic wave. However, the story shifted for that company too. When “return to office” happened, companies started to cut costs, and team events are often the first thing cut from a budget. So, I was there for close to two years, had a lot of fun and led a marketing team, but that was one where it didn’t quite work out.

In the meantime, I loaded this at the start and I had built a side hustle doing outbound marketing, basically lead generation. I founded that with another former Convoy employee. This was the next thing I was gonna try, which was running it full time as a company (Wolfscale). It was a really good side hustle. Running that full-time as an agency was tough.

What is cool about this story is how that company, Convoy, led to a lot of other companies being founded beyond it. So what’s fun is that when you’re at a startup, even if it fails, you’re building this amazing network of other entrepreneurs who are startup-minded, and a lot of those companies became customers of Wolf scale. I worked at one of those other companies as well. And ultimately, Convoy is what led me to my job at Google.
The person who hired me at Google was somebody I had worked for two years at Convoy. We had a very high opinion of each other.

And so even if something, a startup can fail, the company can fail, but you can succeed, that if you position yourself the right way, or ideally, you kind of get out before things blow up, or you’re kind of thinking of your parachute or your next steps, before things go bad, you can kind of ride the upswing, get some of the benefits of the company, you learn a lot from the start up experience, while not, kind of protecting yourself from some of the downside as well.

Well, of course, trying to help the company succeed, but sometimes a company, you know, success or failure is somewhat out of your control as a marketer.

👍👍👍👍👍Rule of Thumb #5: It’s all about relationships.

(And they matter more than ever in a world of AI.)

Andrew Mitrak: This is my final rule of thumb before we open up for questions.

At the end of the day, everything is about relationships. Relationships matter more than ever in a world of Artificial Intelligence.

There’s a lot of uncertainty about what’s going to get replaced and what’s not. Whether you trust somebody or not, whether you work with somebody or not, whether it’s somebody who makes you happy at work, that’s something that AI won’t be able to replace ever. Basically, for all of human existence, it’s been about relationships.

Every story I’ve told you here, everything happened because of relationships. My story and I wouldn’t make sense for me to talk about every individual person who got through along the way, but everything was because of somebody placing their faith in me, or hiring me, or trusting me to do some campaign, or working with me on something. All the jobs I’ve talked about, nothing ever happened because I applied online. Sure, maybe a job application through an online form was part of the process at some point, because it’s like a formality. But I always had someone. They’re either a personal reference or they’re directly at the company, or they’re directly the hiring manager, who was a reference in playing a part in beginning their role. So overall, all of this happens because of relationships.

Your reputation is really everything. Are you capable? Are you ambitious?
Are you a good person to work with? Those elements are always part of it. So the final takeaway is that everything is about relationships.

By the way, a great way to build relationships is a podcast, because all of a sudden, you’re meeting all these amazing guests, and you’re building relationships with them. You’ve researched their work, and you get to meet people who, otherwise, you might not have a reason to meet with you, and you just get to say, Hey, I have a podcast, do you want to talk? And they’ll talk to you, it works that way.

I could go on. I have more slides about the podcast and other stuff, but I want to stop here and open it up to Q&A from the group.

Q&A: Big Tech vs. Startup Culture

Xiaoying Feng: I remember someone asking about the difference between working in a startup and working at Google.

Andrew Mitrak: Going into Google, I am the happiest I have ever been. I love it and it is a really great place to work. Of course, there are tradeoffs with any big company. When I was at a startup, I reported to the CEO or the Board of Directors. I had a pretty big role, managed a team, and got to think about the large scope of marketing.

A tradeoff at a bigger company is that you narrow your scope. You focus on a specific area. You are going to be much more collaborative, and you have bosses, and bosses’ bosses, and their bosses have bosses. You will be taking the orders. You always have a boss, even you work at your own company. Your clients will be your boss at the end of the day. You operate in a more well-defined space. There is a tradeoff. There is a lot to do within that space, and there are new skills I am building, but it is different than running wild and demoing to Jeff Bezos.

I am personally grateful I had the experience of doing a startup before joining a big company. I can do a lot of things myself because I had to do them myself. There are people who have only worked at big companies who rely on agencies to do the job or other teams to get things done. I tend to just do a lot of things myself. I think that helps you stand out and that also shows that you have a lot of capabilities. Personally, I like the experience with several startups.

Also, selling things matters. When I was an entrepreneur, even when I was freelancing, I had to sell. I had to invoice clients and negotiate. As a marketer, if you are able to sell something and understand what that is like, and if you are supporting the salesperson, you learn so much more about marketing. At the end of the day, you are marketing stuff, and it will lead to the salesperson closing the deal. If you can empathize with the salesperson and go through what they are doing, you will be much better at your job. There are a lot of differences and these are my top thoughts about the differences.

Q&A: Balancing Work, Side Hustles, and Family

Xiaoying Feng: You do so many side hustles and have your main job. Do you ever sleep at all?

Andrew Mitrak: I also have three kids—a five-month-old, a three-year-old, and a five-year-old. So, I haven’t gotten a lot of sleep since I had kids, to be honest!

I definitely sleep overall, but I tend to like having a project at the end of the day. The biggest thing I gave up when I started the podcast was video games. I used to have a habit where, as my kids were falling asleep they’d want me to be next to them. And as they were falling asleep I would play my Nintendo Switch, mostly Zelda games.

I just stopped doing that. Instead, I have my laptop open and I will edit or research as they falling asleep. I think it is a more productive use of time. I really enjoy video games, but it is easy to get addicted to them. I try to replace one addiction with another.

I treat this podcast like a game: Can I get that guest? Is that going to be a good interview? Can I make the next one better than the last one? That is how I think about it.

👍 Bonus Rule of Thumb: Learn to Send a Cold Email

Xiaoying Feng: I have one more question connected to your podcast. How do you reach out to so many famous people? It is so difficult to start.

Andrew Mitrak: This is actually going to be my Rule of Thumb #6.

The number one guest I got was Philip Kotler. He is called the “Father of Modern Marketing.” He is in his 90s. I figured if I was going to talk to someone, I wanted to talk to a primary source. Who better than a person who’s widely regarded as the father of modern marketing? He seemed like the right guy to talk to, and he hadn’t been on that many podcasts. He isn’t really on the “podcast circuit.”

This is literally how I reached out.

My Rule of Thumb #6 is: Learn to send a cold email. Or just do cold outreach and meet with strangers. This kind of ties into building relationships, and a lot of marketing could be condensed into a cold email.

He responded within two hours.

There are a few things to unpack here. First, the podcast is called A History of Marketing. What guest doesn’t want to be part of history? If you are a marketer, the name itself lends itself to getting a guest. It isn’t “The Andrew Mitrak Podcast” that nobody would listen to and nobody wants to be part of.

Second, I called it a “new podcast series.” I had never recorded a single episode before. If he hadn’t replied, who knows if I would have even launched it?

Third, I showed that I had read his book. I flattered him. I’m not some random person. I’ve done the work.

Fourth, I said “our listeners.” I knew I would have at least two listeners—me and my wife. I haven’t published my podcast yet but I didn’t say how many. I also talked about what I intend to do.

Finally, the 45-minute request is a hack. If somebody agrees to 45 minutes, they’ll agree to an hour. If you say a half hour, somebody expects to get it done in a half hour.

You say 45 minutes, they expect to get done 15 minutes after that. And so it’s a way to ask for as little as possible, but get the most possible.

I also like the thrill of cold email. I had a lot of success early on, and then the thing that also happens after that, is a bowling strategy. You get one person, and then they get the other ones to knock down, right?

Every other guest is like, oh, you talked to Philip Kotler? Sure, I’ll do it because Philip Kotler did it. That’s amazing. If you can find your first win, the next ones are a lot easier. Phil himself was like, “Hey, I talked to Andrew. He asks good questions.
He sent off emails to a handful of other folks who became guests of early episodes as well. So, doing outreach, and if you’re a professional or young person, don’t just say, “Hey, could I grab coffee with you for 45 minutes to ask about my career?” People are busy, and they can’t do that all day, right?

But if you have a project, I’d love to help somebody with a project. If you’re doing a course, if you’re working on something like a startup, if you’re trying to learn something or build something, people love to help people who are young. People love to help people build stuff. They don’t want to have somebody suck out their time and ask about how to help their career. They want to help you build a thing. So, finding what is the thing that you’re asking, how can you have a project that makes people want to talk to you? I am not saying everybody should start a marketing history podcast, but if you can find your own marketing history podcast or find your own type of project that can lead you to interesting people and to publishing things online, then that can just pay dividends for the rest of your career. ​​

Andrew Mitrak: Thanks so much for having me. This was a lot of fun. I hope it was somewhat entertaining and useful. Xiaoying, thanks for inviting me. It was an honor to speak with you, and I had a lot of fun.

This week, I’m sharing my excellent conversation with Geoffrey Colon, a creative strategist and author of Disruptive Marketing. Geoffrey is a self-described “hybrid” marketer with a career spanning the full spectrum of the industry, from running street teams for Red Bull to leading brand strategy at Microsoft, with stints at Ogilvy, Dentsu and his own agencies in between. He’s won Cannes Lions, Webby’s, and bylined articles in Fast Company and Advertising Age.

In our conversation, Geoffrey draws a direct line between the first radio ads of the 1920s and the creator economy of today. He argues that the most successful marketers aren’t the ones try to invent something new, but those who embrace the art of the “remix” copying, transforming, and combining ideas from the past.

Here is what you’ll learn in this episode:

• The First Radio Ad: The story of station WEAF in 1922, and how a real estate promotion for apartments in New York City created the blueprint for interruptive advertising methods still in use today.

• The Art of the Remix: Why Geoffrey believes we overvalue “originality” and undervalue the power of borrowing ideas from adjacent industries to create something new.

• Guerrilla Tactics: A look back at the era of Red Bull street teams, and why physical, guerrilla marketing is making a comeback in a digital-first world.

• The Power of Unlearning: Why the age of AI isn’t just learning new tools, but being willing to “unlearn” old ways without falling victim to sunk costs.

Be sure to check out Geoffrey’s newsletter at Creative Studies and his popular TikTok.

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, who volunteers to review and edit transcripts for accuracy and clarity.

The First Radio Ad: WEAF and the Birth of Broadcast Marketing

Andrew Mitrak: Geoffrey Colon, welcome to A History of Marketing.

Geoffrey Colon: Thanks for having me.

Andrew Mitrak: You wrote a book called Disruptive Marketing, which we’ll talk a lot about. The very start of the book talks about the first radio ad on WEAF back in 1922. Can you talk about this story and how did you kind of come across this?

Geoffrey Colon: So WEAF was a station in New York City. At the time, radio was music and people talking on it. They would do things no different than today. They would maybe talk about what was happening in the world. That’s where most people were getting news, probably similar to how a lot of people get news on a news feed now on a social media app. You would turn the radio on and listen, I think as a group, to sort of figure out, “Oh, what’s going on?” and you would be entertained that way.

And at the time, they had to figure out how to monetize radio. It was expensive. The technology to run it was expensive. And I think the station said, “Well, how are we going to make this work? Because we have to figure out how to pay for all of this equipment.” And one of the people there got the idea of, “Well, why don’t we talk about things that need to be promoted?” And they came up with an idea of, “Let’s promote this local housing that was basically available in the Bronx* where families could go live.” And that was really the first radio ad as we knew it.

[*Correction: The neighborhood was in Queens, not The Bronx]

And that, I guess, was the beginning of the end, if you want to look at it that way, Andrew, in the sense that all media always has advertising that invades it. So you have radio, you have television, you have the internet, you have social media, you have whatever comes next. But advertising always figures out how to invade these spaces where people pay attention to something.

Andrew Mitrak: It’s a great story. I’m wondering, reading your book, it was published in 2016. It’s all here and now, future-looking work. And by the way, a lot of the future sort of, the things that you say in 2016 will happen in the future, happened in the future. So it’s very prescient in a lot of ways. But you start the book with this case study from 1922. What was your thinking? Why was that? Why did you feel the desire to start with this particular case study? What lessons did you want readers to draw from it?

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, there’s a tendency of us in marketing and many fields, we don’t really look back on really older history. We have a tendency of looking at things that have happened in the last two, maybe five-year cycle. And what I wanted to do is note like, hey, wait a minute. Here is a case of something that is 80-some years old and it basically explains how almost everything, what happens in every media space.

So like when people say, “Oh, the world is about attention and capturing attention,” it’s like, well, that was the case back in 1922 when this radio station decided, “Oh, let’s use attention, people’s attention to promote an opportunity to live somewhere.” I mean, we’ve always been in an attention economy. I don’t think that’s new at all. And that’s what I was really trying to show. And I’ve always been a believer of like everything is a remix. If we go back and study history, it doesn’t necessarily, you know, what’s the phrase? It doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. And that I think we’re not good as an industry of looking at how a lot of things are remixed and recycled from older eras that we just figure out like, “Oh, how do we make that fit the new era?” This concept of copy, transform, and combine.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, no, it’s totally true. It’s a theme that we’ve covered a lot on the show of that there’s these things that feel like contemporary debates within marketing or advertising. Is it creativity or is it measurement? Is it storytelling or is it salesmanship? And these debates, they’ve been happening for like 150 years. It’s like a lot of the things, it’s like, “Oh yeah, you could just trace it back.” And it’s not new. And it’s like, gosh, wouldn’t you think like we would just acknowledge that or at least start like, “Yeah, these are debates that have happened. Let’s kind of move forward from there.”

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah. Performance versus brand. I mean, a lot of people could say, wait a minute, that, you know, David Ogilvy was talking about that because he was always like, “If advertising doesn’t sell, then it’s not really doing what it’s supposed to do.” We have those debates now in this current era where it’s like, “Well, does it help sell?” It’s like, all right, we’ve been talking about this for 50, 60 years.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, totally. So one of the things that I like about this WEAF radio case study story is that one of the things is that this idea of radio ads didn’t come from radio people. That it came from like telephone people at AT&T. And that it’s like there was an innovative thing at the time, right? It was radio and it was ads and it was selling stuff and that was a way to monetize it. So there was innovation there, even though it was also interruptive. But it was people borrowing ideas from an adjacent industry and applying them in a novel way. And it seems like that’s a theme throughout your work is that that’s an angle for creativity and for the eye. Can you speak to that idea of borrowing from adjacent industries and applying them?

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, I mean, I’ve always been a generalist, not to use that term, but you know, how do you look at the world that, you know, in a wide manner? And then say, “They’re doing this over there. How do we apply that in our area?” But again, remix it so it fits our area. I sort of cringe when people will sort of say, “We need to go out and get an expert to do this particular job.” And then the job isn’t really creative or the output from that job isn’t really creative. And then people will sometimes be frustrated and say, “Well, it’s not as creative as I thought it would be.” And it’s like, well, yeah, because you’re basically having people who are not really wide, they’re just deep. And they’re doing exactly what you expect them to do.

I mean, there’s plenty of areas in marketing where I see this. Like if you market healthcare or insurance, you are probably doing a lot of the same things there. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago when you had organizations like GEICO and Progressive and State Farm said, “Wait a minute, let’s throw that old playbook out because they actually hired people who came from different industries to figure out what their marketing and advertising was going to look like.” So I think, you know, we should take more risk in terms of who can we get that is unique to basically apply their learnings to our field.

We’ve seen this in lots of different areas. Even if people say like, “Well, you wouldn’t hire someone outside medicine to work on medicine.” The thing is doctors and scientists are still inspired by lots of areas outside of medicine that they then apply. This is why, you know, you have a lot of medical scientists now saying things like, “Hey, one of the best things you could do is actually fitness.” And fitness doesn’t necessarily fall into like medical science, Andrew. It falls into like, well, wait a minute, that deals with like VO2 max and basically walking and doing things that should really, you know, come natural to people. But, you know, the more you apply things from other areas, the more that actually can lead to some interesting outcomes for, you know, how we basically navigate life.

Andrew Mitrak: Totally. You know, this is like another area that even within the guests that I’ve spoken with, I’ve spoken with real like, you know, marketing PhDs, experts, and folks who like are very, very deep into marketing as a discipline. And then I just had an interview that I just recently published with a historian at Nike. And basically the gist of the story was that, you know, their first head of marketing was their lawyer. Phil Knight was an accountant. Carolyn Davidson, who designed the Nike logo, was a student. And all these people who aren’t trained marketers, didn’t learn about the 4 Ps, you know, and didn’t get an MBA, but they just had good instincts, they had a passion, and they made many of the best marketing decisions of all time.

And it’s just kind of a thing to square. Like what is it? Is it worthwhile to read a bunch of marketing books and really learn it? Or what does that say when so many like folks who seem like amateurs or are not experts but can make a lot of the same, the right decisions on it? So like, yeah, what’s your reaction to that?

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, I mean, I’m in the middle there. I’ve always been more of like a hybrid where it’s like, I think it’s bad if you’re a person who’s like, “Well, you shouldn’t study anything on marketing. You should just go do it and wing it.” I mean, like there’s a lot to learn from the science of marketing. I think like it’s important to study those things. That being said, I also think it’s good to not be mired in, “Oh, well, that’s the way to do it and that’s the only way to do it.” Because you don’t make up any ground that way, Andrew, when you sort of get stuck with the, “Well, this is how things have worked the last 60 years. That’s what we’re going to continue to do.” Because ultimately that’s what leads to fatigue from most audiences where they’re just like, “I know I’m looking at advertising or I know I’m being marketed to.” And then it becomes less effective.

So I think it’s somewhere in the middle. I always tell students who are marketing majors, “Oh, I’m glad you’re doing that. But go build a business too. Go learn how to actually build a business, even if it’s like selling t-shirts online. Just go learn how to do something so you’re not a person that I call the professional managerial class, people who have advanced degrees, but when you say, ’Have you ever built anything?’ they’re like, ’Well, no, I’ve only managed things.’ I’m like, ah, I don’t know if you really, you know, I don’t know if that’s all that you need to do to make things really happen in life.”

Andrew Mitrak: Or go sell something as well. Like building something and selling something, it’s like your empathy for a salesperson as a marketer changes so much if you’ve had to like sell and close a deal yourself or things like that where it’s like, yeah, you have to have like life experience to apply it as well.

To kind of wrap a bow on the WEAF radio case study, it’s like on the one hand, this is a hundred years ago now and there are still radio ads and there’s still interruptive things. But then part of the lesson is like, can’t we evolve past that? Can’t we get past interruption? But then interruption still exists. And does that just mean that it’s been around for a hundred years, it’ll be around for a hundred more years and there’s that Lindy effect where it’s like it’s just existed forever and it’ll continue? There’s some reason to that? Or is the lesson like, no, we need to really think of how to break away from it? Do both of those things exist at the same time? Or what’s your thought about that?

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, I mean, I think if you didn’t have interruptions, you would just sort of have what we have with streaming nowadays. When I mean streaming, like when a streamer goes on YouTube and is on there for four hours or they’re on Twitch and you’re like, “Wow, like you’re not taking a break at all.” You just, ultimately the audience fades as well from scenarios like that. I’m not saying that everything has to have advertising breaks, but I think advertising when you do interrupt, you can decide what, you know, whether you want to take a break and not pay attention or you may happen to pay attention.

I don’t know what the answer is there because I think if you integrate more advertising or more sponsorship into media, people start to get upset about that as well because they’re listening to you talk like you and I are talking and then all of a sudden they’re like, “Wait a minute, they’re talking about something and I think they’re trying to promote it.” And I don’t like that either. So it’s, you know, it’s, we’re in a weird world where we’re always trying to figure out the best way to sell or give awareness to something. And I don’t know what the right answer is.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, sort of, I guess that’s part of the fun. It’s like an evergreen challenge and we continue to experiment.

Guerrilla Marketing: From Ancient Rome to West Philadelphia

Andrew Mitrak: And so, okay, shifting from that example, I also want to talk about some of the kind of historical moments of your own career because a topic that I haven’t covered at all in the show is guerrilla marketing. And can you just share when did you first start doing guerrilla marketing?

Geoffrey Colon: You know, I was really, I got really into like graffiti and street art having grown up not far away from Philadelphia where graffiti actually, the modern graffiti I should say, was invented. If we look at, you know, where graffiti really originated from, there’s cases of it going back to ancient Rome and ancient Greece. But the modern version of it came from Philadelphia and then it was really...

Andrew Mitrak: Like the opening of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air [Laughs]

Geoffrey Colon: Correct. Correct. No, that’s actually a good example. And then New York City took it and put it on another level. So I’ve always really been interested in guerrilla marketing because you are doing something out of context, out of the norm. You might be, you may see a blank wall somewhere and you’re like, “Okay, how are we going to take that over and paint it in a way that draws attention to what our product is that we’re doing?” It might be what we’ve seen recently with people setting up real-life versions of people in storefronts and getting people’s attention because they’re like, “Whoa, what is going on in there?” There was a recent case of a B2B product called Ramp that recently did this in New York City.

So it’s, you know, guerrilla marketing does exist still. There’s just less cases of it because you can’t track it. You can’t really see what the effectiveness of it is. But it makes for good PR and it can be exciting because you can do stuff that’s just sort of out of the norm that we have usually been doing, I would say the last, you know, 20 years where we sort of stick to the playbook.

Andrew Mitrak: It’s funny because you mentioned how you don’t see as much of it anymore. And it is one where as I became aware of marketing, I would hear a lot about guerrilla marketing, right? And I think that in the early 2000s-ish to maybe the late, early 2010s, I feel like I just heard guerrilla marketing as sort of a buzzword a bit. And then I don’t hear as much about it anymore. Is it because it’s been absorbed into normal marketing? Is it just like a PR stunt, I guess? Or is it that there’s actually less of it happening as the world becomes so much more digital? Or it’s not really a digital guerrilla marketing per se and that’s, and it’s not trackable and therefore so much marketing is digital that it’s just less guerrilla is part of it? Is that sort of, like why is it disappearing, I guess is my long-winded way of asking a question.

Geoffrey Colon: I think we’ve, I think you hit the nail right on the head. I think we have over-indexed on digital. And so we don’t really put an emphasis on guerrilla marketing because that’s in the physical world, it’s in an analog world. The reason I think it’s starting to creep up again is because people are doing a lot more things in real life. But also a lot of that scales. Canadians actually were really big on guerrilla marketing. They, in Vancouver, they called it culture jamming. That, I mean, like Canada really sort of led the way. I think Kalle Lasn who wrote the book on guerrilla marketing is Canadian. So I don’t know what it is north of the border that made Canadians do that, but I think they saw something that said, “Wait a minute, let’s take advantage of the physical space and then figure out ways to draw attention to ourselves.” And then that’s just, that has spread across the world, you know, pretty much to every territory, every country now does some form of guerrilla marketing for brands.

Andrew Mitrak: And as you were early in your career, you were doing some guerrilla marketing yourself. And I think, did you work with the Red Bull street team?

Geoffrey Colon: I did. Yeah. That was pretty wild.

Andrew Mitrak: What was that story?

Geoffrey Colon: I was running sort of my own, this is early 2000s, my own influencer business out of my apartment in Brooklyn. And Red Bull approached me because I used to do a lot of street teams for music releases. Anytime there was something big coming out in the music world, street teams were the most effective way to call attention to that because you still had physical record stores. So you wanted to make sure people knew when something was coming out. And they said, “Hey, we want to hire you to figure out how to do this to get our product out to more people.”

And Red Bull at the time was really only popular, the first area in North America that it was really popular was Miami because they sort of figured out how to get the product into nightclubs there. And then they said to the bartenders, “We’ll give you this product for free, but can you push it based on these drinks that you can mix together?” And then more people were like, “What is that?” And it’s like, “Oh, that’s Red Bull.” And that drove word of mouth that then got the beverage to grow off-premise. So it actually started to show up in like delis and grocery stores.

But I ran, you know, street teams in New York for a while for Red Bull. And now we still see the cars out there with the can on the back that drive around. I mean, again, that’s a lot of guerrilla marketing as well. Like people will always ask me like, “What do you get from that?” But you get attention. You go to an event, people see things. Sampling was really big. So, you know, we would do a lot of things where we would actually get the can in people’s hands to try it. You know, I don’t see a lot of that anymore.

Andrew Mitrak: I don’t know if I hang out in the areas where that might occur anymore. But I know when I was in college, I think that was the very first time I had a Red Bull, I think, was somebody with a car and a can and handing it to me. And being a poor college student, I’m like, “All right, sure, I’ll get some free calories out of this.” And that, I don’t know, I didn’t convert me. I don’t drink many Red Bulls, but you know, it got me to try it and be aware of it a lot.

So how did you transition from having your own agency to working at Ogilvy?

Geoffrey Colon: I sort of went from having my own to working at a couple of other places. And then, you know, Ogilvy had an opportunity and I was working at a really large digital agency before I went to Ogilvy. And I just was like, “Wow, it would be interesting to be at a big traditional agency at a time when they were really yearning for people with social media and digital experience.” And so, you know, I had a great boss there. She totally got it, was really a good social media marketer herself. And we just were able to apply a really lot of interesting strategy to the clients that we had. But I was also able to learn a lot from like the traditional creative directors there and how things were put together, you know, for what I guess we would consider old media. But I think, you know, when you understand that entire mix of how to buy media, how to make creative, what does that creative look like, what do these stories look like, what’s a customer journey look like? I mean, it’s a good education, I think, to be in an organization like that.

David Ogilvy and the Hybrid Marketer: Balancing Creativity and Fundamentals

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, you were kind of talking about how you want to do both. You want to be a hybrid creative, but also you want to know the principles of marketing and you want to know the fundamentals. And it seems like that’s something you get out of a place like Ogilvy is some of the structure and discipline and kind of the big company thinking and almost understand which parts need to be disrupted in a way because you’ve kind of seen how a larger agency works firsthand.

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, and I mean, David Ogilvy is interesting because he has tons of case studies of things that I would consider to be disruptive for their time and place. I mean, a lot of times people are like, “Oh, that’s an old stodgy, you know, advertising agency.” But when you look at the case studies again, going back to how we look at history, it’s like, wait, what, you know, they did then could be applied now. And that can be quite disruptive. Putting an eye patch on someone who is, you get people to pay attention to the fact, “Oh, why does that person have an eye patch? Oh, that’s an interesting shirt.” You know, that’s, those are interesting tactics.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. So how much, so you mentioned David Ogilvy and you worked at the agency Ogilvy and he had, he had probably retired in what, like the 80s and had passed away by the time you were at the company, right? But was his legacy still there? Like does his legacy a big part of the, you know, it still bears his name, so clearly it’s at some point it’s there. But do they still kind of like give everybody Confessions of an Advertising Man and have them like read Ogilvy on Advertising to sort of understand sort of some of the history of it?

Geoffrey Colon: Your first day there, I remember, here’s Ogilvy on Advertising. Everybody gets that book who joins the agency. Yeah. So his spirit is definitely embedded there. There are quotes all over the walls there. I don’t think that I don’t think they’ve tried to move away from their historical legacy like a lot of other larger agencies have.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, because a lot of other agencies, you know, the one of the names like Ogilvy just becomes an O, like an extra thing in like the big string of letters and it’s like it gets merged in and gets shortened and you kind of lose like who was that guy to begin with. So it’s cool that his legacy was still there. Like what, how was it sort of applied still? Like how does it go from like a wall or some quote to actually like showing up in materials?

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, I mean, every brief there is still originated from what his briefs were. So that hasn’t gone away. And if people are like, “Well, why don’t they update that?” Because it works. Like why change that? It’s because it’s simplified, Andrew. It’s really simplistic. And I think the issue with briefs is we make them so complex that when you get them back, you’re like, “This is 25 pages,” whereas it’s one page with three things that you’re basically trying to do.

And I find in this day and age when everyone’s like, “Okay, let me do my hand talking here. Here’s the 70 things.” It’s like, no, no one’s going to remember that because people don’t have the time or attention to remember that. What’s the one thing you really want to get across? I think that’s important in terms of not just advertising, but like anything you’re trying to do in marketing. Whether it’s marketing a product, marketing someone who’s trying to run for office, or marketing anything, an idea. You really need to, you know, this is where the whole elevator pitch comes from. Nobody really wants to be in an elevator being pitched something that they’re like, “Yeah, I don’t understand what you’re saying.” They just want to know like, “Oh, by the way, I have an idea. It takes this and this.” And they’re, “Oh, yeah, let’s actually do that.” So communications skills, I think we’ve made them way too complex for the 21st century. And we can make them much more intelligent again.

Andrew Mitrak: As far as the complexity, one of the truisms from David Ogilvy, his principles is like, if you have a successful campaign, keep running it. It’s like you’re not presenting to a standing army, you’re presenting to a marching parade. And the idea that if you have something that works, you don’t need to just like change it up every season just because. And I feel like there is a thing where it’s like people, you know, have the new holiday ad just because and totally rewrite everything just because it’s like a new year. And there probably could be a little more of just repeating a good message, sticking with a good slogan, not rebranding and having a new jingle or whatever. Like, yeah, do you think about that or are there other sort of like lessons that folks should sort of embrace still from Ogilvy?

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, I mean, that’s a big one. Like even modern thinkers like Mark Ritson talk about that. Like he will say, “Why are people running these new ads or why do they have a whole new campaign when they should run the this other one?” It’s one thing if you change a campaign because let’s say the company has new products or features of those products. But if you’re like, “Hey, let’s do a brand campaign.” It’s like, is your brand still based on what it is that you sort of laid the foundation for with this original campaign? Yes. Then keep running that because you’re, to your point, and I love the analogy, it is like a parade. There’s a lot of people who have not probably seen the messaging that you have to keep hitting and hitting and hitting until they realize like, “Oh, that’s interesting, that company.”

And I think we’ve seen that in a lot of different areas, people taking that to heart. I just also liked David Ogilvy’s approach to the fact that, you know, he said like, “Your customer isn’t a moron. It’s your wife.” I think I have that quote correct.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, it’s along those lines, yeah.

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, it’s like we have a tendency of thinking that our audiences are different from who they really are. And I think we’re actually going back to an era where if you understand who the audience is because let’s say you’re marketing something that you yourself use. So you’re like, “Oh, I know who the audience is.” Like that’s way more impactful than people who may say, “Well, this is who we want the audience to be.” That’s very different and that sometimes is delusional, if I may say that word.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. No, exactly. It’s funny because when I recommend Ogilvy, I say, “He does use some gendered language at the time. Yada yada.” Like caveat, it was a different, I mean, I don’t know if it’s a good excuse, but it was a different time. But like there’s a lot of truth to that. And the intention behind it is actually, yeah, speak, don’t assume your customer is a moron. Like they’re actually intelligent. You don’t have to dumb things down that much.

He also was a proponent of like actually having a lot of detail in your ads. And I don’t know if that works totally today on social and of course it doesn’t apply to every format. But in general, like just assuming like sometimes there’s a thing like, “Oh, everything has to fit in, you know, a three-word slogan and you can’t have a, you know, but it’s like actually sometimes you want to read a paragraph of like good copy about why this product is so great or that, you know, that Rolls-Royce ad about how it’s at 60 miles an hour, the loudest thing in this is the electric clock or whatever it was. Like these little things that just like, “Oh yeah, that like totally catches your imagination.” And he’s willing to write longer, which I also also like.

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah. Yeah.

From Agency to Big Tech: The Microsoft Shift

Andrew Mitrak: So you shifted from Ogilvy to Microsoft, and which is like a pretty big transition. So at this point you’ve been a solo agency owner, you’ve worked at leading digital agencies, you’ve worked at larger ones like Ogilvy, and here you are at like among the top few largest companies in the world and you do a brand leadership role for you. Like what was that like going to Microsoft and what was like sort of the big shift from agency world to, you know, big tech world?

Geoffrey Colon: I mean, it’s a huge leap in terms of the learning curve because you’re going from outside a company and really being sort of an advisor because that’s really what agencies are, they’re advising their clients, to being in-house and having to learn everything about the brand. From like the history of the brand, every product at the brand, every failed product at the brand because that comes into play too in terms of understanding evolution. Every solution area that the company was involved in.

I mean, there’s a lot to learn there, especially for, you know, when I got there, I think the company was around 40 years old, but it feels like 100 years old because there’s so many things that a company like Microsoft does. So yeah, it was a big learning. And I liked that though. I think, you know, drinking out of a fire hose is good for everyone to do at least once in your life where you don’t feel intelligent, you constantly feel like, “Wow, I don’t know anything.” And you have really, really smart people in the room around you at all times because that’s how you get smarter. That’s how you get better. You don’t get smarter or better by being around people who aren’t really good at their craft. So I think that was a great challenge. I looked back at that era and it’s, it was almost like having an advanced degree on steroids, Andrew, because you’re just like learning how to scale multi-billion dollar businesses.

Disruptive Marketing and DisruptiveFM

Andrew Mitrak: And so you wrote Disruptive Marketing while you were employed at Microsoft, right?

Geoffrey Colon: Yes.

Andrew Mitrak: And you’re publishing this and hosting a podcast called Disruptive FM while you were at Microsoft. And did you feel like, were you partly speaking and preaching to Microsoft employees trying to like evangelize a shift in thinking? Or were you more like and also speaking to people outside of Microsoft? Or what was your approach to sort of communicating both within your company and outside your company?

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, it was internal and external. I think what I identified is that regular people on the internet were going to have larger influence than what I guess you would call the mainstream media or journalists. At the same time, I also thought employees were going to have huge influence on how you sell products. And then you were also going to have a huge influence on the other people who work at the company in terms of inspiring them.

I think what I identified early on is what you call, you know, the creator economy. This was 2013, 14 where I was like, “Hey, video is everywhere. This is, you know, how things are going to work.” And I remember someone going like, “No, no one’s going to watch video with like regular people or people who like work at a company.” And then I was like, “Hey, I think podcasting is going to be big and I think it’s also going to convert into like audio video like we’re doing right now.” And I remember someone saying, “Nope, that’s not going to happen either.”

But the reason I look back on that and I realize why those people said that, these were people who were PR folks who were scared about change because if that changes, then their job, which was pitching people at the New York Times or Fortune or Wired, they don’t see that as relevant. And it’s like, no, no, no, no, you can adapt because you’re just going to be pitching to creators, these people who are all talking about different things on YouTube or TikTok. I just don’t think they could see that, Andrew, at the time. I think they see it now. But I think every company sees that now. So I don’t know. It’s sometimes lonely seeing some of these things, you know, ahead of the curve and at other times it’s pretty interesting. So...

Andrew Mitrak: That’s right. I mean, because you’re also, you’re being a little provocative too. You’re talking about disruption and there are probably people where, you know, you kind of criticize MBAs a little bit. You probably work with a lot of MBAs, right? And you’re talking about this old way of doing things and Microsoft is probably doing a lot of those old things. Did that lead to any uncomfortable meetings at all or anything like that? Or what was that like?

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, I mean, I think that provocation, like if you look at how people provoke on the web now, a hot take gets people to, you know, “What? Why are you saying that?” You know, um, I think there were parts of the book that I, when I wrote it, I was like, “I’m going to say stuff that is controversial because otherwise no one’s going to pay attention.” And that’s sort of how the web operates for better or for worse. I don’t think it’s always a good thing that people do that.

I think now if I rewrote the book or wrote a second book, I would take a different tone of that’s much more uplifting and has more of a collective leadership style. But at the time, that’s what you did to provoke people out of like a stupor. And yeah, those, I mean, sometimes people would be like, “Nah, this is not, you know, this is not where things are headed. This is always going to be relevant.” You know, that’s not necessarily something I always wanted to get into debates with people about. But, you know, I saw like, hey, there’s a need for creative technologists at these companies. There’s a need for people who understand APIs just as much as saying, “Well, I got my MBA from Northwestern or Wharton.” I don’t downgrade MBAs. When I wrote the book, I didn’t have one at the time. I went back and got one since. But like I think there’s much more of a need of just human understanding from folks that you may not get from an advanced degree.

Andrew Mitrak: Totally. That’s right. And obviously the gist is the point of the book is not to like diminish MBAs or anything like that. But it’s to really advocating for this idea of creative hybrids and that there’s lateral thinking and having broad experience that’s not purely just MBA to management consulting to big tech and management with no experience actually building things and being hands-on and being able to draw inspiration from outside of a very specific worldview.

Geoffrey Colon: That’s right. I mean, some of my best employees I worked with had like philosophy degrees. Some of the best UX people could also, you know, code or maybe they failed out of being like an engineer and did business. But like we’re in a weird, like to your point, Andrew, we have weird hybrid roles now that you can’t just say, “Well, I’m going to go and major in this.” It’s like you have to have a lot of different subjects and do a lot of different things and have a lot of range to really apply that to the world that we’re currently in or and the world that we’re like moving into.

Podcast Marketing: From Niche to Mainstream

Andrew Mitrak: I want to ask more about Disruptive FM because you, I’m relatively new to podcasting myself. I was a long, I was a very, very early like podcast listener like back in like when the Ricky Gervais Show was out in like 2005-ish or something like that. That was the first one I got into. But I mean, I’m sure you even predate me on podcasting.

Geoffrey Colon: No, no, no, no. That’s about the time I got into things too. 2005-ish. Yeah.

Andrew Mitrak: Right around that, yeah, right around then. But you actually were producing like relatively like way early like as far as especially business-wise, there wasn’t nearly as much business-related podcasting stuff. A lot of it was like comedy shows or things like that. But so Disruptive FM, you’re producing that. What did you learn about podcasting as you were doing it in those early days? Like beyond technical stuff or things like that, what was you worked on it for a long time, you’re still podcasting. What is it that you got out of it and what did you learn from podcasting?

Geoffrey Colon: You know, the things that I thought people didn’t want to hear about when I would do episodes where I’d be like, “Oh, I’m going to, you know, interview this person who wrote a book.” I have a lot of authors that were on the show. You know, maybe the book wasn’t a bestseller or, you know, no one really knew who the author was. And I’m like, “All right, we’re going to do this. I doubt anyone’s going to really like this episode.” Those were the ones that always did really, really well. Like the niche topics. People loved hearing about that because they would always say the same thing to me, which is, “You know, hey Jeff, I wouldn’t know about that unless you told me about it.”

Which made me realize that even in our algorithmic discovery world, there’s still a need for human curators, people who find things and tell other people about them because not everyone’s going to know about every single thing out there. And then when you make them aware of it, they’re like, “Wow, that is like a fascinating topic. I got really, really into that.” So that was a big learning for me early on, you know, before people said, “Oh, there’s tons of people out there who talk about micro topics.” It’s like, yeah, and a lot of them write books. People are really fascinated about that just as much as they are about, you know, the big authors.

The Many Benefits of Podcasting

Andrew Mitrak: For sure. Yeah, and reading somebody’s book and then getting to interview that person is a magical feeling too because when you read a book, it’s like you’re so removed from the author in a way. And in podcasting, you’d have no reason to really talk to me per se or spend an hour with me. I’m some guy with a podcast and all of a sudden you will and it’s amazing when you just reach out to people and be like, “Hey, I have a podcast. Do you want to talk about your book and talk about other things?” It’s kind of just a wonderful shortcut to get to meet people and have conversations that you otherwise wouldn’t get to have. And I just personally, I enjoy this and I also, I’m sure did you kind of experience that at all as you were just reading books and getting to talk to cool authors on stuff?

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, and in a lot of ways, I mean you bring up a really good point. It’s like exchanging business cards. I know that sounds wild, but when you’re like, “Hey, would you like to come on my podcast, we’re going to talk about this,” you then are connected to that person. It isn’t so much about the metrics as much as, “Hey, we talked, we got to learn some things from each other. This is really great. Now I know you and now I can actually talk to you in the future.” I mean, almost every person I had on, and I had a lot of guests on over the decade that I hosted that show, I mean I could reach out to almost all of them and say, “Could I ask you a question or could I run something by you?” And some of the people I had were nobodies at the time who are now huge. Scott Galloway, Steven Bartlett, Gary Vee, very early on when not many people knew these people. I had interesting CEOs on as well that most of them are retired but I think it’s interesting in terms of, I’m happy that people actually took a chance and said, “Sure, I’ll go on your podcast.” Some people I don’t even know if they knew what a podcast was when I would bring them on because it was audio at the time, audio only until later.

The Evolution of Podcasting Distribution

Andrew Mitrak: I didn’t think about that. At that time you were probably still having to explain what a podcast was like, “No, it’s not on the radio. No, it’s not a live webinar. It’s a recording.”

Geoffrey Colon: This is how it’s distributed, you know, this is how people listen to it. It was at a time when Apple sort of ruled that world. Spotify didn’t have any podcasts, iHeartRadio didn’t have podcasts, Amazon didn’t have podcasts. I mean, it was still the wild west in terms of listenership and people taking a chance on that, but, you know, look at the medium now.

Andrew Mitrak: Do you have any thoughts on how it’s evolved as a marketing channel itself? Like when you were starting, obviously beyond it just growing and there being more listeners and more podcasts in the world overall. Has it mechanically as a marketing channel or how brands or individuals think of it for marketing purposes? Has podcasting changed in your career working on it?

Video Podcasting and Gen Z Listening Habits

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah. It’s gotten, I mean, some of the early podcasts I remember were almost three hours, like they were long. And you would just talk about everything. It actually reminds me a lot of FM radio. It’s like, “Hey, let’s just experiment and talk.” And they were minimally edited. You did not edit a lot of it because it just was for people to listen to. Now I find if you’re not doing video, you probably are going to have a harder time being discovered. Now, that’s at this moment. I’m starting to hear a shift from Gen Z listeners saying, “I don’t want to watch video. I want to be in my headphones again.” Now this is a, I haven’t scientifically researched this, but I’m starting to hear from more of the younger generation, they want to just listen to some things, but it still has to be theater of the mind. Meaning there’s two people talking, maybe then there’s something they shift to something else, then they shift to something else. So it’s like you have to still keep the audience engaged. And I think the same is true with anything now is it’s not a matter of being short, it’s a matter of like, is it interesting? Do you have interesting people? Are you talking about interesting things? I mean, that’s the biggest learning I think nowadays.

