A History of Marketing / Episode 46
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.
