A History of Marketing / Episode 56
Yoram “Jerry” Wind has spent six decades at the frontier of marketing. He has won virtually every major award a marketing scholar can receive, and his CV is more than 100 pages long.
In B2B marketing ,the shift from single leads to buying groups is framed as a new revelation (see my interviews with Kerry Cunningham & Jon Miller). But Jerry Wind mapped organizational buying centers in 1966 and developed the BuyGrid model in 1967.
I was almost angry when I discovered this. “We’ve all known about buying centers since 1966, and marketers are still chasing individual MQLs?!” I had to ask Jerry about this directly. It’s where we kick off our conversation.
We then shift gears to one of my all-time favorite case studies: Courtyard by Marriott.
Like Moneyball, it’s a case study of taking on the old guard (hotel industry veterans trusting their gut) and using data (conjoint analysis on traveler preferences) to build a modern system. Jerry and his collaborator Paul Green used marketing research to reshape the physical world, creating hotel layouts and room designs we still see today.
Jerry’s foresight is just as impressive. More than 10 years ago, he was writing and presenting on AI and its coming impact on marketing and education. Last year, at age 87, he published Creativity in the Age of AI.
We also cover:
The RAVES framework and balancing cognitive data with emotional appeals
Why the CMO role must evolve to orchestrating all customer touchpoints
How to spend a career challenging mental models
Why most marketing lectures fail and how to fix them
For me, this conversation felt like a return to form for the podcast. It’s in a class alongside my interviews with legendary professors like Philip Kotler, David Aaker, Jag Sheth, and George Day.
I learned a lot from Jerry, and I find his prolific career inspiring. I hope you like it too.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Special thanks to Xiaoying Feng of Syracuse University for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity.
In case you missed it, play the “Date the Ad” marketing history game. Learn more.
The Wharton School in 1967: Bridging Theory and Real-World Practice
Andrew Mitrak: I want to start right at the beginning of your career as you were entering the field of marketing. Can you describe the scene of what marketing looked like as a field back in 1967 around the time you first joined Wharton?
Jerry Wind: Marketing was a little different, but it was the beginning of kind of what we see today. And I think one of the great things about Wharton is Wharton had the orientation that we still have, which is marketing theory and methodology has to have practical value. It started with Wroe Alderson, who was basically the founder of this practical approach to marketing. And with Paul Green, who really was the main figure in the Wharton marketing since the early ‘60s, but he joined the department. I joined in January ‘67, primarily because of Paul Green and Ron Frank. I liked their orientation and approach, and at the time Wharton Marketing also had the Marketing Science Institute that was actually launched because of the work of Wroe Alderson, that convinced Scott McCabe from Scott Paper to start an institute that will bring industry to academia and academia to industry. When I joined Wharton, I almost immediately joined some of the projects at the Marketing Science Institute. So the environment at Wharton was really a little different than the rest of the field. We were very much, especially because of the influence of Paul Green, focused on new methodology. Reavis Cox was still at Wharton at the time and he was kind of one of the leaders in the marketing theory area. I think it was an ideal place to be in. It probably was the most advanced of most of the other marketing departments at the time.
Andrew Mitrak: One of the names you mentioned a couple of times, I was wondering if you’d bring him up, is Wroe Alderson, because I did a whole episode on Wroe Alderson. I interviewed his son, I interviewed Stan Shapiro, and I interviewed a scholar named Ben Willis Croft who had studied the life of Wroe Alderson. I think Wroe would have probably just passed away in 1966, right before you joined.
Jerry Wind: Correct. I never met him. All I know about him is really through Paul Green.
The Influence of Wroe Alderson
Andrew Mitrak: Could you speak to him as a figure? Because it seems like he’s one of those figures who had a lot of influence in marketing, but kind of—I don’t want to say he was forgotten, we’re talking about him here, but his impact, maybe because he passed away right in the 1960s as marketing was taking off and growing as a field. I’m wondering if you have any comments or would want to speak more on his influence.
Jerry Wind: Well, Wroe actually had a consulting firm, was very active, and it’s still very insightful to read—I think it was called Cost and Profit, the short publications that he issued. He really influenced a lot of us, definitely Paul Green, who then influenced the rest of Wharton marketing and the field. It also legitimized to a large extent consulting. For many years, consulting was viewed as: you could say you have one day a week you could do some consulting. Most of the consulting people did was really lecturing to industry. Lecturing is not really consulting. The real consulting that Wroe epitomized, and that Paul Green and I did a lot over the years together, were actually solving business problems. A lot of the developments in marketing over the years, especially on the methodology side, came because we had to solve problems of real companies who faced them. Conjoint analysis, multidimensional scaling—all of these are great examples of developments that came because of needs of industry and the need to address specific problems.
Organizational Buying Behavior: The Buygrid Model and the Buying Center
Andrew Mitrak: That actually is a nice segue to organizational buying behavior. This is one of the topics you researched. For context, I am a marketer and I’ve almost always worked in B2B marketing. The way that organizations buy is really interesting, and I think that the way things are sometimes set up and measured today are flawed and don’t really take into account the dynamics of organizational buying behavior. I want to start just by asking you about that and why did you start researching it? What was the scene of the status quo of the way people thought about the way organizations buy, and how did your research help change that?