The Shift to Fractional Marketing Roles

Andrew Mitrak: You’ve had your own small agency, you’ve worked at large agencies like Ogilvy, you’ve worked in-house at Microsoft, which is one of the biggest companies in the world and you have your own practice again. You have your own agency again now.

Geoffrey Colon: I do. Yeah.

Andrew Mitrak: And how is marketing different across those environments? Just broad question, but what is the same and then what’s different across them?

Geoffrey Colon: You know, most companies that I advise now and consult with, they really want people who are immersed in understanding what their company does. So they’re not so interested anymore in let’s hire an agency and they’ll do X, Y, and Z and then they’ll go away. They probably have an in-house team. So the in-house team does a lot, but they still need people who are outside in to keep them honest because if you look at some of the worst work that’s been done over the last five years, it’s been from in-house agencies that don’t have outside advisors. Because an outside advisor isn’t drinking the Kool-Aid of that company, let’s just say. And you need that. CMOs actually want that. They’ll say like, “Hey, we’re going to have a couple outside consultants.” And you know, you’d always be in-house going, “Oh great, we’re going to have this person who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” But those people actually would just keep you honest about, like you said, “Hey, I don’t know that’s a great idea. Here’s why.” Or like, “That’s a great idea. You’re not going far enough with it to make impact.” So that’s what I’m starting to realize is that fractional work is really changing what our relationship is with marketing. I noted this in the book as well that most of us would be, let’s say, fractional temporary gig workers when it comes to marketing. And that doesn’t mean that all full-time jobs are going away. It just means that there’s probably less of those on the staff. And then everything else is supplemented with other people who may come on board and do something for five months and then they’re done with that particular project. So it’s almost like the future of marketing is the future of work, which is a lot like putting a movie together. “Hey, you’re going to be working on this. It’s going to take us four months to put it together. After that you got to go find whatever your next gig might be.” And I’ve been working like this now for the past year and a half. And I’ll be honest with you, Andrew, it’s scary, but it’s also exciting at the same time because it’s disruptive to make that point.

The Power of Being a Generalist

Andrew Mitrak: It’s great. Everything you’ve talked about, I resonate a lot because I think of myself also as a very generalist type person. My background’s in video and in virtual reality production, things like that. And then startup marketing and I’m at big tech now but also do a podcast. And also have some creative outlet where I want to learn about other things. And my career is never like one thing at a time. It’s at least two things sort of. And you have more than two things. It seems like most of the time you have a lot of things going on, which is I think just good. It’s like a good way to have a rich experience in life and just embrace a lot of things and not like that you’re dilly-dallying and just sampling, but you’re doing a lot of things in a meaningful way, but also wearing hats which makes you better at the other thing. It’s like I do this thing here and that gives me an idea for this company over here. And that’s just I think a productive way to be a good creative and a good marketer, right?

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah. It almost is like this, I saw this thing recently where someone said Dr. Seuss actually niched up instead of niched down, which is he was a really good writer, but he knew that just writing words wasn’t going to be enough. So he figured out slowly how to do illustration even though it wasn’t the best. But he figured that out and he became world renowned. That is like I think the way that I look at things now. It’s like someone might say, “Are you an expert in this area?” No, and I probably never will be, but I’ll know enough to be dangerous to get by on that with the other things that you need to blend together to make something happen in our sort of creative era that we’re in. That’s really how creators operate. When you talk to a lot of creators, like people will say, “Oh, you’re amazing at this.” And they’ll be honest. They’ll be like, “I don’t really know how to use that. I just sort of figured it out.” And that mindset, we need more of that, especially to solve I think most of the problems in the 21st century because you can’t just be like, “Well, we don’t know what to do there. Let’s just give up.” It’s like, no, you got to figure that out.

Adapting to AI and Unlearning Skills

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, no, totally. And also I think there’s, we’re at this moment of course with AI where a lot of things are like you have to unlearn and relearn things too. And if you have an experience at learning new things, it’s a little less intimidating to unlearn some things because you’re less attached to them. Because it’s only if your whole body of work has all been in one really specific area doing one thing in one specific way and then this new technology comes and changes that, it’s like, “Wow, I have all this sunk cost.” And I have a little bit of sunk cost across a lot of things, but I’m willing to kind of give it up a little more and change it. So I think it’s like overall a pretty healthy thing.

Where to Find Geoffrey Colon

Andrew Mitrak: Well, Geoffrey, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. There are a lot of places where listeners can find you online. Where do you recommend people who have enjoyed this conversation find your work and follow you online?

Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, I have a website, geoffreycolon.net. I spell my name with a G just for those who are listening. I’m also pretty active on LinkedIn and I have a Substack like so many people called Creative Studies. I’ve also been a lot more active on TikTok. I know that sounds wild, Andrew, but I don’t know, like sometimes I just like to talk about interesting things because you’re like, “Well, I’m just going to bring the phone out and do it and it doesn’t have to be polished.” And people sort of, they like that. They just join in on the conversation. They ask questions. You know, I try to talk about the things in terms of like, “Hey, everything is a remix. Here’s where this may have originated from and we’re seeing it again.” And I think younger people really love that. And I like that too. I think that that’s important in our era where, I think as a person who’s more advanced in my career, I think it’s important to give back to people who are new in their career, whether it’s through time or advice or just listening.

Andrew Mitrak: That’s awesome. I love that, you know, you’ve inspired me. I should open up TikTok again. I’ve dabbled in it and I do get scared about it. But here I am, I’m telling everybody to unlearn and relearn. I’ve got to do it myself and get back on TikTok. So I’ll check out your work there and dabble as well. And it’s great. I know a lot of college students listen to this as well. So I’m glad that you’re there educating young people about your career. So yeah, Geoffrey Colon, thanks so much for joining me. I really enjoyed this conversation and it was just such a pleasure to read your book, to read your work, and I’ll keep following you online because it’s all great stuff you’re putting out.

Geoffrey Colon: Thank you, Andrew.

This week, I’m joined by Tracey Panek, the corporate historian for Levi Strauss & Co, a company that embraces its past as an active part of its marketing strategy.

Tracey’s role sits directly within the marketing department. Among her many tasks is to mine Levi’s archives for authentic stories. “Authenticity” may be a buzzword we hear often, but Levi’s backs it up with primary sources, including patents, artifacts recovered from shipwrecks, and of course, jeans… lots and lots of jeans.

Tracey walks us through the brand’s evolution from a dry goods wholesaler serving miners in the California Gold Rush to a globally recognized icon of American culture.

This episode is a great case study in how a company can embrace its heritage without getting stuck in the past.

Here is what you’ll learn in this episode:

• The Patent to Trademark Pivot: How Levi’s transitioned from relying on the functional patent of the copper rivet (1873) to building brand equity through the “Two Horse” trademark once the patent expired.

• The “Picks and Shovels” Reality: Why Levi Strauss was originally an importer/wholesaler, and how a customer letter led to the invention of jeans.

• Cultural Chameleons: How the brand navigated the shift from John Wayne conservatives to the “dangerous” denim of the 1950s and the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s.

• Campaign Spotlights: The stories behind the sales-doubling “Launderette” ad of the 80s and the Walt Whitman-inspired “Go Forth” campaign.

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, who volunteers to review and edit transcripts for accuracy and clarity.

Bridging History and Marketing at Levi’s

Andrew Mitrak: Tracey Panek, welcome to A History of Marketing.

Tracey Panek: Thank you for having me.

Andrew Mitrak: I thought I’d start by asking you about the connection between history and marketing at Levi Strauss & Co. You’re a corporate historian. What is your relationship to other marketers at the company?

Tracey Panek: Well, I’m actually part of the marketing department, so it’s a very close relationship. It’s actually a really great place to be because I can see what projects are coming up and what I can tie into that we can use and provide resources from the archives to. So, it’s a great spot to be in.

Andrew Mitrak: One of my research sources for prepping for this interview was a book called Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World, written by Lynn Downey. I saw that Lynn worked as a historian at Levi’s. Was she your predecessor? Did she help build this history department, and what did this history department look like when you took it over?

Tracey Panek: Lynn was my predecessor. She worked at the company for almost 25 years. She was hired in 1989 to establish the archives. Her great contribution was to help start to tell the stories, was to help try to clear up myths about Levi in particular, but other stories that had been told that weren’t really accurate. She also scoured the world in search of pieces to add to the collection, to build the collection. So when I joined in 2014 at her retirement, there was a great collection in place.

But one of the things that was missing is it was a very manual collection. And what I mean by that is it was not digital. If you wanted to use the collection, you had to come in person. There was the need to bring the collection into the 21st century. So I started in mid-year 2014. By the end of the year, we were doing the first photoshoot—we now do this annually—but we were photographing all of the vintage pieces on site. That has been the beginning of a much more digital collection. So we have the physical collection and the digital collection, adding new and exciting pieces along the way.

Andrew Mitrak: If she was hired back in 1989, there is sort of a self-awareness about Levi’s place in history, that they know that they’re a historic brand and that for over 35 years now, they’ve embraced their place in history and kind of leaned into themselves as a historic brand.

Tracey Panek: Yeah, definitely. Being able to have the archives and have the resources to come up with authentic stories. Today we use that word in marketing, and for me, what it means is that they’ve got to be accurate. They’ve got to be based on primary sources as much as we can, and having the collection allows us to do that.

The Early Life and Resilience of Levi Strauss

Andrew Mitrak: I want to ask you about the life of Levi Strauss, because reading his story, I just felt grateful to be alive today. He fled and escaped Bavaria because of antisemitic laws. The trip across the Atlantic was super dangerous and it seemed miserable. Then once he got to the East Coast, he then traveled through Panama to get to California, and that was really dangerous as well. Do you think these hardships helped shape his character and made him and his company more resilient?

Tracey Panek: Well, you’re very right in describing a lot of the hardships that he went through. He was the youngest son in a Jewish family. There were very few opportunities for him to work or to marry with all the restrictions and pogroms that they had. So his father dies when he’s still very young, he’s 15 or 16, and he and his mother and two older sisters decide that they’ll make their way to America. They looked with hopefulness and kind of an American spirit that today we look back on and we call the American Dream. And I think there was a bit of adventurousness and wanting to make a name for himself and his family.

He definitely went through a lot, even changing his name when he arrives in America. He was lucky to have a couple of older brothers and they help him to learn about what will be his business, dry goods in the wholesale side of it. So absolutely. One of the stories I love to tell to describe how tough he was and how resilient he was—because you went through a lot and you just had to get up and move on—is 1857. Four years after Levi sets up his company. He’s only been in San Francisco a few years but has managed to be very successful. So successful that by 1857, he decides to send an amount of treasure—I want to say it’s like close to $80,000 in gold.

But you can imagine, in 1857, it is worth a lot. And he’s going to send it back to New York where his family is and where Wall Street still is, it’s still the financial capital of the United States. He sends it by steamship down the Pacific down to Panama. It is then loaded onto a train, goes to the Atlantic side because of course there’s no canal at that time, and then another steamship, the treasure rooms are the contents are deposited into another ship and they head up to New York. But off of the coast of the Carolinas, the ship hits a storm and it sinks to the bottom of the ocean floor. And all of that treasure is lost.

It’s a huge amount of money. And Levi just has to continue on and not dwell on it. Although I think it’s rather telling that in some of the invoices not long after that date, there is little notes: “Are you insured? Are you insured?” It’s a great story of resilience. I actually bid on and won a piece of that ship. The ship is called the SS Central America, “Ship of Gold” is what it’s referred to as because it’s this Gold Rush era ship. And we have in the archives now a piece of the copper hull plate that’s on display and that is a perfect example of what you point out. You had to be hardy. You had to get up and move on when you’re faced with obstacles and you had to be resilient.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. That was one of the stories in the book that stood out to me. Like, oh my gosh, this shipwreck and he’s sending a decent chunk of his fortune back. And also like 400-something people die. It’s a really horrible tragedy, all this money lost, but also these people lost. And it kind of also speaks to just the hardships of operating a business at that time, making it to California and the West Coast in the first place, and that that was just how commerce was done, is how things were sent back and forth. Anybody who is coming to the West Coast, they’re making this perilous journey where they can sink, they can get horrible diseases.

Tracey Panek: I’ll just mention one more thing about those early years. The other great story about Levi is a year after he arrives in the city, and he’s pretty successful early on, he donates a portion of his profits to an orphanage in the city. It’s still around today, that orphanage, Edgewood. In fact, I went last year to a big event they had there. It set a precedent for giving back to the community and also spoke volumes really about Levi, his Jewish values, his own values about, you know, you go through hardships, but where you can, you try to give back something.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that’s great.

Levi Strauss: The Wholesaler and the Gold Rush

Andrew Mitrak: I think of Levi Strauss as the classic “picks and shovels” story, and that it’s not the people who search for the gold who make the riches, but it’s the people who sell the tools that get them wealthy. But also, when I learned about this story in grade school—I grew up in California and they teach you about the Gold Rush then—they taught me as if Levi Strauss was selling the jeans directly to the miners and they kind of pitched that as a story. But it was a little more complex than that. He founded the company in 1853 when he was only 24 years old, but then the riveted denim jean wasn’t invented until 1873. So he wasn’t really selling jeans until much later. So what was he actually selling the miners during the Gold Rush? Because it wasn’t the jeans yet.

Tracey Panek: The Gold Rush was an important part of the company’s history. Levi wouldn’t have come to San Francisco were it not for the Gold Rush. He leaves New York where he’s learned from his brothers, but he comes out to make a name for himself. And you’re right, he’s not going to do it by looking for gold. But he recognizes an opportunity to sell, and within a month of his arrival in the city, he’s looking for a warehouse near the waterfront where we still are today, by the way. But Levi, he is prepared for a shipment of supplies that will come a month after his arrival so that he can set up his business very quickly.

He is not manufacturing. As you point out correctly, in those first 20 years, he’s not manufacturing. He is importing and exporting and selling things that others are making. And we have an invoice from 1858. And on that invoice, there are things like fabric, drawers, gray flannel shirting. There’s hose, which would be socks, and you can get, I think each of the socks was $1.15 for some hose. And the Hardy and Kennedy wanted to get $128 worth of hose. All of the requests, the supplies that they want, add up to $1,600. 1858. That’s a lot of product. One retail customer. So imagine all of the business that Levi is doing. So you’re right in noting that Levi wasn’t manufacturing, but the Gold Rush and the time that he begins, it certainly molds who he is and his relationships that will be established throughout the West.

Andrew Mitrak: The folks in the Gold Rush, they were certainly benefiting from materials that Levi’s imported and sold wholesale to retailers, but they weren’t buying jeans quite yet. That wouldn’t come until 1873. Can you tell the story of how Levi first encountered Jacob Davis and how the riveted denim jean kind of came into play?

Tracey Panek: Well, let me first say that a lot of what people read and what you may have read in your own research is myth about Levi coming and bringing denim with him when he arrives in San Francisco and creating on his own, sewing on his own blue jeans. Well, that’s not what happens. He develops a very successful dry goods business within the first 20 years. And he gets a letter in 1872 from a customer in Reno, Nevada. Reno, Nevada is very close to Virginia City where the Comstock Lode silver load has been discovered. It’s a huge discovery. It will help fund the development and growth of San Francisco.

And this customer is a tailor in Reno. And he writes to Levi about this remarkable innovation. And it’s so interesting because it’s tiny. A tiny little innovation that will eventually allow Levi to manufacture for the first time and will eventually revolutionize fashion. It’s just a little piece of metal. A little tiny piece of metal, a rivet that’s added to pockets of work pants. And in this letter from Jacob Davis, that’s the name of the tailor, he sends two samples of them and tells them that they are selling like hotcakes and he can’t keep up with the demand. And would the company be interested in taking out a patent to protect his idea? He just knows somebody’s going to steal it.

Levi, he’s adventurous as you pointed out, he agrees. The company on May 20th, 1873 is granted a US patent for an improvement in fastening pocket openings. It is the birth of the modern blue jean or riveted denim pant. And in that patent, those patent papers, there’s a sketch with little dots at the pocket area and one at the base of the button fly where the original rivets were. And that’s the story. We celebrate at the company May 20th every year as the birthday of the blue jean or 501 Day, as that garment or overall would eventually be called.

Jacob Davis and the Birth of the Blue Jean

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. This really changed everything. Because if you think of how annoying it must be for your pocket to break and rip, because if that’s the thing that gets ripped, if people are using these jeans or I should call them waist overalls, that’s what they were called then, right? They were using them to hold their tools. Maybe if you find some silver, maybe put that in there. And if it’s ripping, you’re just losing everything everywhere, right? And so this comes and they totally lean into this. I just checked the Levi’s I’m wearing, I checked them before I put them on like, it’s right there. Patented May 20, 1873.

And it’s kind of unusual, thinking of this as a marketer, that most products, they’ll say the date the company was established, right? You’ll see that EST, such and such date. But it doesn’t say that. It says the date that this was patented. So was it immediate that Levi’s the company started manufacturing and leaning into this patent as sort of their differentiator?

Tracey Panek: Yeah, and let me clarify that what you’re talking about is the branding on the rivets themselves. Which is amazing because these are tiny. This is like smaller than a thumbnail. And it’s a little tiny little bit of copper and on that little rivet it says PAT for patent, May 1873, SF CA, SF California, and LS & Co. And all that on the little rivet. Yes, it is on that rivet and that imprint is given to those first manufactured products in 1873, the first waste overalls, those riveted pants. So Levi and the company, they’re very savvy about their branding and know that if they put it on there, you know, it’s something you can recognize. And then of course the Levi’s buttons are going to be branded as well. And eventually they’ll also anticipate the end of the patent, which doesn’t last forever, and start to create something to differentiate between them. So yes, the company leans into it. Levi is still a wholesale dry goods dealer, so the wholesale part of the business still continues as usual. And those riveted denim products will be a part of his business, but they won’t become super popular and bring the business what will happen eventually until much later.

From Patent to Trademark: The Two Horse Brand

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, let’s dig into that story. Because then when does it sort of start to emerge? Because you mentioned how patents expire, they don’t last forever. Trademarks, however, last a lot longer. And pretty soon you can see the Two Horse Brand patch that’s on the back and the red imprint on the leather that’s on the back of the jeans. So when did that start to come into play when they sort of evolved from relying on the patent to then sort of trademarking more of their IP around what’s on the pants themselves?

Tracey Panek: So a patent doesn’t last forever. It lasts about 20 years. And the company wanted to create something that would be recognizable to customers who wanted to get a genuine pair of Levi Strauss & Company waist overalls. And they created this image of two horses facing opposite directions with a little pair of our overalls in the middle. And the idea is they’re so strong, even if you pull them, you’re not going to tear them. And that trademark was created in 1886. It’s one of the oldest continuously used trademarks in the world. Originally we put it on our garment, on our waist overalls, on the inside pocket. But only the wearer could see that. So then we wise up about that and we put it on the back patch of the garment so that others can see it, not only potential customers as well as our customers who knew us.

It was important in a couple of ways. That image could be recognized by anyone who was illiterate, which would have been a number of our workers, our blue-collar workers who wore our products. It could have been recognized by somebody who didn’t speak or write English, because we had a lot of immigrants who were working as well. So it played a number of roles and it symbolized the strength and quality of the product. So it was a great way to easily let people know: look for the Two Horse Brand, and then you know you’ve got a genuine pair of Levi’s.

From Trademark to Icon: Levi’s and the Cowboy

Andrew Mitrak: So, when did the waist overalls themselves, when did that become the majority of Levi’s business? When did they start to sort of divest from the rest of the dry goods part of the business and really lean into the waist overalls themselves?

Tracey Panek: Well, it happens slowly. When they bring some of the first trained accountants into the company—this will be members of the Haas family who marry in, who have come with an accounting background in the late teens and early 20s—they start to recognize that this is a bigger seller than they knew. And by the 1920s, they start devoting some revenue to advertisements. So in the 20s, you’ll have advertisements with cowboys wearing our products and feature details being called out. And they’re being produced in a number of languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese.

And then it’s by the 30s, coming out of the Depression—because the Depression was hard for the company, but everybody around the United States and the globe—when we begin to recover from that, we focus on the cowboy as our marketing symbol and also on our denim, our riveted denim products. Which, by the way, almost immediately include riveted denim jackets, which will add to the line and other riveted denim products. We don’t really pull out of our wholesale business until after World War II. But we had recognized, beginning as early as the late teens, how valuable this product was and started to focus on that more. So it happens gradually. It doesn’t happen just immediately.

Andrew Mitrak: When did it grow from primarily being sold to working people just for utility versus being more of a fashion statement? What were the first inklings of people wearing it for something other than just its pure utility and more for the image associated with it?

Tracey Panek: Well, we get hints of it because it doesn’t happen immediately. But we get hints of it in the 1930s. In fact, one of the earliest examples of it is in 1935 in Vogue magazine. An article about dude ranching, having a dude ranch vacation, which becomes very popular in the 30s and 40s. People from the East, the East Coast, and even as far away as Europe will come to the West and stay on a working horse or cattle ranch. And they want to have a Western cowboy dude ranch experience, and so they want to dress like a cowboy.

And Vogue magazine says, if you’re coming out and you’re a woman, get yourself a pair of Lady Levi’s. The year before, we had introduced the first blue jeans for women. Get yourself a pair of Lady Levi’s, wear them cuffed at the bottom once, with a Stetson hat, a silk kerchief, boots, and a great air of bravado, the article says. And if you can do that, you’re going to have a great time. But here you see people who are dressing not because they want to do tough work, but because they want to dress like someone else. In this case, cowboys or dudes from a dude ranch.

And then, of course, you have movies. We’re in California to the south of us in San Francisco. You’ve got Hollywood coming out with leading actors, especially in Westerns, and they’re wearing Levi’s. John Wayne, for example, in 1939, he has his first leading role in Stagecoach and he’s wearing a pair of 501s. So there are a number of influences that will change and lead people to start purchasing not just for practical workwear. And by the 50s, we like to say that’s the decade when denim became dangerous. And a lot of customers will be from those who are joining motorcycle clubs and they want to have some tough clothes as well, but they’re going to get their Levi’s with a leather jacket perhaps, and that look of the rebel, which is implanted in people in the movie like Marlon Brando’s The Wild One.

Levi’s and Hollywood: An Organic Connection

Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned the movies and iconic actors like John Wayne and Marlon Brando. Levi’s, more than most other companies I can think of, is really tied to the movies in a way where there are so many just iconic characters, even very different types of characters, that are wearing Levi’s. You mentioned Stagecoach and how the Westerns were really popular and that presumably people on the East Coast were watching Western movies and seeing Levi jeans and coming to the dude ranch out West and then wanting to get their own Levi’s or their Lady Levi’s. Was Levi’s sort of intentionally making connections to Hollywood to sort of use product placement in a way? Or was it more organic where costume directors and wardrobe folks at Hollywood were just picking out Levi’s because that’s what looked good or what they thought would be good on the character?

Tracey Panek: Not in the way we think about it today. Today we have something called the House of Strauss, where influencers, movie, film folks can come and be outfitted in Levi’s. We didn’t have anything like that. But we certainly had good relations with the studios. And we’re in California, our location certainly probably helped. But also, we have many people who are wearing Levi’s. By the 1960s, when you have this rising youth generation who are adopting denim and certainly blue jeans in a big way—thanks in part, I think, to the idea of the rebel and what they’re wearing—then there is a desire to look a certain way, to wear something different from your parents and your parents’ generation, and they do that through Levi’s.

Plus, Levi’s are such a great canvas for self-expression. It’s just this lovely tough blue fabric. Even if it tears, you can repair it with embroidery or a patch and it’s going to look cool. So all of these influences will come into play when it comes to the popularity of Levi’s in pop culture and in other subcultures generally.

The Shift from “Waist Overalls” to “Jeans”

Andrew Mitrak: As we’re talking about this era, at some point, waist overalls become jeans. Can you tell the story of how that transition happened? When did waist overalls—which is just so funny that that was the phrase that was used, jeans just sounds like something that’s existed forever, but no, it’s actually relatively recent—so how did that happen?

Tracey Panek: Yeah. So we, I mentioned briefly the rise of the youth generation. San Francisco is the headquarters, the city where our company is headquartered, and we’re a stone’s throw away from the counterculture epicenter, the Haight-Ashbury. And young people are flooding into San Francisco and they are adopting Levi’s and blue jeans and denim in a big way. It was in 1967 when we introduce our first zippered jean, the 505, which is slimmer and intended to be a product that this younger generation will like, that we switch the name on our advertising to “Jeans” instead of the “Overalls” that we had been using.

So I think the story of that is, as a company, we’re observant. We are watching what’s happening in culture and we’re paying attention and so we’re responding to that. And that includes not just naming a product for what the young people are calling it, but using their music because that will be another way that they will connect with our products.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, using their music. On YouTube, I found a radio ad of the Levi’s Jefferson Airplane song, which is amazing and so from the era.

And so you’re leaning into this counterculture, but also there is sort of a dance between the John Wayne sort of conservative, actual using jeans for their utility purpose—that Levi’s has probably a large customer base that’s doing that—and then you have the Marlon Brando sort of greaser type motorcycle guy of the 50s, the hippies of the 60s, you even have like rockers and punks of the 70s. And there are different flavors of counterculture that Levi’s is appealing to even as it’s also appeasing sort of the mainstream. How does the company balance both?

Tracey Panek: The great thing about Levi’s is its timeless appeal and those working-class roots, which make it a garment that’s not pretentious. If you want to fit in and not be somebody that’s making airs, then you’re going to want to wear blue jeans. So they become really something that so many different cultures and subcultures choose, as you correctly point out in your description of the folks that are wearing them. Even today, I’m pleasantly surprised when I learn about a unique group that I didn’t know about that have been wearing Levi’s and have been tapping into that.

So the company, to some extent, works on creating timeless products. Our iconic product being the 501, that waist overall, and still having those products that have been timeless and that you can use and that won’t look dated. Let’s just say that. So you can wear them today, or you could have worn them in the 1800s and they look relatively the same. And in that way, you can use that as a basis for so many different age groups, genders, sexualities—because that’ll be another story in and of itself—who have worn Levi’s. And I think it’s one of the really amazing qualities is the versatility of our clothing.

Levi’s Iconic “Launderette” Commercial

Andrew Mitrak: One of Levi’s most iconic advertisements is their Launderette ad, which aired in Great Britain in the mid-80s. Can you tell the story of this advertisement?

Tracey Panek: Well, by 1985, we’re well established as a global product. And the 501, which is the icon, it is a button-fly denim riveted waist overall—we call it jeans now—but that product, we wanted to give a little love, especially coming out of eras where there were other competitors. And so in 1985 on Boxing Day, which is the day after Christmas in the UK, we launched a commercial called Launderette. And in the commercial, Nick Kamen, who’s this very handsome young man, comes into a laundromat and the ad is set to the music “I Heard It Through the Grapevine“ by Marvin Gaye. It’s just a great song.

And he goes into the laundromat and he starts taking off his clothes because he’s going to wash his Levi’s. And it’s busy. There’s other people at the laundromat and they’re looking at him, “What’s this guy doing?” And so there’s certainly a little sex appeal there, but there’s also surprise. He throws his Levi’s into the washing machine and washes them. And that is the ad. It is an incredibly popular ad. It, in estimates from people and reviews that I’ve seen of it and talking to people, it probably increased sales of the 501 by as much as 200%. Thanks to the music, thanks to Nick Kamen who is featured on it. It just hits the right notes in so many ways and it helps to re-energize the 501.

Andrew Mitrak: So the creative behind it, BBH, and the person who made it is one of the creatives, is Sir John Hegarty, who’s... he’s knighted. And I don’t think he would have been knighted if it wasn’t for this ad. It’s like, there aren’t that many advertising people who get deemed a Sir and get knighted. And it’s like, he’s one, and it’s probably you could tie it to this Levi’s Launderette ad. He’s had an amazing career, but this, this ad is what he’s most associated with.

Tracey Panek: He was a guest speaker just this past year for our marketing team. So it was quite an honor to have him talk a little bit about working with the company and working with a brand that was willing to be very creative.

Andrew Mitrak: Oh, that’s great. I love his talks. He’s so inspiring. So that’s cool that you got to hear directly from him with your team.

Walt Whitman and the “Go Forth” Campaign

Andrew Mitrak: I want to ask you about my personal favorite campaign, which I saw probably around the time I was in high school. It was “O Pioneers!” and “America Go Forth,” and they’re both set to these beautiful poems by Walt Whitman.

And they’re filmed in this very impressive cinematography type way that just evokes this feeling of Americana. I loved these ads when I first saw them. Can you share more context about these ideas?

Tracey Panek: Those ads launched in 2009. One of the things I love about them is they actually used wax cylinder recordings of Walt himself. So you can hear his, you can hear him speaking, which I think makes it even more appealing and authentic coming from him. And you can hear his, where he puts emphasis on his words. It’s so beautiful, isn’t it? That poetry that you were referring to. And the imagery that they used in the ads was also to support those beautiful words that he says.

It was really created as a campaign to inspire a pioneering spirit, the way that Whitman captures it in his poetry. And I think it did it really beautifully. And I recently watched some of those, just the beautiful images with his voice in the background. Just lovely to, and very different from some of the other ads that we’ve done, but very memorable.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that’s right. And I think this was one of the first ads that I remember seeing like really tying a brand to Americana. You know, it’s a historical ad. It’s very striking to hear a wax cylinder recording with music behind it. And it struck me that Levi’s wasn’t advertising the rivet, they weren’t even advertising the product. They were like advertising this idea and leaning into a shared history of people. And I’m wondering for you as a historian who’s also part of a marketing team, do you sort of see this trend of Levi’s from going to marketing rivets and marketing their product to marketing ideas like durability to then evolving their brand to talk about things like whole cultural movements and then ultimately shared history? Like, do you sort of see that evolution in how Levi’s has approached their marketing?

Tracey Panek: Well, that campaign with Walt Whitman especially, was a nod to our Western roots, especially the old pioneer and coming out West and what it means to be, which really is all about our early history. You know, we were born here in the American West. And for a lot of people overseas or in other parts of the world, we represent what they think of when they think of America. So I think that we did it well.

I think that, you know, we’ve used at different times what we’ve felt was relevant for that particular time period. You referred to the Jefferson Airplane and their “White Levi’s” song that you can hear Grace Slick singing. And that ad campaign was from 1967. And they just hit it perfectly. It was the year of the Summer of Love. And at that time, that made sense to do it then. So I think we look at what’s happening and relevant at any given time and try to do our best to respond to that.

Discover More Levi’s History

Andrew Mitrak: Tracey Panek, thanks so much. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation and having this opportunity to go through Levi’s history and analyze their marketing in a new way. For listeners who want to learn more about your work and the history of Levi’s, where would you point them to?

Tracey Panek: I do a series on TikTok called “Greatest Stories Ever Worn” and “From the Levi’s Archives.” You can look for me there. You can look for videos that I’ve done on YouTube. I narrate the YouTube “From the Archives,” the Levi’s Archives series. If you’re looking for more of a corporate kind of thing, you can look for me on LinkedIn and you can find a lot of my content there. And then of course, I also do a lot of the writing for Unzipped, our company blog. So, yeah, several different places.

Andrew Mitrak: That’s great. I’ll paste links to all of those in the blog that accompanies this show. So Tracey Panek, thanks so much for joining me. This has been a lot of fun.

Tracey Panek: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Andrew.

Long before giant balloons floated down Broadway* at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a remarkable young woman with a prosthetic eyeball developed the beginnings of the Macy’s brand in the 1860s.

Her name was Margaret Getchell. She was a marketing visionary who gave Macy’s its iconic red star logo, she captured customers’ imaginations with fantastical window displays, and she cemented the brand’s connection to the holiday season.

Even though she was the first female executive of Macy’s, Margaret Getchell’s contributions were largely lost to time. That was until Stephanie Forshee rediscovered Getchell’s story began the work of restoring her legacy.

Stephanie published Getchell’s belated obituary in the New York Times as part of their “Overlooked No More” series, and introduced her story to a new generation through her children’s book, Hidden Gems: Margaret Getchell LaForge, which is part of a series celebrating fierce females in business.

It’s an inspiring story that gave me new appreciation for the Macy’s brand. Now, here’s my conversation with Stephanie Forshee.

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, who volunteers to review and edit transcripts for accuracy and clarity.

Andrew Mitrak: Stephanie Forshee, welcome to A History of Marketing.

Stephanie Forshee: Thank you. Thank you for having me, Andrew. I’m excited to be here.

Andrew Mitrak: I’m so excited to speak with you and have a great conversation about the life and career of Margaret Getchell. That’s a name, Margaret Getchell, that I’m guessing a lot of listeners haven’t heard before. You’ve written a piece for The New York Times about Getchell, as well as a children’s book called Hidden Gems. So to start, how would you describe Margaret Getchell to someone who’s never heard of her before?

Stephanie Forshee: Yes, I think you’re correct that most people don’t know the name. Margaret Getchell was America’s first female retail executive. She worked for R.H. Macy & Co. during the 1860s and 1870s. She worked with the founder, Rowland Hussey Macy, who was a distant cousin of hers. She started with the company in 1860 as a cash clerk, worked her way up to head bookkeeper, and then made history in 1866 when she was named Superintendent of the store. That means she was the manager of the store, overseeing about 200 employees at that time, which would have been a big deal, of course.

Rediscovering a Retail Pioneer

Andrew Mitrak: As well as that managerial and executive experience, she had a lot of contributions to marketing that we will speak on as well. I’m just wondering, how did you first come across this story? When was the moment where you realized, “Wow, I need to help tell this story and make more people aware of Getchell?”

Stephanie Forshee: Early in the pandemic, very early on, when we were still in lockdown, March 2020, I was a business journalist at the time and enjoyed reading about businesses, particularly retail companies. I was nerding out on this book about the history of Macy’s. Within the first few chapters, there was information about Margaret Getchell and some of the early employees of the store. That’s when I learned she was supposedly America’s first female retail executive.

I had never heard the name, so I was very intrigued by her story. I was doing a little searching online, and I just thought maybe it was just my ignorance, silly me for not having heard of this woman, but I quickly realized that not a lot of people knew about her or had written about her. There was an encyclopedia.com entry about her and maybe two or three articles about her at the time. She was very uncovered in terms of what she deserved. I started researching her as much as I could and immediately became more and more intrigued by her story. I was very interested in the idea of uncovering information about this woman that very few people knew about. So that was exciting for me as well.

Andrew Mitrak: It’s always an exciting rush of a feeling when you discover somebody who has an interesting story and realize it is relatively uncovered. You think everything is covered on the internet, and it is surprising, of course, your book is called Hidden Gems, when there is more to be told here. I’ve experienced that myself, and it is a good rush.

Stephanie Forshee: Yes, I can definitely relate to that.

Andrew Mitrak: Your background is as a PR professional now, but you had been a reporter as well at some point, so telling stories was in your wheelhouse as well.

Stephanie Forshee: Yes, I was a business journalist for about 15 years and worked for various publications. I was always drawn to stories that were sort of off the beaten path. Finding Margaret fit into that narrative, even though it was something completely new to me—covering a historic figure and researching someone like this. That was a whole new process but used a lot of the same skills.

From Schoolteacher to Retail Executive

Andrew Mitrak: Let’s walk through some of Getchell’s career. To start, how did she get her job at Macy’s? You mentioned that Rowland Hussey Macy, the name of Macy, was a distant cousin of hers. Was that the initial connection for her to start work there?

Stephanie Forshee: Actually, they had not met at that point. She graduated high school at the age of 16. She was very skilled with numbers, so she became an arithmetic teacher for a school on Nantucket. Then she traveled to a couple of different cities in New Jersey and New York.

Years earlier, she suffered an eye injury. It was a freak accident playing a game of tag with her sister. It was a gory accident where she injured her eye. She didn’t immediately lose her vision, but it was deteriorating over the years. When she was 19 years old, she finally had surgery to have her eye removed and replaced with a prosthetic eye. It is one of those incidents that changed the trajectory of her life.

Andrew Mitrak: Just to pause on that—an eye injury. Today that seems gruesome, but in the 1840s or 1850s, just thinking of what eye surgery was probably like back then... there were probably not the same types of anesthesia or processes. It seems like a really horrific, traumatic, formational experience.

Stephanie Forshee: I agree. That is something I’ve been researching the past few years—what that would have been like, that time versus today. You’re right, it is not something that anyone would want to endure. But it did shape her as a person and was something she had to deal with.

So, when she was 19, she underwent this surgery. This was early in the summer of 1860. As she was recovering, the doctor recommended she should consider a change in career. She had been a school teacher at that point, and he was saying that grading papers by candlelight things like that was probably not too great for her eye. That’s how the story goes. In hindsight, the doctor was probably suggesting, “You’re 19, you need to be married and go about your life.”

But she did take it into consideration to change her career. She had heard of her distant cousin Rowland Macy. They had both grown up, he was 20 years her senior, but they both were from the island of Nantucket. He was her distant cousin, even though they never met. She decided to apply there. The meeting went very well; she had an interview with him, she explained that she was skilled, so he hired her as a cash clerk to start, and she made her way up from there.

The Humble Beginnings of R.H. Macy & Co.

Andrew Mitrak: It’s funny that it all started because a doctor allegedly recommended this change in career. It’s funny tho, reading some of these old books, old biographies, how often doctors would recommend things like, “Go move out West” or “Go live near a lake.” Doctors don’t really prescribe that kind of treatment anymore. A lot of changes in medicine and doctors’ recommendations. Anyway, this may have been the starting point for her meeting with R.H. Macy. The meeting went well. Can you share a little more about R.H. Macy and about Macy, the department store itself in 1860? Obviously, I am guessing, it wasn’t the major brand that it later became. Where was it in its journey? Just started? Was a little more established? Where was it in its establishment?

Stephanie Forshee: At that time, the New York store was only two years old. Rowland had other ventures—he really had a lot riding on this because he’d opened stores in Massachusetts as well as California, and Wisconsin, and those just didn’t pan out the way he had hoped. He was not the “Merchant Prince” at that time as he came to be known later.

At that time, the store was on its way. Sales were okay; they were definitely growing and surviving. But when she came to the store, it was not a full-fledged department store by any means. It was a dry goods store. The advertising, the signs out front just said cloaks, millinery, silks, and gloves. They had select items, but it was just a small store. Over the years, it would expand greatly.

Andrew Mitrak: Can you paint a picture of that time for women in business? Was it common for somebody like Margaret, a young woman, she was 19 or 20 at this time, to get a job at a store, or was this unusual just to work in business at all as a young woman?

Stephanie Forshee: In New York, it would be pretty uncommon even just to have this job, much less what she would go on to accomplish. There were definitely women employed by the store, but it wasn’t that common at that point.

What is interesting is that she was from Nantucket, so she came in with all the confidence in the world. Nantucket, if you ever visit there or even read about it, they are very proud of its heritage and history. They were known as the whaling capital of the world at that point. Most of the men, the majority of them, were out on whaling voyages for months or years at a time. The women, just like in many times when men went to war, women had to run things. It was like that early on. In Nantucket, they were having to run the post office, the schools, and pretty much the whole town while men were away on these whaling voyages.

She would have grown up seeing that in her community. Roland, having that same perspective, knew that women were just as capable. So they were, in a way, in their own bubble thinking that women could do things and run businesses too. But to your point, that was not very common generally at that point. And that would be the 1860s, right before the war. So in the coming years, it would become more common.

The Origin of the Macy’s Red Star Logo

Andrew Mitrak: That’s really interesting. This connection to Nantucket, and you mentioned whaling, and this actually leads to one of the most iconic contributions that Margaret Getchell has was the Macy’s logo, which was a tattoo that R.H. Macy had, that was a whaling tattoo. Can you tell the story of the logo and how Margaret Getchell helped identify and create that?

Stephanie Forshee: She started out as the numbers person, accounting and bookkeeping, and gradually became a trusted confidant of Rowland Macy. She was constantly coming up with ideas. She would say that she liked to “put a bug in his ear” for different things.

One of her greatest contributions was the logo. She knew that he had a red star tattoo on his wrist. At the time, I think that he was actually kind of embarrassed by this tattoo or his past as a whaler; it wasn’t something that he was particularly proud of as he was trying to make a name for himself as a merchant in New York at that point. But she saw that and thought it would be a good idea to be an emblem or insignia for the store.

She decided to put the red star logo on their letterhead and on each individual price tag and for items within the store, which we will get back to that as well. Macy was one of the first to have fixed prices. Before that, it was all negotiating and haggling on prices. The fact that they had price tags on their individual items was innovative at that time. The other thing is that they put the red star on columns outside the store, which still stand today. The original Macy’s is actually at 14th Street and 6th Avenue; that predates the famous Herald Square location.

Andrew Mitrak: I use the word “logo” to describe this red star, but that is kind of an anachronism. It wouldn’t have been called a logo at the time. Logo is kind of a more common thing later. The red star emblem itself has been such an iconic part of Macy’s. Was that somewhat unusual for a company to adopt an emblem like that, or was that common or can you contextualize that decision for them?

Stephanie Forshee: I wouldn’t say that it was common. It would have been somewhat unusual, but not restore our business, a logo like this, but it did exist for sure. One of Macy’s earlier ventures, he was in Haverhill, Massachusetts and his logo used a rooster as an emblem at that time in some of the newspaper advertisements. So it wasn’t unheard of by any means, but at that time, they didn’t think it was a “must-have” for a business.

Andrew Mitrak: That’s right. If I were to think of them at the time, I haven’t studied this deeply, a lot of them tend to be much more ornate and much more detailed than have the names as part of it and it’s hard to remember. The red star logo or just a star itself, is such an instantly recognizable, simple type of emblem. You can see that Macy sort of wants to use it in different ways, where they’d like to use typography, and it kind of gave them some more flexibility on how to use it. So it seems like a really good decision as a logo and you couldn’t just do a star today cause it seems like so widely overuse. Also, it’s also claimed by Macy as a thing. It seems like it was a really good, prescient thing for Margaret Getchell to notice, latch onto, and embrace as well.