Jerry Wind: I started because, first of all, I was curious. It was curiosity as to: how do organizations buy? How do they make the buying decision? The literature at the time was not very helpful. Luckily, one of the faculty at Stanford at the time was Bob Davis, who chaired my dissertation committee, who also worked as vice president at Varian Associates, which was an industrial firm. In discussions with him and with Ron Frank and Bill Massy, who were basically the lead faculty at Stanford, Bob Davis suggested, “Why don’t you start speaking with some of the people at Varian and get a feel for what’s happening?” That led to actually studying them and studying another company, Motorola, that had major operations in Las Vegas at the time. So the motivation was fundamentally: how do they buy? How do organizations buy? How do they make the buying decision? Since very little was known at the time, I thought it was a bright field to start, and it was a great start. Also, it reinforced the belief that was developed later on when I moved to Wharton of the importance of working with industry.
Andrew Mitrak: Did you visit Las Vegas and Motorola in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s?
Jerry Wind: Spent a lot of time. This was in the ‘60s. I worked on the dissertation from primarily late ‘64, ‘65, and ‘66. I got it from Stanford. My doctorate at Stanford was two years; it was ‘65–’66.
Andrew Mitrak: What was Las Vegas like in the ‘60s? Was there the Rat Pack era?
Jerry Wind: A little different than today, but still glamorous and very hot.
Andrew Mitrak: As a young scholar visiting a company and learning about the way they buy, what was that like? Were the people at Motorola like, “Who is this person? Is this strange?” What were the dynamics like? What kind of questions did you ask them or what were observations you had there?
Jerry Wind: I was lucky. I got an introduction through Bob Davis to introduce me to Varian, and Varian introduced me to Motorola; they had some relation between the two of them. They were very open. They were actually curious and tried to find out what I could find out about the way they behave. When I developed the buygrid model, which was recognizing that there is a buying center that makes the decision, so not the individual; that there is a buying process; and that the buying process is conditional on the buying situation, whether you’re buying something for the first time, repeat buying, or modified rebuy. The whole conceptualization, I presented it to them and they loved it. They said, “Yeah, makes sense.” It represented what they were doing. The interesting thing: it was a real breakthrough in the field because nothing like this existed before. Also, we did one other thing in my dissertation, which was quantitative analysis of brand loyalty. Brand loyalty at the time was viewed in the consumer behavior area, but never applied in the organizational buying behavior area.
Andrew Mitrak: That’s really interesting. Of course, I think there’s a lot of brand loyalty dynamics within an organization. The concept of the buying center and how the buying center changes depending on the dynamic of what’s being purchased—like you said, a first-time purchase in the category, a new vendor in the category, a repeat of the same vendor—that dynamic is so interesting. If I were to characterize it, please correct me if I’m wrong. Because previously, there’s a thought of, “Oh, you just go to the single purchasing agent, the person with procurement in their job title, just find them and they’ll procure it for you.” But it’s more complicated than that. Can you speak to sort of the before and after what people thought about B2B purchasing, prior research, and how your research expanded on that and added more nuance to the way businesses buy?
Applying the Buygrid Model to Consumers
Jerry Wind: I think the buygrid model is still relevant. Later on, I actually suggested that a lot of this applies also into the consumer behavior area, because consumers don’t buy individually. There is a buying influence. If you’re thinking about any purchase, a person doesn’t just buy a car by itself; you consult with your wife, the kids, neighbors, their influencers. So a buying center exists also in the consumer behavior side, but that was not really formalized as such. I think there is a lot of the concepts that we developed in organizational buying behavior that apply to the consumer area. Similarly, there are a lot of concepts and methodologies that we use in consumer that can be applied in organizational buying behavior. So there is a lot of synergy between the two. In today’s environment, with what’s happening with AI, and especially agentic AI, there are changes that have to impact both of them.
Andrew Mitrak: Absolutely. That’s absolutely right. As a consumer, especially if it’s a larger purchase, but even for things around the house, I’ll consult my wife, I’ll kind of think about my space, I’ll look at YouTube videos, I’ll look at the internet and reviews, and now I’ll ask an AI about it. In a way, all those things collectively—I might be the decision maker or the person with a credit card making a purchase at the end of the day, but I’m consulting a number of resources somewhat similar to how a company would have multiple stakeholders influencing the decision.
Jerry Wind: Today, basically no one is making any decision without checking some type of online source. That really requires companies to start thinking about themselves as omnichannel companies where the consumer journey really has to go through a seamless experience online and offline, which has a major, major implication to any marketer.
Andrew Mitrak: As an impact of that, do you think that the practices of a B2B marketer versus a B2C marketer should be converging or overlapping more than they do because of these sort of similar dynamics? Or do you feel like B2C is becoming a little more like B2B or vice versa? How do you think of those in practice as disciplines?
Jerry Wind: I think that we see in more advanced companies that you have the interface between the two. The same concepts and methods that are used in one are being applied in the other. Again, we have to look at this in the dynamic center of what’s happening today. Until two years ago, a few years ago, if you asked me in terms of what really drives decisions, I would have said that to a large extent emotions dominate even in the B2B world. This was actually an early finding: that B2B is not only rational, that there are actually a lot of emotional aspects involved in the decision. But the entry of agentic recently is changing this, because agentic relies primarily—when you market to a machine as opposed to a person, they’re looking at the data, they’re looking at the cognitive elements. In the last two or three years since the proliferation of ChatGPT and all the other platforms, we have more of a balance and need to focus more on both the cognitive and the emotional. My answer, which two years ago would have been based on a lot of research that showed that emotional appeals are by far more powerful than cognitive, will not be true today. Today, you really need the balance of the two.
Flaws in the Funnel: Why B2B Marketing Gets Buying Groups Wrong
Andrew Mitrak: I want to circle back to the buying center and your work on that for one more question. Because I mentioned how I’m a B2B marketer today, and something that frustrates me is that so many things are still built around tracking individual leads. A lot of our systems kind of think of a funnel, and there’s a lead, and that lead is an inquiry and becomes a marketing qualified lead and a sales accepted lead, and that lead turns into a sales opportunity. So many things are still set up to track the individual lead level, as if it’s still a purchasing agent and somebody with a title called procurement. I look at your research and it just reminds me people have known that’s not the case for 60 years. Your research 60 years ago shows that this isn’t the case. It kind of makes me mad in a way, because I feel like I have to explain this at work: like, no, actually there’s a buying group, there’s a buying center, you have to engage these different stakeholders. It’s not just about us doing lead generation; it’s about finding the different personas, reaching them, influencing them. There’s more nuance than just measuring the number of leads marketing delivers. So I feel a little frustrated about it because we’ve known this for 60 years. Does this ring true for you that this hasn’t been fully internalized by marketing practitioners and businesses? If you agree, do you have a sense of why? Is it just that it’s complicated to track different people, or why has it not been fully adopted if we’ve known about this dynamic for so long?
Jerry Wind: I love your observation. I think you’re representing the current situation in many cases. There are a few exceptions, obviously, but you’re absolutely right. I would suggest that this is partly a function of the power of the status quo bias: just continue—my work in mental models—doing what’s convenient, you’ve done it before, and the available technology that makes it easier to go through this individual tracking. I think that the companies that are doing a little better are the ones that are focusing on account strategy and insist that the sales people and other people in contact with the customers actually complete the information needed in the data about the company. The problem is the sales people typically viewed that reporting back on the call, especially if the call was not successful, is a burden, and they kind of skipped it or said two words and moved to the next assignment, as opposed to realizing that building the data, the information about the company—who are the people involved, what are their motivations, what have their experiences been, and others—is a very important part and they should be rewarded on this. The problem with traditional sales force management is that many of them don’t reward the sales people or others involved in this. So you have to go back to the organizational structure, the reward system that they have. Hopefully, people wake up and realize that you have to have this better understanding: who are the people involved in the decision, what are their considerations, and try to design a strategy that addresses it. But account strategy is the hope, and I think that advances in the technology that companies use for tracking is also the hope.
Andrew Mitrak: That’s right. I think that there’s the systems and the structure, and a lot of it comes back to incentives. I also think that your observation on the type of purchase it is—you listed a number of things there, and I think also that gets simplified often into: is it new business or renewal? That’s it, and that’s maybe the extent of the type of purchase it is, and they’ll have a new account executive sell if it’s new business and then they’ll put it on an account manager who will sell it for renewal. But there’s even more complexity than that that I feel like isn’t accounted for. Is this their first time entering a category, or are they—is it a takeout of a competitor? Sometimes that’ll maybe get captured somewhere in a sales call or something, and it’s not really like marketing and sales together don’t quite go to market that way as far as the nuances of types of purchases it is. It just seems like your research uncovered this a long time ago, and still today, even with how far we’ve come with data and technology, it’s still not fully adopted and it seems like a miss. It seems like something we should have gotten right longer ago.
Jerry Wind: At the minimum, companies should realize that it’s not only new task and repeat, but there is the in-between category that I called modified rebuy. Modified rebuy is the most common one, actually, and the one that offers the opportunity if you’re an outside supplier to enter an account by creating the need for perceiving that things have changed. You perceive it as saying that leads to a modified rebuy. But you’re touching on another point, which is the separation between marketing and sales, which are viewed as two silos in the organization. That leads to my current work, which is really in the area of orchestration. In a sense, when you look at the role of the CMO, there is hardly ever a CMO that has responsibility for what we teach in marketing as the four Ps: product, price, promotion, and place. I have never seen a CMO that has responsibility for all four. They have responsibility for branding, some aspects of advertising, and perhaps a responsibility for understanding the consumer, the marketing research and consumer research aspects. To succeed, what the company needs is they need to orchestrate all the touchpoints a company has with a customer and create an integrated approach. That’s a different role. That’s a role of an orchestrator and not the head of the marketing department. It really calls for rethinking, reimagining really what marketing is.