Stephanie Forshee: Yes, at the time I think it was just a great idea that she had. To your point, the simplicity of it is what really stuck with people. As you know, it is still the logo today, so it must have been a success.

Innovative Marketing Stunts and Store Layouts

Andrew Mitrak: Let’s talk about some of her other contributions to Macy’s, specifically around things like placement and displays. Do you have any favorite examples of her other contributions—clever tactics to help increase sales and attract customers?

Stephanie Forshee: She loved thinking different innovations for the store. She was constantly coming up with ideas for different departments. It was her idea to introduce the toy department and the book department; at that time, it would be a bigger draw than today. Unfortunately, Macy’s doesn’t have a ton of books in its stores today.

She always came up with new ideas for new merchandise. One of my favorite examples of Margaret’s innovations is that she loved a good publicity stunt. One of the things she did was bring cats into the store. She dressed them up in baby doll clothes and put them in little carriages, or prams as they were called back then. She put those in the window display. I’m sure passersby were wondering, “What on earth is going on?”

They were so intrigued and enchanted by these cats. So many people came into the store that day, and they had record sales selling all these baby doll clothes, different accessories, and the dolls themselves of course. That was just one example of creative, out-of-the-box thinking.

Andrew Mitrak: Just to comment on this cat thing, and it’s so funny when I read this. I’ve been to a few conferences where everybody has booths in these conferences, and it’s almost like a window display, and you want people to come to your booth. A thing that sometimes people will do is bring puppies. “Oh, we got puppies! Come play with puppies and hear about our company software, B2B SaaS product.” People will be like, “Oh my gosh, that’s so innovative. They got puppies there.” This is kind of just a riff on something that Margaret Getchell did 150-plus years ago. So it’s funny that sometimes, like these tactics that they can be from the past, but still see kernels of that almost today as well.

Stephanie Forshee: Yes, I can only imagine this within the children’s department at that time, just hanging out with all the cats.

Andrew Mitrak: In addition to cats, any other favorites of yours?

Stephanie Forshee: Macy’s had a lot of ideas, and a lot of the New York department stores were following the lead of European department stores. Soda fountains were becoming all the rage. It would have been the late 1860s and the early 1870s. When they were becoming popular, Margaret knew that they needed a soda fountain at Macy’s. Her idea was to place it towards the back of the store so that customers would be eyeing other items as they were walking back and forth to the soda fountain. That is something that we know most stores do today, but at the time, it was a grand idea.

Andrew Mitrak: Totally. Today, I think of grocery stores—essential products like milk are almost always at the back of the store. It’s the thing that expires, the thing you often need a refill of. Just thinking of, “What is the thing that will attract people in? How do I make them exposed to more of the products and merchandise within our store to increase sales?” Super clever.

The ‘Customer-Obsessed’ Philosophy

Andrew Mitrak: She had this motto: “Be everywhere, do everything, and never forget to astonish the customer.” Do you have a sense of how she actually used that motto? Was it something she wrote down? Was it something she said to her employees? How did that motto manifest?

Stephanie Forshee: It’s not exactly clear. It must have come up because many employees said that she had embraced this motto. I would imagine she used it in training, perhaps with the cash girls. I have mixed feelings about the motto. “Be everywhere, do everything”—it is true, if you want to astonish the customer, you do have to do those things. But I think she, as well as Rowland Macy and leadership within the store, were maybe workaholics for sure. From everything I read about them.

Andrew Mitrak: To me, it has echoes of Amazon. I am in Seattle, and so Amazon is a big company– It’s a big company everywhere, but it’s one that’s so close to my home– and it sounds a lot like Jeff Bezos. He has this idea of customer obsession, and that’s in their culture. And of course, they are the everything store and so “Be everywhere, do everything, never forget to astonish the customer” seems like it echoes Amazon. And at the time, Macy’s was selling books and all sorts of goods, they were being an everything-type of store.

Stephanie Forshee: That’s a great parallel. They definitely took the customer obsession very seriously.

Establishing the Holiday Shopping Season

Andrew Mitrak: I want to ask you about one more famous contribution she had: convincing Macy’s to have the store open on Christmas Eve. I think this was in 1868. Now Macy’s is so associated with the Christmas holiday and Thanksgiving through Christmas season. Can you just share a bit about this decision and the impact that had?

Stephanie Forshee: At that time, she was wanting the store to stay open late. It started out on Christmas Eve and would later turn into the entire month of December, staying open late because, as we know, there are lots of last-minute shoppers. She knew that was an opportunity for the store to make more money if they would stay open late. They did, and they had record sales that day. It’s one of those things that today, in hindsight, some people who are working on Christmas Eve and throughout the Thanksgiving holiday might not love Margaret’s grand idea.

Andrew Mitrak: There is a trade-off on your priority stack: do you prioritize the customer or your employees? It seems like that trade-off was for the customer at the expense of some of the employees who have to work longer hours as a result.

Leadership Changes and Unfair Compensation

Andrew Mitrak: Getchell is a pioneer in the business world and she is a pioneer of reaching the glass ceiling at Macy’s. She was promoted to Superintendent, she became second-in-command to Macy himself. But as Macy’s the brand grows, she becomes overlooked. Her time there was super impactful but relatively short, and was not a multi-decade career there. Why do you think it was that she became overlooked?

Stephanie Forshee: There are a few things. We haven’t talked about her husband yet, but she did meet her husband, Abiel LaForge, at Macy’s. She was introduced to him through Rowland. He had been a soldier during the Civil War and met Rowland Macy’s son, helping him out. He became a close, trusted person of the Macy’s family. Abiel eventually comes to work for Macy’s years after Margaret started.

He was very dedicated to the company, for sure, but he was not coming up with all these innovations and he was not giving the same type of contribution as Margaret. In 1872, Rowland Macy is thinking about future partners of the firm—what’s going to happen if he retires or passes away. He is looking at successors. For some reason, Margaret is completely overlooked in this equation. As much as she was given opportunities before and for the year prior, at this point, Rowland, he did choose Abiel LaForge, as well as one of Macy’s nephews, Robert Valentine. There is no exact reason given. I think simply because she was a woman. At that time, he gave her a lot of opportunities, but it seemed like there was a limit there.

Andrew Mitrak: As an aside, she does marry Abiel LaForge. I’ve referred to her as Margaret Getchell, but her full name is Margaret Getchell LaForge, and it does seem like they’re kind of almost both used. I know your book is Margaret Getchell LaForge, but the New York Times’ piece just calls her Margaret Getchell. I wasn’t quite sure which name to use. Do I use LaForge or not?

Stephanie Forshee: Yes, so they were married in 1869 and she did take his name. But I think that some people who would just say Margaret Getchell is because most of her contributions really to the store were before her married life. So it was out of respect for that.

Andrew Mitrak: I’m going to quote from your New York Times article: “In fact, after her husband became a partner, her compensation was eliminated and she gradually stepped away from her work to care for her children. Having a husband who owned a stake in the business was considered sufficient, as he would support the family with his earnings.” It sounds like her compensation was eliminated before her job was eliminated. To all these points of Macy being tough on employees, that seems really unfair.

Stephanie Forshee: When you think about it today, it is unbelievable. You can’t really think of someone not being paid for their job. In a lot of ways, Margaret was ahead of her time. She not only worked when she was married, but she worked through her pregnancies as well. That was really unheard of. She would have already had two children by 1872. When her husband was named a partner, but at that time, that was when her compensation was taken away. With Abiel being a partner in the store, everything was going to be the same pot of money, if you will.

Andrew Mitrak: It sounds like that period from 1860 through the end of that decade, she really was full-time Superintendent, rising the ranks, having astonishing contributions. Then from 1870 onwards, it becomes a little less formal.

A Legacy Cut Short

Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned that R.H. Macy had been doing succession planning in the 1870s. It is important that he was, because there are a series of tragic endings in a short period of time. R.H. Macy died in 1877, age 54. Then Abiel LaForge dies a year after that in 1878. And then sadly, Margaret Getchell dies in 1880 at 38 years old. Is there anything you’d want to share about her final years?

Stephanie Forshee: It is really sad to think, she accomplished so much in the business world and started her own family. For anyone to pass away at 38 is devastating. The fact that she lost the two men she was closest to in her life—her employer, that she grew so close to and her husband—those few final years were extremely hard for her. She had some health issues, things like nerves pain and chronic pain. She ultimately passed away from a combination of heart failure and ovarian issues. As far as I know, it would have been ovarian cancer, though at that time they didn’t exactly know how to treat that. Those final years were definitely marked by tragedy.

Andrew Mitrak: It also seems like, certainly tragic on a personal level, but for Macy’s the company, it leaves a leadership vacuum. The steward of the brand and marketing innovation is gone. The founder is gone. Abiel, considered one of the potential successors, is also gone. Who takes the reins at Macy’s, and do any of Getchell’s innovations survive this transition?

Stephanie Forshee: A few people stepped in temporarily because it was a very quick succession with Macy and Abiel LaForge dying the next year, and even Valentine. When Macy passed away, Margaret’s husband Abiel and Robert Valentine had intended to and filed paperwork to rename the store “LaForge & Valentine.” So in some way, it is crazy to think of now because of all the tragedies that happened, because they passed away, the store was never renamed. It’s crazy to think that it would have been a completely different name.

A few people stepped in temporarily over those next few years. Over the next decade, it was a shorter tenure. It was the Straus family who would eventually become in charge of the store for decades and innovate even further in the coming years throughout the early 1900s.

In terms of her innovations and contributions to the store, surviving her legacy, I think in many ways they did. When Macy hired Margaret, because she had been so successful, that encouraged him to hire many more women and promote them to leadership roles. Even though, they didn’t quite get to the level that Margaret did—there were managers and head buyers—but the next Superintendent or two were not female. But there were some positives to come from that.

The Enduring Spirit of Innovation

Andrew Mitrak: It wasn’t until decades later in 1924 that Macy’s launched the Thanksgiving Day Parade, which is probably its most famous marketing event. Getchell obviously wasn’t alive to see it, but do you see any of her fingerprints on this event?

Stephanie Forshee: In some ways, yes. There is nothing you can directly link to say she had the idea for a parade, but just the fact that she was constantly innovating and encouraging others to share their ideas. I think she would be in favor of it and definitely proud that Macy’s came up with this idea and was able to pull it off in a way they have. To see it today, I’m sure she would be very pleased.

Lessons from Margaret Getchell’s Life

Andrew Mitrak: Wrapping up, as you reflect on Margaret Getchell’s life and work and you spent a lot of time on her biography, are there any top lessons that you’ve taken away? Are there ways you’ve applied her “astonish the customer” philosophy, or other ways you take her lesson to your own professional life as a marketer and PR professional?

Stephanie Forshee: Absolutely. I think of that all the time. I feel inspired by her. I have been writing for the sake of other people knowing her name and learning from her, but I feel very lucky to have been the person to follow her journey and research her over the past few years. The “astonish the customer” philosophy—I am constantly thinking of that.

I also put myself in her shoes a lot. I don’t know this for sure because it’s not something she wrote in her diary. I think she must have faced some forms of imposter syndrome or having doubts, being one of the only female leaders. I put myself in her shoes a lot thinking, “Okay, if she can do it, I can do it.” Those are the things that encourage and inspire me.

Andrew Mitrak: That’s a really inspiring lesson to wrap up on. Stephanie Forshee, thanks so much for joining. I’ll be sure to post links to your piece in The New York Times as well as your book Hidden Gems in the blog post. Stephanie, I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks so much for joining me and sharing about the astonishing career of Margaret Getchell LaForge.

Stephanie Forshee: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, Andrew. It was great.

*Footnote: In the intro, I mention balloons floating down Broadway. While the parade famously followed Broadway for decades, the route changed in 2009. Today, the balloons float down 6th Avenue, though they still end at Macy’s flagship store on Broadway & 34th.

A recurring theme on A History of Marketing is the tension between marketing as an art and marketing as a science.

Lately, we’ve explored the former. David Gluckman shared how he invented Baileys Irish Cream in 1973 based on gut instinct and “the benefit of ignorance.” Scott Reames revealed how the team that birthed the Nike brand in 1971 had no formal training as marketers.

This week, the pendulum swings in the other direction in my excellent conversation with Jim Spaeth, Ph.D.

Jim’s career places him at the center of the industry’s shift toward rigorous measurement. From his early days at Young & Rubicam and General Foods, Jim pioneered Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM), a discipline designed to measure marketing’s ROI in financial terms and further optimize investments in marketing.

• The Origins of MMM: How General Foods used early models to uncover granular insights to bridge the gap between marketing and finance

• Connecting Ads to Sales: How the ambitious ScanAmerica venture attempted to measure actual SKU-level supermarket purchases to locally-aired TV ads

• Standardizing Internet Advertising: His time leading the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) during the dot-com boom, where he fought to standardize the chaotic new language of clicks and views

• The Future of Measurement: How deep learning and AI are addressing the lingering challenges of causality and creative assessment

If the last few episodes demonstrated the power of creative intuition, this conversation explores the discipline of proving that intuition actually works.

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, who volunteers to review and edit transcripts for accuracy and clarity.

Defining Marketing Mix Modeling

Andrew Mitrak: Jim Spaeth, welcome to A History of Marketing.

Jim Spaeth: Thank you.

Andrew Mitrak: I’m really excited to speak with you. Prior guests, Shelly Zalis and Bill Moult, both highly recommended speaking with you, especially on the history of marketing mix modeling, which is something that has been brought up on this show before, but we haven’t fully delved into.

So, I thought I’d ask you about some of that. And first, I thought maybe we could define that for listeners. So if you were at a dinner party or having a glass of wine with somebody and you had to explain marketing mix modeling to them—to somebody who hadn’t heard of it before—how would you overall describe that to them?

Jim Spaeth: I would describe it in a few ways. The simplest is just from what its goal is. It attempts to decompose the contribution to sales of all of the marketing and non-marketing factors that drive sales. And at its simplest, in some ways, it’s to prove that marketing is accomplishing something. To quantify what it’s accomplishing and to measure the return on investment. So, it’s a way for marketing and finance people to talk to each other. That’s kind of one part of it.

But also, by understanding all of the factors that are driving sales, you can begin to think about how to optimally allocate budgets, which things are working, which things need help, how external factors that you don’t control impact your sales. So good examples would be things like the weather, the economy, competitive product pricing. You don’t control everything, but you need to react to certain things. So, in a way, conceptually, it’s the engine for an ideal dashboard for a marketer.

Andrew Mitrak: And do you think of it more as a backward-looking dashboard analyzing results or more of a forward-looking model of where to apply things? Or is it a little bit of both?

Jim Spaeth: It’s a little bit of both. It’s accused of being backward-looking because the problem is, typically marketing mix models need two or three years’ worth of data. So, what they learn or figure—learn tends to make it sound like AI, and these days there is AI in marketing mix, but not always, and certainly there hasn’t been—but what you can infer, I guess is a better way of saying it, from marketing mix is what the impact of those historical activities have been.

So if you ran the same television campaign for the last 10 years, that’s what you’re going to understand about, that’s what your model is going to tell you about. It’s not going to tell you about this great new campaign and what it might do. Now, that said, you can use marketing mix to, as I said, optimize your spend going forward based on what historical responses have been. You can use it to forecast, and forecasting can be at a broad level or it could be at a very granular level to help, you know, production, inventory, things of that sort.

But you always have to recognize that it’s based on history. So that’s why it has that backward-looking reputation. However, I would say any technique is backward-looking because any technique based on data is based on something from the past. I mean, it might be yesterday or last week or last month, but it’s something from the past. It’s just a question of how far back in the past you have to go.

The Origins of MMM: From Marketing as Art to Science

Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned earlier in your career, you were at General Foods in-house. And by the way, General Foods is probably better known today for the Post cereal brands, is that right?

Jim Spaeth: Oh, it was the home of Post, Maxwell House, Jell-O, Tang that went to the moon, or at least in space, I can’t remember anymore. So, it was merged with Kraft, then Kraft has been merged with Heinz...

Andrew Mitrak: And so really mass CPG products. Were you involved in marketing mix modeling there?

Jim Spaeth: So that was kind of the beginning. GF was the beginning of marketing mix modeling, quite frankly. I would say the prologue is, before that, I worked for nine years at Young & Rubicam when it was a full-service ad agency. And those were the days of the 15% commission, so the agency had a lot of money to bestow many, many benefits and services upon their clients, and they weren’t always squabbling over every nickel and dime.

So we had a big, big research department and we did a lot of different stuff. But these guys were thinking about how to use science in marketing. Marketing was an art. I mean, it was just all an art. It was judgment, it was creativity, it was... and it worked. You know, we just couldn’t really prove it, we couldn’t measure it, but you could see it work when well-marketed brands beat the crap out of the more commodity brands, and they could charge more money and get away with it because they seemed to be higher value. So we knew marketing worked, but it hadn’t really been measured and it hadn’t really been submitted to the science of optimization and all those kinds of things. So that work was beginning at Y&R.

So, those are kind of the prologue days, really trying to bring science methods, econometrics, and such into the marketing world.

An Early Insight: Connecting Stove Top Stuffing Sales with Potato Prices

Andrew Mitrak: You worked at Y&R before General Foods. Did having this in-house and agency perspective on marketing mix modeling shape your views in any way? Did you notice sort of gaps or things that didn’t work? Because not everybody has the luxury of working at both.

Jim Spaeth: Yeah, that’s a really good, really, really good point. Absolutely did. My knowledge from Y&R of how media is bought and sold made a big difference, because why do you need to learn something when you can’t act on it, right? So, you buy your television largely in the upfront market. While you have some flexibility, you’re pretty much, let’s say, 80% locked in. So, we’re not going to be able to change it anytime soon, whereas radio was pretty nimble, and if you learned something about radio, you could act on it over the weekend and make a change.

So things like that, knowing how media really worked was very, very helpful. And then the view from inside the business, inside the food business, was amazing because you really got to see how it worked—both organizationally, how it worked, what the decisions were, when they got made, what the decision-making process was like.

I came in initially into the market research department where we began to build an actual, honest-to-God marketing mix modeling practice, which meant, to boil it down simplistically, using econometrics. So using regression modeling and all the sales and marketing data you could lay your hands on. And in those early days, we built models for all of the GF brands.

And they were very simplistic. They would just say, “Here’s my sales. To what degree is...” Now remember, we’re talking in the ‘80s now, right? “To what degree does television drive sales versus radio versus outdoor versus magazines? What’s the impact of pricing? What about my in-store promotions? What about my coupons?” So what I just named, seven or eight factors, maybe there would be 10 or 12 factors in a model. My personal big breakthrough was when I discovered that Stove Top stuffing did well when the price of potatoes was high. So, you know, starch on your plate could be Stove Top, could be potatoes. When potatoes were expensive, you go to Stove Top. When potatoes are cheap, Stove Top didn’t do as well. So, that was pretty sophisticated. That was a cross-elasticity in the model. So they were really, really simplistic.

Who Actually Used Marketing Research?

Andrew Mitrak: When you built those early models at General Foods, who do you present that to, and who makes use of that information? Is it to product groups as far as, “Okay, we’re going to change our products”? Is it to advertising agencies who then use it to inform their campaigns? How does that research actually get put into practice?

Jim Spaeth: That’s a very, very good question because that development of that kind of organizational process has been equally, if not more, important than the development of data and statistical technique. In those days, we worked collaboratively. So every division had its own little research group and a head of research. And so we would collaborate with them because we wanted to be somewhat cohesive and consistent in our story. And then ultimately, we would report to the marketing director or the division president.

Andrew Mitrak: The marketing director or division president, they are looking at all this information and then they’re using it to just inform their overall marketing strategies.

Jim Spaeth: Right. Setting budgets, allocating budgets. That was the primary application, deciding what’s working, what’s not working. Back in those days, we weren’t able to break out creative, so we couldn’t really try to understand whether this particular campaign was working. That has only come very recently. That was a desire from the beginning, but not something we could accomplish.

Andrew Mitrak: Did it feel like General Foods was early to this kind of practice? That this was sort of the frontier of using research and analytics?

Jim Spaeth: My impression is back then, GF was clearly the first. And it disseminated from there. So one of the reasons mix modeling in its early phase was pretty much just a CPG practice is because people moved from GF to Pepsi, to Kraft, to Clorox, to wherever, and brought the practice with them.

The ScanAmerica Project: “Ahead of its Time”

Andrew Mitrak: After General Foods, at some point, you get involved with ScanAmerica and Arbitron. Can you tell me this story?

Jim Spaeth: That was an early attempt at measuring both product purchasing and television viewing among the same households so that you could look at not the audiences among women, but the audience among Maxwell House purchasers, or frequent Maxwell House purchasers. That was ScanAmerica. That was actually a joint venture between Burke Marketing Services and Arbitron. So Arbitron did the TV part and Burke did the sales part, and they also had expertise in test marketing.

So that was very, very exciting, and it didn’t make it. The first of a number of startups that I’ve been involved in that have not been successful but have been exciting and groundbreaking.

Andrew Mitrak: It seems like a really ambitious project because this would have been in the ‘80s?

Jim Spaeth: Second half of the ‘80s.

Andrew Mitrak: The idea really was the ads you’re running, really connecting those to actual purchases and having a set of SKUs that are at a grocery market in an area that saw those ads, and really connecting end-to-end, which seems like a complex, ambitious challenge to solve. It still seems challenging today, especially 40, 50 years ago or so, it sounds like a really tough one.

Jim Spaeth: Yeah, it was a little bit ahead of its time.

Andrew Mitrak: I’ve worked for a handful of startups and it seems like there’s an interesting thing as a marketer to join a product as part of the vision, right? Where the product is not quite reality yet, but if you get enough people on board and it seems like it could cross the chasm and become real, there’s a big opportunity. So it seems like it’s important to just swing for the fences and try things out, even if they don’t work.

Jim Spaeth: Absolutely. That’s been the story of my career. It’s like, when you see it, go for it. And we really, really believed in it. And we had clients who really, really believed in it. It was just too hard to do, too hard, too expensive to do at that time. And the other thing is you run into those organizational issues. That’s I think where I first learned, it may make complete sense, total sense, it might have demonstrable economic benefit, but before you really push too hard, make sure you understand what the industry or organizational constraints might be.

Standardizing a New Frontier: The Internet and the ARF

Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), and you became president of the ARF in the mid-’90s. What is the ARF for somebody who hasn’t heard of that before?

Jim Spaeth: Sure. The Advertising Research Foundation is, I want to say the oldest... Now, I don’t know how far back the AMA goes, but the oldest or one of the oldest marketing-centric trade organizations in the United States. It was founded by the ANA (the Association of National Advertisers) and the 4A’s (the American Association of Advertising Agencies) because they needed something, they needed to stimulate better research.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, and I think the AMA was the ‘30s or ‘40s. I’d have to look it up.

Jim Spaeth: So I think the ARF actually predates it. And it was focused on advertising because it was the child of the advertisers and the agencies. So obviously marketing is a broader topic, but that’s what their focal point was. And again, many, many years later, ARF was still respected around the world as a preeminent authority with respect to advertising and media in particular, maybe not marketing more broadly or market research more broadly, because you had other organizations in Europe and in Asia and elsewhere. But it’s an organization with global stature that’s been around for a long time and does a lot of leadership. We’re doing some great work right now on this topic of marketing mix modeling.

Andrew Mitrak: That’s awesome. By the way, it looks like ARF, based on Wikipedia at least, was founded in 1936, and AMA was founded in 1937. So it predates the AMA. [laughs]

Jim Spaeth: Slightly earlier, all right.

Andrew Mitrak: Why the jump to ARF after having a career at startups, at agencies, at large CPG companies?

Jim Spaeth: The ARF was very important to me personally. The reason is, back when I was at General Foods, the head of research at GF was involved, I think he might have been on the board of ARF. They needed someone with some media expertise in a volunteer role. This was just early on. And he kind of volunteered—he went to my boss and he said, “I want to volunteer Jim for this job.” Which was great because I was a little bit bored, frankly.

And I had very little exposure to the outside world. I’d been in my two companies I worked at and was fine and comfortable, but didn’t really get out a lot. So this kind of put me out in the outside world. And I will never forget being in a meeting with five or six legends of the day who were on this committee. They just didn’t want to chair it. And somehow, not because of me, but because of my company, I had the stature to chair it. So they gave it to me. And the kid walks in, not knowing what he was getting himself into, and suddenly I’m talking to these people who I’ve read their papers, I’ve read their articles, I know all about them. It was like... I was awestruck.

And I will say, just without making this too much about me, it enabled me to find my footing. And I think that’s what ARF does for a lot of people in the industry. It really brings them on board, broadens their perspective. And a lot of my ambitions where maybe I had something that was innovative I really wanted to push, but the company I worked at wasn’t really quite ready for it, I could go... I had another gig. I could do whatever ARF volunteer work I was doing and kind of try to push the industry in a certain direction. My whole career has been about innovation. What better place to try to drive innovation? So that’s what brought me there.

Andrew Mitrak: As far as driving innovation when you’re there, this is the late ‘90s through early 2000s that you’re president, and this is the dot-com bubble era. The rise of the internet and the rise of early digital advertising as well. As I was researching and prepping for this interview, I came across an article that was published in 2002, and I’m going to read you a quote. The article is all about how advertising measurement models are changing as the internet is developing. And I’m going to quote: “We’ve invented this jargon: clicks and ad views and page views,” says Jim Spaeth, president of the ARF. “We need to direct people to standard media terminology and get people to talk the same language.”

I’m still talking about ad views... yeah, ad views and page views and clicks. Those are still used today. So I was just thinking of this, putting myself in this era. It’s like, okay, the internet’s developing, it’s brand new for everybody. There’s a lot of uncertainty around it. It kind of sounds somewhat familiar with AI today as well. But there’s new standards that need to happen, people are measuring different things, there’s uncertainty. And then you, as the head of ARF, need to help standardize, need to kind of bring people together. Can you just paint a picture of that era and some of the challenges and opportunities there, and who you needed to persuade to adopt the same language around things?

Jim Spaeth: The internet was just happening. You had a lot of really smart people coming on the scene with absolutely no background in advertising or marketing, for that matter. And they were reinventing the world. Now, that’s great, they’re reinventing the world, but as you will appreciate as a historian, it pays to understand where this world came from and what the framework is you’re moving into. Particularly when you think about it from an ad spend perspective, digital was new. It was like novelty money, it was experimental money, it was some extra cash here and there. The bulk of the spend was still... we were spending more in outdoor advertising than in digital, right?

But suddenly digital is reinventing everything. So we don’t have impressions, we have clicks, and we don’t have reach, we have uniques, and we don’t... It’s like, can you just stop confusing people? Do you want to be part of the scene, or do you want to have somebody have to have a special training course just to understand your vocabulary? And then by the way, what happens when you put your clicks into a media plan? Do we add them to the impressions or do we have to create clicks for television? It was like... it was kind of stupid, frankly. And it continues.

Why Programmatic Advertising was Digital Marketing’s Breakthrough

Andrew Mitrak: It continues. It is shocking how little digital was for as far as a percentage of marketing spend for as long as it was, but it grew at a rapid rate. Were there any milestones at standardization that you saw as big wins in this period?

Jim Spaeth: I think the biggest breakthrough was programmatic advertising. Digital always had a problem because the audiences to any one thing you bought were so tiny that instead of going out and buying a 12-rated television program, now I got 12% of the country watching me right now. That’s it. Let’s put another one of these in. Let’s put 12 of these in. Now I’ve got a plan. You could do it on the back of a napkin. You could do it on an Excel spreadsheet for sure.

But digital was tiny, and you needed to buy thousands and thousands of units to add up to anything. So it was manually prohibitive. Labor was prohibitive. It was not efficient for agencies to do at all until you could do it in an automated fashion, which was supported by the fact that digital is data-driven, right? So there’s metadata and so forth associated with it.

So programmatic was possible for digital and absolutely necessary. And it took a while to get it to work right. And I’m not sure it still works right, but... and then we had some experiments trying to do television programmatically, and the early ones were kind of nuts because you didn’t... whatever, it’s a long subject, but they ignored some basic things that we understood from the beginning of time. Like, people pay a lot of attention to ads on primetime, so that’s important. They pay a lot less attention to ads in daytime because they’re busy, if they’re home, they’re busy around the house doing whatever they’re doing. So there’s different value propositions, and that was often not seen in programmatic. Now, attention has become an important variable, which I think is great, and that really differentiates the quality of impressions in a big way.

So, automation, right? Sorry, long-winded answer. Automation was necessary and possible for digital. It made it more affordable, and then the other thing that happens is digital has more or less an infinite supply, right? So, as an economist, I would say when your supply is infinite, your price gets really low. So that’s why digital impressions are so inexpensive. “Oh, you want some more? We’ll make you some more.” It’s a little oversimplified, I will say, but that dynamic is at work. So they became cheaper impressions. It was good for advertisers because they were cheap. It was good for agencies because it was labor... it was not labor-intensive, it was efficient and profitable for the agencies. And now, of course, we’ve got television and out-of-home and other media, radio, going through that same kind of automation process now.

Recent Innovations in Marketing Mix Modeling and the Impact of AI

Andrew Mitrak: Kind of reflecting on this conversation in your career and the development of marketing mix modeling, are there any sort of remaining challenges with it that haven’t fully been solved yet? Or are there still things you would have expected to be more buttoned up and dialed in and more of a solved problem by now that still haven’t been resolved? Are there lingering things where you think, “Wow, more innovation needs to happen in this space that will \pave the way for it in the future”?

Jim Spaeth: There’s always that. But you know, I have to say, marketing mix is, in some cases, conducted by bigger companies as a business, and like a lot of businesses, they’re really trying to drive costs down and profits up. Not to say they don’t do a good job, I’m not saying that at all, but it changes the orientation a little bit.

And then there are a lot of modeling companies that are driven by entrepreneurs who are really motivated to do a great job. It’s one of the things I’ve enjoyed about being involved in this field is a lot of very highly motivated—and not just about making money, I mean, that’s obviously a good thing—but highly motivated to just advance the state of the art and do a great job.

And just off the top of my head, I’ll call out Nancy Smith at Analytic Partners, who has created one of the biggest independent marketing mix companies in the world. I would call out Ross Link, who developed his company and then actually ran Nielsen’s company for a while and is back doing his own thing in his own way. And Steve Cohen at in4mation insights and his partner, Mark, who just keep pushing the envelope. I mean, these people just want to do great work, and it’s so refreshing to see. There’s real pride of their services and their products.

Andrew Mitrak: That’s cool. It’s great that it continues to develop and continues to get better, and it’s an area where entrepreneurs continue to make an improvement for folks. Do you have any other kind of final reflections or takeaways on this conversation?

Jim Spaeth: You know what is interesting? Kind of just go back to your previous question more directly. The practice, under the stewardship of those people I’ve mentioned and others, has continued to push in the directions I always, and my partner Alice, have always seen as where the benefits are—getting faster, getting more granular, more inclusive. And that just keeps happening, which is great.

A big breakthrough was a few years ago, we finally started seeing creative being assessed through these same tools, which was really, really good. So that’s finally happening on a bigger scale, I think, than ever before. And then, the frontier right now is AI, which offers to make certain levels of analysis more possible, affordable than would be if it was all manual.

But the other thing with AI and deep learning in particular is, mix modeling was always a bit of an art and a science. The science was the data and the statistics and the models, but the modeler had to look at the results and go, “That’s not possible. Everyone knows when prices go up, sales go down. So what’s wrong with the model?” Right? That was the art part. You had to have a common sense sort of understanding of how these things work because the model can come up with some cockamamie solutions, and you have to really make sure you’re looking at something that really makes sense from every angle.

And deep learning—I have not practiced it, but as I’ve read about it and understood it—has a better grasp of causality and can give you more assurance that what you’re looking at is actual causality and not coincidence. I think that’s another important breakthrough. And I hope we see that spread quickly through the industry.

Andrew Mitrak: Jim, thanks so much for your time. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Jim Spaeth: Great talking to you, Andrew. Thank you so much.

“Why should all alcoholic drinks taste punishing and challenging? Why shouldn’t they taste pleasant?”

My guest, David Gluckman, asked himself this question in 1973. It led him to develop what became Baileys Irish Cream, a liqueur that’s now sold ~2.5 billion bottles globally.

In our conversation, David shares the remarkably haphazard origin story of Baileys along with the contrarian lessons from his career creating alcoholic drink brands like Tanqueray No. Ten, Cîroc, and Smirnoff Black.

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

We dive into the stories and insights from David’s book, “That sh*t will never sell!” David’s candid about his disdain for modern marketing practices, his frustration with Baileys’ brand extensions, and why he believes great ideas never come from middle management.

I also ask David about how brands interact with unexpected internet memes, the ethics of marketing alcohol, and if cavalier marketers like him can succeed in an era when brands have become bureaucratized.

Here is my spirited conversation with David Gluckman.

Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, who volunteers to review and edit transcripts for accuracy and clarity.

How a Tax Break Inspired Baileys Irish Cream

Andrew Mitrak: David Gluckman, welcome to A History of Marketing.

David Gluckman: Thank you very much. Nice to be a part of it.

Andrew Mitrak: I loved reading your book, That Sh*t Will Never Sell, which is a really fun read. I’m excited to speak about your full career and all of the amazing products and beverages you’ve had a chance to work with. But I thought I’d start off with one of your most famous stories and case studies, and that’s all about Baileys. Could you share the story of developing Baileys?

David Gluckman: It all happened very quickly and it happened pretty well seamlessly, as well. We got a brief on a Friday afternoon which said that the Irish government were looking for brands for export, and if they were successful, they’d get a 10-year tax holiday, which is quite significant. But it was just a telephone conversation late on a Friday afternoon.

And the following Monday—we had just been in business on our own—my partner came in and I said, “What are we going to do about this Irish brief?” We discussed it and I said, going back to my previous career 10 years earlier, “Is there anything in my experience in the development of Kerrygold butter—branded Irish butter—which we could bring to bear on this?”

My partner said, “Well, what happens if we mix cream and Irish whiskey?”

So, being an action man, I said, “Let’s go down to the local supermarket, buy some cream, buy some whiskey, mix it together, and see what it tastes like.” There was no intellectualization, there was no identification of a target group or anything like that. We simply—the brief was hot off the presses, so we just started thinking.

The mixture of Irish whiskey and cream was pretty disgusting. But I just figured there was something there. So we went back to the supermarket, looked around, and we bought some powdered drinking chocolate. Added it, added some sugar, and I think the realization dawned: Why should all alcoholic drinks taste punishing and challenging? Why shouldn’t they taste pleasant? And what we had with this mixture was a very pleasing, chocolate-flavored drink.

I got quite excited by this because there’d never been anything quite like it that I’d come across. So I called up my client and said, “We have an idea in solution to Friday’s brief. Can we talk?”

And that’s how it started, really. It was my experience on Kerrygold that was the trigger, if you like, that led to the first part of the solution, which was the product, the liquid.

The Benefit of Ignorance: Developing a Drink with No Training

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that’s right. It seems like such a jump. So this, to place this in time, this was the early 1970s.

David Gluckman: It’s 1973. That’s right.

Andrew Mitrak: 1973 that you’re developing Baileys. And you had worked previously with Kerrygold and on Procter & Gamble products. But it seems like jumping into you mixing the drinks themselves and coming up with a concoction, it seems like a jump. And you were also involved in the branding elements as well. So this is an example of the product being developed with the same people behind some of the branding of the product. I guess, could you speak to that experience of just developing a drink and developing a beverage itself? Did you feel like you had any training or authority to do that? Or what prompted you to actually develop the drink?

David Gluckman: I think that not having any training and being fairly ignorant was probably a benefit. Because had we had some scientific knowledge, we would have been deterred by the thought that something that contained cream could survive in temperatures of 40 degrees above zero or 40 degrees below. If you have a certain element of ignorance, you can do anything. If you don’t know what you can’t do, you can do anything.

And I think ideas start in different ways, and that’s how this one started. I can’t explain why. We didn’t start like this every time, but I wasn’t averse to mixing products up and changing things around.

Andrew Mitrak: There must be so many lessons in this because it all starts with a tax incentive, which is—I wouldn’t imagine, it doesn’t seem like the best reason to start a beverage is because of for tax reasons, but why not? You do that. You mix it yourself with ingredients from the grocery store and it’s, I don’t mean this in an insulting way, kind of dumb. It’s just like, “Oh, that’s Irish cream, Irish whiskey, why not?” It’s not really over-intellectualizing it.

And then you go on to develop the name and the brand and the bottle. Can you speak to the next steps of building everything that surrounds the liquid itself? What did that look like?

From a Bottle in a Cab to the ‘Baileys’ Bistro Sign

David Gluckman: I was excited, so I jumped in a cab and took it over to my client. And he was just intrigued by what I had in a bottle in my hands. So, not allowing any foreplay, he grabbed it and tasted it and said, “Hey, this tastes really good. Maybe we should do it.”

And that was the most important part of the whole procedure because had he turned to me and said, “Look, this is not our thing,” that would have been the end of the brand and the end of the story. But he bought the idea immediately. He just thought it was worth taking to his technical people to see whether they could make it happen.

But then he said to me, because he was a man of some impatience, “We must now think about branding.”

And I remembered... the best way to start branding is to start with a name, a brand name, because you can’t design a package without a brand name. And I remember talking to a gentleman, the late Tony O’Reilly—very famous businessman, he was for a while president of Heinz in America, worldwide, and also one of the most famous men in Ireland. He said to me over a drink, “If you ever develop a brand that requires an Irish surname, don’t use one like his.”

So I said, “Well, why ever not?” I mean, O’Reilly’s, whatever it was, sounded perfectly normal to me. He said, “No, Irish family names have a tendency to sound whimsical.”

So that lodged in my cortex somewhere. And I remembered that. Anyway, we were moving office, and as we arrived at our office, there was a restaurant below it called Baileys Bistro. And I think when you’re developing brands, you think about every aspect of the brand almost 24/7. It becomes a kind of an obsession. It’s always not too far from the front of your mind. And when I saw the name Baileys, I thought it was perfect.

Baileys Irish Cream. It just seemed to fit. And so I called up my client and said, “Why don’t we call it Baileys?” And he said, “That sounds terrific. Let’s do that.” It’s an Anglo-Irish name. And that’s how the name began.

Crafting an Instant Classic: The Design and Branding of Baileys

David Gluckman: And from there we developed packaging. And I think that in the brief for the packaging, there were echoes of Kerrygold. I said to the designer, “Imagine Kerrygold with all that wonderful bucolic greenness that is Ireland, and build that in. But remember that it’s an alcoholic drink and people will pay a premium price for it. So it doesn’t belong in the chiller cabinet, but on the liquor shelf. So give it some status and some quality.”

And he got it almost in one. But in effect, that was the Baileys story. There are one or two bits and pieces, but effectively that was it.

Andrew Mitrak: The thing that surprised me is just the time in which this happened. 1973... I was born in 1990 and that, and so Baileys was around before I was born and certainly had been around by the time I became of drinking age. And it just seemed like one of the products that’s been around forever, right? That so many spirits and liqueurs feel like pretty old brands. And Baileys, for me, just seemed—I would have assumed that it was a hundred years old or more, not just invented today, like 50 years ago or so.

Did you think about creating a history for Baileys or having it appear to be older than it really was and have some traditions to it? Or did you want it to be perceived as, “This is a new product, this is a new option for you, this is a new alcohol you can consume?”

David Gluckman: I think we were governed by the kind of style that attached to alcoholic drinks at that time. You know, there was a lot of heritage, dates going back to the 19th and 18th century. There were idiosyncratic devices, like the bat on the Bacardi bottle. I think the convention was antique and conservative. Although there were brands that were emerging at that time that were much more modern, like Malibu, for example, which didn’t follow those rules.

But no, I don’t think so. I think we just had a vision in our mind of what the label and the packaging had to say. And it was all about a celebration of Ireland’s green and pleasant land. And I was imbued with a certain passion for the country through working with O’Reilly and on Kerrygold, and that always stuck with me.

‘Benefit Out’: Why Baileys Wasn’t Built for a Target Audience

Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned that there wasn’t a lot of, you know, target audience and persona building and things like that that went into it. Did that come down later, after you had invented it and passed it off? Did the targeting and demographics and how to go to market and where to target first—did that come later after you had handed off the product, or was it never part of it? Was it just a beverage for everybody to begin with?

David Gluckman: Well, my belief, I think, is what I call “benefit out.” In other words, I think if you have a product that has something to offer, communicate that to people and it’ll find its own level. So I didn’t have any particular target archetype in mind. People were doing that kind of thing back then, but having been in this particular field for 50 years, I think most of that is bullsh*t.

You design a product, make it available. The advertising and marketing people will fine-tune it if you like, but we handed it over the product as it was and left it to the companies. I think it’s one of the saddest things about my job is you develop a brand for which you have a passionate feeling, and then it disappears and perhaps isn’t developed along the lines you would like. But that’s life.

The Creator’s Dilemma: Letting Go of a Brand You Built

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. So this is something I wanted to follow up with you about because you were a consultant, and you obviously had a massive part in Baileys, from the conception, the ingredients, the name, the bottle, so much of it. It’s you bringing this to life. And then you don’t own it at the end of the day. You hand it off. And you write, “I can remember being introduced as someone who, quote, ‘a man who helped out with the label design.’” And that rankled you a bit, but you let it go. And is it hard to let go of a product that you helped create?

David Gluckman: Not really. I mean, I think that the remark to which you refer was made at the launch party in Dublin in 1974. And somebody... I think the Irish are very protective of brands that go out under their name, as they should be. And somebody introduced me not as one of the people who created the brand, but someone who helped with the pack design. Since I have absolutely no graphic skills whatsoever, that rankled a little.

And then I think if you look back on things, you realize that for ideas to succeed, other people need to own them. In other words, what this guy was saying is, “This is my brand, not his,” and “I own it.” And I think that’s important. It’s a grown-up way of accepting the situation with brands. But if people start buying into it and feel ownership, then it’s very important.

Andrew Mitrak: That’s an important lesson and something I think every marketer and brand person could keep in mind.