Pioneering Market Segmentation: From Demographics to Conjoint Analysis
Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned the four Ps, and another concept is segmentation, targeting, positioning. I want to talk about segmentation. Segmentation is another field where you’re one of the defining pioneers of market segmentation theory and the methodology. Can you share more about where segmentation was as a practice when you started researching it and diving into it?
Jerry Wind: The major work in segmentation was the book Market Segmentation that Bill Massy, Ron Frank, and I wrote, published in 1972. So a long time ago. A few years later, I edited the special issue of JMR on market segmentation. At the time, the motivation for writing the book was that most markets still viewed markets as homogeneous. At the time, when you think about the ‘60s, most companies viewed the market as a homogeneous market, have an offering, go to the market. A few companies, the more advanced ones, realized that the markets are heterogeneous and started looking at how to segment them. Most of the segmentation at the time was on demographics: consumers were male, female, or age, or some other demographic, easily observable characteristics. There were beginnings at the time of research that showed the value of psychographics, and the value of what we brought to the table at the time was focusing on behavioral-based segmentation: your behavior, loyalty is a great base for segmentation; the frequency in which you buy, how much you buy. A lot of the work moved away from demographics to much more detailed psychographics or behavioral-based segmentation. This was one development at the conceptual level. The major development was methodologically, because there were huge advances in methodology: multidimensional scaling and clustering, because segmentation was also linked to a lot of my work later, especially with Paul Green, on positioning, focusing on segmentation and for the given segment what will be the most effective positioning of the product, the reason people will buy the product. That’s where multidimensional scaling and clustering came into play, as well as simulations. Then, when we did a lot of work in the new area at the time, conjoint analysis, conjoint analysis provided another basis for segmentation. All the work that we did in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s had relevance to segmentation in terms of as we had better understanding of how consumers buy, their buying decisions, and then using this as a basis for segmentation.
What is Conjoint Analysis?
Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned conjoint analysis a couple of times. Can you share more about what that is and what that unlocked in marketing?
Jerry Wind: The key book on conjoint analysis was Multiattribute Decisions in Marketing with Paul Green. The work actually started with joint work that Paul started—I joined him a little bit later on this—with Bell Labs. The idea behind conjoint analysis is to get more accurate and valid information about consumer preferences, how consumers make decisions, as opposed to asking them, “How important is the color of the pen in buying the pen?” Conjoint analysis was based on: don’t ask people to try to rationalize the importance of each component—the color, the shape, the design, the material, the durability of the ink. Give them a number of options to look at and compare, and just tell me if you prefer A or B. I will design the different options based on experimental design of all the relevant characteristics. If you tell me you prefer A over B, knowing the characteristics, I can infer the relative importance of each of the attributes involved. This was the breakthrough. It’s a very simple idea, very, very powerful. We’ve done tons of studies in almost every conceivable product and service category using conjoint analysis.
Andrew Mitrak: That’s really interesting. Basically, as a researcher, you should not expect the consumer to accurately break down the attributes point by point and measure them; you need to just present them the whole.
Jerry Wind: They don’t know. They have no idea.
Andrew Mitrak: They just know why they like it, but if you present them the whole and a series of them, you can then derive the attributes that make one more preferable than the other and rank those attributes in importance.
Jerry Wind: Correct. They can either rank or rate them, but the important thing analytically is you’re inferring what is the relative importance of each attribute that you have. There have been tons of studies that we and others have done and validated this over the years. It’s generally accepted. It’s still accepted today. It’s still used today by many, many companies, and there are different software packages that help people use it. But the breakthrough was in the thinking: how do we basically deal with a multiattribute phenomenon such as a product or service and get reliable and valid information from consumers?
Andrew Mitrak: Are there limitations to it? Does it work in any product and service category where you can perform conjoint analysis?
Jerry Wind: I’ve not seen an area that it cannot be applied to. I think the limit on whether to apply it or not is the creativity of the researcher. We used this in pharmaceuticals. We used this in many service areas. We used this in designing a hotel, the Courtyard by Marriott. In every one of these, the beauty of the approach is that the design is flexible and we can modify the way we are asking questions. Originally, it was viewed the limit would be how many attributes can you deal with because you have to compose the hypothetical product. It was viewed originally like five, six attributes. But then you come up with structural designs. In the Courtyard by Marriott that I mentioned, we had 10 different categories like indoor, outdoor characteristics, the bathroom configuration, and others, and for each one of them a lot of variables within it. We were able to design a very large, integrated conjoint analysis where then you put all the components together. The idea is sound and it’s really up to the creativity of the researcher to be able to deal almost with any situation.
Andrew Mitrak: I was going to ask about Courtyard by Marriott. Let’s go straight to that now, because this is such a great case study and example. Can you share the story of how you initially came into contact with Marriott? Where were they in the ideation or development phase of Courtyard by Marriott? Can you walk me through that story from the beginning?
Jerry Wind: I was called by the director of marketing research at Marriott, who either read one of our papers or heard me in a presentation. He said he was intrigued: they’re thinking about developing a new hotel, which will be a Marriott-style hotel for smaller markets that do not justify the large Marriott. Their current thinking was that they would like to create a mini-Marriott for the other markets, but he was intrigued with the presentation or the paper, and can we apply this to try to test the idea? I said, “Yeah.” We started talking, and eventually we got the architects and the economists and all the other people from Marriott on the team to sit together and agree on what are all the decisions that have to be made in designing a hotel. For example: should you have a restaurant or not? Should you have a motel-type entry where people can leave their car outside and go directly to their room? What should be the configuration of the bathroom? Tons of decisions. We listed all of them and we created basically a model that allowed us to do it. The objective was to try to attract two markets: the business market, people who travel for business, including women as a market segment; as well as people who travel for leisure, the family and combination of the two. We designed with the team all the decisions that had to be made, and then designed a study to see how consumers would evaluate different combinations of these different options. It led to the Courtyard by Marriott. There were a lot of surprises and it was not a mini-Marriott. We tested it against simulations testing against: what if we were just to create a mini-Marriott compared to this? And the Courtyard by Marriott won hands down.
Andrew Mitrak: This is amazing. I think it’s so cool that market research could have such an impact on a new product and service that has such a physical footprint in the world, that the world is physically different as a result of this research. That’s just really inspiring. When you’re presenting the idea of conjoint analysis to me, you show me two pens and how they’re different and you can pick one versus the other. But you can’t do that with a hotel that’s not built yet. You can’t just build a whole hotel and build a different hotel; that wouldn’t be feasible. As consumers, they don’t know the answer to where they want to park their car and pick up their keys. They can’t think that way exactly; they just know it when they see it or know when they feel it. How do you construct the conjoint analysis for them to be able to experience those things and make their preference in such a way where you can derive what the attributes are that they care about? How did that study work at a tactical level?
Jerry Wind: A combination of pictures, drawings, and words. You explain to them, so they see a picture of a hotel and they can see a picture with cars in front or a hotel where you have to enter through a major area. The reason, incidentally, for the way the Courtyard by Marriott is designed as it is, is because women, especially who travel by themselves, had a very strong preference to have the central control point and not distributed. The hotel room configuration that has the bathroom split into two—where you have the bathtub, shower, toilet in one area, and then outside of this a door, and then outside of it is the counter with the sink where you can make up—was purely a result of the study. No one did it before, and there was a very strong preference for having this because two people can be ready at the same time by using the two facilities. Simple things like this came up from the study. Incidentally, another study we did where we had to go even more extreme was E-ZPass. We tested the viability of E-ZPass before it existed. The only way to communicate it to consumers, we created videos showing driving with E-ZPass or without E-ZPass. You have to provide them visualization so they can actually relate to this.
Andrew Mitrak: For a listener, E-ZPass would be a toll booth system—an electronic scanner where you don’t have to stop and take out your coins and pay a toll booth. But if that’s all you ever knew, that would be a pretty big jump. If you’ve only ever known taking out your coins and paying something physically and stopping, and that’s just how it is—you stop and pay the toll versus drive right through—that’d be a lot to take in. Even Amazon did a series of groceries where it’s just walk out, and that’s been in a pilot for a long time still and hasn’t fully adopted that way because you’re just used to stopping and scanning and paying, and there’s a ritual to that and habits. It’s an interesting one to have market research and be able to show that to them.
Jerry Wind: The only way to do it was by visualizing, creating videos with and without, and giving them the choice with these different options.
Andrew Mitrak: I want to go back to Marriott. Courtyard by Marriott—it does seem like they’re a pioneer as far as soliciting market research to do this. If I was to picture a large hotel chain and a large company, they have their systems, they have designers, they have architects, they have people who’ve been in the hotel industry their whole lives, and they might be thinking, “Why do I need some analysis to tell me how to make a hotel? I’ve done hundreds of hotels.” Did you run into any stakeholders—kind of back to buying groups and buying centers—who were hesitant to believe the research or were skeptical that this type of conjoint analysis and methodology could lead to a better decision? Did that come up at all, and if so, how did you overcome it?
Jerry Wind: All the time. All the time. It’s human nature almost to object to anything that is new. The good news is that the Marriott leadership was courageous enough and willing to experiment. We did not launch right away the whole chain. They started with a few test locations based on the results. Luckily for us, the test locations were successful, and then they launched it. Had there been less courageous leadership, they would have said, “Forget it, let’s just go with our intuition and our expertise.” That would have created the mini-Marriott, that would have based on our research been a failure. But they had the courage to experiment, and that’s what we encourage everybody in every one of the studies we’ve done. Paul Green and I probably done hundreds of studies over the years with all product and service categories. Almost in every single one of them, there’s resistance to implement, and our recommendation is: experiment with this. Take the results, experiment, experiment against the other model you have, and see what the results are.