What Explains Baileys’ 50 Years of Staying Power?

Andrew Mitrak: So reflecting on Baileys, it seems like there are just so many spirits that have been introduced and come and gone and had various levels of success over the last 50 years. And why do you think Baileys has had the staying power that it’s had?

David Gluckman: Well, I think what amazes me about Baileys is how it hasn’t been superseded by competitors. In other words, it’s sort of kept its position. And I think that’s largely through manipulation of price because Baileys, I think, sells for far less than it ought to. But I think that in that way, Diageo, because of the economies of scale, et cetera, are probably able to prevent any other operator from really damaging it. I don’t think that’s forever. I think that will happen.

I hate Baileys’ advertising and I loathe Baileys’ brand extensions because I think they’re cheap and nasty and trivial. And I’ve been quite vocal in my comments along those lines. But that’s... it’s been a long, long dead for me as a brand.

Andrew Mitrak: You’ve watched it from the sidelines over the last five decades or so since you handed it off. And they have, you know, Baileys candies and peppermint Baileys and all these new flavors of Baileys. And it’s just like, “Okay, that seems a little...” Parts of it seem a little gross, but it also seems to cheapen the brand and some of the core ideas that you helped develop there.

When a Meme Takes Over: Baileys and the ‘Old Gregg’ Phenomenon

Andrew Mitrak: The first time I ever came across the brand Baileys was in this viral video that was an early meme called “Old Gregg.”

Andrew Mitrak: And I was a teenage boy, like probably 15 years old when this came out. And there’s this absurd sketch that has a line from this character named Old Gregg. And the character asks:

“Have you ever drunk Baileys from a shoe?”

And this was my first time, I’m like, “What is Baileys?” And still today, within a very small group of people who are give or take five years from me, if I’m at a holiday party or some gathering and there’s Baileys, someone might say, “Have you ever drunk Baileys from a shoe?” And it’s just a silly thing. And I’m wondering, did you ever come across this sketch at all? And do you know if anybody at Baileys had a reaction to this Old Gregg comedy bit?

David Gluckman: I don’t. In fact, the first time I saw it was the link you sent me yesterday. Yeah. And I’d not heard of it before. And bear in mind, I went to the Baileys 50th-anniversary lunch recently, but that’s the only connection I’ve had with the brand since the 1970s.

Andrew Mitrak: There’s an interesting thing where there’s meme culture of the internet. There are these people who like share things, and brands don’t always have control over that. That the internet—you bring a thing to life, and then some comedy sketch makes a silly joke and has your product being drunk out of a shoe. And no control over your product whatsoever, but sometimes the internet just will run with a thing. It just seems like an interesting little case study of what a lot of brands deal with, where there’s some meme that now comes across on the internet that a brand has to somehow choose to embrace, choose to ignore, or just choose to live with for a bit. And it just seems like an interesting element of today’s media culture of how a brand might have to interact with the online universe.

David Gluckman: Well, again, that’s beyond my pay grade. You know, the brand has been handed over, and I either jump up in the air with delight or cringe when I see the way it progresses. But you know, that’s life.

Why Great Ideas Start at the Top, Not in the Middle

Andrew Mitrak: You go on through your career and it turns out okay. You work on a number of great brands: Tanqueray No. Ten, Smirnoff Black...

David Gluckman: Cîroc.

Andrew Mitrak: Cîroc, yeah. And more, the list goes on. And rather than tell the story of each of those, I’d also, in your book, you also talk—there are these themes that come through your work as well and lessons that you’ve learned from all of them. And I thought we could talk about those lessons, and maybe some of your stories of those other brands you worked on could come through that.

And one of the lessons that I totally identified with is that successful ideas don’t start in the middle of the organization. They start at the top. And that you need corporate cojones, you need leaders—usually the president or CEO or founder—to have conviction and make bold bets for a product to succeed, for a brand to succeed. Can you expand on this idea?

David Gluckman: Yes. What happened was that roundabout the time... I think I started in brand development in ‘69. Around ‘72, I think, an American called Tom Peters and a colleague called Robert Waterman wrote a book called In Search of Excellence, which we read. And we got very excited by this book because it talked about how companies worked, how big—and these guys were McKinsey consultants, I think—and they were talking about what it was like being inside big companies. And we came to various conclusions. It took a long time for these conclusions to bed down, but I think they’re very appropriate now.

One, that you could never develop a successful new brand if your path to development was through middle management because middle managers didn’t have the power to make things happen. So what IDV did, which was before it became Diageo, was instituted a thing called the “champion system,” which we got from Tom Peters, which said that anybody could commission a new brand provided he or she had the power to make it happen.

So we were getting top members—we had the finance director come in with a brief—mainly top-level management because, A, top-level management weren’t interested in the mechanics of doing something. A middle manager has to go and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars researching an idea to prove to his people above that it’s going to work. We didn’t have that problem. You would simply be asked by your client, “Will this work?” to which the answer was, “Yes, I think so, but I’m not sure.” And you can never be sure whether something would work.

So we had this top-down approach. The other thing is we didn’t engage marketing people. None of the brands we developed went down the marketing route or were developed through the marketing route. Marketing was very successful in making the brands work, but we didn’t use marketing. We didn’t use that constant desire to prove everything. If you look at Baileys and deconstructed it, nothing would have been as it was if we’d gone through the marketing route. Everything would have been questioned and debated and alternative before it happened, and might not have been quite such a successful brand. So we had a different way of working.

“Don’t Go Through the Marketing Route”

Andrew Mitrak: I want to follow up on this idea that you don’t go through the marketing route because something that I’ve thought a lot about on this podcast series is I want to cover the stories of a lot of the greatest marketers of all time. And within business, the greatest marketers of all time within companies, very rarely would you think that it’s the CMO, actually. If you look at a list, you’ll see it’s often founders or CEOs that have very strong marketing instincts. Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Oprah Winfrey, Lee Iacocca.

David Gluckman: A lot of people in the drinks business: Sidney Frank.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. And it strikes me that a lot of the best... if you ask somebody, “Who is one of the best marketers in the world?” they usually won’t name somebody with “marketing” in their title. They’ll think of a CEO or founder who has really strong instincts. Do you have a reaction to this?

David Gluckman: I think that’s true, and that’s certainly been my experience. The best people I worked with were board directors. O’Reilly was a fantastic guy to work with because he could take a decision. And he’d take a decision—I was a junior executive, aged 24—and if I came up with something that he thought was interesting, we’d do it.

Whereas with marketing, you go through strategic analysis and you look at target audiences and you spend buckets of money doing market research. I remember I did a pitch to Unilever 30 years ago, and I said, “If I ran your business, I would cut your research budget, your market research budget, in half, and then I’d halve it again. And get people, A, to use their brains more, and B, to look at the data you already have.” I didn’t get the business, but that wasn’t a surprise.

Andrew Mitrak: That is funny. It is interesting how often a company will always want to commission new research, even if the company’s been around for a very long time and probably has decades of existing research you could draw from and draw conclusions from faster and more cheaply.

Why Buying an Idea is as Important as Creating One

Andrew Mitrak: Another idea of yours is that the person who purchases the decision deserves as much, if not more, credit than the person who comes up with the idea. Can you speak to that or can you articulate what this idea is?

David Gluckman: This is something you learn over time. Ego plays such a big part in this whole business in which we work. But when you come to think of it, if somebody had said, “Look, I don’t think this chocolate milk stuff is our kind of thing,” that’s the end of the story. I think the people who buy ideas are not given nearly enough credit for that. I would say that every single idea of mine that got out of my office and into somebody else’s and worked was down to the person having the ability to buy the idea on an argument, because we never spent any money on research. We figured it was a complete waste of time.

Because if you get nine out of 10 consumers thinking an idea is good, the chances are it’s mediocre because you’ve just reinvented your competition. Good ideas will get two passionate people out of 10 loving it and the other eight hating it, and you build from there. But you can’t use that as a tool to sell it to your marketing guy. Two out of 10 people think it’s a brilliant idea, you ought to go with it? No chance.

Andrew Mitrak: So how does this change your behavior over time, knowing that you’re really dependent on the person buying the idea? For me, for instance, this totally resonated with me. And I know that I almost treat my ideas a little more cheaply in a way where there was a time, especially early in my career, when I feel like I had a good idea, I’m like, “Oh, this is so precious. I shouldn’t share it with anybody. I should really develop it for a long time.” And now I’m like, whenever I have an idea, I just share it. I try to get it out there. And I know whether it gets adopted or not, I’m not going to feel too bad over it. Of course, I’d like things to succeed and be adopted, but just get it out, share the ideas, be confident you’ll come up with more ideas. And if somebody buys it, great. And of course, do your best job to try to sell it, but if you don’t, try to not let it be out of your control. Is that your thinking about it, or are there other ways we should treat our ideas differently, knowing that really their success depends on somebody buying the idea?

“There’s No Plan B”: Why it’s best to pitch only one idea

David Gluckman: When I worked in advertising in London in the ‘60s, there was one agency called Collett Dickenson Pearce, which I think was one of the best agencies in the world in its time. But they only ever produced one idea in response to a brief. When they went to a client, they said, “This is what we think you should do.” And there were two ways out of this: the client would give them good reason not to do it, in which case they’d do another one, or they’d fire the client and look for somebody else.

And at the time, we were just amazed—working in more conservative agencies—how could they do that? How could they just go with one idea? But I think when you engage with the business of creativity and the business of solving problems, you realize that there can only be one solution within your capability. Now, I’m not saying it’s the perfect solution. There might have been a better idea than Baileys, and there may be better elements in brands. But I think if you’re really true to what you believe, you go with one idea.

To the point, I had this long relationship with my client. I remember once going with two ideas, and my client said to me, “You haven’t solved it, have you, if you’ve got two ideas?” And I said, “No, I haven’t.” So they said, “Go away and come back with one.”

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, one of the quotes in your book is, “There’s no plan B.”

David Gluckman: I think that’s what we had to do. After Baileys... when I started, the first pitch I ever did, there were 48 ideas. That was because we weren’t sure what the client wanted, and the client wasn’t sure what they wanted either. So there were 48 solutions. Whereas once things became more specific, you could look for one idea.

Innovation vs. Renovation: The Case for Inside-the-Box Thinking

David Gluckman: The areas I... I think there’s a lot of glib nonsense talked about my particular field. The word “innovation” is used because somebody comes up with a turnip-flavored Smirnoff or something. But that’s not innovation. That’s something that you knock up on a Friday afternoon after lunch. That’s not innovation. Innovation is something new and doesn’t happen all that often.

I have this... you know, people talk about breaking paradigms and disrupting markets. Most of that’s complete bullsh*t. My counter-theory to this is what I call “inside-the-box thinking.” I think most of the thoughts and ideas that have been any good that we’ve produced have been from inside the box, from looking at past research that people have done, just reading through documents and reports. From looking at... coming up with ridiculously obvious observations.

Like, I remember when we did Tanqueray No. Ten, the observation upon which it was based was: Did you know that there’s 10 times as much vodka sold as gin? So why don’t we try and get vodka drinkers to drink our gin? And how do you do that? You take out all that juniper flavor and tame it down and make it fruitier and fresher-tasting. Now, that’s inside-the-box thinking because that’s based on data that’s already there.

Andrew Mitrak: I love this idea of inside-the-box thinking. Do you have some practical guidance or a few tips for embracing this, for discovering ideas that are hiding in plain sight?

David Gluckman: Well, I think you have to disregard consumer research because I think it’s a very blunt tool. And I say that from having done hundreds of focus groups all around the world, many, many in America. But you don’t have to go and ask consumers what to do. There’s a legend on the front of my book, which is the story of the man who sold the world what it didn’t know it wanted. And I think that’s what you’re doing. You’re trying to develop things that people didn’t know they wanted. I think that’s quite an important... you know, if you take the research route into innovation or development, you just end up with what people say. Can we produce a product to compete with Red Bull that doesn’t taste quite so ridiculous?

The Rise of Non-Alcoholic Beverages (and Their Puzzling Price Tags)

Andrew Mitrak: Back to alcohol brands, you’re mentioning the brand extensions that Baileys has done over the years. It seems like there’s this tension between alcohol beverages wanting to be part of cultural trends and to be innovative, but also that there’s this history and this tradition to it, right? Johnnie Walker has been around for 200 years, but I remember not too long ago when they were releasing all these special Game of Thrones editions to their brand. And similar with Guinness, you know, it’s a big piece of Irish pride, they’ve been around for hundreds of years. I hope they don’t mess with the recipe too often. But now I’m seeing the alcohol-free version of Guinness. And I actually think it’s pretty good, as far as non-alcoholic beers go. But it’s very different than traditional Guinness, and it almost seems like sacrilege to mess with Guinness, right? So, do you have thoughts on how brands both stay true to their values, their history, and not damage their brand with too many brand extensions, but still want to try new things and to innovate and be relevant?

David Gluckman: I’m quite an outspoken critic of the non-alcoholic category, particularly wines and spirits. I bought a bottle of Gordon’s a while back, Gordon’s Zero. And it cost a pound less than a bottle of full-strength Gordon’s. And when you think about it, what you’re paying for that money for is gin-flavored water, which is crazy, really. I mean, gin-flavored water for £14.

Andrew Mitrak: You’re totally right that, especially with a spirit or wine, the trend to go from like 14% to 0% just seems like almost too big a jump somehow. I think it works better with beer, but the pricing of it doesn’t make any sense to me at all. That if you look at the non-alcoholic beers at a supermarket, at least here in America, basically the same price, sometimes even higher than the alcoholic ones. There’s a thing called hop water, which is like the hops in an IPA beer that are infused in water. And sparkling water will be 30 cents a can here, but hop water will be like $2 a can or more. And it’s like, why is that? It’s just sparkling water with a different sparkling flavor.

And then mocktails, if you go to a restaurant, there’s this thing called a mocktail instead of a cocktail, and it’s juice. It’s just juice! But it’s priced the same way a high-end cocktail is, and it just seems crazy.

David Gluckman: Yeah, exactly. I find it strange. I had some non-alcoholic product, which I will not name, the other day, which cost, I think... on a 70cl bottle, which is our unit size here, cost about £42. And a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label, where your capital has been locked up for 12 years in a warehouse, costs £35. I think that’s just crazy, really, that you’re paying for a kind of flavored squash thing for £7 more than Johnnie Walker Black. It’s ridiculous. But that’s the way the world works.

Marketing Alcohol and Navigating the Ethics

Andrew Mitrak: I want to talk about this trend towards non-alcoholic beverages because I think it does coincide with more awareness about the negative health impacts and societal impacts of alcohol. People are almost willing to pay more because it’s perceived as healthier. Do you think that’s part of it?

David Gluckman: It’s in part. I think we went there in 1984. The guy to whom I reported at IDV, who was a global director of the company, said to me one day, “Well, look, I think that alcohol is going to come under attack.” This was 40 years ago. He said, “Alcohol is going to come under attack.”

We were amazed at how successful Perrier was, especially in the US. Because to me, Perrier is just soda water with history. And so we looked at developing a series of non-alcoholic products, which we did, and they were quite successful, except the company committed too much money. They set up a separate organization to manage it without having the critical mass of some big brand to make it successful. But we were there then. We had developed a brand called Aqua Libra, which was incredibly successful in the UK for a while, and another drink called Purdey’s, which is now owned by Britvic. So we went down that route. But the company, I think at that time, went into the merger and took the decision that their business was alcoholic beverages, not non-alc. So they were dismissed.

Andrew Mitrak: I do want to ask you about this a little more as well because on the one hand, I’m mesmerized by the capabilities of developing an alcoholic beverage and the marketing around it, and iconic campaigns. Absolut Vodka, the Super Bowl is so full of great beer advertisements that people will talk about for weeks afterwards. So a lot of the best marketing and branding and advertising is around alcohol, but it is something that does have societal harm to it. My family has a history of alcoholism, and I’ve seen firsthand it’s had really, really bad impacts on people. And I’m kind of... it’s a tension because I can both admire the brilliance that goes into developing the products, but I can also see some of the harm that the products have had on people and in society.

Does that ever come up? How often does that come up as you were working on these products, as you work in this industry? Do folks think very much about that and how they reconcile some of the negative impacts of the products they’re selling?

David Gluckman: There was always that background feeling, as there would be with cigarettes. You know, should I be doing this? Is this the field in which I should be engaged? And because I smoked when I was younger, I would never have taken on a cigarette brief, I don’t think. But alcohol... well, it was there in the back of my mind, but it didn’t stop me from working in the category. It was just so interesting. And the laws protect us from selling booze to children and things like that. So that’s an adult decision.

Andrew Mitrak: As companies introduce new brands of alcohol, they’re doing that because they want their company to grow, right? And they want to sell more. And in America at least, the top 10% of drinkers consume like 90% of the alcohol. And I’m wondering, where do they want to sell more to? Do they want to sell more to that top 10% of drinkers who are already drinking a lot? Are they trying to find new drinkers and bring new people into the market? Are they trying to upsell people so they’re paying more for alcohol than they otherwise would, so they’re not going at the bottom-shelf liquor, they’re going more for the premium one? Do companies have that strategy in mind of like, which market are we breaking into? How are we growing our product? And how does that reconcile with the ethics behind alcohol marketing?

David Gluckman: I think most of the time people copy other people. So if somebody brings out a raspberry-flavored vodka, seven other people will come up with raspberry-flavored vodkas, which is copying. When Seedlip came out with their non-alcoholic spirit, about which I was quite scathing, other people have rushed in and copied Seedlip as well. So a lot of it is just copying what other people are doing. Not many people are looking to completely change things around.

Could There Be Another David Gluckman?

Andrew Mitrak: I’ve really enjoyed this conversation and reading your work. One of the questions that I have is that, could there be another David Gluckman? You seem to have been in the industry at this moment and had this career where you could come up with these ideas and work with relatively small teams and take bets and find the right decision-makers to champion that.

But a whole industry and things have been bureaucratized around it, things have been so formalized with more stringent types of market research. It seems like there’s so much more consolidation within the beverage industry that they might be a little more risk-averse, and that having independent voices or having smaller teams create bolder ideas just doesn’t seem to happen as much anymore. So I guess the two parts of the question is, could there be another David Gluckman or a person like you who does what you do? And if so, how would they go about it?

David Gluckman: I think the only way that would happen is the way it happened for me, is to find a client with whom to work who makes that possible. A client with corporate cojones, if you like. A client who says, “Yes, we can,” has a very positive attitude. And the client—I mean, I think if I didn’t have a client, I would have been... I might have done one or two brands if I’d been lucky. But the client that I had that could go to a member of the main international board and sell an idea off the back of a cigarette pack, and they empowered this kind of thing, they stimulated you.

I think it’s the company. Otherwise, it’ll happen with entrepreneurs because the beer business is certainly full of people like that. Brilliant, brave people who went with their instinct.

Andrew Mitrak: Again, for listeners, the book is That Sh*t Will Never Sell by David Gluckman. It’s full of great stories, some of the case studies you’ve heard here, but they go into more depth, and there are lessons and a lot of wit and fun throughout it. So, really enjoyed the book, David. Aside from purchasing your book, are there any places you’d point listeners to as far as where they can find more of your work online?

David Gluckman: Well, I think they’ll be all over the place. So if you just Google me, you’ll probably find some stuff. If anybody buys a book and wants to have a chat, my Zoom door is always open.

Andrew Mitrak: Oh, that’s a very nice offer. I hope you get flooded with meetings. So yeah, David Gluckman, thanks so much for your time. I really enjoyed the conversation.

David Gluckman: It was a pleasure, Andrew. Enjoyed it too. Thank you.

This week, I’m sharing a special conversation with Scott Reames. Scott spent three decades at Nike and for 16 years was Nike’s official corporate historian, a role he invented. He even helped Phil Knight with research and fact-checking for Shoe Dog, the only business memoir I’ve read more than once.

Nike is the first brand I remember embracing as a kid. I suspect this might be true for a lot of marketers.

Growing up in the 1990s, I played basketball, I watched Michael Jordan win six NBA championships, and my favorite movie was Space Jam (which, as we’ll discuss in this episode, originated as a Nike ad).

Nike is the gold standard for branding. They set the bar for iconic advertising, bold messaging, and culture-defining sponsorships.

But how did they build their marketing empire? Who were the marketers responsible?

In our conversation, Scott shares the stories of Nike’s most important marketing milestones and the people behind the brand.

Nike’s brand wasn’t built by seasoned marketing experts, but by a group of self-taught mavericks in Portland, Oregon with passion, ambition, and good instincts. Their professions: an accountant, a social worker, a lawyer, and a student.

In this conversation, Scott shares:

• How Blue Ribbon Sports (Nike’s original name) established its early reputation in the running community with the help of cofounder Bill Bowerman.

• How marketing helped Nike win a legal battle against Onitsuka, allowing it to continue as a brand.

• The story of Rob Strasser, Nike’s first head of marketing, who started as the lawyer on that Onitsuka lawsuit.

• The real story of the movie Air, and how Hollywood gets so much wrong.

• The surprisingly morbid inspiration behind “Just Do It”.

Here’s my conversation with Scott Reames.

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, who volunteers to review and edit transcripts for accuracy and clarity.

Nike’s Secret Sauce: ‘We never sold shoes. We sell dreams.’

Andrew Mitrak: Scott Reames, welcome to A History of Marketing.

Scott Reames: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to talk.

Andrew Mitrak: I’m so excited to talk about the history of marketing at Nike. And as I was preparing for this interview, I was thinking, is the history of marketing at Nike just the same as the history of Nike?

Scott Reames: It’s funny, I was thinking about a quote I have from Jeff Johnson, who was the first full-time employee hired in 1965, right? So, Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman, the co-founders, were working full-time at their own jobs, and they hired Jeff to essentially be boots on the ground and really do everything: start the marketing, start the advertising, start the product development, everything.

And he told me years ago, he said, “The secret sauce for Nike, Scott, is we’ve never sold shoes. We sell dreams.” And to me, that is like the epitome of marketing. I mean, that literally is marketing. It’s marketing a product by going well beyond just, “Here’s what it does for you, here’s how it wears, here’s why it’s good for your foot,” that kind of stuff.

So yeah, I would say if that was the mindset in 1965, then it certainly was a part of the fabric of what developed later into the company of Nike.

The Bold Early Days of “Blue Ribbon Sports”

Scott Reames: I mean, Phil Knight, there are some early letters that Phil Knight wrote to early retailers and coaches as well, but mostly retailers. And at the time, Nike started—or Blue Ribbon Sports started—as an Onitsuka Tiger distributor, not it didn’t have its own brand yet. And Tiger is now ASICS for those who aren’t as familiar. So we were the distributors of the Tiger brand running shoe in the United States.

And Phil created a letter, I think it was also in 1965, might have been ‘66, where he didn’t name the runner, didn’t name the athlete, but said that there was a runner, a high-profile runner who had been running in Tiger shoes and felt that they were one of the greatest shoes ever. And he said something along the lines of, “The only people who won’t be running in the shoe are either uninformed or idiots.” And then Phil at the bottom wrote, “And now you are no longer uninformed.”

I was like, wow. I mean, talk about a not-too-subtle dig at coaches and retailers. So from the beginning, there’s been that understanding that Nike, or Blue Ribbon Sports then Nike, maybe looks at things a little differently.

Andrew Mitrak: That’s a bold line. There’s so much there. So, Jeff Johnson, who I’ll ask more about, he said Nike doesn’t sell shoes, they sell dreams. But in the early days, and you mentioned this, they weren’t Nike at all. They were Blue Ribbon Sports, and they were selling Tigers, Onitsuka Tigers. I actually, Onitsuka has re-released these, and I wear Tigers a lot.

Scott Reames: Nice.

Andrew Mitrak: Like they’re actually pretty good shoes. They’re kind of that old, I don’t know how much they actually match the original style of it, but I like Nikes of course, but I do also like my Tigers as well, those branded ones. And so, do you think that Nike in 1965, were they making marketing decisions? Or what was sort of the original Blue Ribbon Sports approach to marketing?

Scott Reames: I think in the earliest days—‘64 was when the partnership started and the shoes started getting delivered from Tiger. ‘65 was when the first outreach really began. So the original, early marketing was really mostly done by Tiger because Nike was just… I keep calling it Nike, it’ll be interchangeable, but Blue Ribbon Sports, because Nike didn’t exist yet, was just the distributor of the Tiger brand shoes. They didn’t do a lot of their own marketing. They mostly sent out the flyers that that Tiger had sent to them.

That started to change as the ‘60s progressed. Jeff Johnson started to be more involved in creating the flyers that would be used in the US. By the end of the ‘60s, Phil Knight is actually writing some copy. He actually coined the term “Swoosh fiber” that was used to describe basically nylon, the nylon uppers, in a 1969 print ad. So that was the first place that we can see the word Swoosh being used, and obviously becomes important later.

How Marketing Won a Landmark Legal Battle

Scott Reames: But throughout the ‘60s, what Nike, Blue Ribbon Sports, did was increasingly taking over the marketing of Tiger, at least in the United States. To the point that when the two brands did part ways in the ‘70s, and they each sued each other for breach of contract, the judge ruled in Blue Ribbon Sports’ favor in terms of who owned the names like the Nike Cortez, the other shoe brand names, that we—they said Nike owned them because they had done the marketing of those products. And so it’s like Bill Bowerman designed the Cortez, and they ruled, the judge ruled that neither Tiger nor Blue Ribbon Sports owned the design of the Cortez, but that Blue Ribbon Sports owned the name of the Cortez because of the marketing they’d done of it.

So those are anecdotal, but those are indications that the company was starting to realize the benefit and the power of marketing and advertising.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, so marketing helped give them a legal win early on.

Scott Reames: Which was critical because if you lose that, if we lost that case, I wouldn’t be talking to you today.

Andrew Mitrak: Exactly. There are so many places where the Nike story seems like it could have just flipped a coin and could have gone either way. One of those, really early on, Phil Knight, I think he’s in Japan, and he comes up with the name Blue Ribbon Sports because he needs a company name. I’ve heard a few versions of the inspiration for that name. What do you think is the real story?

Scott Reames: Well, one of the versions I bet you’ve heard is that it was his favorite beer, Pabst Blue Ribbon. That was lore and/or myth that was spread mostly by his contemporaries and others of that era who just liked to tease him. And he never really went out of his way to correct them. He just thought it was funny.

But when we were working on Shoe Dog, he obviously wanted to really tell the story correctly. And he admitted there that no, he didn’t… while he did kind of BS his way into a meeting with the Onitsuka—well, with the president of Onitsuka—that when they said, “Who do you represent?” he was prepared that that question might be asked, and he answered “Blue Ribbon Sports,” because as a track athlete himself and just in general, a blue ribbon signifies first place or it’s a great thing to earn when you’re in Little League or sports in general. So he felt “Blue Ribbon Sports” telegraphed the message that this was a quality company, even though it didn’t exist.

Andrew Mitrak: It’s so funny just to contrast the name Blue Ribbon Sports to Nike. Like one just kind of seems so generic, vanilla, it’s a distributor, right? And the other is so branded and is kind of abstract and all that. And you have to kind of create new meaning into it. It’s not obvious what Nike is until the brand exists. So it’s just funny to contrast the two.

Scott Reames: That’s correct.

Bill Bowerman’s Credibility and the Birth of an Empire

Andrew Mitrak: So, Phil Knight’s early partner was Bill Bowerman, the co-founder of Nike. And Bill Bowerman, he gives all of this credibility and reputation to Nike as a brand. So do you almost think of this partnership somewhat as a marketing decision to work with Bowerman, or how do you think Bowerman improved Blue Ribbon Sports’ marketing presence?

Scott Reames: Well, certainly his name, the gravitas of his… I mean, literally the University of Oregon had won its first track and field title, NCAA title, in 1962. So he was certainly a rising star in track and field coaching. And the university also was starting to register some A-level runners. There was a man named Otis Davis that ran in the Olympics in 1960 who was a Duck. So it was basically a program on the rise.

And obviously Phil Knight, having run for Bill Bowerman, also had a personal affinity for it. But I do think it was a little bit of mercenary, a little bit of certainly wanting to make a sale, obviously. I mean, Phil’s trying to get his fledgling company off the ground and making a sale to the University of Oregon would not be a negative thing in any way. And then also being able to say that the Tiger brand running shoes are the shoes worn by the NCAA title, you know, NCAA champion, University of Oregon, certainly had its own cachet.

Whether that was done completely with forethought as to the marketing side of it, or it was just literally, where else would you start as a Duck alum? You know, Phil’s not going to go to the University of Washington, right? He’s not going to go contact USC. I mean, maybe eventually, but he’s going to start at home. So I don’t know if it was overtly a marketing thing like, “This will be amazing.” I think he didn’t have any idea that Bill Bowerman would ask to be cut in as a partner. He was just looking for a sale.

And the main reason for that is the reason why he didn’t expect him to cut in as a partner was that he, Phil, did not have any knowledge of the fact that since at least 1954, Bill Bowerman had been contacting Adi Dassler, Horst Dassler, other members of the footwear cartel at the time, trying to get somebody to sell him shoes directly instead of through wholesale so he could get them less expensively. But more importantly, he also had design ideas that he wanted to impart and have put into a running shoe. And all he would get back from Adidas and others was, “Thank you for your interest. You can get our shoes at through such and such distributor.” And they made no mention at all about any interest in his design ideas.

So Phil is just reaching out to Bill to get a product endorsement and a sale. Bill sees now an opportunity to have a connection, a direct connection to a footwear manufacturer who might take his ideas and actually turn them into something. So it was a very serendipitous exchange of letters that led to the partnership that led to Blue Ribbon Sports, which led to Nike, which led to you and me being here today.

Andrew Mitrak: Right, yeah. And then so for listeners, Adi Dassler, obviously Adidas, and then the other brother, is it Rudolf Dassler?

Scott Reames: Oh, sorry, Rudy, yeah. Horst was the son. I forgot about that, sorry.

Andrew Mitrak: Rudy was Puma. Which is its own really fascinating history there that we won’t go into...

Scott Reames: I mean, there’s a great book called Sneaker Wars. It’s absolutely fascinating about the two brothers and how much they didn’t like each other.

Andrew Mitrak: Totally. Yeah.

“If You Have a Body, You Are an Athlete.”

Andrew Mitrak: So one of Bill Bowerman’s lines is, “If you have a body, then you are an athlete.” And I love this line, and it’s just like, what a great turn of phrase, and also really expands your addressable market as well.

Scott Reames: Yes.

Andrew Mitrak: Did Nike or Blue Ribbon Sports ever use this line publicly? Or how was this used?

Scott Reames: No, not in the earliest days. It didn’t really… he may have used it to his own, in speaking to his own people or in his own communications with others, but Nike didn’t start using it until 2001. There was the Nike mission statement in the earliest days was essentially to be the world’s leading sports and fitness company. Right? Okay, well, it’s a good goal. We don’t want to be number four, you know? It’s like we want to be the world’s leading.

So by 2001, check. They’d done that. So it was kind of like saying, well, we want to be what we already are. So Mark Parker, the co-brand president, or co-president at the time, decided that it was time to change the mission statement. And they went around and around, and basically they decided to be more aspirational instead of literally achieving a specific goal. And so it was like, to bring innovation, innovation, inspiration, and innovation to every athlete in the world. And the athlete had an asterisk. And then if you look at the asterisk, it said, “If you have a body, you’re an athlete.”

Which is about the most inclusive way you could… I mean, there can’t be a more inclusive slogan, as you were saying earlier. I mean, literally, we all have a body. We can all be athletes. We can all, you know, we can’t all be Michael Jordan or Serena Williams, but we can certainly be more athletic or we can do something that is athletic in our own way. So that was when it really took a high profile within the company. Again, how it was used before that, I don’t know. That was the first time, and since then it is a key part of the mission statement.

Phil Knight’s Skepticism and the Ad that Changed Everything

Andrew Mitrak: So back to Phil Knight and the early Blue Ribbon Sports story, I read that somewhat ironically, Phil Knight was skeptical of advertising. So when did they really start advertising beyond just sort of republishing Onitsuka’s brochures? What were their first early forays into advertising?

Scott Reames: Really, beyond just the one-offs that were done like Carolyn Davidson, who designed the Swoosh, she also did some early advertising, but those were very one-offy. There wasn’t really a program put together, per se. That really came about in the mid-70s when we started to have a series of products coming out on a fairly regular basis. So there was, it was all print, there was no television, certainly by this point at this point. But roughly once a month, there would be a new shoe in the pipeline that we would advertise.

The advertising was done first again by Carolyn, and then it became too much for her. She was just a freelancer, and we weren’t her only client. So she basically said she’d like to be replaced. So we brought in a couple of agencies. One only lasted for about a year, but the second one was John Brown and Partners. They were based in Seattle, and they started really doing the series of ads, a series of print ads.

And usually it was a fairly technical: “Shoe X is coming out and it does this, and here’s why you would want to run in it,” and blah, blah, blah. So they were informative, but they certainly didn’t have the Nike oomph, whatever you want to call it, yet.

And then that all changed in 1977. So one month in 1977, we didn’t have any new product in the pipeline. But we were particularly committed to running the ad. It was always in Runner’s World, I believe. And so we had a space there that we’d purchased. So Patsy Mest, who was the ad director at the time, or ad manager for Nike, told John Brown, “Just write something that makes a runner feel good about themselves.” That was I think the entire brief, at least that’s what John told me.

So he’s kicking around like, okay, okay, what would you do? What would you do? So he came upon a very simple, five-word: “There is no finish line.”

And then Denny Strickland, the art director for John Brown, and Bob Peterson, the photographer, had the brilliant idea to essentially create an atmosphere where you see a long way, a distance, in the distance there’s a runner running down a country road. So you can’t see the product. You wouldn’t know it’s Nike, literally, until you saw the bottom of the print ad. And that really became the first brand ad that Nike did. And it was mostly by the luck of the fact that we didn’t have product that month, and that John Brown had an inspiration, which is even more amazing because he told me he’s by far not a runner. Right? But he just felt like this was something that was like, to make them feel good, but it also meant like there is no finish line. So you ran a great race today, but tomorrow I bet you could do a little bit better because there is no finish line.

And it just hit. Right? I mean, people really, it resonated with them. We got letters, Nike got a bunch of letters from people saying how much they appreciated the fact that we see them, that Nike gets them as runners. And so it actually spawned such a demand that people started wanting us to make a poster of the print ad, which was not part of our plan at all. We didn’t have a poster business. But within three or four years, we had a multi-million dollar poster business because of that print ad that spawned other posters like “Iceman” and some of the iconic, “Supreme Court,” that are now super, super iconic. All came about because of responding to the consumer saying, “We really like that ad. It hits for us. Can you reprint it for us?”

Andrew Mitrak: So that ad, “There is no finish line,” great line, because there was no product that month. Most of the advertisements had been, “Here’s this shoe and technical specs,” and more advertising a product line versus advertising Nike as a brand and selling the dream. Did that, leading to things like the poster business, do you think that’s when it clicked for Phil Knight that advertising was really powerful? Or do you think that’s when he sort of went from being a skeptic to fully embracing advertising?

Scott Reames: Well, it’s funny because when I interviewed John Brown, he told me that he had introduced, Phil Knight introduced himself to John by saying not necessarily what he told Dan Wieden, “I’m Phil Knight and I don’t like advertising, I hate advertising,” but he said something along those lines, that he was skeptical. He felt that word-of-mouth or, as we used to say, “word-of-foot” advertising was best. An athlete, a runner, say, “Hey Andrew, I think you’d like this shoe.” And then that’s why you would run in it, not because you picked up a print ad or saw something on TV and you’re like, “I’m going to wear that shoe.”

So that was his mindset. And John believes that “There is no finish line” and the reaction to it was one of the first moments where Phil saw, literally firsthand, that there is a power to good advertising, to persuasive or not in-your-face advertising. But it was funny because that’s 1977, and then in 1980 or ‘81 is when Phil, I guess it was ‘82 when Phil first met Dan, and he said essentially the same thing, “I don’t like advertising.” So Phil was clearly reluctant or slow to embrace the power of advertising, which of course now is the ultimate irony, that it’s synonymous with Nike now.

But he needed to see it because in his mind, he’s an accountant by trade, he’s a runner himself. So for him, it was Steve Prefontaine wearing Nike running shoes that he felt was the power, the endorsement of that kind, as opposed to just a clever turn of a phrase or a funny, you know, words on a paper.

The Legend of Steve Prefontaine: Nike’s First Icon

Andrew Mitrak: Let’s talk about Steve Prefontaine, because it seems like he was one of the first Nike iconic sponsorships. Nike’s so well-known for partnering with athletes and having long-standing partnerships. Can you tell the story about their initial relationship with Pre and how this kind of became an early template for their sponsorships?

Scott Reames: Steve Prefontaine followed in the footsteps, literally, of other Oregon runners like Phil Knight of course earlier, but Geoff Hollister and Kenny Moore and some of the early 1960s runners, all of whom played important roles both either in the launch of Blue Ribbon Sports then Nike or in the University of Oregon’s ascension into essentially the elite of track and field programs.

So when Pre comes along in 1969, the Tiger Cortez had already been created, the Tiger Boston, I mean, we’re really starting to… we being both Tiger and Blue Ribbon Sports are really starting to get some, no pun intended, traction in the industry. Sorry, footwear jokes, what can you do?

And then serendipitously, this kid from Coos Bay, Oregon, a little tiny little town on the Oregon coast, shows up at the University of Oregon and he just instantly captures everyone’s… he was so magnetizing. I mean, people were just drawn to him. And he performed so well at Hayward Field. Right? That he drew from the crowd, and the crowd fed off him. It was just an amazing symbiotic relationship.

And he was also brash, but he backed it up. Right? He had swagger, but he was cocky, but he was also really good. So it’s not like he was just like, “God, that guy’s full of himself.” He was good and he knew it, but he then performed. And Phil seemed to really gravitate towards that personality. Maybe that’s Phil… Phil’s a very quiet, kind of introverted person. Maybe if he weren’t so introverted, maybe he would be more Prefontaine-esque, I don’t know. But Phil has referred to Steve Prefontaine as the soul of Nike on many occasions, which is all the more remarkable when you really look at that Steve had a very, had a very short life, unfortunately. He came to Oregon in ‘69 and he was killed in a car accident in 1975. So, and that was only two years after he graduated from U of O. And of course, back then, before NIL and all the other things we have today, Steve couldn’t accept any money from Blue Ribbon Sports. He was basically living on food stamps and surfing off couches for a while because he was training all the time. He couldn’t find a job.

So by the time he graduated, then he was able to, Blue Ribbon Sports could hire him to be an employee, if you will, but mostly to let him train. But it was only a two-year window where he was essentially affiliated officially with Blue Ribbon Sports. And yet he is so impactful that more than 50 years after his death, he’s still considered one of the triangle legs. I mean, Phil Knight, Bill Bowerman, and Steve Prefontaine are essentially considered the initial trinity of the company.

Andrew Mitrak: It’s a really remarkable story and a really sad ending to it. And I think when he died, he held like pretty much every record he could hold at the time. Is that right?

Scott Reames: He held, I believe, eight American records. And this was back when they were doing both mile and multiple miles, like one mile, two mile, three mile, but also the metric races too. And he held pretty much all of them from within about a mile to three miles, and then the metric equivalents, at the time of his death, which is remarkable.

Nike’s Pattern of Picking Rebels and Upsetters

Andrew Mitrak: It seems like a pattern is Nike, either deliberately or with a lot of luck, just finding the right talent to identify and pick the right talent early on and get their brand associated with them. And Pre is just one example, and of course, they’d have a lot of other examples of doing that as well.

Scott Reames: Well, theoretically, if a guy doesn’t or a woman doesn’t pan out, you kind of forget about them, right?

Andrew Mitrak: I guess that’s right. Yes, it’s survivorship bias. Exactly.

Scott Reames: Right. But so Steve Prefontaine passes in ‘75 and the mantle moves from—it doesn’t stay with running, it moves to tennis with a young John McEnroe, right? Well, look at McEnroe: rebel, brash, cocky, backs it up, you know, but not establishment, you know. And then the transfer is over to Andre Agassi: rebel, brash, you know, all the way up through Serena, Kobe. I mean, it’s just been the MO.

And this isn’t always true. I mean, Pete Sampras was a very successful Nike athlete and he’s pretty buttoned down. You know, he’s not, I don’t think you’d call him brash by any stretch of the imagination, but so I think part of it is Phil seems to just have a gift for identifying, especially when they’re young, right? Because it’s really easy to sign somebody after they’ve, you know, been with another brand for five years and you kind of know who they are.

Scott Reames: But to take a chance on a Tiger Woods, who, okay, yeah, obviously he was turned out to be great, but you don’t know that for sure when he’s 20 years old. I mean, there’s been a number of players that are can’t-miss who missed, right? And so, Phil does have—I don’t want to call it the Midas touch because he’s certainly not perfect. We’ve certainly had some people we picked that didn’t exactly pan out, but usually the ones that are, again, the status quo upsetters, the people that have a different point of view, the people that give zero F’s about, you know, how you feel about them. I mean, that kind of appeals I think to Phil, and it certainly has been some of the more successful Nike athletes over the years.

Andrew Mitrak: So we jumped a little in history.

Scott Reames: I tend to do that.

Andrew Mitrak: No, no, it’s great because it’s all—all these ideas are related.

The Serendipitous Origins of the Nike Name and Swoosh

Andrew Mitrak: And so, back to Blue Ribbon Sports becoming Nike. There are these stories that have been told a lot, and I don’t want to dwell on them too long. So there’s the story of Jeff Johnson coming up with the name Nike, and Carolyn Davidson designing the Swoosh logo for $35. And you can read about these in Shoe Dog, you can—they’re very well-documented online. I’ve also listened to several of your interviews to prep for this and I’ve heard you talk about it so much, so I don’t want to spend too much time on this part of the story.