Andrew Mitrak: That’s great. I love this case study. It reminds me of—I’m not sure if you’ve read the book or seen the movie Moneyball, where the idea was the baseball people: there’s a whole group of old baseball people who say, “Oh, that player looks like a star. I like the way he looks. I like his girlfriend.” They’re just judging based on: “I’ve been a scout for decades and I know.” Then somebody comes in with the numbers and is able to make an argument. And it takes courage. The whole movie is about overcoming the status quo and using data, but also being willing to stand by convictions and a belief that there’s a better system and being able to change it. This story of Courtyard by Marriott sounds like one of those stories. I like to hear it a lot.
Jerry Wind: Yep.
Andrew Mitrak: What was your first time walking into a Courtyard by Marriott?
Jerry Wind: It was one of the experimental units. I don’t remember where it was at this stage; it was a long time ago. It was, “Wow, it happened. It’s here.” I think they’ve done a terrific job in implementing the recommendation. Before, we had a concept, and now suddenly you see it, so it was a real high. The same is true with every project that we’ve done where you see the results later on. It gives you kind of a feel: yeah, it works.
Breaking the Status Quo: Mental Models and the RAVES Framework
Andrew Mitrak: I think this theme is very closely related to mental models. This is something you brought up earlier in our talk. As I was researching your work, in the YouTube videos and presentations you’ve given, you highlight this idea of mental models and you’ve argued that for decades, the greatest barrier to innovation isn’t a budget or technology; it’s outdated mental models. Can you talk about mental models and why they’re such a barrier?
Jerry Wind: The book we wrote about this is The Power of Impossible Thinking from 2004. The idea is people feel very comfortable just continuing doing what they’re doing. It’s kind of the status quo bias. Yet the world is changing. The world is changing dramatically all the time, whether it is technological advances, political reality, demographics, wars—you name it. There are continuous changes in the world. Why can we or should we assume that what worked for us yesterday will work tomorrow if the world is changing? The whole idea here is that we have to challenge the status quo, challenge the way we’re doing things now, and explore whether there are better alternatives. There is a whole set of approaches to challenge mental models. In my more recent book, Creativity in the Age of AI, the premise is that everyone—every individual, every organization, every society—can enhance their creativity if they use a number of approaches to enhance creativity. Each one of these approaches can be turbocharged if you use AI. In the book, we described 12 different approaches to enhance creativity. The first approach is really challenging your mental model. The last approach, the 12th set of approaches, is the need for courage and persistence—the point we talked about in the context of Marriott, the courage of management to change and do things differently. Between these two extremes, the first and the 12th set of approaches, all the others are different approaches for enhancing creativity, many of them to challenge mental models. I think it’s absolutely critical, whatever you do, especially with the change in the environment, to ask yourself the question: are the bases on which I base my decisions still valid in today’s environment, or do they need a change?
Andrew Mitrak: First off, I love that you have all your books close by. For listeners who are listening and not watching, it’s great to see them, and I’ll link to all of them in the blog and the show notes that accompany this episode. It is amazing to see how prolific you are and how you’ve contributed to ideas throughout your career, including AI, which is something you’re actually way ahead of the curve on AI. I saw videos of you from more than a decade ago talking about the importance of AI. It’s great that as recently as last year, you’re publishing books on it. On this topic of mental models and bringing it to marketing: are there mental models you’ve seen that were commonly held by marketers over the years that eventually broke down and went away? Or are there things that you feel like marketers continuously misunderstand about their mental models that you’re frequently correcting? How would you sort of characterize common gaps in mental models within marketing?
Jerry Wind: Unfortunately, huge, there’s a huge gap in this area. Marketing really needs reimagining, reinventing. We talked before about the four Ps, that no CMO has responsibility for all the four Ps. Yet we continue teaching marketing with the four Ps. I think we have to go back in marketing to Peter Drucker, who’s probably the greatest business philosopher that we had, who defined business as being marketing and innovation. It’s marketing from a consumer point of view: understanding how consumers view products and services. If you’re a firm, you have to start by understanding the consumers. I think the problem of academic marketing—actually, two colleagues of mine, Dave Reibstein and George Day, and I just wrote two papers on the problem with academic marketing, that we have created two silos. One is the consumer behavior area. PhDs in marketing are either in the consumer behavior area or the quantitative area, and they left out marketing strategy: the why, why are we doing it? What is the reason, what is the problem we’re trying to address, that you should bring both consumer behavior and modeling to it? I think that’s part of the problem of academic marketing. A lot of the marketing publications are viewed as being totally irrelevant by a lot of practitioners, which is a shame because there’s a lot of advances in methodology and in theory that can be relevant. An example of an area that’s missing is the research that we’ve done on the future of advertising. We published this in a book, Beyond Advertising, which was the result of interviews and discussions with over 100 leading marketing and advertising experts asking them about how they view the future of marketing. The heart of the book was: we created a model called RAVES that suggests that every advertising or every marketing offering has to meet the RAVES criteria. What are the RAVES criteria? R is Relevant and Respectful: make sure that whatever you’re doing, the advertising message or the product is relevant and respectful of the consumer. A is Actionable: that you can do something about it. V is Valuable, and there are three dimensions of value: cognitive, emotional, and monetary. We discussed before that the entry of agentic AI to the picture leads to the need to equally balance between the emotional and the cognitive. E is Experiential: what is the experience? Part of the experience economy is that what people are really buying, they’re buying products not necessarily for the product itself, but for the experience that they’re sharing. S, which is very important, is a Sharable Story: that there is a story behind it. What is the story of the product or service you’re trying to sell, and is it attractive enough, engaging enough, that you want to share it with others? If you look at the RAVES criteria, still most of marketing today ignores many aspects of it.
Visionary Leadership vs. Interdisciplinary Teams
Andrew Mitrak: One of my flaws in mental models of marketing is: you’ve talked about all of your amazing collaborations, your collaborations with Paul Green, and you mentioned Dave Reibstein and George Day, both of whom I actually interviewed on this show in prior episodes as well. I, as a marketer, sometimes think of marketers as individuals. If I think of the best marketers of all time, I might think of Steve Jobs, or think of Walt Disney, or think of P.T. Barnum. You kind of think of individuals, but often I think the best marketers are small teams and organizations, and that it’s not about marketers as individual contributors, but as people who attract the best talent to collaborate with and find the right partners. I wonder if that rings true for you at all, the importance of collaboration with contributing to marketing or having a long career in marketing, whether it’s on the practitioner side or on the academia side. Because I probably overindex on myself wanting to be a good marketer and underrating teamwork and collaboration.
Jerry Wind: You really need both. You need the visionary leader who can make it happen. Steve Jobs was really a visionary leader and he made it happen. We need people like this who are changing the world. Think about all the people who came with—I don’t remember all the names—but think about the people who invented Uber, Airbnb, all the innovations that changed our lives. There were individuals behind them, the leaders who had the vision, the courage, and the persistence. The same is true in innovation when you look at the innovators of the COVID vaccines: there are two individuals who basically were persistent despite 20 years of rejections, laughter, and ridicule, but they persisted.
Andrew Mitrak: The week that we’re recording, that underlying technology just finished a stage-three melanoma vaccine using that mRNA, which is incredible. That’s something that’s chipping away at this thing that’s always seemed like the holy grail, and we’re seeing glimmers of being able to get that on the basis of that underlying technology that was locked out of the room for 20 years.
Jerry Wind: So you need the individuals, but at the same time, you need the teams. You need the teams to work, and many of them are either innovative as a team or definitely helping implement. Ideally, you have interdisciplinary teams. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of interdisciplinary teams and interdisciplinary education. There’s no problem that can be solved with a single discipline, and it’s really critical to understand other disciplines that have relevance to the challenge you’re dealing with, and also bring people from other disciplines. I’m a great believer in interdisciplinary education. I helped co-found Reichman University in Israel. At the time, it was the Interdisciplinary Center, and the original name actually suggested the core value of the university was an interdisciplinary university. We tried to focus on interdisciplinary studies and move away from the superficial dilettante-type approach, and try to move toward truly the Renaissance person who understands enough about multiple disciplines and can bring them together.
Rethinking How We Teach Marketing
Andrew Mitrak: This is touching on some of the future of marketing and marketing education. I’ve interviewed a number of CMOs and executives on this podcast, and I’ve interviewed a lot of legendary professors like yourself and others you mentioned. That theme does always strike, because the gaps in marketing education—I think that both sides recognize this and the need for closer collaboration, like you’ve exemplified in your career, between the academic world and the real business world. I know this topic is a big one. The future of marketing education and what needs to change. You probably have a lot of ideas, and this could be an hour-long interview just in itself on this topic. But if you were to pick one area or one key idea that you’d want to change in marketing education, what’s the one you’d most lean into, or what’s the most important thing that needs to be corrected?
Jerry Wind: Forget the traditional classroom lecture. It’s totally ineffective. The level of comprehension from lectures, depending on the studies that you look at, is somewhere around 20%. Why are you wasting the time of the students? What is much more effective is to move toward the approach of a hybrid or flipped classroom, which is really effective, especially with technology. There is no reason why we cannot teach on your smartphone or any other device the content that you’re trying to deliver in the lecture. The students can get the material, listening to it 24/7 in any language, because you can translate this at their convenience. If they’re a fast learner, they can do it really fast; if they’re a slow learner, they can go any number of times over it. Then bring them together to try to implement the idea, to test the idea, and provide them feedback in real time. With the flipped classroom, we can provide them feedback as they learn in real time; you can give them tests and they can learn it. I think that we have to rethink the whole educational approach and leverage technology in trying to do it, and be courageous in experimenting with this.
I’ll give one example for a very innovative university, which is Minerva University, which is ranked as the number one most innovative university in the world. They totally rethought the undergrad curriculum. They don’t have a fixed campus. For the first year, they teach them the integrated concept of critical thinking and creativity, and then they take them every six months to a different city around the world to implement the ideas in different contexts. That’s what we need in marketing education in general: we need more creative approaches and the courage to do it.