But the thing that strikes me about this period of time is that it’s like lightning strikes twice in the same place at the same time. That that name, Nike, and that Swoosh that Carolyn designed, it’s like peanut butter and chocolate or something like that. It’s just like, wow, those go together so perfectly. And what do you attribute it to? How did luck happen like just like that, right there? Was it luck? Was it some marketing instincts? Was there something in the water in Beaverton, Oregon? Like, what happened?

Scott Reames: Well, Jeff has told the story multiple times, so I—and I don’t want to rehash what you said is already pretty much out there. But in terms of Nike was a chosen—it came to him for several reasons. Marketing was related to a big part of it. I mean, just the fact that it’s the Nike goddess of victory, the Greek goddess of victory. Well, certainly, again, like a blue ribbon, that’s kind of what you’d want to associate with, you know, victory. Duh.

The Marketing Logic Behind the ‘Nike’ Name

Scott Reames: But Jeff had also read quite a bit about the successful brands and what they share often. And usually it’s a one or two-syllable name. It’s a hard or exotic letter like a K or a Q or an X, you know. And I mean a couple of other factors, and he just was like, Nike, when he thought of it, it was just like, it’s like check, check, check, check. All those things seem to work. So he was really adamant that that that was the name.

And the funny thing was, just like with the Swoosh, all the people who were involved at the time with finally selecting the name Nike and the Swoosh logo agreed that they didn’t like either one of them that much. Both of them they considered to be the least gross, the least, you know, eh, you know. And that’s why that quote about Phil Knight saying, “It’s the one I, you know, I don’t love it, but maybe it’ll grow on me.”

So it wasn’t like, again, they were like the clouds parting and the angels singing and they were all like, “Ah, that’s the mark.” You know, it was more of, “Okay, well this will do for now.” So part of it was blood, sweat, and tears of developing the brand and developing the fact that Nike—the Swoosh was now standing for and being associated with quality and successful athletes. You know, so if it had been a circle or a—I mean, there’s a bunch of other drawings out there that may or may not be legit that Carolyn came up with. She didn’t unfortunately save the rest of them, I wish she would have.

So if it had been if it had been an X, let’s say, you know, then that today might be an X on a pair of shoes. You’d be like, “Oh, that’s the Nike Swoosh,” you know, or the Nike whatever, you know. And so we sort of again, retroactively look at now the Swoosh and say it was a genius move, or the name Nike was a genius move. But there were a lot of folks, when we first introduced the logo, especially the lowercase n-i-k-e, the italic lowercase Nike, a lot of people were like, “Who’s Mike?” Because the N looked like an M. And so there wasn’t that brand recognition.

And even again, Jeff Johnson, when he was at the first trade show in 1972 where we’re actually debuting the new Nike line of shoes like the Nike Cortez now. They they actually brought the Tiger Cortez and the Nike Cortez to Chicago to the NSGA show to sell them to retail clients. And Jeff Johnson basically said, “You don’t need this shoe. You’ve already got the Tiger, but we think it’s a good one.” And retailers actually said, “Well, we’re not sure what’s going on,” because we couldn’t talk about it. “We’re not sure what’s going on between you and Tiger that you would have your own brand. But you’ve always been straight with us, so we’ll buy some of your shoes too.”

You know, so it was literally, it was relationships, honestly, more than just explaining to them that, well, this Nike Cortez, it has, you know, Swoosh fiber, you know, or whatever. It was the relationships of it. And so if that’s—I don’t know if that’s marketing or if that’s just, that’s just building on your reputation and building on people trusting you.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that’s right. So I framed the question in such a way that it’s as if lightning all struck in 1973 and everything came out perfectly and that everybody embraced this as an iconic brand from day one. And the truth, of course, is no, it takes time. Right? You build—by the way, did I have the year right? Is it 1973?

Scott Reames: ‘71.

Andrew Mitrak: ‘71. Okay, thanks for correcting me. Yeah. So those happened in 1971, but people are mispronouncing the name, calling it Mike. And it takes years and years of building the brand and identifying with that Swoosh that it becomes sort of ingrained with all this meaning. So it wasn’t that it was like a home run right off the bat. It did take a lot of time to build.

Scott Reames: It was unique enough, and it did look different, right? I mean, you got Adidas with three stripes, you’ve got Tiger with the sort of two-stripey, you know. And so stripes were kind of the look. And you could call the Swoosh—I mean the Swoosh originally was just called “the stripe,” right? It didn’t—nobody said, “This is the Swoosh.” In fact, we never have been able to fully find a paper trail or any sort of trail that went from “Swoosh fiber” for a shoe in ‘69 to “the Swoosh.” There was no memo saying, “Henceforth, this shall be called the Swoosh.” You know, it just sort of organically was referred to that over time, and then later trademarked.

So it was a different enough logo. And there was also other efforts to—I mean, so the Nike boxes were orange, right? The shoeboxes were orange, very bright orange to contrast with the blue boxes of Adidas, right? So you again, very different—we’re trying to find different ways to differentiate that this brand is clearly not that brand, you know, or the other brands. And that was done with some forethought. Jeff Johnson has told me that that was specifically done, the orange boxes and some motions, some movements were made to make us look and be remembered as different from the establishment.

Rob Strasser: From Lawyer to Nike’s Head of Marketing

Andrew Mitrak: I want to ask about another major figure in Nike’s marketing history, and that’s Rob Strasser. And Strasser, he joins as a lawyer initially, then he became Nike’s head of marketing. And this just seems like an odd transition. I can’t think of many great marketers that started as lawyers. So can you tell me about this early part of Rob Strasser at Nike?

Scott Reames: Yes, so he was one of—he was on the legal team. I mentioned earlier the lawsuit between Onitsuka and Blue Ribbon Sports. And he was on the working for the company, the law firm that Nike hired to represent them. And so he did such a great job and he just bonded. He bonded with Phil and some of the other Nike executives at the time. And so when the dust settled and the case had been won, at some point, I don’t know if he approached Phil or if Phil invited him, but he joined the company.

And I think he did join originally to do some partly legal work, but you know, again, in the 1970s, it was pretty much all hands on deck. And I don’t know, I don’t know if I’ve ever really heard the story of how he specifically was asked to become the marketing director. I know that it was with—they had what was called the Buttface meetings. And again, if you’ve read Shoe Dog, you know the Buttface meetings. So it was fairly common every six or nine months for the senior leaders to get together at an offsite and walk in as the marketing director or the apparel VP and walk out as the footwear VP or the, you know, so they they would basically do almost a carousel. So it could be that Rob walked in as the legal rep and walked out as the marketing director. I don’t know.

But whatever, however that came about, it was genius because he had an affinity for it. And that was what led to, you know, many, many—I mean, we talked about the poster program. I mean, that was essentially Rob’s realizing that this is a—that people want posters. Let’s make them posters. It’s not part of our business plan, but we can figure this out. Air Jordan. I mean, the whole signing of Jordan, that was Rob Strasser. And just the marketing in general, creating the Pro Club, you know, where people where NBA and ABA players got a percentage of some of the footwear that was sold that they wore. That was that was not done in the industry. And Rob created that. You know, so he was very much ahead of his time in a lot of things. Or maybe he just was a guy who could just analyze stuff. Maybe that was his legal brain that he could just say, “Well, this would make sense. Why don’t we do it this way?” And there’s a lot of more Wild Wild West back then.

The Story Behind Rob Strasser’s Legendary ‘10 Principles’

Andrew Mitrak: Rob Strasser, he penned these 10 principles. And we don’t need to read through all 10 of them or anything like that, but when did this happen? When did he write these principles? And what was sort of the context for that?

Scott Reames: It was 1977. And from what I’ve been told, because Rob has passed many, many years ago, so I never got a chance to interview him. But what I’ve been told by his secretary is that she was called at the time, and by others who knew him, was he was just having a bad day. He—I’ve heard different versions of it, but essentially a couple of employees were pushing back on being assigned something that they didn’t really want to do. And Rob, that was like the last straw for him, that the people were no longer fully embracing that we, you know, you give all for the company and you just do whatever’s asked.

So he went to his typewriter, sat down at his desk, just started quickly, quickly, quickly, you know, pounding out what became these 10 principles. Showed them to his secretary. She kind of looked at it like, “Oh, you sure you want to do this?” you know. And so they she made or they made a bunch of copies and he taped it or left it on people’s chairs or taped it on their doors if they weren’t there. Didn’t run it by Phil Knight, didn’t run it by anybody. It was just there the next morning when people showed up.

And even though—I don’t know if we want to go down that whole Air rabbit hole, but in the movie Air, they they play those up as if they were like on every wall and they were like the guiding principles that everybody quoted all the time. And that doesn’t seem to be accurate at all. But I can tell you that almost everybody I interviewed had their original copy. They never got rid of it, right? So it had an impact. Not an overt daily, you know, it wasn’t like, “Well, as principle number four says...” You know, there was not that kind of quotation of it.

But I think people appreciated that somebody, first off, clearly has a passion for it. And secondly, there’s the first effort to really try to figure out, well, what is it about our company that does make us different? And we’ve been, I mean, all the way through the maxims in 2001 and all the way to today with the five maxims now that there are, there’s been that desire to try to boil down to its essence what makes Nike Nike. And Rob’s was purely organic, purely hellfire and brimstone, you know, just and then they’ve done HR has tried to do a much more of a measured thing. And that’s to me, that was a little bit too shaved and polished, you know. So there’s but every time they do that, whoever does it, it comes down to performance, teamwork, authenticity, innovation. I mean, I’m pleased in a way that over 50, you know, 50-some-odd years almost later, the core values are roughly the same. However you want to articulate them, they’re really the same.

Breaking Down the ‘Break the Rules, Fight the Law’ Ethos

Andrew Mitrak: I’ll read through a few of them just to give listeners context. And I’ll also post a link to them in the blog that accompanies this show. But it’s:

1. Our business is change.

2. We’re on offense all the time.

3. Perfect results count, not a perfect process. Break the rules, fight the law.

And I’ll jump to number 10, which is: “If we do the right things, we’ll make money damn near automatic.”

And I do think, like you were saying how like when HR writes it, HR wouldn’t say “damn near automatic” or things like “break the rules.” They can’t say that. Break the law, like, oh, we can’t do that. Yeah. So, but it’s funny though, like you need to have a little edge to be inspiring, otherwise you kind of like roll your eyes at it. So, it sounds like they weren’t completely formalized, but they definitely landed and there were things people would remember and keep as well. So is that kind of how they were how they were used?

Scott Reames: I believe so. From the number of people I’ve talked to about it. And the hard thing or the thing that people need to be reminded of is the context of it. This is 1977. There was no guarantee that Nike was going to be Nike, right? I mean, we’d been only a company for five years as Nike. We didn’t have our own real basketball shoes at this point yet. We were mostly selling off-the-rack Blazers and Bruins that we got from, you know, different Japanese companies. So there wasn’t, other than the Waffle, the Waffle outsole, which was the one innovation that Bill Bowerman had brought in the mid-70s, when people, you know, people sometimes they laugh like, “Live off the land.” Like, yeah, like Nike has to live off the land or or, you know, “Break the rules,” you know, or it’s like they’re making it sound like we’re just, you know, we’re just kind of like completely just out there just to run roughshod on people. But we weren’t—we didn’t even know if we’re going to survive. There was some, ironically, since we’re dealing with tariffs today, there was some tariffs that were being imposed that were going to be costing the company like $25 million, which was like $24 million more than we had, right? And so it was going to potentially shut the entire company down.

This is all in the late 70s. So yeah, we’re Nike now and Nike’s, you know, multi-kajillion dollar business, but not in 1977. So this was this was very heartfelt and there was a real concern that if people did start to put themselves first or start to push back on being asked to what they do, that the company may not survive. So with that context, these 10 principles, I think, resonate more.

Andrew Mitrak: So you joined Nike in the early ‘90s, and this was after Strasser left, but shortly before he passed away.

Scott Reames: Correct.

Andrew Mitrak: Did you encounter these more like just in your role, or was it more later as a historian that you encountered them? What was when did you first come across these principles?

Scott Reames: I don’t remember specifically, but I don’t recall them being—I definitely would say it was probably after I created the historian role in 2005. If I had come across them, it might have been like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” But I didn’t really know the story behind it. Again, partly because there hadn’t been a me before me, right? There wasn’t a historian who was capturing this stuff and publishing it. So maybe the people who were around from ‘77 on who did keep them in their drawer or kept them on their wall or whatever, they may have known the story, but it was not like you could just go to the website or go, you know, it’s like, it was just like, “Oh, wow, okay. What was the context of this?” “Oh, yeah, Rob Strasser.” “Who?” “Well, he died last year.” You know, it’s like it was definitely not a cohesively told story. It was more of if you knew, you knew.

Setting the Record Straight on the Movie ‘Air’

Andrew Mitrak: Okay, going down the Air rabbit hole a little bit.

Scott Reames: Be careful.

Andrew Mitrak: I know, I know. So you had mentioned Strasser being instrumental in signing Michael Jordan and the Air Jordan and the Jordan brand. And the story is well-documented. Unfortunately, like the best-known documentation of it is the movie Air. And when I first saw the movie, I did like it. I thought it was like a very entertaining movie and all that. But of course, like later on, you realize, oh, it’s it’s like almost entirely a work of fiction aside from like a few, you know, yes, Michael Jordan and Nike worked together kind of stuff. So, but as a historian, are you are you just sick of being asked about this movie, or what’s your relation to it now?

Scott Reames: So I’ve had a little bit of a bell curve reaction to Air. Initially, I was like charged up. I’m like, I’m going to get the story straight. I’m going to tell the story the correct way. And I went on LinkedIn and, you know, posted a couple of links and stories. And then the next thing I know, I’m getting media inquiries. People are, you know, the Portland Monthly and Sports Business Journal want to talk to me about it. I was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I wasn’t really planning to go that big.” But it was good because I was setting the record straight.

And then it became like, okay, now I’m telling this for like the 40th time. So I was getting a little tired of it. But now, I still feel that it’s important that the actual story be told because there are people in the movie who played a much larger role—Rob Strasser, Peter Moore—in the signing of Michael Jordan than did Sonny Vaccaro, who was played by Matt Damon. Part of that’s storytelling, I get it. I get creative license. But I know Rob Strasser’s daughter, right? I’ve worked with her. She works at Nike. I’ve met Peter Moore’s kids, his sons, you know. So it’s like, I want them, I want their families to get their due.

And you know, again, I just present what actually happened. If you—I thought the movie was actually pretty entertaining, too. Phil Knight actually told me he thought the movie was entertaining. When I asked him, because he had seen it before I had, and I said, “Well,” he said, “I thought they captured Nike in the 1984 time period perfectly.” And I said, “Oh, good.” I said, “How about accurately?” He goes, “Oh no, it wasn’t accurate at all.” I’m like... you know. So it’s just, that’s the hard part, is there are other people who were instrumental in signing Michael Jordan, and if you see the movie, you would have no idea.

The ‘Cringey’ Portrayal of Phil Knight in ‘Air’

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, for sure. So I’m kind of surprised that Phil Knight was able to enjoy it because from, you know, reading his book, seeing some of his his speeches, and, you know, you were describing him as a pretty introverted person, the Ben Affleck portrayal of him, he kind of comes off as a—I don’t know, not a great look. Not that I know Phil Knight at all, and you only get so much from watching interviews or watching a speech of his, but it didn’t seem to be anything like him whatsoever.

Scott Reames: The word that I was told and heard most often from people who know him and know the story was “cringey.”

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah.

Scott Reames: Right? That Ben played him kind of cringey or cringily because he’s not... I mean, again, in 1984, he was certainly younger, obviously, but yeah, there was just, it was a lot of license taken there. And again, I, my concern or my issue there is they could have reached out to Phil Knight, they could have reached out to me, they could have reached out to anybody, and they didn’t. You know, and again, as as people kept reminding me, it’s not a documentary, right? So it’s Hollywood.

But the hard part though, Andrew, after the movie was how many people treated it like it was a documentary and said things like, “Oh my gosh, Deloris Jordan, Michael’s mom, I love her. She’s tough as nails. The way she negotiated Michael’s contract...” and I’m like, “That never happened.” So that’s to me is like, you’re you’re basically taking David Falk, the agent, and basically minimalizing him and saying that it was Jordan’s mom that did it all. I’m like, well, that would be interesting and it’d be a great story if it were true, but it isn’t. So why would you write it that way?

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, for sure. And also, reading a bit about Rob Strasser, he seems like such a larger-than-life character.

Scott Reames: Literally.

Andrew Mitrak: Blustery and… yeah, exactly. And couldn’t be any more different than the Jason Bateman character. And it’s like, I kind of would like to… it seems like the real person would actually be a pretty cinematic character. Like, just would have a big screen presence. So I just wonder if you were to rewrite it or do a story like this, would he and Peter be among the main characters for you?

Scott Reames: Oh, absolutely. No, Rob Strasser—again, I didn’t meet him, but I’ve seen plenty of photos of him, I know plenty… I mean, his nickname was “Rolling Thunder.” He’s been described as a “walking HR violation,” right? I mean, the stuff that he would do in the ‘70s and ‘80s and the things he would say and the stuff he would throw at people, I mean, would get him written up by HR on almost a daily basis today. He was over three bills, right? So he was over 300 pounds, but I mean, it was a big man. It wasn’t like fat, he was just big. Very intimidating, very imposing.

So yeah, when I heard Jason Bateman, and I love Jason Bateman, he’s one of my favorite actors, but I was like, for what role? And then when I saw him, it’s like he’s witty and urbane and Jason Bateman. And Rob, from everything I’ve heard, was just… let it all just loose. He just was like, didn’t give… he just would be Rob. And so it was like, there’s a disconnect here. That was a little strange. But the movie… again, it does capture some of the great stories, it just credits the wrong people.

The Impact of ‘Air’ on Nike’s History

Andrew Mitrak: Do you think it’s… when it comes to interest in Nike history, do you think it’s a net positive or a net negative? Because on the one hand, you know, you’re… spent a lot of time as a corporate historian at Nike, and it’s near and dear to your heart, and you probably want more people interested in Nike history. So it’s probably good to get people to think about what happens behind the scenes and think more about the ads they see and the shoes they purchase and the brand they’re familiar with. But on the other hand, it’s obviously got so many things wrong that we just talked about. So it has to be super frustrating for you to hear these things repeated. But just on net, do you think it’s been a positive or a negative?

Scott Reames: I don’t think it was a negative thing. I think it could have been more. And again, I think the story is fascinating enough that it didn’t need to have a lot of the manipulation of it. But in terms of, did it redraw and draw in a new generation of people? I think absolutely. So I’m not regretting that it was made. I’m just wishing that they had tried a little harder to stick more towards the actual happenings because they’re just as interesting in my opinion.

But if it spurs other movies, if it spurs other people to become more interested in how Nike came about… I mean, Nike’s story is a fascinating story, right? I mean, to your point, you made a comment earlier about how there were many times that Nike has… you know, if you go left instead of right, you would have come to an end. It’s kind of like a video game, right? You pick the wrong door, game over. And when Phil and I were working, when Phil was writing Shoe Dog—I say Phil and I, but Phil wrote Shoe Dog and I helped to edit and helped with some materials—he was candid about how many times… I mean, we came up with more than 20 or 25 different times where, you know, if it’s left, it’s game over; if it’s right, we continue. And he just kept making the right calls, or the decisions just turned out to be the right ones. And that’s why we’re here today. There are so many other businesses that make that one wrong turn and they disappear, you never hear of them again.

How Wieden+Kennedy Landed Nike as Client #1

Andrew Mitrak: So around the time of signing Michael Jordan, it was in the early ‘80s that Nike formed its relationship with Wieden+Kennedy. Can you tell me about how they were founded and how Nike came to be their first client?

Scott Reames: Sure, that’s a great story. So we had, as I said earlier, bounced around. We had John Brown and Partners, before that we had the Morton agency—I forgot them. So we had Morton for like a year, John Brown and Partners for like three or four years. And there was another agency called the William Cain agency here in Portland. And they had a young copywriter named Dan Wieden. Dan Wieden had worked with Peter Moore at Georgia-Pacific before that. And as Dan said, “Peter left Georgia-Pacific, I got fired.” So they kind of went their separate way. Dan ends up at the William Cain agency, and Peter ends up at Nike.

So Peter is starting to need some more advertising help, and he contacts his old guy from the agency, Dan Wieden, or from Georgia-Pacific, and Dan starts writing some copy. And then Peter at some point decides he’s got too much on his own plate to do all the art direction, so he says, “Can we find somebody to do the art direction?” Well, David Kennedy was also an alum of Georgia-Pacific, and as Dave told me, he said, “I got tired of working on plywood advertising and decided it’d be more fun to work on footwear.”

So Dan and Dave individually—Wieden and Kennedy, not Wieden+Kennedy—started working on the Nike account to the point where they realized that they wanted to do this full-time on their own and not be working for another agency. So they made a pitch on St. Patrick’s Day, 1982. They made a pitch to Tom Carmody and Patsy Mest, who were the advertising people at Nike, that they would start their own agency and they wanted Nike to come along as their first client.

Again, this was one of those times where I just loved my job so much, because Dan, being a tremendous storyteller that he is, of course, can’t just say, “And so they signed us.” He’s giving me the whole thing about how he’d had a tooth pulled or he was about to have a tooth pulled, so he’s on painkillers. He’s already nervous about the meeting, so he’s having a drink or two. And he just said the whole thing is like this surreal circus going on in his head, and they’re pitching this idea of becoming the agency. And I said to him later, “What if they had said no?” And he goes, “Well, I probably would have quit and moved to Chicago or moved away.” But thankfully, Tom and Patsy decided that they would go with these two.

And on April 1st, like two weeks later, they officially opened up their doors, if you will, although the door was like a hotel, and they were using… they borrowed a card table and a typewriter from Patsy at Nike. And that was essentially the launch of Wieden+Kennedy on April 1st, April Fool’s Day, which I adore, 1982, with Nike as its only client. They had never done a national TV ad, Nike had never done a national TV ad, and by October, they did their first couple of ads, and then, well, you know the rest. It worked out pretty well.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, for sure. The rest is that, yeah, 40 years on, they’re still an agency partner for Nike. So it seems like amazing.

Scott Reames: Winning Emmy awards and doing all these cutting-edge, amazing things.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. It’s funny also that Georgia-Pacific was like the common thread of so much talent because I don’t know, I guess I don’t mean to be offensive to any Georgia-Pacific fans out there, but it’s kind of the most boring company possible. It’s like, what, it makes like cardboard boxes or something like that, or like tissue paper or something. It’s kind of a funny… just a funny place for all this talent to spring from that would do such creative, iconic ads out of that company.

The Darkly Inspiring Origin of ‘Just Do It.’

Andrew Mitrak: I have to ask about the inspiration for “Just Do It.” It famously is… Dan Wieden credits this to Gary Gilmore’s last words, which… it’s sort of a dark story. There had been this moratorium on the death penalty, and then that gets overturned, and Gary Gilmore was the first to be executed in 10 years, and his last words were “Let’s do it.” His last words are “Let’s do it” in front of a firing squad.

And then 11 years later, Dan Wieden comes up with “Just do it” as a slogan for Nike, and he kind of recalls that it was Gary Gilmore’s “Let’s do it” that was the inspiration. And it just seems like a really odd connection. One that it’s not one-to-one, it’s “Let’s do it” versus “Just do it.” But also just that this odd little thing that’s a little footnote in history that’s kind of a morbid piece of history inspires, you know, probably among the best-known slogans in history, certainly in the top few. And it just seems like an odd connection. So what do you think about this story and what… is this truly how it happened or what’s your take on that?

Scott Reames: Well, all I can tell you is that’s what Dan told me. And I remember my jaw opened up a little bit, like, “What?” And I said, “I’d heard rumors of different things, but this...” And he said… and then I finally said, “Are you putting me on?” And he goes, “No, no.” And he relayed the whole thing. He said, if I remember correctly, it wasn’t right yet before the firing squad, but essentially they were coming to get him from his cell, and they were like, you know, “Do you have any last words?” and so on. And he was just kind of like, “Let’s do it.” You know, I mean, “Just stop, let’s just get this over with. Let’s do it.” And he said that just stayed with him, that defiance, right? I mean, literally, it’s like, “Yes, let’s send me to my death.” You know, it just attached into one of his synapses in his brain and it parked there. From what he told me, that’s kind of the way his brain worked. Things just stayed with him.

So why it was 11 years, I don’t know if his mind had been refreshed by an article that he’d read. He didn’t ever go into that level of explanation. But I know that he was frustrated that the campaign that they were working on was very disparate. It had about a half dozen different 30-second ads, and they were all interesting and kind of whimsical and funny, but there wasn’t really a thread that tied them together. And he even said to me, he goes, “I don’t… I’ve never been a tagline person. I’ve never been really one that considers that to be great moments in advertising.” But he said, “I felt like this needed it. It needed something to bring them together.” And that’s somehow that the “Let’s do it” bubbled up.

Originally it was going to be “Do it.” And he told me that that felt too bossy. “Do it! Do it!” So he thought “Just do it” softened it a little bit. Like, “You know, okay, you’ve been talking about this forever, Andrew, just do it,” right? “You’ve been saying you’re going to start running after work, just do it.” It’s a little bit less, “Do it!” And it obviously worked.

Andrew Mitrak: I mean, obviously it does. And it’s something where… well, one, back to the story, it just sounds like one of those things that’s like an internet urban legend or something like that. It kind of sounds like there’s just a ring of it that sounds like it’s a myth that’s debunked on Snopes somewhere. But in this case, it’s actually true, it actually happened.

Scott Reames: The man credited with it told me he did it. So I don’t know how you refute that.

Andrew Mitrak: No. And also, as you say, it’s like, okay, I have notes that have been tucked away for more than a decade, and I’m sure that him being the copywriter he is, he could do that too. So it makes sense, but it does, yeah, it turns into this amazing inspirational ad. It’s an inspirational slogan that you can remember. And like, sometimes I honestly say, like there are times in my life where I’ve probably been on the edge of something and just thought, “Oh, just do it.” And it probably got me over the edge to take some action. And who knows how many times that… probably a billion times in the world somebody’s made some decision kind of thinking, “Just do it.”

Scott Reames: The reaction they got almost immediately was, I mean, women saying, “I left my husband or my boyfriend because I was inspired to just do it.” And it’s like, whoa, that was not part of the brief. But that was… people internalize that to be whatever it meant to them. And I think that’s why it’s still resonates so many years later because people still have an internal need for motivation. Some people are very easy to get themselves out there and other people just need, “Hey, just do it. I know you can do it, just do it.”

Mars Blackmon and Michael Jordan: The Perfect Foil

Andrew Mitrak: One of the ad spots I want to ask you about are the early Spike Lee ads with Michael Jordan. Do you know how those came to be? Because they’re among, you know… Nike’s made so many in history that are great, but those are just some of my favorites.

Scott Reames: Well, the… Jim Riswold, right, a legend at Wieden+Kennedy, now passed away unfortunately not too long ago, somehow had the genius to realize that Michael Jordan needed a foil, right? Needed somebody to bounce off of and essentially to be the pitch person, whereas Michael then almost became the anti-pitch person. I mean, some of those original ads, I mean, literally Michael’s saying, “No, Mars, it’s not the shoes.” You know, I mean, it’s kind of weird or kind of bold for a company to say, “Our shoes actually will not make you Michael Jordan. But here’s Michael Jordan.”

So, you know, and obviously, it was again very organic because Spike Lee had created the… I think it was Do the Right Thing, I think it was the first movie where Mars Blackmon appears, and he’s wearing his Air Jordans. So that was not because Nike placed them or gave him shoes, he just… Spike Lee, slash Mars Blackmon loved the Air Jordan.

So that was that special sauce of Riswold and others just basically saying, “Hmm, these two could really play off each other.” And obviously, they did. And we recreated that to some extent with Little Penny and Penny Hardaway, right? So and Little Penny was from Chris Rock‘s voiceover. Same idea, right? An athlete who’s maybe not the most bold and outgoing person, so you pair them with a foil who is, right? And you get pretty much the same result.

So I think a lot of times when we do ads, we do them once or twice and then we move on to something else. And Spike Lee, the Mars Blackmon-Michael pairing, just seemed to have that special “it,” right? It was like it hit over and over again. So they found different ways to bring the two of them together all the way up until, you know, essentially when Michael retires for the first time, and then we actually… Mars comes back, you know. So it’s or and then when he plays baseball, you know. It was like literally Spike Lee was almost attached to the hip to Michael through those ads.

Andrew Mitrak: Well, then the other foil to Michael becomes Bugs Bunny with the “Hare Jordan” ads, and that becomes Space Jam, which is the other one I want to ask you about because that seems like such an innovative, kind of unlikely pairing as well.

Scott Reames: Yeah, and I don’t, I don’t know the actual impetus for what caused them… you know, who was it that sat down and said, “You know, what if Michael played a bunch of the Looney Tunes?” I would suspect Riswold, but I don’t know for sure. But it was just a… you know, it was kind of whimsical. It was a Super Bowl ad, right? So they knew that they were going to have a bigger audience and a more diverse audience than just football or basketball players. It’d be essentially a lot of people who’d be watching it. So you want an ad that maybe is more… draws more people in. And obviously, Looney Tunes, you know, certainly who doesn’t… who didn’t grow up with them and who doesn’t love them?

So the fact that it actually turned into a movie and then later a second movie and I think even a remake of the first movie just shows that whatever the thinking was, it was tapping into the right vein.

The Origins of Nike’s Corporate Historian Role

Andrew Mitrak: In the early 2000s, is that when you made your transition to becoming a corporate historian for Nike?

Scott Reames: 2004 into 2005, yeah.

Andrew Mitrak: How did that happen? What did that look like?

Scott Reames: Before that, I was in what was called Global Brand Communications. So my role specifically was to do the communications for senior-level leaders, including Phil Knight, Mark Parker, and others. And the more I facilitated those interviews, the more I listened to these guys talking about the early days of the company, the more I noticed that there were… let’s just call it variations. You know, “The Swoosh was $35,” “The Swoosh was $50,” “The Swoosh was $75.” Just little things, but I realized that because we were a very oral storytelling company, once a voice disappears, whether it’s Bill Bowerman dying in 1999 or Rob Strasser in 1993 or ‘94, those voices are gone, right? And if we aren’t capturing those stories better, we lose that amazing opportunity to really learn from them.

And I was learning also a lot, Andrew, that a lot of what we accepted as lore wasn’t necessarily true. It’s like the game of telephone, right? It shifts and it drifts and it gets embellished and it gets just changed over time. And for the most part, except for a couple of the exceptions I just listed, most of the original people were still around back in the early 2000s. So I didn’t need to ask somebody else what Frank Rudy was thinking when he came up with the Nike Air idea; we could just interview Frank Rudy. And so we did. We could talk to Jeff Johnson about the name Nike and how he came up with it because he was around, and thankfully still is.

So it was just more of kind of these ideas percolating together. In 2004, Phil Knight also announced, at least internally, that he was stepping down as the CEO. And again, as his PR person, I felt like, okay, well his legacy, his stories… we’ve got to make sure we capture these because who knows what… nobody knew at that time that he would still be pretty much be hanging around every day. But you didn’t know that for sure. And Jeff Johnson, right at that same time, had had a pretty bad stroke, which he’s recovered from, but it was a little bit of a shot across the bow. Geoff Hollister, employee number four, also a long-time contributor, was diagnosed with a cancer that eventually took his life a few years later. So mortality was essentially rearing its head right and left in the early 2000s, basically reinforcing my belief that we needed to capture these stories while we still could from the OGs.

So that all came together. I pitched it to Phil over lunch. He said, “Let me think about it,” and a couple of months later, I got a call from the head of the department that ran the archives department saying they got a head count approved for the historian role. “Do I want it?” And I said, “Yes. Yes, yes, yes.”

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, it sounds like a dream.

Scott Reames: It was a dream. I did it for 16 years until I retired.

Nike’s Secret Sauce: Passion Over Pedigree

Andrew Mitrak: I wanted to sort of wrap up with reflections on Nike and their marketing story, and one of the themes that comes to mind is people who aren’t trained marketers making some of the best marketing decisions of all time. That Phil Knight was really… he was an accountant, that was his background. And Rob Strasser was a lawyer, and Jeff Johnson, I am not sure what he was doing before marketing.

Scott Reames: He was a social worker in Los Angeles.

Andrew Mitrak: He was a social worker. And Carolyn was… Carolyn Davidson was really early in her career as a freelance graphic designer.

Scott Reames: She was a student at Portland State, yeah.

Andrew Mitrak: Still a student, yeah, still a student. And folks who just kind of have to learn and just have some instinct and do the right thing. And I’m guessing if you have any reflections on that, of just folks who aren’t necessarily trained in marketing, but still… I don’t know what it says about marketing, that you don’t have to be trained in it to make some of the best decisions ever in it. But what are your thoughts about that?

Scott Reames: Well, I think Phil has a knack for finding people who are greater than their role, or that they’re flexible or they’re inquisitive and they… they can look at a problem that may not be something they’re classically trained in, but they’re intelligent and observant. And especially if they have a passion for and an understanding of what Nike is or who Nike is, they can articulate that maybe in different ways, but they can look at something and say, “Well, I don’t know, I’m not really trained in marketing, but doesn’t it seem to you that we should do this?”

And I think the more, whether it’s the principles or the maxims, the different ways that Nike tries to get people to understand who we were/are, the more people are internalizing that and accepting it. And again, if they’re people who think beyond what’s laid out in front of them, they can somewhat extrapolate and essentially come up with an idea that maybe isn’t really something they were trained to do, but it just seems… “Well, that seems like a logical thing to do, doesn’t it? I mean, if this is Nike, shouldn’t we do this this way?” And I’m probably oversimplifying it, but it just can’t happen so often and be a happenstance, right?

I mean, we’ve had this weird track record of bringing people in who were building architects and become Tinker Hatfield. He was not hired to design Nike shoes. He was hired to design Nike buildings because he was an architect. But somehow, he made that leap. And the people within the company who gave him that latitude… they could have easily said, “You’re an architect, get out of here.” Instead, it was like, “Well, that actually is not a bad idea, Tinker. What can you go with that?” That’s kind of cool.

Andrew Mitrak: Super cool. No, I think it’s super inspiring. Scott, I’ve found this conversation super inspiring. For folks who want to learn more about Nike history and follow some of your work online, where would you point them?

Where to Find More Nike History

Scott Reames: To my LinkedIn page, I guess, would be the best place. I don’t do a lot of social media other than LinkedIn. I try not to just barf out stuff on a regular basis. I try to come up with something that’s topical or something that maybe is in the news, like Air. But I love hearing from people, and I love… I don’t really do an AMA kind of thing, ask me anything, but I love it when people do send a question, and I try to find the answer if I don’t know it. So if they want to find me on LinkedIn and follow me, I’d be happy to respond when I can. I will not tell you how to get a job at Nike because I haven’t applied there since 1992. But it is a great company and there are a lot of amazing stories about it.

And of course, read Shoe Dog. Definitely if you have any interest in Nike, please read Shoe Dog because it’s an amazing look at the company.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, Shoe Dog is just one of the best business books, business memoirs of all time. So thanks for your contribution to Shoe Dog as well, because it’s one of those few business books that I’ve reread and enjoyed a lot because it’s so good. So thanks for that. Well, yeah, Scott, thanks so much for this conversation. I really enjoyed it.

Scott Reames: Thank you, Andrew. I appreciate it.

This week my guest is Ken Rufo, the owner and principal of Manchester Street, a marketing consultancy focused on B2B differentiation. Prior to this, he ran positioning and strategy at Emphatic Thinking, a consulting firm that’s now owned by Accenture.

Ken earned his PhD in communication from the University of Georgia, and I met him back when he was my professor in my master’s program at the University of Washington.

One of the things that I like about Ken Rufo is that he brings such a unique, original view on marketing, and he’s not afraid to be provocative and contrarian.

For instance, when it comes to marketing messaging, he’s less interested in brand storytelling and more interested in making persuasive arguments.

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

Ken questions if marketing’s obsession with data was actually a mistake. He argues there’s too much attention on what’s easy to measure instead of what actually influences buying decisions.

These are themes that I explored in my prior two episodes with Jon Miller and Kerry Cunningham, and I see this conversation with Ken as completing a trilogy of sorts on how B2B marketing has developed in the 21st century and how data and analytics and marketing tech have all changed how we go to market.

Note to listeners: I hope you don’t mind the past month’s focus on recent marketing history. It’s been fun for me to dive into the inflection points that shape today’s digital marketing world (especially in B2B)as it’s relevant to the work I do every day. Don’t worry: we’ll travel back to earlier times of marketing history in episodes to come.

Here’s my conversation with Ken Rufo.

Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, who volunteers to review and edit transcripts for accuracy and clarity.

Bridging the Gap Between Marketing Theory and Practice

Andrew Mitrak: Ken Rufo, welcome to A History of Marketing.

Ken Rufo: Thank you for having me.

Andrew Mitrak: You were a professor that I had in grad school, but you’ve also been a successful principal at agencies and a consultant. And a thing that I’ve noticed over the course of the 40 or so interviews I’ve had for this podcast is that there is a really big gap between academia and practice. And you seem like one of the few individuals that I’ve encountered who successfully bridged that gap. I’m wondering if you have any observations on that.

Ken Rufo: Yeah, it’s a good call out. And I think that academics, to their disservice, are significantly behind the times. And this is a very gross generalization, so there are going to be people who listen to this who get upset with me. But you look at a lot of the even the digital marketing curricula that are present in MBA programs, they’re five years on a good day behind where the industry is. They’re a decade behind, right? Like there are still classes in digital marketing that are not talking through the kind of granularities of a DMP DSP integration, for example. And I don’t know how you really understand what’s happening at a digital marketing level if you don’t understand that degree of technical granularity.

On the other hand, I think that one of the things that happens on the non-academic side is because there is not rigorous academic theory and research behind a lot of things, there are a lot of things in the marketing world that are imaginary that we take as being true. A lot of things like that. You’ve probably heard things like the seven touchstones, right? Like you need seven touches before there’s a sale. That’s made up.

Andrew Mitrak: The marketing rule of seven.

Ken Rufo: Yeah, that’s a made-up rule. It was made up by a radio station like back in like the 30s or 40s to explain why it is you should buy multiple ad spots. It wasn’t based on research. There is research about threshold effects within persuasion within marketing, but it’s highly variable based on like the size of the market, the number of entrants, how recently you’ve been an entrant. Like the math is super complicated and it’s really only understandable right now post hoc. It’s not like this formula thing that you just plug in a formula and be like, I need nine buys, you know.

Andrew Mitrak: It is funny how sometimes somebody will present a plan or some strategy and say, as we all know, you need seven touchpoints to get a customer. And you kind of want to start off with the meeting by saying, that’s BS. But it’s something we all kind of nod along with.

The Evolution of Marketing’s Value Proposition in the Post-Dot-Com Era

Andrew Mitrak: I know we could go a number of routes, but I want to kind of narrow in on the last 25 years or so to the post-dot-com era of marketing. Do you have thoughts on how the value proposition of marketing itself has changed over that era?

Ken Rufo: Yeah, I have two, I have two really, I think, strong thoughts on this. And one of them will be a hot take and the other one will be, I think, really conventional. I think the first thing is we’ve gotten better and better and better at targeting. And we’ve realized that it’s not just enough to target a person, you have to target a time. Right? So like there has been a general switch from kind of like segment-based or audience-based marketing towards finding the moments in which the touchpoints actually matter, right? And the easy way to think about this is that in any act of marketing for it to be compelling, I need both my interest in the thing to be present and my attention to be available.

So I can have the most amazingly catered, like audience of 10 people type message, you know, like really granular messaging, but if I’m not paying attention, and it’s not the right time for me to make a purchase, it doesn’t matter. Or at least it doesn’t matter in any kind of timeframe in which I could attribute conversion, right?

So that has been really amazing. There is a downside to that. This is not the hot take, but the downside of that is that the more you target a smaller window, like you went from like broad message to a group of people to a person to a moment in that person’s life, the harder it is to fit a lot of information in. There’s a kind of compression paradox where if I’m just targeting you with the right display ad at the right time or the right search ad with the right time, it’s a smaller target and if I nail it, I just can’t fit that much information density into that package. And so that is a little bit of an issue. So I think that’s one of the things that’s really cool about what’s happened is that we’ve kind of understood this.

“Hot Take”: Has Marketing Cannibalized Itself?

Ken Rufo: The other thing, and this is more of the hot take, is that we have shot ourselves in the foot. I’ve never seen an industry self-cannibalize as successfully as marketing did when it went digital. Everyone was so excited to go digital. They were like, we’re going to we’re going to show you, like if we invest over here, we can AB test, look how B performs better than A and, you know, our CTR rate is like 100% higher, which often when people say like our CTR rate’s like 100% higher, what they mean is that there were five clicks before and now there’s 10 clicks out of a thousand. You know, now that that was in fact technically a 100% jump, but that’s not super compelling. I don’t know you can build a growth strategy off of like a five to 10 click-through rate, especially when that’s not even the conversion.

But the biggest issue is it’s not how persuasion works. The stuff that we measure in a digital world, the original value proposition is we can provide you with demonstrable and measurable results. But the reality is that’s not how persuasion works and the kinds of things that we measure don’t measure persuasion, they measure interaction.

Andrew Mitrak: Do you think it’s a result of marketing needing to justify its own existence? We want to prove the ROI of marketing and therefore we’ll kind of invent some metrics to prove ROI and therefore we’ll kind of obsess over those metrics and we need to get them better and better all the time. Is that kind of what’s behind it or if not, what would you attribute the cause to?

Ken Rufo: Okay, that’s actually a really fascinating question. I’m going to say there’s three. The first one is marketing is often considered a soft skill. So unlike technical skills or financial skills or whatever else, marketing is a soft skill. I say some slightly compelling things and we wordsmith, right? Wordsmith is typically used in a negative, oh, you’re wordsmithing, right? Or sometimes a positive when you want to hire somebody in to make something sound prettier or whatever.

But it’s considered a soft skill. So there’s a lot of folks in the especially in the tech world who like because they can solve computer challenges, kind of assume they can solve marketing challenges. Sometimes they’re right, sometimes that’s not accurate. I think same with CFOs, they tend to look at the CMO and they go, look, I can I can look at like we had X number of sellers, we hired X plus 10, you know, we got more revenue, see the sales team created revenue. How did you create revenue? Right? And the marketers are like, well, okay, I’m going to come up with an Excel document, it’s going to show you a bunch of stuff and we can attribute a lot of that to marketing.

And I think the problem here is that because it’s a soft skill, it’s not as trusted, right? And there’s a bias against soft skills by folks who are more technical or objectively inclined. But I think the other problem here is that at the end of the day, marketing measures the interaction that a company has with a customer prior to sale and occasionally if we’re talking about retention marketing subsequent to a sale, right? But it does not measure the act of persuasion. Like what’s happening inside the brain is still black box, right? It’s still like unknowable. So I think part of the problem here is that what marketing is measuring is just it’s not measuring the right things. And not because they’re not measurable, I don’t know.

The Challenge of Measuring Marketing’s True Impact

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that’s right. I guess every other department, most other departments at least, you know, sales, you have closed deals, you have revenue. Finance, you have profitability. If it’s a product or engineering thing, you could measure the rate at which things are delivered and customer service or other things you can measure tickets closed and things. And everybody needs OKRs or you know, some type of measuring and marketing needs to create them. Would you say that marketing, and I obviously we’re saying marketing like there’s a lot of companies out there, there’s different areas of marketing, but just by and large in broad strokes, do you think marketing has kind of come up with some of the wrong ones, and when do you think they started doing that?

Ken Rufo: Look at it this way, right? Like CTR is a great example of this. When a CRO goes to present the effectiveness of their sales team, they don’t ever say we AB tested a 46-minute pitch meeting versus a 48-minute pitch meeting. We looked at a blue background on slide four versus a teal background on slide four, right? And what we noticed was a 67% more like larger focus of eyeballs, right, on the slides. Like so no one else offers that level of granularity as a means to justify their existence or process, right? See, I think we can separate the value proposition of the existence of marketing from the processes of marketing. And I think we’ve tried to substitute measures for the process for measures of the value. Does that make sense?

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, for sure. I think like kind of up-leveling the message back to your original hot take of marketing shooting itself in the foot. And to paraphrase it, hopefully not too poorly, is that marketing kind of got obsessed with data science and that may not have actually been a good idea for it in the long term.

Ken Rufo: Yeah, I think some degree of data science is absolutely essential for contemporary marketing because you do want to know like, I think there’s a difference for example, between an ROAS measurement and an ROI measurement for marketing, right? And I think the latter of that is much trickier than the ROAS, right? Because within ROAS, I can look at like this ad versus that ad and I can say, well, this ad did perform better, right? But that doesn’t necessarily tell me that the idea to run ads period, was a good idea.

Right? And that’s the part that I’m saying is tricky. There is still a lot of assumption and a lot of theory that is implicit within most marketing campaign structures, right? Or messaging structures or brand structures or brand architectures, right? But I think marketing did get a little bit too oriented on the data science thing where they were like, look, like we can pull numbers now. We can run some Python scripts, we can use R. And everyone was very excited. And I’m not necessarily sure that worked out. I look, every company I work with, I won’t mention specifics. Almost every company I work with, when they get bought by private equity, the very first thing that gets cut is marketing. Which is weird because at the moment you’re purchased by private equity, you have an automatic marketing opportunity boost, right? Why do they cut it? Because they can’t prove on a spreadsheet that it actually has value.

Are we coming full circle back to Brand Equity?

Andrew Mitrak: You know, the thing is, actually, I think a lot of that is why brand equity started. If I kind of think of David Aaker and his work and the original Marketing Science Institute conference, it was in the era, it was in the 1980s, in the era of, you know, the Wall Street movie with Michael Douglas and private equity, corporate raiders. And all of a sudden, marketing needed to justify itself and say, hey, brand equity, equity, that talks to the private equity folks, right?

Ken Rufo: Yeah, exactly.

Andrew Mitrak: So it’s kind of funny that you’re bringing it up. We’ve almost kind of come full circle as far as what you’re experiencing there.

Ken Rufo: Yeah, and I do think that’s kind of like a weird moment that we’re in. I think we have reached a kind of weird full circle where we’ve gotten adept enough at targeting and measuring that now we’re looking for value in places that are not the metrics.

Is “Marketing Science” a Real Thing?

Andrew Mitrak: Do you think… this is going to be a loaded question here. I mentioned the Marketing Science Institute. I’ve spoken to folks from Ehrenberg-Bass, the Institute of Marketing Science. And I like a lot of their work. And also I mentioned how I worked with data scientists for marketing too.

And there’s this Peter Thiel quote, I know he’s a controversial figure, but sometimes he has spicy quotes. And he a quote that’s something to the effect of, “If ‘science’ has to come after the word it’s describing, then it’s not science.” Right? Like biology and physics, those are science. Political science, social science, those aren’t actually sciences. So do you think marketing science is actually a real thing?

Ken Rufo: Okay, so I mean, I should point out that etymologically, like biology, the logos that is “ology” in biology is the equivalent of science. Logos would have been like words, meaning, theory, structure, right? So like what we call science would have been that, right? Like scientia, the word that gave us science, right, is just the Latin version that we use. Okay, whatever.

But I understand his point. His point is, the more you have to say it, right, the more you say like, I’m very handsome, the less it’s probably true, right? So I do understand the basic point. And I don’t think he’s wrong about that. I think it’s more like, what is the purpose of science?

Andrew Mitrak: Maybe what’s also behind my question is that it seems like as far as marketing marketing itself and the value proposition of marketing itself, it wants authority and prestige and to be more tied to science. And it might even call itself “marketing science.” And that may lead you to kind of obsess over numbers like CTR. I’m wondering if that is a little bit of marketing, just putting a veneer of science on itself and is not as scientific as it might want you to think.

Ken Rufo: Okay, here’s the charitable read on this. I think there is a general desire in most sectors of business to prove that you have value, right? Like to prove that you’re producing really good stuff, right? And the reality is that marketing has a variety of core functions and many of those core functions are very difficult to measure, but it does not mean they aren’t true, right? It doesn’t mean there aren’t scientific ways of assessing them. It just means it’s very difficult to measure some of those things, right?

So, you know, for example, it’s very difficult because it’s functionally a counterfactual to say, would sales have sold as much if the landing hadn’t been softened by some really effective marketing stuff, right? If they hadn’t read some pre-materials or some good thought leadership or they didn’t have some ideas or vocabulary that was instilled in them by the marketing materials that they got or the account-based plan or whatever else, could sales have gone in and have, you know, a 40-minute conversation that resulted in a likely sale? Like could a seller pull that off?

And the answer is sometimes a seller is just very talented and they can pull that off like out of a vacuum, right? Like I’ve seen some sellers who are so compelling, I’m probably sure I could if they had asked for one of my kids eventually, I probably would have given it. They’re just they’re just they’re very smooth. I appreciate that. Some folks are just like that. Not all sellers are like that, right? And the question is, when you talk about an average seller with average marketing, is that more powerful than a good seller with no marketing or really amazing marketing with a bad seller? That combination is very, very difficult to measure, right?

We don’t have a lot of interoperability in the metrics that we use for marketing in a way that would make sense with the measures that we have for sales, right? We typically look at like we gave you a target, you hit your target, you had some tough accounts, you grew your accounts, etc, right? You had a certain number of calls, a certain number of meets, a certain number of deck deliveries, right, etc, right? There’s a variety of things that we can look at as sales metrics, but they don’t really work interoperably with our marketing metrics. So it’s a little bit harder to guess that that’s the case. And typically, although this isn’t always the case, revenue and marketing are split.

So there’s no reason why we would want them to be interoperable. They report separately. I think marketing wants very much to say, hey, look, we contributed to that. Like you wouldn’t have done as good of a job if we hadn’t been around. But that’s just a very difficult case to make conclusively.

Measuring Marketing’s Impact: B2C vs. B2B

Andrew Mitrak: Is there better data for it on the consumer side or the e-commerce side? For instance, most e-commerce websites are pretty much the same functionality at this point. The variance between a good seller and a bad seller on the B2B side versus a good e-commerce site—the gap has mostly narrowed. Sure, there were early leaders who were way better, but other people usually catch on pretty quickly and implement whatever the best practices are. So, is marketing’s impact just a little easier to measure on the consumer side or the e-commerce side?

Ken Rufo: Yeah, that’s a great call out. I tend to think about things from the business-to-business perspective.

Andrew Mitrak: Yes, same here.

Ken Rufo: In B2C, I think there are some differences because there is a more direct line between a marketing material and a conversion. So it’s a little bit easier to verify that some things resulted in a conversion. I still think there are a lot of attribution problems with this. I think there’s a lot of questions about whether or not incremental ads added to the conversion or if the conversion would have happened anyway. And that’s not a negative about marketing, I’m just saying that, let’s say I’m really interested in a product and I keep thinking about it. I see an ad and I go click on the ad because I’m already interested in the product.

There’s an interesting question about whether the ad generated interest, added interest, sustained interest, or just filled a gap until I was ready to make a purchase. Those are four different scenarios for what an ad can do, and you would measure all of them slightly differently. For example, maybe there was something in that ad that broke a moment of tension within my deliberation process, and I was like, that is the phone I want to buy. That is the upgrade phone I want to buy. I want to go with a Pixel instead of a Samsung this time. And maybe there was something in that ad that did that, but I might have already been interested in the Pixel before that. Maybe the ad got me interested in the Pixel in the first place. We can look at the fact that an ad interacted with a consumer and we can say, hey, that ad was part of the journey that they made, and they ultimately decided to make a purchase, so the ad gets attribution, it led to a conversion. My point is just that we don’t always know what its actual rhetorical or persuasive function was—whether it was strictly awareness, deliberation, what other thing was contained within that.

“Stories Bring Us Together, Arguments Set You Apart”

Andrew Mitrak: If marketing’s obsession with data science helped shoot itself in the foot, what’s your take on storytelling?

Ken Rufo: I don’t want to plug Manchester Street, which is my little entity, too much, but we do use a line that I like quite a bit, which is not mine originally. A very talented graphic designer named Nick Danielson used this line I think for the first time. Stories bring us together, but arguments set you apart. I think that when you’re thinking, especially in the B2B context where decision-making tends to be multiple people, it tends to be against very particular requirements, and sometimes sales can be more complicated, sometimes even elevated to complex in terms of the level of integrations. In those instances, storytelling is a great way to say, “I get you.” It’s not a great way to differentiate. The power of stories is precisely that it combines shared experience, but that does make it harder to stand out from the crowd.

So I like storytelling, as long as it’s in the service of well-thought-through and very persuasive argumentation. I think storytelling for the sake of storytelling is a fun exercise, but there are novels for that. So I think it’s not necessarily what I think of as being a marketing function. That being said, I think that storytelling is a great corporate function at a strategic comms level, as a kind of organizing principle for the culture of an entity or an organization. I think storytelling is really useful for that. It helps people see themselves as part of a larger project or value, and I think that’s really powerful. I just don’t think that a lot of people see... look, you own a cell phone.

Andrew Mitrak: I own a cell phone.

Ken Rufo: Alright. How many times have you seen a Google Pixel ad or an iPhone ad where they’re out and they’re camping and they take a picture of the stars and you’re like, I need to go camping with my phone to take a picture of the stars. In fact, I can’t go camping without an iPhone or without a Pixel or without whatever. You know what I mean? You kind of like the emotion, but that’s not how you would decide on a phone.

Andrew Mitrak: I think with the picture of the stars, I couldn’t say the specific ad you’re referring to, but I know the type of ad. Usually, the thing is you want to differentiate this year’s phone versus last year’s phone, right? And low light, that’s a difficult thing, and having a more powerful camera that’s better in low light, maybe telephoto, I don’t know, or the wide one. And it seems like a way of choosing a more extreme use case, which is a night photography use case, and which I think in a way is hopefully showing storytelling but also somehow weaving in some type of competitive differentiation, in that case, the camera.

Ken Rufo: Those ads don’t do that. I just disagree with the premise that those ads do that. I think if we go back to Apple ads like the “Think Different” campaign, I think that’s a much better example of tying an emotional value or aspiration to an argument. “It just works,” or “I saved the day,” Apple “Think Different”—I think that was a really compelling way to separate the idea that if you wanted a machine that you could muck around with, then sure, maybe Windows. But if you would like to just be creative and not be encumbered by the machine, you can Think Different and do that. I think that’s a much more compelling campaign. In that situation, it’s a great example of where the story serves the argument, rather than just being the emotion for the brand or the product.

Why It’s Time for CMOs to Embrace the Immeasurable

Andrew Mitrak: Coming back to data science and marketing, maybe having shot itself in the foot, and just to kind of tie the bow on that thought… What should be done about that? Or what should have been done differently about that?

Ken Rufo: Those are two probably different questions. I think what should have been done differently is just that we over-promised what was possible. And I think we over-promised what was possible in part because of the question that you asked at the very beginning, which is the split between the academic and the practical that we see oftentimes. I think that in practice, people just thought, oh my gosh, if we can show these numbers, we’re going to be able to prove that marketing has really good ROI. We know it works. We all kind of intuitively know marketing is useful.

And now we just thought, well if we have the metrics, we will be able to show this. But because the folks who were doing that were not folks who studied persuasion, rhetoric, psychology, other than as adjacent things that were useful to very specific acts, they weren’t really digging into the research and the theory that undergirded our understanding of those things. If they had at the time, they would have realized that the things we can measure don’t really assess whether or not the marketing was effective; they assess whether or not the marketing happened. And then we can do a post-hoc behavioral analysis, kind of like behavioral psychology, where we say, well, the result was more clicks, ergo, it must have been a more effective ad.

But that doesn’t explain the act of persuasion. It doesn’t tell us that the messaging was better for a reason. It tells us that we are making an assumption after the fact that the behavior suggests that B is better than A, not explaining why B is better than A. And I think that’s a bit of the problem originally.

In terms of what would fix it now, I think that marketers, CMOs, my preference would be that they just really stand up and say, look, a lot of what marketing does... marketing has some core functions: it makes you aware, it differentiates, and it educates on a point of view. I can measure awareness pretty easily, actually. I can measure whether or not my campaign made you more aware. Unaided brand recall, click-throughs, whatever, those are all actually pretty good measures of whether the ad effectively made you more aware. Search optimization, etc. In terms of, did it differentiate? That’s a little bit harder because we have to have a better understanding of whether or not the message actually resonated. And in terms of educating, what I mean by educating, I mean that I got you to think about things from my point of view.

That is very difficult to measure. Unless I can somehow measure whether or not your sentiment, if I look at the sentiment that’s being used, matches the verbiage that I want you to use, that’s really the only good measure for that. I think that CMOs should stand up and say, a lot of what we do isn’t super clearly measurable, but I’m convinced that there’s a vision and a strategy and a thought leadership and a coherent way to do this. In the same way that when we think about sales methodologies, and we think about, say, Challenger Sale versus solution selling versus impact selling, we’re picking a framework that we think is just going to be the most effective based on our experience and intuition and a degree of measurement, but it’s not entirely decided by measurement. Marketers should do the same thing.

A Collective Action Problem in Marketing Leadership

Andrew Mitrak: Do you think there’s a collective action problem among CMOs to do that and stand up and do that? If I’m the CMO—I’m not a CMO, but if I was at some big company and said, “I’m going to take this belief, things that are not measurable.” And then some executive, CFO, CEO, somebody who has influence over whether or not I have a job, says, “Yeah, but this guy over here from that company says they can measure it. I’m just going to go hire that person.” It’s like if one CMO does that, good for them, and maybe that works at a company, but there’s also a threat from others who might have bigger promises and then come in and do those promises, maybe not deliver on them, and then get another CMO job a few years later before people figure out it’s not working.

Ken Rufo: That’s a real risk, and you’re not wrong. But the average tenure of a CMO is, I think, still somewhere around 18 or 19 months.

Andrew Mitrak: Right.

Ken Rufo: So it’s not like the current system is highly stable. I think this is one of those things where we all got seduced by the siren song of digitalization. Digital transformation was promised in a variety of venues, first in operations and workflow and cloud practices and whatever else. And then we were pretty convinced that we could assign data to a lot of different things to improve operational practices. And sometimes that data just doesn’t measure what we think it’s trying to measure or even sometimes what it purports to measure. I think a lot of companies sold CMOs and sold CEOs on the idea that if we could just attach more digital data, if we had the right platforms in place, we could do some stuff.

By the way, there are some instances in which data is incredibly useful. I actually think that ABM programs are a great example. I think account-based marketing programs really benefit from data, although we should point out that most ABM programs look at completely different stats than our typical demand gen programs or even some of our brand programs. They look at completely different stats. I actually think those stats are often very, very useful in determining whether or not the ABM program is actually effective, along with conversion rates. And I also think that you should probably post-hoc interview sellers to talk about what the sales cycle was through.

One thing that I would love to capture more data on—because I’m not an anti-data person, I like it—is I would love to know what questions sellers get asked in an aggregate subsequent to a campaign structure. So a seller goes into a meeting, how many times does the language accord with what we had in our thought leadership? How many times do they ask the questions that we’re suggesting are important questions in our marketing materials, so that we’re controlling more of the conversation? How often does that happen? But again, that requires a degree of integration in that training process, which is difficult.

The Shifting Dynamics of Marketing Consultancy

Andrew Mitrak: So you’ve been in the marketing agency world and consultant world. Has it been close to 20 years for you doing that, or how long have you been doing marketing consulting?

Ken Rufo: I don’t know. I’m really old now, so it’s been a while. I’ve been doing this for at least a decade and a half. I could probably figure out the exact timeline.

Andrew Mitrak: How has that changed? How have the dynamics of running a consultancy changed over the time you’ve been in this profession?

Ken Rufo: You might actually be better at answering this just because of the range of people you’ve talked to. So I can really give very limited anecdotal assessments. But I think it’s changed in a couple of core ways. The first one is the absence of business travel now, the relative absence of business travel, is really large because it’s much easier to develop larger, integrated relationships with an entity that you’re doing consultation for—whether it’s marketing strategy or strategy all up—when you are physically present in the day-in and day-out of an office where people are also physically present.

There are all sorts of cross-pollinated... you know, people use “water cooler conversations,” but there are those things. You end up sitting down, you go out to drinks, whatever, and you end up getting some other tidbit that starts to factor into your analysis and assessment of what’s going on. And there is just a sort of magic to that as you learn more about the dynamics of an organization.

One thing that I learned really early on as an academic who was moving into this world is that every business makes a decision for a reason. Sometimes it’s terrible decision-making, sometimes the reasons are not good, but they are absolutely intentional. There’s never a random policy; it’s there for some reason. It might be counterproductive, might be a bad policy or whatever else. But if you don’t understand what those reasons are—and sometimes those reasons are just people politics—so, one of the things I think does impact your ability to do marketing strategy from afar is that you just don’t have as complete of a puzzle in the post-COVID, less-business-travel era. I don’t think that’s a ding against consultants; it’s just that you have to change some of your own workflow processes to adjust for that. In some ways, you need to schedule meetings with people that you make sure are diversified across their level of the organization.

We sometimes do these messaging workshops, and when we hold them, we want to make sure that the person who’s monitoring web traffic is in the same room as the person who’s setting the messaging strategy. Because I need to be able to say to that person, “Is that actually what the web traffic says?” and they go, “No.” And I go, “Okay, great.” Or sometimes we’ll do multiple workshops where we’ll do product in one group, marketing in one group, sales in one group, execs in one group, and then we’ll do a reconciliation group where we say, “Okay, so here’s a chart of how everyone disagreed. Who’s right? Like, why did product think X when marketing thought the opposite of X? Is it because marketing doesn’t understand product, or is it because product doesn’t understand the customer? Where’s the miscommunication there?” You have to adopt those sorts of processes now because you have such a partial window into an organization. So that’s one thing.

The Value of Marketing Consulting in a World of AI

Ken Rufo: I think the other thing is just that there’s a lot more scrutiny right now on whether or not the consulting dollars pay off. And some of that is because of some, let’s say, high-profile examples of getting paid to change the name of a streaming service and then getting paid because that didn’t work out to change it again, and to eventually get paid to change it back to what it was before you got paid. And I’m not calling anyone out on this, particularly.

Andrew Mitrak: Well, it’s got to be HBO to Max, HBO... all that. They themselves are pretty cheeky about it. I don’t know about the background stuff on that.

Ken Rufo: The same entity was billed, let’s just say, billed for all of those.

Andrew Mitrak: That’s funny.

Ken Rufo: But I do think there’s a little bit more scrutiny because there have been some high-profile mess-ups for consultancies. But the other thing, by the way, is just AI. Like, I can hop on to some of the better AI programs and I can say, hey, give me the Forrester read on what this would be. Here’s a paper on how Forrester assigns its quadrants, what would we have to do to be considered in this quadrant? Here’s what Gartner says, what would we need to do to be part of this thing? And I think the pressure to have a person be smarter than the aggregate of the data of an organization that can now be parsed by AI is just really high. You just need some really innovative stuff. And I think, weirdly enough, this is actually where the academic part comes full circle, because now what we need is not aggregate levels of practice. Like, “I have so much experience, I can tell you what to do,” because so can all the things that cataloged evidence of your experience. What I really need is your way of seeing, and that’s theory.

The Consultant as an “Insurance Policy”

Andrew Mitrak: One question I have just about where marketing consultants fit in is that... I’m going to say something provocative and you can shoot it down, okay?

Ken Rufo: Yeah.

Andrew Mitrak: Do consultants partly exist so the decision-maker at the company doesn’t get fired? That if I’m a marketer and I have an intuition about a thing, let me hire a marketing consultant to do things, and you say to do this thing that I was kind of wanting to do, and then it doesn’t go well, I’m like, “Oh, that consultant.” At least I get to keep my job, but I’ll fire the consultant. Are they partly an insurance policy?

Ken Rufo: Oh yeah. Yeah. There have definitely been... I think in two ways. Sometimes you’re just there to resolve an internal political dispute. Like one person says A, some other entity says B, and your job is to come in and be like, “I think A is probably the more reasonable thing.” And they go, “Aha!” But typically, it’s A that paid you. And I’m not saying that’s because you are biased in your thinking because A paid you; you’re biased because typically the reason why A decided to bring in a consultant is because they were pretty confident they were right anyway, and they just didn’t want to keep spending political capital to convince someone when they could just have a third party do it. But the other reason is, you’re absolutely right, we are fireable. And so when we mess something up or whatever else, it absolutely can just be because the consultant’s an idiot.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, and this kind of comes back to the AI thing. If I’m the marketer and I’m having some political dispute or whatever, I can ask the AI and we can both ask it and then see if it supports our opinion and say we’re right. Or we can go to the consultant and do it. If I choose AI and I make a bad decision and I get fired for it, that’s my fault. They’re like, “Hey, you shouldn’t have trusted the AI, you should have done something different.”

If I hire a consultant, you kind of get the insurance policy benefit, right? I can fire the consultant. So it’s like the AI in some ways for consulting isn’t as much of a threat.

Ken Rufo: Yeah, there is that.

The Value of Consultants: Breaking the “Inside-Out” Perspective

Ken Rufo: I think the other way to think about it, which is the more useful and charitable part, is that there are two things that consultants typically bring to the table. The first one is, because we work with a variety of companies, we have a variety of lateral experiences that we can draw from. A lot of times, the really good new twist in marketing is simply an idea from an adjacent industry that one industry wouldn’t have thought of, but the other industry needed to think of. And when you put them in juxtaposition, it suddenly makes a lot of sense. So someone who’s worked across a lot of industries is very useful.

There’s an idea, both John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen talked about this in different ways. One called it “trained incapacity,” one called it “occupational psychosis.” But it’s the basic idea that the more you work in a particular space, the harder it is to see the outside point of view. This is the cop where every boyfriend that comes home with the daughter is probably a criminal. It’s that kind of idea. Or in marketing, we refer to it as the problem of the “inside-out perspective.”

I’ll give you a great example of this. I was working with a company where we’re in a meeting and the head of product goes, “No other company does the following things.” And he lists this thing that their product did really well. And he’s like, “Nobody else does that.” And I said, “Well, that’s just not true,” because we always do a lot of really heavy compete analysis. And I said, “That’s not true. These entities all claim to do that exact thing.” And he goes, “Really?” And I go, “Yeah.” And he goes, “Well, we do it better than they do.” And I was like, “Okay, come on. You can’t say that’s true. You didn’t know they did it a second ago. You can’t now say that you have an assessment comparatively of your value relative to theirs. You were unaware they did it.” But that’s what I mean. Sometimes just having somebody who can come in and be like, “Dude...” is a way to break that inside-out glass and force them to think about things from outside. So I think that’s a real value that consultants can provide.

Andrew Mitrak: I really enjoy this conversation, Ken. Something I like about you is that part of your offering is debating to get to the truth and also you kind of not that this is a debate per se. And it was a little more back and forth than usual on this podcast, and it’s something that I think brought a liveliness to the conversation.

Ken Rufo: I will tell you, from an argument perspective, when I think about storytelling serving argument, there’s a concept called agonism. It’s where we get the idea of agony or struggle. Antagonism is typically when you are opposed to something, but sometimes you just struggle. And there’s this idea that when you put multiple ideas against each other for the purpose of letting them struggle, you emerge with a better idea. There’s actually good research on this.

There was a great example, there was a study out of UC Davis, I think maybe about 12, 13 years ago. And what they did was they looked at... they basically assigned some students to do a thing. They said, “Come up with these ideas.” They assigned to one group no instructions. Another group they gave brainstorming instructions that are very similar to what you might see in an early design thinking workshop. And then they said, “And you guys argue about it.” What was interesting about it was not only did the argument group come up with more ideas that were more advanced in the sense that they were actually useful, they had been thought through a little bit, than the even the brainstorming design thinking group, but when they then called everybody back two weeks later, a lot of those same participants were still actively thinking of ideas in a way that the other groups were not.

So I just tend to think that especially in marketing, you are talking about a battle of ideas. So preemptively have that battle. There’s lots of stuff that I’m probably wrong about. My kids tell me I’m wrong about a lot of things, but I’m always open to a better argument.

Andrew Mitrak: There’s a great book on this. A previous podcast guest was Ian Leslie; he wrote this great book about John and Paul, but he also wrote this book that was called “How to Disagree.“

Ken Rufo: I’ve not read it, but it sounds great.

Andrew Mitrak: It was a good one. You might dig it. And I just plugged somebody else’s book, sorry about that. But if listeners have enjoyed this conversation, want to learn more about you and your work, are there places where you’d recommend they follow you online or any links you’d like to plug there?

Ken Rufo: Look, I’m on LinkedIn. I have a LinkedIn profile, kind of. Manchesterstreet.com is the name of the agency, you can go check out the website.

But the reality is, honestly, I think LinkedIn is such a diminishing return right now that I don’t really post on it anymore. We are looking at doing two things that I will, I guess, preemptively plug. Manchester Academy is probably going to start by the end of the year. This is going to be a kind of online course system that looks at some things like, what does the research say is the most effective way to run a meeting when you’re trying to get buy-in from execs who are a level higher than you? It’s going to be stuff like that. Or what’s the correct way to run a strength-weaknesses analysis that isn’t reductive to a SWOT analysis? Is there a way to do that at a marketing level that’s more important? So we’re going to be having those sorts of courses.

And then we’re also looking at starting up a Substack that I think is going to be a more kind of heavy, just like, hey... because when we have conversations with clients and I say, “Well, one theory is this,” and I’ll cite something, they’ll be like, “Oh my gosh, I wish I had known about that.” And I don’t scale well. I can’t have that conversation an infinite number of times. But there’s been a request that we just start to put some of the theory discussions as well as some practical examples in some sort of a newsletter. So that’s probably something that we’re going to start up again by end of year. But if anyone wants to talk about stuff, just look me up. I’m super happy to have conversations about stuff. And if you think I’m wrong, absolutely tell me I’m wrong. Understand, I have no allegiance to any of the arguments that I’m saying. I think they’re right. But if you convince me they’re wrong, it doesn’t hurt my feelings. I want to be better. So if someone listens to this and is just very irate, breathe, and then reach out and send me an email.

Andrew Mitrak: Ken, thanks so much for your time. I really enjoyed this conversation.

Ken Rufo: Absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.

This week, I’m joined by Jon Miller, a Harvard-trained physicist turned marketing tech pioneer. Jon is best known as the cofounder of Marketo, and he helped define the playbook for B2B demand generation over the past 2 decades.

A serial entrepreneur, Jon founded Engagio and was CMO of Demandbase. He’s busy building his next venture (which he not-so-subtly hints at during our chat).

Jon pulls back the curtain on the rise of marketing automation. He shares the inside story of Marketo’s creation, the explosion of the “MQL-chasing playbook,” and how that playbook eventually led to the category’s stagnation.

This is a great companion piece to my last podcast episode with Kerry Cunningham. Together, they tell the story of the symbiotic relationship between advisory firms like SiriusDecisions and tech companies like Marketo. They created a powerful cycle: They sold B2B firms on new marketing frameworks, the software to manage them, and the consulting to implement it all, spiraling into what Cunningham describes as the “MQL industrial complex.”

Jon explains why he now believes the very system he helped build is flawed, leading to a focus on short-term metrics that “causes us to do wrong by the customer”. We discuss why he thinks innovation in the category “fell off a cliff” and what it will take to build a new playbook for the age of AI.

Jon is super insightful and a great storyteller, and he’s candid about the ups and downs of working with startups, so this one is entertaining and informative throughout.

Now here’s my conversation with Jon Miller.

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube Podcasts

Shoutout to Kerry Cunningham for introducing me to Jon Miller.

Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, who volunteers to review and edit transcripts for accuracy and clarity.

Andrew Mitrak: Jon Miller, welcome to A History of Marketing.

Jon Miller: Thank you for having me. Hello, hello.

Andrew Mitrak: I’m so excited for this conversation. I want to start with one of your LinkedIn posts. Quote: “The metrics-obsessed, MQL-chasing playbook that I helped create at Marketo is steering us away from marketing’s fundamental truth. Do right by the customer.”

And so, this quote encapsulates the story I’m hoping to unpack through this conversation with you: the creation of Marketo, how B2B marketing became obsessed with MQLs, and what sort of downstream impacts this had on marketing today. So, does that sound good to you?

Jon Miller: That sounds great. This is a topic near and dear to my heart.

Riding the Dot-Com Wave: MarTech in the Internet Bubble

Andrew Mitrak: Well, let’s start at the beginning. I saw that you started by studying physics at Harvard. So I’m wondering, how did you go from there to a career in marketing and MarTech?

Jon Miller: It’s one of those things that makes sense when you look at it retroactively, but you wouldn’t have necessarily thought it going in. I always thought I would be an academic when I studied physics, and I actually applied and got into MIT for a PhD program.

But at the same time, being at a place like Harvard, there’s a lot of recruiting, and consulting firms and banking firms who come to campus. I couldn’t help thinking that that life seemed kind of glamorous, potentially, compared to the life of the academic researcher. And so I decided to apply and give it a shot. MIT was kind enough to let me defer my admission for a year, and so I ended up taking a job in a management consulting firm. And it turns out I really liked it.

The quantitative background from physics actually applied to the consulting world, especially the kind of projects I was working on, which ended up being projects around topics like: there’s all this information about my customers, how can I use that information to make better decisions about how to interact with them and how to create the best value exchanges with them.

So, I decided to go to business school. And so I found myself at Stanford, from 1997 to 1999, which if you recall is like the peak of the internet bubble.

Andrew Mitrak: It’s an exciting place to be.

Jon Miller: If you were at Stanford and not thinking about starting a company at the time, you were doing something wrong. Almost by just momentum, I ended up getting a job at a company called Epiphany, which was literally down the street from Stanford. I started working there in my second year of my MBA, and I could literally walk there. That’s how close this was.

And I had no business getting a job in a high-tech company at that point. I had no high-tech experience or anything like that. But Epiphany was just entering the marketing technology space. Turns out, the consulting firm that I’d worked at before was a company called Exchange Partners, and we’d had a sister company called Exchange Applications. That company ended up building a marketing technology product that actually had an IPO and was probably the top marketing technology of the mid-90s.

So, Epiphany was entering that space. They knew about Exchange Applications as the competitor, and the fact that I had even any connection at all through this sister company was enough for them to give me a job. So I find myself at Epiphany at the peak of the internet bubble, building marketing technology.

The State of Marketing Technology in the Dot-Com Era

Andrew Mitrak: What did marketing technology look like at this time?

Jon Miller: It’s a great question. First off, it was on-premise. So, you know, half a million to a million-dollar software investment and another million-plus of implementation fees. And you were typically connecting this technology to a data warehouse. And it was mostly technology to build and extract lists. Right? So, The Gap would use Epiphany to query their data warehouse to pull this list for the direct mail catalog A versus this list for direct mail catalog B. And then email just started to come on board. So now they’re going to also use this to pull the list for email one and email two.

Andrew Mitrak: Who’s buying the technology? Is this an IT buyer? Is this a CMO who’s buying it? What’s who’s on the buying committee for something like this?

Jon Miller: Back then, with what I just described, it was like a million-dollar-plus investment. So it was complex capital investments that were very IT-driven. That was hard. The marketing department didn’t necessarily always have the political capital to drive their agenda into the IT department. And that was something that really, I think at the time, held marketing technology back.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, and I imagine that it’s just a brand new thing. That marketing technology is sort of a new category and that there must have been some customer education on your part for them to just buy a product and use a product and implement it through their org like that.

Jon Miller: To a degree. I think people had been doing—remember, especially before email, the main channel was direct mail, whether you’re sending postcards or coupon discounts or catalogs or things like that. And people had been doing direct mail and list pulls for a long time. It’s just they were doing it with handcrafted SQL code. And so, the innovation, the thing that was “new,” was the ability for a non-SQL database coder person to be able to go in and slice and dice the data to sort of start pulling some of their own lists. So it wasn’t a completely new thing, but it was a better, more efficient process.

Andrew Mitrak: So you’re at Epiphany in the dot-com era. Were they impacted by the dot-com bubble?

Jon Miller: Absolutely. I mean, I still remember the day that we announced that we had sold Amazon as one of our customers. And the stock went up literally, I’m not exaggerating, $70 per share that day. So I mean, that was literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of value on paper for me personally from that announcement. You can imagine that was a good day.

And then the internet bubble... we peaked at a market capitalization of $8 billion, which is just insane to think about. And then the internet bubble popped and everything came crashing down. The stock went from $300 a share down to $60 a share. That was still worth a fair amount of money on paper, but you can imagine psychologically, when it was just at $300, it’s pretty hard to sell it at $60.

And so, a lesson I learned is if you ever have the ability to take profit off the table, sell your stock when you can.

Founding Marketo and the Shift from On-Prem to SaaS

Andrew Mitrak: Can you tell me the story of founding Marketo? What was the problem you were hoping to solve with Marketo? This is sometime after the dot-com bubble bursting, I think it’s around the 2005 era. So what was going on then?

Jon Miller: I stuck with Epiphany until 2005 when we finally sold Epiphany to an ERP firm called SSA Global. And I didn’t have interest in working there. And so when I was offered a package to leave, I took the package, came home, told my wife this. She thought I was insane because we had just bought our first house and we had a mortgage and she was pregnant with our first kid.

So I was out kind of looking for a job, but I remember I had lunch one day with Phil Fernandez. Phil had been the president and chief operating officer of Epiphany. So I was like, “So what are you thinking of doing?” He’s like, “Oh, I want to be CEO of a company and I’m interviewing at a couple places, but I’m also thinking about starting something.” He asks me what am I thinking about doing. I was like, “Well, I want to be CMO or VP of Marketing and I’m interviewing a couple places, but it really does seem like there ought to be a company.” And we realized that the vision that we both sort of had for the company was pretty similar.

So what was that vision? To your question, like, what was the idea and what was it for Marketo? And I’ve already alluded to this slightly. So before Marketo, there was on-premise software, which was a complicated capital investment to buy. The problem is that most executives looked at marketing as a cost center, and it’s very hard to justify a capital investment into a cost center. People want to make it cheaper; they don’t want to make it better.

Andrew Mitrak: Right.

Jon Miller: And that really had always held marketing technology backward. And at the same time, in 2005, you had Google AdWords really starting to take off. Google AdWords only got up and running in 2002. And here was a thing that a marketer could buy programmatically on their credit card. And what we realized is that marketers have lots of discretionary budget, whether it’s to spend money on Google ads or a trade show or printing brochures. But the key idea is it’s all Opex, not Capex.

So the big idea from Marketo was that software as a service (SaaS), which was just becoming mainstream, could allow us to deliver complicated, serious marketing software as a subscription that a marketer could buy out of Opex and not Capex. So we had to make the software as easy to buy so they could make the decision of, “Do I do more Google ads, or do I buy Marketo?” And that’s what we really tried to build. Our mantra was “make it easy to buy, easy to own, and easy to use,” so that it would feel like that kind of Opex program investment. So that was the big idea.

Marketo vs. Eloqua: The Battle for a New Category

Andrew Mitrak: What were you kind of going up against with Marketo? You mentioned sort of on-prem technologies. If you were going to a big account that you were trying to land, what were you the alternative to?

Jon Miller: So there was this other company at the time called Eloqua. Eloqua started in 1999 as a chat solution, and I think in the 2003-2004 time frame, they started delivering what now became known as marketing automation. And it was technically SaaS, but it was sort of like a weird semi-SaaS solution, if you will.

Eloqua did a great job of convincing high-tech companies in Silicon Valley that they needed a solution like this. And we’ll talk about that more in just a second. But they also had a reputation of being complicated and expensive. And so it made for a really easy positioning for Marketo in the early days. Well, it’s like Eloqua, which you heard of, but that’s expensive and hard to use. We’re affordable and easy to use. That was the main thing we were positioning against.

Andrew Mitrak: The other thing that strikes me about Marketo compared with Eloqua is “Marketo” is a much better name.

Eloqua is kind of hard to spell, hard to pronounce, hard to know what it means, whereas if you’re selling to marketing and Marketo... it makes a lot of sense.

Do you remember coming up with that name, Marketo? Because it’s a pretty great name.

Jon Miller: Oh gosh, we tried all sorts of names and ideas. Even back then in 2005, 2006, getting a good domain was hard. So we would come up with ideas and I’d type it in, and nope, that one’s taken. Nope, that one’s taken.

Specifically, the story is, one day I was playing with anagrams of marketing and what not. I tried Marketo, and it was like, no, that’s taken. And then I tried Ramketo, where I just played with the letters a little bit, and I was like, “Ramketo.com, it’s available!” And I remember emailing Phil and saying, “Hey, what do you think of Ramketo?”

And he said, “Well, that’s terrible.”

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, it is. (laughs)

Jon Miller: He said, “What about Marketo?” And I was like, “It’s not available.” So then he just went to the browser and typed Marketo.com. And there it was taken, but the website said, “If you want to buy this domain, email me here.”

Andrew Mitrak: All right.

Jon Miller: So Phil emailed the guy and said, “I want to buy Marketo,” and $4,000 later, he bought Marketo.

Andrew Mitrak: Oh, man. Yeah, $4,000 in this day and age, that’s a steal. That’s great.

Jon Miller: Yeah, exactly. So that was how we ended up being Marketo.com.

Andrew Mitrak: I always love company naming stories and getting domain stories because there’s always some little hustle to getting the domain.

Jon Miller: Yeah, exactly.

How Marketing Tech + Marketing Consultants Sold “The Demand Waterfall”

Andrew Mitrak: So, one of the things that is associated with Marketo is this idea of the marketing qualified lead, or the MQL. Do you remember the first time you ever heard the phrase “marketing qualified lead?”

Jon Miller: I think so. So the term was coined and popularized by SiriusDecisions, which was an analyst firm. And they published what they called the Demand Waterfall. And so what they had was MQL, they also had the SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) and the SAL (Sales Accepted Lead). I believe they debuted that formally in 2006, which was the year that Marketo got up and running.

I think in the early days, a couple of things kind of came together. One, Eloqua and SiriusDecisions kind of had a little bit of a symbiotic relationship, where SiriusDecisions was saying, “Hey, you should follow the Demand Waterfall.” Well, people would be like, “How do you do it?” They’re like, “Well, you need Eloqua to do it.” And Eloqua would be on the reverse side of that thing, like, “Hey, you should follow the SiriusDecisions model.” And so that synergy behind the MQL and the Demand Waterfall is part of what drove that Eloqua success, especially in those venture-backed tech companies.

Andrew Mitrak: Right.

Jon Miller: And that’s what we were able to glom onto with Marketo, as like, “Oh, you want to do this MQL thing that you’re hearing about from SiriusDecisions? Well, we’ll make it easier and more affordable for you to do that.”

It was related to the core ideas of lead nurturing and lead scoring. Because the other thing you have to remember that was happening at this time is Google AdWords and other digital marketing channels were just beginning to take off. It was literally still early days where somebody might click on an ad and come to your website and fill out a form. And you needed a place to put that lead, if you will. But people realized that just because that person filled out the form, they weren’t necessarily ready to talk to a salesperson. It was a waste of time for both sides. So you needed technology to help you keep in touch with that lead and nurture it and develop it till it was ready. And you needed some ability to score them to know when they might be ready and it’s time to pass them.

So by 2008, 2009, people were basically like, “I gotta get me some lead nurturing!” Like literally, that’s what people would say on their first call with us. They’re like, “Apparently, I have to do lead nurturing and you can sell me lead nurturing, so how fast can I get started?” And that’s kind of what drove a lot of the success in the early days.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, it’s funny because I had spoken with Kerry Cunningham, who was at SiriusDecisions at one point in time. And when I was asking him about the origins of MQL, he was kind of blaming the marketing tech. He was saying the marketing tech came first, but it wasn’t totally clear to me. It seemed like a little bit of a chicken-or-the-egg-type thing.

Jon Miller: I think it was very much a symbiotic thing going on.

Andrew Mitrak: They’re working together in cahoots with each other.

How Marketo Built the MQL-Chasing Playbook

Andrew Mitrak: You alluded to this right at the start: “the MQL-chasing playbook that steers us away from marketing’s fundamental truth: do right by the customer.” And you mentioned that Marketo is partially responsible for this MQL-chasing playbook, and people were coming to you saying, “I want to nurture some leads.” Why is that? What was Marketo’s share and responsibility in popularizing this sort of MQL-chasing playbook?

Jon Miller: I literally wrote a book at Marketo called The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing. I wrote another one called The Definitive Guide to Lead Scoring. And so I went on teaching people, “This is how you do these things.”

Over time, we became known as this successful, fast-growing company. And people would ask me to come give presentations about how you do it. Like, “Tell me, how do you do it? What is your secret sauce for your fast growth?” Right? And so I would give presentations on how I generated my leads and how I would nurture them and how I would score them and create the MQLs and pass them along. And it just almost created... it became this playbook that if you’re a tech company looking to grow, this is kind of how you did it. And again, it wasn’t just me. It was also SiriusDecisions preaching things, and it was also Eloqua preaching things and the rest of the category. But collectively, we created a movement where the MQL became the holy grail that everybody was trying to achieve. It became the standard of success for marketing.

Andrew Mitrak: The MQL industrial complex is what Kerry had called it.

Jon Miller: Yeah.

Finding Traction and Product-Market Fit

Andrew Mitrak: So, you’re talking about Marketo gaining traction, and I want to dive into this story because it was founded, you said it launched in 2006, you co-founded it in 2005. Was it immediate overnight success, or when did you feel like, “Hey, this is a company here?”

Jon Miller: I skipped a little part of the history of Marketo, which was the very first product we built was to help manage your Google AdWords. So it could set your bids and it could make your ads for you and A/B test the ads and also host landing pages to capture the leads. And it was easy to buy it. Come to the website, free trial, give me your credit card, start using it. And that product did not have great traction for a variety of reasons that we probably don’t have time to totally get into. It was too easy to buy, if I sort of oversimplify it.

But we always knew that pay-per-click was just one step along the way, and we were going to add email and automation and these other things. So what’s interesting is we were building the thing that became marketing automation. And that didn’t actually come out till 2008. But as we were beta testing that and approaching it and getting ready to build it, it was clear that people thought there was something special there. Like people who knew Eloqua would look at what we had and they would say, “Wow, that is really cool and easier.”

And Phil made a really interesting decision that was the right decision, but I always wonder if I would have made it myself, which is he decided to kill the pay-per-click product. He was like, it’s just not successful enough, it’s distracting - even though we worked on it for a while - it’s distracting from this other thing that seems like it’s a success. He also changed out our head of sales not long after the launch of the marketing automation product.

These two things kind of made it come together. We had this product that seemed to have product-market fit and traction, and now I had a counterpart in sales who was executing well against the leads I was creating. So by mid-2008, it felt like we were starting to really hum along with traction.

From PPC to a Full Platform: Finding Marketo’s True Calling

Andrew Mitrak: Between these two products, the pay-per-click one and the marketing automation one, was there a different buyer for these products? And I’m also wondering, you were mentioning how with Epiphany, because it was a big upfront Capex versus Opex, that this was a different selling method as well. So were these marketers directly could buy it versus IT? Who was actually buying this at the company?

Jon Miller: The pay-per-click (PPC) product would have been purchased by the digital ad manager. So literally the same person who would otherwise be logging into Google and setting keyword bids, they could just kind of buy our tool. The biggest problem there is, at the end of the day, we were a better UI on top of Google. But it’s really hard to compete against Google’s UI, right? They keep changing and evolving and adding things, and it was a challenging product.

The marketing automation product, because it got wrapped up into this MQL, lead nurturing, lead scoring thing, it started to have more CMO-level visibility. And so the buyer was either the CMO or the head of demand gen or something like that. So it was a more senior, more strategic buyer. But in most cases, it was not IT.

Andrew Mitrak: It was not IT. It was a marketer, and it was sort of higher in the org chart. It’s a little more lock-in as well.

Jon Miller: Yeah.

The Marketo IPO Experience: Marketing Automation Goes Public

Andrew Mitrak: So Marketo IPO’d in 2013, and there aren’t that many marketing technology companies that I can think of that are publicly traded.

Jon Miller: There aren’t that many.

Andrew Mitrak: There just aren’t. It seems like this is just an exciting experience to have co-founded a company and to IPO, and I’m just wondering if you have any sort of favorite stories from this IPO era.

Jon Miller: We IPO’d on Nasdaq. Nasdaq doesn’t have an official trading floor like the New York Stock Exchange. So at the New York Stock Exchange, if you IPO, you get up on the big podium, you literally ring the bell, and that opens up the trading. But in Nasdaq, they have this fake studio where you press a button and confetti drops down, but it’s just a digital exchange. So, besides the confetti dropping, nothing actually happens.

And the other thing about Nasdaq is they don’t immediately start trading the stock. Instead, there’s this whole process where they kind of clear the buy and the sell offers to figure out what the opening price is going to be, and then the stock starts to trade digitally. And that can take like an hour, an hour and a half.

So we go to the IPO ceremony, we have our picture up on Times Square, there’s the big celebration, the button, the confetti. But you remember this is all like 9:30 AM, which is 6:30 AM my body time. And we’ve been going out the night before. And then we go to another room where they give you a glass of champagne. And then all of a sudden, all the adrenaline just leaves your system. Right? Because you’re exciting and champagne, and now you’re just sitting there for an hour and a half waiting for things to happen. And I literally fell asleep on the table from the adrenaline drop.

Andrew Mitrak: Wouldn’t you be so... have a lot of adrenaline just to see what happens? In that hour and a half, wouldn’t you have a ton of anticipation? Like, is it going to go up? Is it going to go down? Like what’s going to happen? Did I leave money on the table? Is it going to pop?

Jon Miller: I very much wanted to see it, but nothing’s happening. You’re just literally sitting there waiting in a room. And so the buzzkill and the energy drop of it is what I’m sharing, for what it’s worth. It’s a first-class problem, I understand.

A Cautionary Tale: The Post-IPO “Why”

Jon Miller: The other story I’ll share is more of a cautionary tale, which is, as we approached the IPO, that in some ways almost became the reason why we existed. Right? Like, “We’re successful, we’re going to IPO,” and “Why should you join Marketo? Because we’re going to IPO.” Culturally, that became our “why,” in the Simon Sinek viewpoint. And that’s a terrible why, because then once we IPO’d, everyone was like, “Okay, now what? Now, why do we exist?”

And I don’t think Phil and I did a very good job defining the culture to be something more meaningful post that. So, you know, it’s a lesson that the IPO is just a financing event at the end of the day, and you need to have a “why” that’s deeper than just, “We’re successful.”

Andrew Mitrak: You left Marketo a couple of years after the IPO.

Jon Miller: Yeah, I left in 2015.

Andrew Mitrak: In 2015. And then a couple of years, a few years later, Adobe acquired Marketo. Do you have any reflections on what this meant at a high level for marketing automation to be acquired by Adobe? Was it a significant milestone?

Jon Miller: Yeah, I think the trend was very significant because there were really four major players that ended up making up the marketing automation space. You had Eloqua, which by this point had been acquired by Oracle. You had Pardot, which had been acquired by ExactTarget, which got acquired by Salesforce. Right? And now you had Marketo being acquired by Adobe.

So three of the four major players were now acquired, with HubSpot being the only real standalone player. But even then, HubSpot, you know, pivoted away from just marketing automation to be CRM and kind of this full platform suite. So if you look at it across the board, I think starting in around 2018, you saw innovation in the category fall off a cliff. You can go look at Marketo today, and it looks like it did in 2018. Right? Yeah, there’s been a couple of bells and whistles added, but it’s still fundamentally pretty much the same product. And so I think that that has been a major disservice to the category, that there’s been so little innovation in the last six, seven years.

And yet, buying has completely transformed in that time frame. And then AI comes along and it’s changing it even again. I personally think the current marketing automation category is incredibly stagnant, and there needs to be a new modern alternative, and somebody needs to build that. Hint, hint.

Unpacking the Anti-MQL Manifesto

Andrew Mitrak: Right, right. So let’s just also reflect on some of the things we sort of alluded to as well, is that you’d co-signed this Anti-MQL Manifesto with Kerry Cunningham, who I mentioned I’d also interviewed for this podcast. And you’re not a fan of MQLs today. And I’m wondering, when did you first get an inkling that something was off with this model? Was it while you were at Marketo? Was it some time after?

Jon Miller: I mean, it started when I was at Engagio, which was the company I started after Marketo. And Engagio was what’s known as an account-based marketing platform. The whole idea of account-based anything is that in B2B, leads don’t buy things, companies buy things. And just because a person from a company comes to your website and fills out a form doesn’t necessarily show any indication that that company is looking to make a purchase. Similarly, you could have 10 people from a company show up on your website to do some research, but none of them fills out a form. That wouldn’t generate a single MQL, but it would certainly show that there’s something happening at that company that’s maybe worth identifying and following up on. So the problem with the lead-centric view started back in my Engagio days.

But fast forward to say 2023 or so, this is when I really started writing about it more. As a marketer—I mean, at that time I was the CMO of Demandbase. Demandbase had acquired Engagio, I was running marketing for Demandbase. And I’m doing marketing, I’m doing the same secret sauce playbook that I did back at Marketo, the exact same stuff that worked so well at Marketo, and it’s just not working as well. It got me thinking, like, what’s going on here?

And I started realizing that the buyer has gotten really frustrated with a lot of the tactics that we’re doing. I started thinking about the fact that the MQL model ends up being a very, I think, transactional way of thinking about marketing. It teaches us, or it makes us think, if I need more MQLs, I just need to run more campaigns. But as I like to say, marketing is not a gumball machine. That’s not how buying works, where you can just put more quarters in and get more stuff out.

In fact, I think a better model for buying is a complex nonlinear system, which I studied back in physics. Like the weather is a complex nonlinear system, the stock market is a complex nonlinear system. And if you’ve ever heard of chaos theory, that’s all about studying complex nonlinear systems. Most people have heard of the butterfly effect, which is the sensitive dependence upon initial conditions that comes out of chaos theory on nonlinear systems, which is one small change here can have unpredictable effects there. That applies to buying. And if you embrace the fact that that’s how buying is working, trying to ever say, “Oh, well, I ran this one campaign which caused them to fill out that one form, which became a lead, which became a deal,” is just naive thinking.

And then second, I think that the MQL way of thinking causes what I call the tragedy of the commons. Which is, anytime a tactic works, people will just keep doing more of that tactic until that tactic no longer works.

Andrew Mitrak: Right.

Jon Miller: And we see that in social, we see that in content, we see that in email marketing, and GenAI is only making that problem worse because it’s easier than ever to create more of all these things.

But I think the worst thing about the MQL mindset is that it encourages short-term thinking. It’s like, I need this many MQLs to make this many deals, opportunities to make this much revenue for this quarter. It’s all about, what am I doing this quarter? And if I don’t have enough MQLs this quarter, what am I going to do? I’m going to do more stuff, causing more tragedy of the commons, causing people to tune out even more.

If we need more MQLs, what do you do? You’re like, “Well, let’s gate our... let’s gate things and put stuff behind forms so that way they’ll have to fill it out to get our stuff so we get more MQLs.” But that actually hurts the buyer experience. Increasingly, we need to be thinking about things like brand and how people think about us before they ever fill out our form. But you don’t do those investments if you’re trying to drive MQLs. So all these things work together to sort of come back to that point that I said, which is it causes us to do wrong by the customer. And that’s why I signed the manifesto, because I think we need to change.

Andrew Mitrak: Exactly. Yes. Well, preach. Amen to all of that. Everything rings true. This idea that it’s transactional, and I’m wondering if at some point the transaction kind of worked and then customers kind of caught on. Basically, I make The Ultimate Guide to X, it’s some PDF, it’s behind a form, you fill it out, and we kind of agree transactionally: you fill this out, you get your PDF, and I send you a bunch of emails you don’t really want that much.

And maybe for the marketer, in the aggregate, that download plus their other behaviors indicates some signal that they might actually be interested in our product and might be a sales-accepted lead down the line. At some point though, the buyer catches on, “That ultimate guide to whatever is probably not worth all the emails I have to unsubscribe to, and it’s just not worth the hassle, and I’m not going to click anymore. I’m just not going to do that.”

What I’m wondering is, did it ever work? Is it that it worked at one point and it was novel enough and it was low-cost enough that it wasn’t so saturated that it did work? Or was it doomed to fail from the start?

Jon Miller: Yeah, I think it’s a little bit of both. You know, so, as I said, it did work at Marketo. You know, and people did download The Definitive Guides, and I think they did get value from them because they told me they got value from them. And then you fast forward to my time at Demandbase, and I wrote the best book I’ve ever written there, and it was hard to get people to download it because I think the world had sort of, for lack of a better word, gotten saturated and moved on.

So yes, I do think there was that... there’s an arc to all these kinds of tactics at play. But I think what the MQL model never got right is that it always had this sort of short-term focus and a bias towards doing things that were measurable, even if they weren’t the things that would be the right long-term strategies. Most classically, over-investing in conversion performance marketing and under-investing in brand marketing.

So I think that’s just fundamental to the problem.

The Future Playbook: “True Revenue Marketing” and Shaping Perceptions

Andrew Mitrak: You kind of had hinted at this—you literally said “hint hint” - as far as what you’re working on now, what we can do to sort of find a better path to the future. Can you share more about the work you’re you’re doing now and what you think sort of the vision for the future of marketing is, kind of given this history?

Jon Miller: Not much more than the “hint hint,” I think, because we are kind of still in stealth. But, you know, at the highest level, as I’ve alluded to, the current category is stagnating. It is not evolving for the age of AI, it’s not evolving to the new playbook. And there really ought to be an alternative that people can go to when they’re looking for something that’s easier and more intelligent.

Andrew Mitrak: Well, we all look forward to some announcement or some product or some company in the future that solves all these problems. Also, just reflecting on this conversation, are there any other top-of-mind lessons for listeners that come to mind as far as this history of MQLs, the history of Marketo, and everything that we’ve talked about today? What are some of, like, if you were to sum up some of the top takeaways, what would those be?

Jon Miller: I would start by saying, okay, it’s clear that we need to act differently, and that there is a new playbook that needs to focus on what I would call “true revenue marketing.” Right? Which is not “how many MQLs can I create,” but “am I shaping market perceptions so I’m the first one a buyer contacts when they actually are ready to buy?” That has positioning that’s so compelling that the competition reacts to us. And that has such strong brand preference that we don’t need to discount to win the deals. So these are some of the aspects of the new playbook.

I really do believe that the pendulum in marketing needs to shift back a little bit more towards focusing on some of those fundamentals, if you will. So that’s one of the takeaways, but I don’t want anybody to walk away listening to this podcast thinking any of that’s going to be easy.

Andrew Mitrak: MQL calculations: “I spend this much on this channel and get this many MQLs that convert at this rate,” is kind of easy. There is a formula that’s been figured out. The problem is often, it ends up being ROI negative if you calculate it all the way down, and so you can’t keep doing that.

Jon Miller: Again, the problem with the sort of simple waterfall math is that it’s just... it doesn’t match reality.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Jon Miller: A model is great to the extent that it’s useful, but if it doesn’t actually reflect the way the world works, it’s going to cause you to make the wrong decisions. But the problem is, I and others spent 15 years teaching CFOs and investors and CEOs that the MQL model is the way that you’re supposed to do things. And so you have PE firms now and VCs who expect MQLs and “how many MQLs are you going to get?” and “what’s your cost per MQL?” and all that kind of stuff. And so as a marketer, if you come in and just say, “Oh, we’re not doing any of that anymore,” it’s not necessarily as easy as saying that.

And so, you know, we could have a whole other podcast on how do we evolve this conversation? Like, how should a marketer evolve the internal organization? How should they position an investment in brand in a way that doesn’t sound squishy-squishy? How do they recruit the head of sales and the head of customer success and other members of the leadership team to tell the story? Because if it’s just the CMO complaining, then it’s marketing complaining. But if the whole revenue team is complaining, then it’s a business problem. That kind of thing. So it’s not easy, but it is also important.

Andrew Mitrak: No, that’s totally right. And if you have any pointers on how to do that, I’m certainly all ears. Maybe we can bring you back for round two of a podcast to have that conversation. In the meantime, Jon Miller, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Just as a final question, where can listeners find you online and learn more about your work?

Jon Miller: The best way is to follow me on LinkedIn. I share my thought leadership, my ideas, my best practices there. Also, cocktail recipes for anybody who is interested in trying to see what cocktails can teach us about B2B go-to-market. That’s by far the best way to find me. I also have my website, jonmiller.com.

Andrew Mitrak: I’ll link to both of those on the blog that accompanies this post. So, Jon Miller, thanks so much for joining me. I really enjoyed it.

Jon Miller: Thanks for having me.

Today we’re talking about a phenomenon my guest, Kerry Cunningham, calls the “MQL Industrial Complex.”

If you’re not in B2B marketing, that term might be new. It refers to the Demand Waterfall, a framework introduced has dominated business-to-business marketing for two decades.

It’s shaped how companies organize their teams, spend their budgets, and ultimately, measure success. It introduced the phrase MQL (marketing qualified lead) and standardized SQL (Sales Qualified Lead).

Kerry Cunningham is among the world’s foremost experts on this topic. He was a Senior Research Director at SiriusDecisions, the company that invented the Demand Waterfall in 2006. He was also a VP at Forrester, the company that owns it now.

And here’s the twist: Kerry is now one of the Demand Waterfall’s staunchest critics, arguing it was misguided from the beginning. He’s now Head of Research and Thought Leadership at 6Sense and is exploring what comes after the MQL.

As a B2B marketer who’s spent a lot of time working within this model, I tend to agree with Cunningham’s arguments. This conversation gets to the heart of some of the bad incentives and flawed assumptions I’ve seen firsthand, so you might hear me get more fired up than usual in this one.

Even if you’re not in the world of B2B marketing, this episode is a great case study in how marketing theory, practice, and technology all intersect to shape the industry.

Now, here’s my conversation with Kerry Cunningham.

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube Podcasts

Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, who volunteers to review and edit transcripts for accuracy and clarity.

Andrew Mitrak: Kerry Cunningham, welcome to A History of Marketing.

Kerry Cunningham: Thanks, Andrew. I’m glad to be here.

Andrew Mitrak: I’m excited to have you because I first encountered your work from The Anti-MQL Manifesto and your description of The MQL Industrial Complex. MQLs have existed as long as I’ve been in B2B marketing, and they’re something I kind of live with, for better or for worse—probably mostly for worse—throughout my day. And so, transparently, I think they’re the wrong metric and lead to a massive waste of time and effort. So your content around this resonated with me.

But part of this podcast, since it’s a history podcast, I’m always curious about, “How did we come up with these ideas? Where did MQLs come from? How did we start living in this MQL industrial complex?” So, can you describe for listeners, where did this MQL industrial complex come from?

The Genesis of “The MQL Industrial Complex”

Kerry Cunningham: Totally, yeah, I’m happy to talk about that. And I think it’s important to understand the history because one of the things that I’ve been doing really constantly over the last seven or eight years is telling everybody we’ve been doing it wrong. And that message is not always well-received, curiously enough. But what I find is if there’s an understanding of how we got here, then it can help ease the pain of realizing that we got to move on.

So how we got here, I think, is kind of just a fluke of technology in a way. My friend Jon Miller, who started Marketo, or one of the founders of Marketo, and a few other folks—the founder of Eloqua. I almost started working for one of the very first marketing automation platforms back in the late 90s also.

Those systems were designed primarily with the idea of the buyer as a person in mind. And certainly, the simplest way to have a system that is going to try to engage people and then try to collect and do something with that information is one based on individual people.

The buyer in B2B has never been an individual person, except on the very low end of the scale. But, you know, we find even now, if the deal is a $50,000 annual value or more, which is not a particularly big deal in B2B, there’s five or six people involved in that not just the decision-making process, but all the researching process.

So anyway, the first technology that came around was built around the person because that was the easiest object to focus on. And what happens over time is you get these systems, it was widely adopted and very rapidly. And then once that happens, then things come along like—I worked at SiriusDecisions for a long time. SiriusDecisions developed the really canonical framework for measuring how you’re doing in this world where you’re producing leads.

And so, SiriusDecisions developed the framework, it became a standard, and so you’ve got these practices: “Oh, let’s go out and get some leads, that seems like a thing that we do. Okay, great.” Now we’ve got a framework for saying, “Here’s how we should measure it.” Then you get standards, you get benchmarks are developed, and everybody wants to know, how am I doing? What are the best practices for improving that?

And before long—and this is why I call it a complex, because it isn’t just the technology. It’s the technology plus you get these measurement frameworks, you get standards, you get benchmarks. And all of those things get an entire industry focused on how to improve their execution of the process, rather than asking the question, should we be doing this at all? Because if anybody had been asking the question, “Should we be doing this this way at all?” 20 years ago, the answer would have been, “No, this doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

But instead, what happens is you get some technology, it’s the first thing everybody has. You want to use it. How does it work? Well, we send emails to people and they respond. They come to our website, they fill out a form, and we go after them. Okay, well, we can do that. Who’s doing that well? What’s the best process for doing that, right? So it all just goes down that path of, how do we do it well, or how do we execute best against this, instead of really thinking about whether we should be doing it.

And the curious thing is, in those same organizations, and I was in some of them back in the day, you have people in product marketing, content marketing, even when it was new, thinking about buyer personas and understanding that each account that they might want to sell to has multiple buyer personas. But nobody ever connected the dots between, “Well, what happens if we get multiple buyer personas who happen to respond to this stuff we’re putting out there?” Is that a thing we should notice? Should we care about that? Does it matter? Is it good? Is it bad? That question, I mean, like literally never got asked. And when you look back, it’s like, well, that’s the simplest, dumbest thing in the world we should have been doing.

So that’s really kind of how it goes. It’s kind of this first-through-the-gate with the technology, and then everybody went after it.

How Marketing Automation Software Shaped the MQL

Andrew Mitrak: That’s a great high-level overview and framework for how it developed. You know, just kind of diving deeper into that, when that technology developed—it sounds like the technology developing, the first marketing automation platforms that were adopted—that kind of helped set some of the groundwork for this industrial complex to be built upon. What were those technologies specifically, and around what years did they come out and start to get adopted?

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah, so the marketing automation platforms. And so, Marketo wasn’t the first, but it was certainly the first really widely adopted, really well-marketed. And it functioned very well for what it did. Eloqua came along more or less at the same time. So this is the mid-2000s, 2005, 6, I think, in that time frame when these things come around.

A lucky coincidence for me, in a sense, is that—and actually, I think I would take that back and say it’s probably more like 2007, 8, 9 when it really started taking hold. The technologies were around since 2004 or 5. I dropped out of B2B. So I was part of a company, and we had a liquidity event, and I just dropped out of B2B for about four years. The four years when marketing automation was really coming in and taking over. So I left B2B, I did other things, I came back, and I was able to look around because I wasn’t part of the implementations of all of this. I didn’t get caught up in the “how do we do it better?” I came around and I looked at it and I was like, “What the hell is this? This doesn’t make any sense.” The buyer is this big group of people, and all you’re doing is looking at individuals and not even noticing if we have buying committees, whatever, paying attention.

So that’s really when it happened and also why I was just fortunate. Like, if I had been working in the space in that time, I’m sure I would have fallen into the same trap as everybody else. I’m not any smarter than anybody else in that respect.

Andrew Mitrak: And so these technologies come out, and they look at leads as an individual person versus being structured to look at somebody as like a team—that teams or groups of people purchase products. Was that a technology limitation at the time as to how these were built? Or was it more of just the initial idea? Because if there were some flaws to them, I’m wondering why they got adopted. Was it a technical reason at the time? Was it just that, “This is better than before, and don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”? What do you think it was that led them to get so adopted at this point?

Kerry Cunningham: A little bit of a mix of those things. So I think one, the technology is easier if you don’t have to connect disparate individuals from the same organization. That’s a complex problem to solve. And you’ve got examples from B2C where they already have systems like this where we’re tracking individual people in B2C contexts. So you can just port that idea over, which is really what happened, to B2B. So it was kind of a borrowing from B2C, where the buyer really is an individual most of the time, into the B2B context.

And then, frankly, I think just what we do as humans, which is we fall in love with the technology, and we’ve got a new toy, and we’ve got a new thing, and we don’t think that deeply about whether it really is the right fit all the time. It’s just, it’s exciting to have it.

And I was around at the time before this happened. And before this happened, you’ve got outbound prospecting, and you’ve really got no inbound marketing the way we came to think about it. You get very few leads of any kind. Mostly, it’s just you have to find companies and go out and prospect into them. So I wouldn’t want to underestimate how exciting it is as, one, as a marketer to finally be involved in revenue, because frankly, before that, you’re not. Right? If you’re a marketer prior to the time that there’s marketing automation, you’re pretty far removed from anything to do with producing revenue. You do branding. The closest you get is you put on events, you do field marketing things. Right? But you’re not producing, you’re not delivering leads in some old way most of the time.

Andrew Mitrak: Most of the time. Yeah, maybe there’s some direct response type things, but those are usually consumer-oriented and not for big-ticket B2B products, right?

Kerry Cunningham: Right. And they’re really small scale. So, you know, way back in the beginning of my career, I worked at some trade publications, and so you can get—you had direct response literally postcards from magazines and things. But it’s really small scale and not—it didn’t occupy an important space in anybody’s mind about how a B2B company was going to generate revenue. So it really was exciting, and I don’t think we should underplay that in thinking about the history of this because I think that’s a huge piece of it. It’s like, now marketing can be really close to sales. Marketing can participate in the production of revenue. For sellers now to be able to get these names of people who’ve come to your website that you have now, and they’ve filled out forms and looked at your content. I mean, this was very exciting, right? This is fun. This is a lot better than cold calling.

Andrew Mitrak: And if I think of that mid-2000s timeframe, the dot-com bubble bursting was not that far in the rearview mirror. There was still some skepticism around the value of the internet in some ways. Mobile and the whole world being online in the way that it is now still hadn’t quite happened yet. So there’s probably some—and then there’s a continuous pressure for marketing to show its value. What is the ROI of marketing and beyond things like brand equity and such. So it seems like a very appealing thing to adopt.

Standardizing the Demand Waterfall: How SiriusDecisions Solidified the MQL Framework

Andrew Mitrak: So you were a research director at SiriusDecisions, and they developed this Demand Waterfall. It introduced these popular B2B terms like Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), and Sales Qualified Lead (SQL). So you joined after these had already been developed? Do you know how these were developed and what it was like, what did SiriusDecisions do to develop this?

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah, so I can talk about that. I got there right after the last lead-based version of it was developed. My job for a couple of years was mostly to help marketers improve their execution within that framework. And what we discovered—not discovered, but a realization my buddy Terry Flaherty and I came to after a couple of years of doing that is like, there is no better that’s any good. You can just keep getting better at this, really, but it doesn’t change the outcomes at all. And so we changed it.

But the way that it came about was really smart people thinking really hard about what the process should be. And this is, I think, the thing that’s dangerous, and we always have to be on the lookout for. Right? So we’ve got this machine, marketing automation, that’s connected to our website, names come in. And so we think, “All right, what should we be doing to optimize the throughput of this system?”

And really smart folks at SiriusDecisions sat down and thought through all of that, worked with hundreds and hundreds of B2B marketing organizations, and I think came up with what I think is the absolute best set of things you could be doing if that’s your paradigm, right? The right checkoffs, the right handoffs, the right nomenclature to distinguish, making sure that at every step in the process when marketing hands this thing off to a BDR (business development representative), say, that we have a date stamp attached to that. We know when it happened, that when they work their process, we know how long that process is, and then we know when the next stage was reached. So working through all of that, and did that for, you know, eight or nine years, I think, building that process out so that you could have industry-standard benchmarks, industry-standard terminology, industry standards for what those handoffs ought to look like.

Along the way, they also introduced the scoring of leads because initially, these are just people who fill out a form, but now, maybe we don’t want them to just fill out a form. And I think, at some point, someone said, “You know, there’s a couple of ways we could go here. We could just look at the individual and say, well, how much content is that individual consuming? And what’s their title? Or we could look at whether we have multiple individuals from the same organization,” and the easiest answer was, “We’ll look at what the individual is doing.” And that’s the way all of the systems were built. And it was just the wrong way for it to be built.

Unintended Consequences: The Tragedy of “Second Lead Syndrome”

Andrew Mitrak: So, just to spell this out as an example, one company could have 10 people all fill out one form to get an asset, which is a signal. Or a company could have one person fill out that form and then click on an email and then do some other things. And that one person would get scored to be a lead, but that company that had 10 people all engaging would get ignored because they didn’t meet the scoring threshold. And so you’re kind of incentivized as a marketer to find more highly engaged individuals like that because then you get to beef up your MQL things, and you kind of ignore the harder challenge of reaching a bunch of different stakeholders in an organization.

Kerry Cunningham:
That’s exactly right. And to me, that’s the tragedy of B2B. What you just described is a massive tragedy. Now, it could be if you get 10 people from an account that come to your website and look at your content, they’re going to get themselves to be your buyer anyway. But you’re not doing anything to capture that or promote that.

So the thing that happens with that 10-person buying committee who comes to your website and looks at one piece of content each is, one, none of them become MQLs. Sales ends up talking to that account because eventually they come and say, “Hey, look, I’d like a demo.” And sales ends up talking to them. Sales puts it in Salesforce CRM or whatever as something that they found or something that came over the wire or whatever it is. But in the meantime, marketing has done all of this work to get these people to come and engage with content. It worked, and there’s no record of it. Like, no record that gets attached to the sales opportunity that gets produced. Right? So what marketing has done that’s been effective is completely unknown, remains completely in the dark. And it never gets connected to the sales opportunities that get produced and moved. So you lose an opportunity to understand what’s working.

It gets worse. We had this term we developed at SiriusDecisions when we were figuring all this stuff out called “second lead syndrome.” So most B2B organizations were structured such that if that first lead from an account comes across, goes to the business development rep who makes the calls, that’s great. If a second lead comes in the next day from that same organization, the BDR pay structures are typically that they can only produce one sales-qualified lead per account. So they look at the second one that comes in, and they say, “That’s no good,” and they mark it as a duplicate lead.

Andrew Mitrak: Right (shaking head) and it still happens!

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah, I know it does. Yeah, that’s another tragedy, right? And one that you think, if you just thought about that for a couple of minutes, you would never do that, right? I mean, I’ve said—I’ve talked about this to like, literally thousands of people, and everybody goes, “Oh, you know of course, you know?” And yet...

And that’s why I think that this MQL industrial complex is a real thing. Because normal people under normal circumstances, it would occur to them that that’s dumb.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, it’s like, it reminds me—it’s like if there’s an open house and you’re a realtor, and a wife comes in to look at it, and then you engage her, and then the husband comes in afterwards, and you just ignore that person. Or whatever order it is, or another family member. Oh, that’s a lot of high intent, but it’s as if they’re ignoring that second person like, “Oh, I already talked to that family once, I don’t need to talk to them again.”

It would never happen in the real world, but somehow in these digitized systems and the incentives that get construed around it, it kind of makes everything sort of wacky, for whatever reason.

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah, it completely distorts everything because everybody gets focused on this process that is in place and “How do I optimize that? How do I get my credit in that system, in that process?” And everybody was smart enough to think, “Well, that doesn’t make sense. Let’s do something else,” but nobody did because they’re just trying to optimize their particular outcomes in that process.

The Ripple Effect: How MQLs Reshaped Org Charts and GTM Strategy

Andrew Mitrak: We talked about the marketing automation platforms—the technology. There’s the SiriusDecisions of the world and the strategy and sort of the structures around it, it’s kind of a consulting complex on how to optimize this. And then also, it filters out into both marketing team org charts and how marketing teams go to market, or and even sales orgs also, and BDR orgs, go to market as well. Just like what tactics they prioritize, how they incentivize their teams. Do you want to speak to any of the other sort of marketing or GTM(Go-To-Market) org chart effects of adopting this complex in this time?

Kerry Cunningham: Well, it’s hard to remember, but 25 years ago, there really wasn’t a demand generation function. And now it occupies most of the budget for B2B organizations. And so, one, it introduced this whole new function whose job was really just to produce leads, because demand was recognized really only as the leads that you produce, the MQLs that you produce. That’s the output from that function.

And then you’ve got all of these functions that really do need to be there even without leads now, like RevOps (Revenue Operations) and those kinds of things. But all of those things are built on the back of, “Now we have to have this machine that really efficiently moves things from place to place.” And so you’ve got not just org charts, but industries built up around measuring these processes, attribution models, the measurement models.

And frankly, that’s the stuff that—that’s the real industrial complex stuff for me. Because once those measurement practices are put in place, once a person has a job of measuring how this process goes—I’m in marketing ops now, and I have this job and I measure that—you get software built to help do that. You educate CFOs on why this is the right thing. And now you’ve got other parts of the organization holding you accountable for how well you do that.

And so, in fact, today, I think one of the biggest reasons the MQL industrial complex hangs on is that people who built their careers in the last 20 years are now the leaders of organizations. And what they’ve known is an MQL industrial complex is, “How do we produce and optimize the production of MQLs?” And so they’re insisting that we have these objects, these MQLs, and all of the metrics associated with them when they’re no longer—I think most of the people close to the action already know that they’re not the right things, but they can’t get away with changing it.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, there’s sort of both the leadership problem, kind of a collective action problem of, depending on how large your organization is, you got a lot of different people who are invested in this system aligned with that. And then also it could make certain marketing tactics just not look very good. Or it could make a lot of that leader’s decisions look like, “Oh, you’re telling me that all that stuff I was celebrating over the last five years is actually just wasted?” “I don’t actually want to say that to my boss.” So it’s kind of a tough thing to wind up changing.

Kerry Cunningham: It is. Yeah.

Gated Content and the Rise of the BDR

Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned BDR, business development representatives, also sales development representatives—I think those are mostly interchangeable, SDR, BDR. Did that function also kind of emerge during this time of the MQL industrial complex? Because it seems like, did that org, did that exist more than 20 years ago, or is that kind of a new function as well?

Kerry Cunningham: It did, but it was all outbound. So, in fact, for a big chunk of my career, I ran a third-party teleservices organization, and what we did was find prospects for tech companies. But it was almost entirely outbound, 99% outbound.

Andrew Mitrak: And phone call at the time as well, probably was a more so than email, just because of the time frame. If it’s more than 20 years ago, not everybody had email in the same way or having cold emails wasn’t quite… There weren’t the ZoomInfos of the world or whatever other data providers there were.

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah. That’s right.

Andrew Mitrak: It seems to me like the thing that also sort of happens as a result of this is that there becomes this playbook of the marketing team creates content, and instead of just getting that content to as many people as possible, you put it behind a form because that form is how you measure something. And then what happens with that form is you start sending people a bunch of emails. And there kind of becomes this exchange where, “I’m going to give you something, but in exchange, you’re going to give me your email, and in exchange for that, I’m going to send you a bunch of emails you probably don’t want.” And that just becomes a whole mechanism that we all kind of have, there’s sort of like an invisible handshake that we all kind of agree to as a thing, which just sort of always struck me as kind of odd, is that that’s part of it.

When Buyers Got Wise: The Decline of the Form Fill

Kerry Cunningham: It is very odd. Yeah. It is. Yeah. So again, I mean, looking at it from the outside, you go, “Well, that’s kind of weird.” It’s kind of like the vendor is charging for the content about their solutions. And, you know, you could do well to ask the question, “Are they getting away with that?” I mean, you know. (Does that work?) And the answer is no, they’re not. Like, because we do this research now. We ask buyers, “Do you fill in forms?” And literally, we’re talking about one purchase you made in the recent past. “Did you fill in a form with the vendors you were looking at?” Two out of 10 people say yes. “Did you fill in a form to look at content with the vendor that you actually bought something from?” Three out of 10 people say yes.

So, you know, I mean, that’s horrible, right?

Andrew Mitrak: It’s a lot of folks that you’re like leaving off the table.

Kerry Cunningham: It is. And it’s almost certainly the people that you really want to talk to, right? Nobody who understands what’s going to happen would choose to do that. You know, so nobody wants to be chased, you don’t like it, we don’t respond to it. And so, if I’m a senior leader in an organization and my company is looking at vendors, what we know from the research talking to buyers is that they absolutely will go to the vendor websites. And if you think about it, even the CFO for a reasonably sized company, if they have to sign off on a deal, if it’s like a big enough deal for them to have to sign off on it, they’re going to come to your website and look around, you know? And they probably already know you anyway, that’s a different story, but they’re going to come poke the tires. They’re certainly not going to fill out a form.

So what message do you want to deliver to that person? What level of comfort do you want the CFO to have or the head of purchasing to have when they come to your website? What experience do you want that to be? If you were thinking about that, you would never put a form in front of it, right?

Andrew Mitrak: Do you think that the consumer behavior changed over the years? Like, I wonder if there was the—so there’s, there’s the tech, there is the, um, you know, demand waterfalls kind of created and this concept of an MQL. There’s marketers changing their behavior and starting to put things behind forms instead of just making it available. And then do you think at some point a hypothesis I might have is, maybe early on, maybe for the first few years of this being a thing, CIOs (Chief Information Officer) and important decision-makers might fill out a form, but by now they’ve all caught on to the game. They know at this point, since this is so saturated and it’s become such an abundant practice, that, “Okay, I fill out the form, I get a bunch of emails I don’t want. I’m not going to do that anymore because I’ve been bait-and-switched too many times. I’ve had too many instances where the content wasn’t actually that great and those emails I got were kind of annoying.” Like, do you think that they changed their behavior over time, or do you feel like it was always kind of the case that CIOs and other important decision-makers just wouldn’t bother with a form?

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah, I would, I think there probably were a few years back in the beginning of this, but I think you only need to go through a cycle of being hounded to decide you’re not going to do that again. I don’t think it took long. And when we look at the, I think the earliest research I could find on form-fill rates just looked at the number of form fills against the number of web visitors, and that was about 3% 12 years ago. It’s 3% today, overall. So, you know, that has a lot of junk and it has bots and all of that stuff. So the real relevant numbers are how many members of a buying group, our actual, you know, legitimate one will fill in a form. And that’s the more two out of 10, three out of 10. And I bet that hasn’t changed very much.

And again, it’s a thing, you know, so think about content marketing is a huge part of this MQL industrial complex, right? Because it was built—content marketing exists, so that’s another, that’s part of the organization that really, that’s part of the org chart that is built to buttress this MQL industrial complex. And it’s a trick, right? It’s just a trick to get people to fill in the forms. That’s all it is. It’s a trick. But the better you get at that trick, the more likely it is that you are going to bring people to your website to look at your content who are actually not in-market. Like, if you have crappy content, the only people who are going to be coming to look at it are the people who want to buy your stuff, or they’re looking at you and your competitors. But the better you get at it, the more traffic that you get that isn’t going to be in-market right away. And that’s going to make everything that you’re doing look worse within the complex of the kinds of measurements and things that we have. So your conversion rates will go down. Your number of visitors, traffic, and all of that will go up, conversion rates go down.

Now, that’s great if you actually are just worried about selling stuff. Right? If I just, if I just care about whether we’re going to build buyers who are engaged with us and like our content and all of that stuff, then I don’t care about conversion rates as form fills. I care about conversion rates of accounts to whether they become customers. So if I’ve got great content and people are loving our brand and learning about our solutions, does it matter that they filled in the forms? Well, it matters to you because you get measured on whether they fill in the forms. It does not matter to them, the buyer.

And that’s the, that’s the disconnect that happened, and where it just, we became blind to the fact that we’re just focused on our own goals and trying to, you know, the process is really about us trying to get what we want. The buyer is kind of getting what they want. I mean, even if they do fill in a form or they get a junior person to go fill in the form, they get the content, they get it from somebody else, they get what they need. They’re going to get what they need. But you’re not going to get what you need, and it’s going to look worse all the time. And that doesn’t make any sense.

And so if you’re a marketer and you’re trying to justify your existence, your ability to justify your existence is continually declining. The ROI numbers based on leads that end up on opportunities continue to go down because, as you said, people are wise to the trick, and they’re not going to engage in that trick. And you can chase them all you want, they’re still not going to respond. We’ve got a lot of stats on that from our buyer research. So buyers, if you ask them when do they talk to BDRs or sellers for the first time, it’s 70% of the way through their buying journey. And if you ask them, “Did you initiate contact, or did the vendor initiate contact?” buyers say that they initiated contact more than 80% of the time. And again, if you ask them, “But were you being called and emailed?” the answer is yes, almost all the time. But buyers choose the timing of when they’re going to engage, and that timing does not change simply because you’re calling and emailing them.

And, you know, when I talk to marketers, I just think, “Well, just think about yourself. Does a BDR emailing and calling you ever change your behavior at all?” Right? Do you change, do you do anything differently because people are calling and emailing you? Of course not. You know? I mean, you’d never even would dream of it. You know, if you like the vendor, you put the email in the folder and you hang on to it for when you want it. You’re not going to respond. I mean, you know how that’s going to go if you do. All right? So, no, of course you don’t.

Was the MQL flawed from the start? Or have we just outgrown it?

Andrew Mitrak: Reflecting on this system as a whole is your overall take that it was misguided from day one and was like a mistake that was like fundamentally flawed? Or is your take more that it was appropriate for its time to some extent, but we can do better now because we have better technology and better insights now? Or what’s your overall kind of assessment of sort of the whole era?

Kerry Cunningham: I would say it was fundamentally flawed from the beginning. There, it would have been complicated to fix from the beginning. It would not have been complicated to know that it needed to be fixed. That’s really what got lost in, and that’s why I focus on this complex idea, because it’s not just the technology, right? The technology got there, but the technology and the process and the measurement and all of that, it has an enormous weight to it that squelches the very simple thinking that would have said, “You know what? Okay, this is what we can do today, but by three years from now, we’ve got to notice when we have three members of the buying group that show up and fill out our forms.” Or, maybe since marketing has known that, say, the form-fill rate is about 3% to 5% for the last 20 years, marketing could have said to themselves, “Well, you know, all of those people that are coming to our website, we’re paying for all of that. And I wonder if there’s anything we can do to understand what’s in the rest of that web traffic.” And the answer has been yes for a really long time, right? Because it’s practically all, you know, I tell folks, look, if you’re paying to bring people to your website, the outcome from that is almost all anonymous traffic. That, I mean, almost every penny you spend results in anonymous traffic. So if you’re not doing everything that you can to legally understand what’s going on there and and which accounts are on your website, that seems like malpractice, you know? And but you’ve got a whole industry engaging in malpractice. It doesn’t really hurt you.

Beyond the Waterfall: The Shift to Buying Groups and What Comes Next

Andrew Mitrak: I think the natural next question is, “What comes next?” What takes its place? Also, do you have any examples of companies or individuals who sort of bypassed this complex entirely and sort of just operated outside of it? Do you have any ideas or successful stories of who’s marketed outside of the MQL industrial complex?

Kerry Cunningham: We do. A little bit of this may seem self-serving, but I can talk about some of the, some of the things that we that have been done. So one, you know, back at SiriusDecisions, we ditched the old lead-based waterfalls and built a completely new one that was based around this concept of buying groups and noticing that there were buying groups. So that was back in 2017. And, you know, hundreds of companies have adopted that way of looking at the world. And some of the biggest companies in the world are still doing it. My friends back at Forrester, which bought SiriusDecisions, are still working with companies and getting them to adopt that. And and some of the really big companies are doing that.

The reason I came to 6sense is because they’ve got a machine that’s built for identifying buying group-level signals. So, do you have multiple leads? We can show you that. Do you have anonymous traffic from those same accounts? We can show you that. Is there third-party signals outside of your website? Right? We can show you that and bring those things all together. So we’re not the only ones, there are others as well, but that’s the, that’s the answer. And the technology for doing that is actually really mature. It’s been around for quite a while, it’s been around for 10 years, but it’s mature now. It’s, it’s attainable by everybody. And so, I mean, there are, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of companies that are doing this the right way, at least for part of their go-to-market practices. So, you know, we, part of this, the weight of the MQL industrial complex led people to do some really bad things like saying you should have both a lead-based and a buying group-based waterfall at the same time. No, that’s stupid. Unless you sell to individuals and you sell to big companies. As long as you sell to companies, you should be focused on buying groups, buying groups alone.

PLG: Reconciling Individual Users with Buying Group Intent

Andrew Mitrak: There are a lot of companies that do both. They have some freemium model, they have some land-and-expand model, they have some, but I guess that is a little more of like a product-led growth type thing where if you have a user signing up for a product or some trial or or some lighter weight account, it is a little bit different than them filling out a form for a PDF or something and becoming like an MQL. So I guess what, what is, how do those things kind of coexist?

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah, so I think of the product-led growth lead, somebody who signs up and does an individual user of your license, as a slightly better MQL. If what your aim is to sell enterprise licenses, the fact that one person in a 10,000-person company is using your thing is better than if no people are using it. How much better is it? If you don’t see any other interest, it’s not any better. You know, it’s just like, you’re not going to go sell them anything just because one person downloaded and is using your thing, right?

Andrew Mitrak: It kind of depends on the type of product someone. I think Figma, it’s like, oh, it’s, it’s kind of had virality sort of embedded in the product where one user uses it and they share it with somebody or, “Oh, and to see this design, you have to create an account.” And then, then all of a sudden you kind of have a buying group because you have a number of users who are using it, similar with Zoom, you know, because you have to have multiple people to communicate. It’s a better MQL in that, and it really becomes impactful when multiple people use it within an organization, which leads you right back to the buying group framework.

Kerry Cunningham: Well, exactly right. So I think, you know, it’s a great signal to have if your product allows you to have that kind of delivery mechanism. That’s great. Now we want to look at all of the signals that would tell us whether the rest of that organization is in-market. And, you know, the key is just being able to to spend your resources in the place where it’s likely to do the most good. If you’ve got a potential 500-user account and there’s one user there and no other signals, it’s just not a good, it’s not a good bet right now. If it’s a great account for you, good fit, I wouldn’t, I’m not saying ignore it, but I’m, they’re not in market now. But if you have another account with no downloaded users because their policies don’t allow it, but they’ve got 50 people on your website, you should be paying attention to that one first.

Beyond the MQL Industrial Complex: Are “Signals” the Future?

Andrew Mitrak: On this topic of what comes next for marketers, what is your sort of vision for replacing the industrial complex? What are the big things that sort of need to fall into place to have sort of a new paradigm adopted?

Kerry Cunningham: The concept of signals is a really important one. Back at Forrester in 2020, a colleague and I did a report called the Buyer Signal Framework. And that was our way of saying, here’s how we step above the level of the lead. We know that there’s the lead, there’s anonymous traffic signals on your website—far more valuable than whatever leads you have—and then there’s all that third-party intent signal, plus there are other kinds of signals as well.

So, I think, first of all, we need to adopt a signal-based approach to understanding the market. And I don’t think that has an expiration date on it. You know, we have to have a pretty expansive view of what those signals can and should be and be continually updating that perspective.

The thing that we struggle with still in B2B, in marketing, is we have had, through this lead-based process, a very top-down view of how we understand which buyer is good. Because, you know, we’ve said going to this web page is worth 10 points and going to this one is worth 20 points or whatever. We’ve controlled that. And I still see a lot of marketers want to look at big data the same way. So, we’ve got literally—we process, 6sense processes, a trillion signals a day at this point.

So marketers need to leave behind this idea that they should start with and have a top-down control over how they understand which buyers are in-market. That’s not the way it works in the world today. It’s a signal-based view. We use AI to understand the patterns, and that’s what we should be looking at, is all the signal we can, use AI to understand the patterns that betray a buyer that is or is not in-market, and then where are they. And you don’t need to be an expert in AI or in big data for that. What you need to do is really understand a little bit of just what’s possible. And what’s possible is we can know a lot.

Because buyers now have so many resources. There have been so many tricks set up across B2B, across the digital universe, and all of those tricks are selling their data. And so when people go anywhere, whether anonymously or known, to look at data and content or whatever, they turn into a signal. So it’s kind of, you know, the bad news about the industrial complex is we were looking at the wrong, we were looking at it through the wrong lens. But if we broaden the lens and step back and say, “All right, instead of looking at the individual, we’re going to look at the buying group or the broader organization to understand what they’re interested in,” we’re looking at much of the same data, but we’re looking at it in a different way that is much more diagnostic of the thing that we’re trying to find and to engage with. And so I think that’s the, that’s the perspective that everybody has to have. It’s like, you know, the data is out there, the technology is out there. What we have to do—and even if you’ve got your leads, okay, great—but we have to look at them differently.

Avoiding the “Signal Industrial Complex”

Andrew Mitrak: The thing that I’m completely on board with is getting rid of the forms and you know, don’t try to trick people behind a form and all that. I agree a lot of the MQL stuff is wrong.

The thing that I would worry about with a signal-based approach is that you develop a signal industrial complex that eventually people learn how to game. And then also there’s not all, not all signals are created equal, not all people who collect signals or sell signal intent data are of equal value. That there’s, there’s sort of folks... I’m not going to name names, but folks who I’ve evaluated or purchased from where, “I think that signal stuff that I paid for was mostly snake oil, and I didn’t see any benefit to it,” right? And, and, um, and I wonder how do you set it up? But I, intuitively, I think it’s the right thing, though. Like, it’s like, okay, obviously this is much better and that there are people who visit websites, there are people who engage with content, there’s data everywhere. And if you can make use of that data, you’re going to have a much, you know, better success at understanding the effectiveness of and what marketing is working.

It’s just like, how do you, how do you set it up in such a way that you’re not 20 years from now talking about, “Oh gosh, that signal, that signal-based marketing industrial complex was a bad idea.” How do you kind of set it up with the right guardrails in place so it sort of is indeed an improvement?

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah, so I think the process has to be set up to collect or use as much signal as possible to make zero assumptions about what any of it means and to apply math on top of it to identify patterns and not try to outsmart the patterns. And so there’s two places, I think, where we get in trouble. One is we try to decide what signals we think should matter instead of just getting them, you know, bring them all in, put them in the bucket, and let the AI, which, you know, really, predictive modeling, which has been around for a long time, is a form of AI. And it’s really all we’re doing is we’re looking at the signal and trying to identify. So what we want to do is just avoid making any assumptions. That’s, and it’s difficult, right? It’s difficult to do that because we want to say, “Hey, I know, we’ve done this before,” but no, you have to just let the data and the math do its job, build that model. And then the model will tweak and adjust as you move. The times change, what happened last month may not predict what happens next year very well. So, you know, those things have to be—we have to adapt to those things. But what we can’t do is panic the first time it doesn’t seem to be working and say, “Okay, shut it off, let’s go do, let’s, you know, go do leads again or something like that.” It’s just, you know, and that’s a difficult thing for us.

Andrew Mitrak: That’s right. There has to be some understanding that, hey, those dashboards that we used to have, we expected those to all drop down significantly. And you have to kind of go to a new paradigm and mindset shift, which could be a little scary, but it’s overall, it’s it could be a much better outcome.

Kerry Cunningham: One of the big fears that happens that prevents organizations from really scaling this approach is if you take away the forms from in front of the content, you don’t have all of these names coming in. All of these names made you feel comfortable and like you had some control over what was going to happen next. The truth is you didn’t. You know, there was an illusion of control.

Kerry Cunningham: But I use this analogy, probably makes some people angry, but, you know, in psychology when they do the experiments and they teach pigeons to press the button to get the pellet, other forms of that experiment are they drop a pellet at random times, right? And does a pigeon just say, “Hey, every now and then a pellet drops in, I’ll just wait for it to happen?” No, they do not. They develop behaviors that are highly personal to each pigeon that they believe are causing the pellet. So if they were just spinning around and pecking the ground before the pellet dropped in, the pigeon, in whatever ways pigeons think, think, “Huh, okay, spin around, peck the ground. If I need another pellet, that’s what I’m going to do.” And that’s what they do, right? And if it doesn’t work, which it won’t, then they’ll think, “Ah, okay, maybe I wasn’t doing it right.” They don’t think, “All right, never mind, I’ll just wait.” They think, “I’m not doing it right,” and they spin around twice, and maybe that works next time, right?

So you get, you could have cages of pigeons on a bench in a lab, each with their own superstitious behavior about what causes that pellet to drop. And that’s exactly what we’ve been doing in B2B when we have these leads and we call out. We have all of these superstitious behaviors. “Oh, maybe if we call them 12 times, maybe if we call them 15 times.” But there’s like no canonical—you would think, you know, in B2B, across all of this time, with the billions of dollars that have been spent, the smartest people on the planet have been working in B2B, and nobody has come up with the right sequence to run to qualify a lead or to do something else or to do—there’s like nobody who can, you could point to and say, “That’s it.” In all this time, we figured it out, that’s how you do it. Why? Because there isn’t a figured-it-out. You know, it just doesn’t exist.

Andrew Mitrak: That’s great. I love those analogies. The other one, I read this in a book somewhere, I don’t know which one, but it’s an analogy that I’ve used, and it’s a little bit of a joke, so here it goes:

A man walks out of a bar, and there’s a drunk down the street under a street lamp, and he’s looking around. And the man walks up to the drunk person and says, “What’s what’s going on, sir?” He says, “I’m looking for my keys. I dropped them as I was leaving the bar.” He’s like, “Well, the bar’s down there. Why are you looking over here?”

And the drunk man replies, “Well… this is where the light is.”

And he’s looking in the spot where the light is, where the signal is. And I feel like that’s sometimes what we do as marketers, too. We are able to measure this one thing, and so that’s what we search for as well, where there’s this whole universe of other things to look for but we ignore because they’re harder to find and inconvenience us.

So it’s like we’re attracted to this one little small area instead of seeing the bigger picture.

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah, it’s a big part of it, right? Because there are lots of forces that keep us kind of doing the wrong things collectively over time, and that certainly is one of them, you know, the ease with which that has been looked at and tracked.

Practical Takeaways for the Modern Marketer

Andrew Mitrak: Just reflecting on this conversation and the MQL industrial complex, the anti-MQL manifesto, the benefits of signals, do you have any other takeaways for marketers? I don’t know if any one of us individually can change the whole system, but what can we do if we’re operating within a certain system or we’re, you know or we just want to be better marketers? What could we, how can we make use of this information to be better at our jobs?

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah, so there are some things I think everybody can do without really a—well, a little, maybe a little bit of additional tech if you don’t have it right away. But first of all, look in your own—if you have, if you’re producing leads today, look in your own leads data and understand what that looks like. So we started doing this again a long time ago at SiriusDecisions, and this is what brought us to an understanding of buying groups. Because when you look at leads data, what you see is that there’s typically between one and a half and two and a half leads per account. And that’s if you just take all of the leads and you just sort it by domain and and that’s what it looks like. So immediately, if you’re being judged based on conversion rate to opportunity and you know that you’re only going to get one lead at the most on an opportunity, you’re being screwed already by, you know, by half, at least, right? Just looking at that.

And that can be a revelation for people in the organization. Like, “Look, this is what it looks like.” And then at least, at the very least, start doing a report monthly, weekly, that shows how many leads are we getting per account and deliver that to sales leaders and have a conversation with the sales leaders to say, “Hey, look, you know, maybe right now we’re looking at these as duplicate leads, but here’s another way to think about it. You know, this is evidence of interest from this organization, multiple levels of interest.” So start introducing those concepts today, but do it with your own data. You know, take our reports, they’re all free to download and all that from 6sense, but take that, take that data and show, “Here’s what the industry looks like, here’s what B2B looks like in general,” but always look at your data and say, “And here’s what it looks like for us,” because everybody’s going to say, “Yeah, but for us.” So you’ve got to do that homework.

Then, if you have a tool that does any sort of website de-anonymization today, use that. Get in the sales cycle for 6sense, we’ll do it for you, but you’ve got to see the anonymous traffic on your website because that’s the vast majority of all signal you’ll ever see. And what you want to see is, one, if we get multiple leads from an account, that very first thing, is that account likely to end up in a sales cycle, and are they likely to go deep? And you can even do something that says, “All right, so if we get one to two leads in an account, how likely are those guys to become pipeline? If we get three to five, how likely are those accounts? If we get six to 10, how likely are those guys?” Right? So you can start to look at the impact of having buying groups engaging with you and the likelihood of those, of sales getting a better outcome. Because now we can show that to sales and say, “Look, this is how our buyers are already buying, and what we want to do is make sure that our processes reflect what’s happening in the data so that we don’t miss.”

Because what you can also do, and you will see frequently, is that, “Here’s an account where we got three form fills in this two-month period of time, but there was never any action on the account.” That’s probably a lost deal, right? That’s probably a deal that went to somebody else, and we just never did anything with it. Maybe those people all filled out a form, none of them scored up and became your MQL, so nothing happened. That’s the 10-person account. Go look for those. You’ll find them in your data. They’re there, right? Use the anonymous traffic the same way. All of those things can help build the case internally for why we just need to look at this differently. Even if you don’t want to take—like, and I don’t recommend taking all your forms off until you’ve had these conversations internally, until you can see this, and until you’ve built a mechanism where you can say, “Here’s a report that shows we’ve got multiple leads, let’s prioritize that account.” Right? So you’ve got to have a process for doing that.

Same thing with the anonymous traffic. I mean, it’s a mistake to take a report that says, “Hey, we’ve got five people on our website anonymously, sales rep, go call on that account.” Your sales reps are going to hate that and are going to throw up all over that. They’re going to want the name. But if you’re the marketer, what you can and should do is say, “All right, well, here’s a set of accounts that have had an extraordinary number of people on our website this month, and we don’t have any of the names that we would like to have. Sales isn’t taking action on that account. What can we do to drive the kind of engagement that we need in this, what will be a very small set of accounts?” Right? So if you’ve got, you know, pick a threshold, but if we have five or more people from an account on our website anonymously this month, you know, for 6sense, “All right, do we know their CMO? We sponsor a community for CMOs. Is that CMO part of it? If not, that CMO should get an invitation to that right away,” right? And if we have any events coming up that are wine tasting events, dinner events, those kinds of things, you can’t do them for everybody. But if you’ve got five accounts a month that are on your website and deeply engaged, but you don’t have the right people to talk to and sales doesn’t want to go do anything with them yet, then that’s a perfect set of accounts to find another set of much higher-value experiences for those accounts to drive some engagement, to get, you know “You’re looking at us, right? So we’d like to buy you some wine. So let’s get together.” You know, that actually works. You know, it actually, those kinds of things actually do where you’re providing—or maybe it’s something that’s more work-related. “We have subject matter experts that you could talk to about given things. We have other kinds of events that you could go to.” So it’s building much more engaging kinds of experiences for your buyers. And then, you know, you’re not going to be able to deliver those on mass, but what you can do is identify the set of accounts where you should be delivering those, not just the good-fit ones, but the good-fit ones where you’re showing engagement where we’re not really there yet. It’s going to be a very small number of accounts relatively for anybody. But you can do some extraordinary things for those accounts and for the people inside them that you’ll be able to afford to do or more likely be able to afford to do because the number of them by then will be so small.

Read Kerry’s Research Online

Andrew Mitrak: Thanks for all of those insights, those tactics, those tips. Kerry Cunningham, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. One last question is, where can listeners find you online and read more of your work?

Kerry Cunningham: I’m on LinkedIn all the time. So, Kerry Cunningham on LinkedIn. I think there are a couple, but I’m pretty easy to find related to B2B stuff. And then on the 6sense website, there’s 6sense.com/research. We call it the Science of B2B. And all of our research is there. There’s videos, there’s, you know, dozens of reports, both about buying and about marketing processes.

Andrew Mitrak: I’ve read through some of that research and really enjoyed it and appreciated the thoroughness of the work and the data that backs all of your insights and recommendations. So, Kerry Cunningham, thanks so much for being on A History of Marketing. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah, thank you.

This week I'm sharing an excellent conversation with Russell W. Belk, Professor and Kraft Foods Chair in Marketing at York University.

Professor Belk is recognized as a leading expert on consumption, materialism, collecting, and sharing. In 1988 he published “Possessions and The Extended Self,” one of the most widely cited papers in the field of consumer research.

The Extended Self is a simple but compelling idea that, “You are what you own.” That possessions become extensions of our identities. Of course, this has massive implications for marketing.

We spend most of our conversation exploring The Extended Self. We look at how luxury brands have leaned into the phenomenon. We discuss the relationship between marketing and materialism. We also explore how The Extended Self has adapted in the age of social media and streaming digital media that we subscribe to but don’t own.

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube Podcasts

More from Russell Belk:

• Belk’s articles on Google Scholar

• Belk’s Interview with the American Psychological Association

• Find Russell Belk on LinkedIn

Shoutouts:

Laura Ries, whom I spoke with on podcast episode #19, released an excellent new book: The Strategic Enemy. Find it wherever books are sold.

Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, who volunteers to review and edit transcripts for accuracy and clarity.

Andrew Mitrak: Russ Belk, welcome to A History of Marketing.

Russell Belk: Thank you.

Andrew Mitrak: Well, I'm looking forward to a conversation about your work and your career, but I thought I'd start right at the beginning. What initially drew you to marketing and researching consumption and consumer behavior?

Russell Belk: My father went to art school and got into advertising. And I can remember these dinner table conversations: “Can advertising really do that to people?” The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard had come out, and I think that was a topic of one of our conversations, or probably more than one. And so that's stuck in the back of my mind. And I wandered over to business and started taking some classes and found that there was something congenial there and something challenging there, even though I regarded most of what I was hearing in the classroom as a load of rubbish. But which I think was a healthy take. But ultimately, I found some ways of getting through the program and finding things that interested me.

Andrew Mitrak: Hidden Persuaders has come up a lot on this podcast. So it's a thing that I think inspired a lot of people.

Bringing Anthropology, Psychology, and Sociology to Consumer Research

Andrew Mitrak: Now, you eventually went on to earn your PhD in marketing. And when I think of your work on consumption, consumer behavior, materialism, and what would go on to be the extended self, it feels like a new jumping-off point that's not just marketing. You know, it mixes anthropology and psychology and sociology. So when did that line of research come up? Was that while you were getting your marketing PhD?

Russell Belk: No, it took almost 10 years for me to get there. All of my training was in psychology, basically, and that was the name of the game: doing experimental psychological research at the time. I never had a course in sociology or anthropology, and so that was self-taught.

And I was interested in things including gift-giving and collecting as initial topics, and they didn't lend themselves very well to experimentation, as you can well imagine. I had been researching gift-giving, in particular, by reading a lot of anthropology and sociology, and eventually, the methods began to at least accumulate as a possibility for me. And then I put together this thing along with Melanie Wallendorf called the Consumer Behavior Odyssey, and that was a jumping-off place for a number of us to get into more anthropological and sociological topics.

The Origin Story of "Possessions and the Extended Self"

Andrew Mitrak: After the Odyssey, you published one of your best-known works, and that's "Possessions and the Extended Self." And when I look this up on Google Scholar, it shows nearly 17,000 citations. It's a widely cited work and really influential. Can you share the story of writing this paper and the initial reaction to it when you published it?

Russell Belk: Well, I think in retrospect, it goes back to my going off to university and finding that there were a lot of wealthier people than those that I'd gone to high school with. And so I became a little bit disaffected with the lifestyles of the rich and famous, if you will. And so, coming into it, trying to understand what possessions meant was the basic thing I wanted to do with my research.

So this thing that the paper came out of was originally going to be a book. And one of the chapters of that was on materialism, and about the same time, I sent off an article on materialism that was from my old psychological days, and it developed a scale of materialism and some conceptual work. And another part of it was this notion of the extended self.

Russell Belk: The way I used to do research in a pre-Google era was I would go to the library of the university once or twice a year, and I would go through all of the current journals, including law and medicine and all the fields. And if there was something interesting in the table of contents, I'd have a look at it. If it seemed to warrant it, I'd make a copy and bring it back.

But one of the things that I found that was really fortuitous was William James's work. And he really talked about—well, he didn't use that term—the extended self. "A man is all that he can call his" is a quote that I'd taken from him. And I also happened to be reading some of his brother Henry James's work and found that the themes that Henry James talked about in fiction were similar to some of the things that William James was talking about in psychology. And so those were among the pieces. I tend to read quite broadly, and so I took advantage of a number of different types of evidence or research in trying to pull that thing together.

Why “The Extended Self" Resonated

Andrew Mitrak: When I was reading about The Extended Self to prep for this, everything to me felt obviously true. And I'm wondering, is that just a bias in hindsight that, it's been around 40 years, it's been so influential, it's more commonly known? Or was it more that you were articulating something that everybody felt was true but hadn't quite been conceptualized and articulated in the way that you phrased it and the way that you kind of packaged up the paper?

Russell Belk: Well, I think I pulled together a bunch of threads, but William James was writing in 1890, and so the ideas that are critical to it aren't new at all. It's been recognized for some time. I think I maybe systematized it a little bit. I played out the implications a bit and looked at things like burglaries and loss and harm to possessions and so forth. And so I think I did something with the concept rather than just reiterating common sense, hopefully. But yeah, in hindsight, hopefully, this has become a more pervasive and accepted concept today.

Of course, as we become a more gadget-oriented, materialistic society, there's reason to go back and look at these things. And also, as we become less materialistic, as we dematerialize now.

Is “the Extended Self” Innate or Culturally Learned?

Andrew Mitrak: So you mentioned the history of these ideas, that they're not necessarily new ideas, but do you think that the core concept of the extended self—that we're not just our body and minds, that our possessions aren't just external objects, they're an extension of our own identity—do you feel like this is something that's biologically ingrained in what it means to be human? Or is it something that's more learned culturally? Are there cultures where this isn't the case, or is it true around the world?

Russell Belk: No, it's not completely true around the world, and it's not biologically ingrained. It is cultural. And so if you look at Aboriginal Australians, until a generation or two ago, they were nomadic. And if you're nomadic, it is a burden to have possessions. And so, rather than having my spear and your spear, if I want to go out and hunt wallaby or kangaroo, I just pick up a spear that is in the community, take it out, use it, and bring it back. And rather than each person carrying spears and shields and other things, it makes sense to not be very materialistic.

There are, from different vantage points, religious groups who are anti-materialistic. I had a student at one point who studied Catholic seminaries. And there was one where the priests—and it was all male—would switch cells (they were called cells) periodically so they wouldn't get accustomed to a particular point of view and see that as their possession. One of them had a letter from his sister that he put under his mattress and kept and felt terribly sinful for doing that. And this was a simplistic, a simplifying ethos, rather. And so, yes, there are cultures, and I would say that these are learned relationships. And now we're learning to get by with less in terms of physically owned possessions. And so that, too, is maybe pointing us in the direction of dematerializing and becoming less materialistic, in at least that physical object sense.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, I'm sure. Well, let's put a pin in that because I'll come back to the idea of both dematerialization but also digitization and the extended self online, which is a really interesting area you've written about.

The Role of Marketing in the Rise of Materialism

Andrew Mitrak: But coming back to the history of this idea, at least in America or Western culture, I've heard people that I disagree with kind of describe, "Oh, our materialism is all just marketing," that these marketers came around and Edward Bernays and others, they placed this idea that we have to have better stuff and we have to start replacing things. And I don't—well, I think marketing probably has some impact, I don't think it's quite that simple that, hey, we're materialistic because marketers tell us to be materialistic. But there are probably points where marketing has shaped it somewhat or has increased the idea of a brand perception, or I'm a Cadillac person versus a Ford person, or things like that. So what do you think of the inflection points of it becoming more pronounced and culture becoming more materialistic, and how did marketing and promotion play a role in that?

Russell Belk: Well, yeah, I think marketing has had a role in exacerbating these tendencies, but it didn't create them. I wrote a book on collecting, and collecting is something that we find evidence of in prehistoric burial sites. For example, we'll find evidence of people's possessions being buried with them, that there's that degree of attachment that the attachment even lasts after death. Collections of interesting pebbles or iron pyrites or whatever it might be. So I don't think that notion of possessing things and, presumably—although it's prehistoric—extending ourself into them is anything new.

But definitely marketing, you know, starting at least with the Industrial Revolution, has done things to encourage people to buy more things more frequently. There's a French Annales school. And one of the books is looking at prehistoric—well, not just prehistoric, but actually 17th, 18th century. This is Fernand Braudel. Possessions of peasants in the 17th, 18th century, and they would have a change of clothes, they would have maybe a pot and a pan, and that was about it. Not very likely to go to the store and buy trinkets or gadgets or doodads. And obviously, that became more feasible with the Industrial Revolution because we began to have jobs and income and things that we could do other than working in the household, for better or for worse. But that income and the cash economy and the rise of capitalism have had a lot to do with promoting and encouraging people to be more conscious of things like brands. And branding itself is not new, either. It goes back a couple of thousand years in China, for example. So it's not that there's nothing new under the sun, but marketing has had a role in exacerbating these tendencies rather than creating them.

Marketing Case Studies of the Extended Self

Andrew Mitrak: So if marketing has played a role—it didn't create the spark, but it poured gas on the fire—are there any specific case studies that are early of when you feel like, oh, this is an example of a modern use of a brand or a company deliberately feeding into this idea of the extended self? A company that's specifically designing things with the intention of its consumers seeing this as part of their identity. Do you have any thoughts on when that first started deliberately happening?

Russell Belk: Well, I think it probably started—it may not have started, but it was certainly alive with luxury goods companies. And initially having bespoke goods that were only available to the extremely wealthy, kings and queens, and people that were high in society one way or another. But eventually, it became, trickled down, if you will, or became available to the masses. And some of the things that were done were trying to emulate these lifestyles with much cheaper versions. Populuxe is one term for that. There are several. But also companies—I don't know if you ever remember any of the magazines that would have instant collectibles in them. And so you could either buy one at a time or get the whole collection, which isn't really collecting. You're just curating it at that point at best. But they were also catering to that notion that you, too, can have a fabulous collection like the art collectors that spend millions of dollars on these things. But it was a cheap imitation version of these lifestyles, if you will.

I think that probably got exacerbated in the '50s when there were things you would go to the movies or you would go to the supermarket, and you could get a limited edition of a plate collection. And if you went every week, you could get the whole collection when you went to every new movie that came out. And these were serial collections—literally cereal, because some of them came with cereal, C-E-R-E-A-L—and laundry detergents and so forth. And so I think that was also catering to this urge that post-World War II, we have more disposable income, there are more things to buy, it's a wonderful consumer world. We have all of this pent-up demand after having sacrificed for the war effort, and now it's time to get back home for the women that were working at the time and start buying things for the household and for yourself.

The Extended Self in the Digital Age: From Owning to Accessing

Andrew Mitrak: I know you've probably revisited the extended self and the ideas of it several times since you published it originally in the late '80s, but it was originally written in this sort of pre-digital world. And now we are in this digital world. How did digitization and the internet and social media and maybe the metaverse and all those things—how do those things change the concept of the extended self?

Russell Belk: Yeah, the extended self, in a sentence, is you are what you own; you are what you possess. And in a digital world, you are what you portray yourself as online on social media. In addition to that, we used to have physical copies of music. Well, eventually, originally, we didn't. We made music together. And then Thomas Edison began to have these wax cylinders and it became a commodity. And then we began to get into an era where we had consumer tape recorders, and we could do, with cassettes, mix tapes and send them to people. Now, maybe we can do a curated playlist for people, but we don't send them physical music any longer. We send them a clip of videotape of a group playing a particular song.

Further to that, I guess I would argue that we now—you are now what you can access. And so that's the sharing economy coming in, the so-called sharing economy, because it's not really about sharing at all but short-term rental of things with Airbnb and Uber and so forth: access to rides, access to vacation homes, and so forth.

Furthermore, besides dematerializing that once physical collection of music or movies because we now can rent them, we now can subscribe. You mentioned Spotify earlier. Spotify and Netflix give us access to things that we never own. We merely have access to them as long as we pay our subscription fees. So the sharing economy, the subscription economy, and the streaming economy have sort of all come together. At least those are our technologies so far that have allowed all this to happen.

And some of those are truly anti-materialistic. Some of them are just finding a new way to capitalize on the latest technology. And we may be able to downsize in our rented inner-city apartment that we no longer have to buy furniture for because we can rent that, too. That we can live a less materialistic lifestyle in a smaller space. And Gen Z and millennials, for that matter, really started that trend of moving back into the city from the suburbs. That reversed a bit during COVID-19. And now that millennials are having larger families, they're moving out to the suburbs and sometimes the exurbs as well. So these are various trends that are affecting the degree to which we own things. It used to be the American dream to buy a house, fill it up with stuff, buy a bigger house, fill it up with more stuff, ad infinitum. Now, I think there are some alternative visions, the small house movement and so forth.

And we've had, you know, since the ancient Greeks and Romans, various anti-materialistic ways of living a life, living a lifestyle. And now we just have some new possibilities, but the truly anti-materialistic practices have never gotten a foothold, even during COVID, where they've been more than a third of the population, and that's probably a high estimate. Most of us are still materialists at heart or possessing things, even though those things may be ephemeral and non-materialistic.

You Are What You Access (And What You Choose to Access)

Andrew Mitrak: There's so much to unpack with everything because there's a lot there. I feel like we just covered several decades of trends here in a very short period of time.

I'm wondering—you mentioned one of the phrases you mentioned, "you are what you can access." And I wonder if it's also "you are what you choose to access."

Myself and anybody else, we both have access to YouTube, but what we choose to watch on YouTube is completely different. I have no idea what somebody else watches and mine is mine, or same with Netflix. And that there is still some element of curation and really how we spend our time is more of a reflection—or how we have access to the thing, but how do we choose to spend our time with that thing defines us more.

Russell Belk: That's true individually, and we could also make that known by featuring the music that we're listening to on our social media channel, whatever it might be. But at the same time, at the aggregate level, there are lists of, "This week, what are the popular Netflix shows?" And you know, how does that break down by demographic? And so it isn't entirely a secret what we consume, at least in the aggregate, although individually it may be as long as we choose to keep it secret.

The Extended Self of Omission: Defining Ourselves by What We Lack

Andrew Mitrak: Does what we choose to not have also define us? Like a recent example is when Elon Musk bought Twitter. A lot of people deleted their accounts. And maybe that Twitter timeline that they had of all those posts was part of their identity. They'd spent maybe a decade or more investing in it, and then they said, "I don't want to be associated with this and I don't want to have it," or "I choose to not take part in TikTok or Instagram or whatever other social platform," and part of my identity is that I don't have something. Is that an element of the extended self, or is that something else?

Russell Belk: No, I think it is. I happen to have a Tesla, and like others, have a bumper sticker that says, "Bought it before I knew what a jerk he was." And so you're sort of defining yourself by what you don't consume, or at least your apology for what you do consume.

There was a time in the early '70s when the Arab oil embargo drove gasoline prices up. And in that case, having a small, modest, small gas-consuming automobile was a high-status thing to do. And having a big dinosaur of a car that obviously consumed a lot of gas was a stigma. And so it can be that consuming less can be a popular thing to do. It can also be that there's sort of holier than thou, that yes, you eat organic food, but I also do that and I'm a vegan, and I also belong to community-supported agriculture, so there, I'm more socially responsible than you are. And so that's a form of anti-materialistic bragging, if you will.

Digital Curation vs. Physical Ownership: The iPod Era

Andrew Mitrak: One of my personal experiences with the digital part—we mentioned Spotify—is that I was really late to adopt any streaming platform for music. In fact, I still haven't adopted Spotify because, strangely, one of my favorite artists, her name is Joanna Newsom, she's not on Spotify. She's on all the others, but she's not on that one, and she's chosen not to. And it's like, I won't even touch Spotify,,, I publish this podcast there, I hope people find it on there, but it's missing one of my favorite artists to this day.

But even when the iPod first came out, though, you manually loaded music onto it. You could buy your album on iTunes, you could rip a CD onto the computer, you could use some peer-to-peer sharing illegal method–which of course, I never did… I would never do that–to get it on there.

But there was effort into it. It was digital, but it was still curated. That it wasn't the whole universe of music, that I had my bootlegs and my live music, and sometimes when I ripped a CD on, and iTunes didn't recognize it, I manually put in the artist's name and the track titles myself. And because I had spent time on it and I had assembled it myself, and I had memories of when I discovered each of those, it was really something that I was very hesitant to part with because it was my iPod with my music and my iTunes that I had poured effort into. And even though streaming has all that stuff and more, it felt like I was losing something with that digital part.

So there were these funny transitional periods within digital where there was still a physical element to it. And I'm wondering if your research ever came across that portion or if this little anecdote sparks any portion of your research.

Russell Belk: Well, yeah, there's still, besides the curation that you mentioned, there are more things that you can do once you digitize your music. You can instantly alphabetize it, you can instantly get the covers of the albums, you can instantly rearrange it in whatever way you like, basically. And those are things that are made possible by digitizing it. So if we didn't see some advantage and some greater ease, we probably would be more reluctant to adopt the technology until it becomes almost force of nature. There are still people that don't have cell phones, but very few. I mean, even in India, that's true, and China, certainly.

So, yeah, I think that we gain something and we lose something. But the whole phenomena of not needing to own things, being able to get by in what might become a post-ownership society—even our clothes. Rent the Runway and so forth, you can have a fabulous collection of clothes or handbags that look like, to an outsider at least, you're extremely wealthy. But in fact, you're subscribing to a service that allows you to have access to those things.

So the notion of post-ownership is something that is not decided certainly. And I think we all like to have some things that we can hang on to. And we lose something as well. My parents, and maybe yours, had troves of old love letters that they bound together and kept for future reference. How do you archive the email messages that you've sent back and forth, or the tweets that you've posted? It's impossible. So I think we're learning to be less attached to things, but to have the access and to learn what further we can do with access rather than ownership.

What to Do with the Knowledge of the Extended Self

Andrew Mitrak: It is a trade-off. And I'm wondering, just, how—not necessarily me as a marketer, just as a human—like, now that I'm aware of the extended self, how should I think about it in my day-to-day life? Is it more just being aware of it? And is it trying to be less materialistic proactively? Or embrace that I inherently, because of my culture, have some sense of materialistic tendencies and just be aware of that and not try to fight it because it's impossible to get rid of it now? What is the takeaway of what I should do with it?

Russell Belk: Well, I mean, that's up to you. My mother died a few years ago, and I'm an only child, so I had to go through her possessions. And I found that there were many things that were deeply meaningful to her that meant absolutely nothing to me. Photographs are probably a good example. I threw away probably 60 or 70% because I didn't know who these people were, and they meant nothing to me, even though they meant, obviously, a great deal to her.

But I learned, I guess, how much we accumulate and how privileged that is. Because at the same time, we have to worry about the next generation and what they're going to do with all this stuff and how they're going to get rid of it. And based on my experience, they're just going to come in with a bulldozer and get rid of most of the things. You know, I think we invest a lot in things that, in retrospect, is kind of foolish. But at the same time, assuming you're wearing one, I probably could not buy you a better wedding ring to exchange for the one that you have on your finger. That, you know, materially, you would gain, but there's an emotional sentimentality and so forth involved in that object.

Andrew Mitrak: Well, yeah, it's funny, that's—I am wearing a wedding ring on my finger. That is probably not the right example for me, though, because I sadly, a few years ago, I was on a vacation and I had sunscreen on my hand, and I was at a beach, and it just slipped right off. And I thought it was so tight, but it somehow, and it's in the ocean. And actually, to your point about the extended self, it did feel like, "Oh, gosh, I really lost something here." And my wife was not happy about this. I wasn't happy about it. It definitely tainted a day on an otherwise great vacation. And now I have just this cheap little $5 one, and it's almost taught me like, "Oh, you know, don't lose a good one again." And I even rotate through them. I have a little silicon one that I use sometimes. So I almost had, with that particular one, even though it's a very small object and I probably should invest in a more important one, at least my wife has a very good wedding ring and engagement ring. Somehow they tricked us to buy two of those now. So we have both of them.

Russell Belk: That's a nice story. You know, that reminds me, there's a film called Harold and Maude, sort of a cult classic from the '70s. And the octogenarian and a teenage boy that meet improbably, and he gives her a ring at one point, and it's meant to be like an engagement ring. And she thanks him very much, and she takes it and throws it out in the middle of the lake. And she says, "Now we'll always know where it is." And so, a different attitude toward the meaning of the thing than the object. It's truly the meaning behind it.

Andrew Mitrak: I still know the beach it was at. By the way, that’s one of my all-time favorite movie soundtracks as well.

Russell Belk: Oh, yes.

Teaching the Next Generation of Marketers: Where the Extended Self Fits

Andrew Mitrak: I'm sure you've, over the course of your career, taught a lot of marketing practitioners at some point. And when you think of, like, what message do you tend to impart to somebody who works in the field of marketing and promotion and in some ways maybe promotes things and pours gas on the fire of materialism to some extent? What is a message for that type of person? Is it, "Do this responsibly," or "ethically," or just "be aware of this?" Or what's your take? Because I am also a marketing practitioner. I sell—I work on, you know, B2B software, so I don't think it's maybe you wrap that up in your extended self as well, but maybe a little less so than certain objects. But what's your takeaway for the message of somebody who's working in marketing and what they soft of do with some of your work on the extended self?

Russell Belk: Well, I'd like them, maybe starting with themselves and their possessions, to think about the relationship between people and things, and then to sort of back away from that. And if you're going into marketing, think about what the hell are you doing? Do you really believe that people are better off having more things?

An exercise that I used to do with classes is: suppose you can start your own economy from scratch. What would you make legal? What would you make illegal? Or if you need to, what would you have age restrictions on, or some other restrictions? And so, okay, can you have guns in this society? Well, what about automatic rifles? What about knives? Knives can kill people, too. What's the difference there? And they'll come up with something lame, like, "Well, it's more personal," or "You have to give it more thought."

At any rate, building your own economy and, you know, would you make marijuana legal? Would you make it illegal? What about heroin? What about junk food? Just what are you doing to try to get them to think more broadly? For my—I currently teach, I just teach two courses a year, shamefully, but I have a PhD seminar that I teach actually every other year and a master's introductory marketing class that I like to teach just because I have a lot of fun with it.

Russell Belk: At any rate, I start out with people in Nunavut, which is a territory in northern Canada. And it's switched because of technology and because of the influx of government funding from subsistence hunting and gathering and fishing to buying things from the store and going out with a snowmobile to hunt and having a rifle and not just having implements that are basically handmade. And things in the supermarket—I can remember a package of dog food that cost $212, and, you know, a carton of milk is $20, and exorbitant prices for these things. And so it's a sort of a mixed economy that they still do hunting, and when they get a moose or some big game animal, they share it out in the community. And so that sharing ethos is still there. It's the same in aboriginal society in Australia where I've also done some work.

So I try to get them to think outside the box or maybe to think inwardly in terms of what they're doing and what the impact is going to be before we get into the techniques of how you market a product and brand and so forth.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, those are great questions to ask yourself, and also, it sounds like a really fun class to take. I wish I could take that one. So, one final question for you, Russ. If listeners want to learn more about your work, where would you recommend they start? Is there some link that you would send them to online?

Russell Belk: Just do a Google search of videos that I've done, and I think you'll find some on YouTube rather than give you one that is the de facto go-to work. There are several talks, and it sounds like you did some homework before this and found at least a couple of them. So rather than my recommend something, just do like people do these days and Google it and see what you can find.

Andrew Mitrak: Russ Belk, thanks so much for your time. I really enjoyed researching your work, and also, I just really enjoyed this conversation. So thanks for your time and your stories and your insights. It was a lot of fun.

Russell Belk: Thank you, Andrew, for having me.