Twelve years ago, I started with QS, which is the world-leading university ranking organization, a program called Reimagine Education. We run an annual competition for the most innovative pedagogical approaches in higher education. We get about 1,500 entries every year from about 90 countries. We have an annual meeting and give tons of awards, but the reality is that most of these entries that we get are minor improvements. They’re not really rethinking the way we are educating and the way people learn. So we desperately need to rethink education.
Andrew Mitrak: I agree. When I’ve given guest lectures in classes, whether virtually or in person, I know everything doesn’t land. You maybe get five minutes or so, and then they might be on laptops; if it’s virtually, good luck, who knows what they’re doing and they’re not listening. Also, if I think about this podcast: one, I’m hoping to contribute to the body of work that somebody can listen to on demand by featuring people like you, where they can use their phone and listen to this. When I was thinking of this podcast, I had considered going back and getting an MBA for some time, but I thought: what if I just did a podcast and got to read things and read books and then interview experts like yourself? The way that I’m learning is through my phone, reading things directly or watching things directly or listening. Sometimes I’ll listen to an AI summary of a research paper—I’m not going to read all 100 pages of a paper published 30 years ago, but an AI summary I might listen to or read. You get all that and then you have an interview, and you want to show up and speak intelligently and know that you’ve done some research. I learn a lot that way, and I think it’s somewhat similar to a model that other marketers could do, where they’re pursuing the things they want to pursue and reading the sources the way they want to read it, but also having some in-person connection where you’re having a back-and-forth and a dialogue which holds you accountable. Something like that could work for a lot more marketers, so maybe more marketers should start more podcasts and do things like that.
Jerry Wind: I think it’s a great idea, and what you’ve done is you created your own personalized learning approach, which is great. That’s absolutely perfect, what you’re doing. Incidentally, when you’re lecturing, let me suggest an approach that I know works because I’ve done it many times. Give a short lecture, let’s say you have an hour: give a short lecture of 10 to 15 minutes, and then divide the group into small groups and give each group a challenge based on your lecture and tell them, “Come up with an experiment to implement this idea.” Let them work in small groups so everyone is engaged and involved, and then ask randomly a number of groups to present it to the entire group. Then have a general discussion, and ask them at the end to write down a memo to themselves or to someone at their firm in terms of what they learned from the session—a to-do list. This way, you get everyone’s involvement and engagement, as opposed to having a 50-minute lecture and then 10 minutes Q&A, and you have three people: one of them wants to make a statement and two ask dumb questions, and if you’re lucky you get one good question. This way, you engage everyone in the discussion, and I’ve done it with groups as large as 500 people.
Andrew Mitrak: That’s great. I’m going to do that next time, because the last time I did that 50-minute lecture and the 10 minutes, that’s exactly what happened, and I knew that people tuned out after 10 minutes in. The discipline of a 15-minute lecture and smaller groups is a better one, so that’s very actionable.
The Long Game: Building a Meaningful Marketing Career
Andrew Mitrak: As we wrap up: when you sent me your CV, or when I went to Wharton’s website and saw your full CV, it’s more than 100 pages long and you’ve won virtually every noteworthy award that somebody in your field could win in marketing. If you were to reflect on how to make a career in marketing feel meaningful and worthwhile, and making contributions that you’re proud of and contributing for a long time, what would your advice or reflections be for somebody who’s listening and is in a career in marketing?
Jerry Wind: It’s a great question. I would say: be curious. Follow your natural curiosity about things that you’re interested in, and have the courage to challenge the way they’re currently being done. Explore areas that you’re interested in, find out how they’re being done today, and try to challenge them: what if I had to challenge them? What if I did the reverse? What if I did something different? And then have the courage to experiment. There’s nothing like continuous experimentation.
Really important: keep up to date with what’s happening in the world. You have to monitor the changes in the world and address them; you cannot just live on the past. When AI came or started years ago, what are the implications? What are the implications of augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality? What are the implications of quantum computing? What are the implications to the deterioration of democracies around the world? How do we deal with them?
We talked before about orchestration. My current project is working on orchestration in many areas, not only in the role of the CMO. I just finished a paper on the orchestrated university: what would a university look like if they were to reimagine who they are, and added to the current focus on expertise in specific areas a whole set of programs that focus on orchestration across disciplines, across technologies, human-machine interaction, and the like? Also, you can apply it in different areas. You can apply it in the political area. I know it’s away from marketing, but think about marketing of political candidates: what if the two parties selected a candidate who, as opposed to appealing to the extreme, appealed to the four ignored segments: to the liberal Republicans, to the conservative Democrats, to the independents, and to the people who are not voting because they gave up on the system? If any one of these two parties had the courage to select a candidate that ignores their base and goes for those four, they will win the next election. Probably they don’t have the courage to do it.
Andrew Mitrak: Yes, for sure. I know i was asking a wrap-up question, and I don’t want to get into my own politics at all. But I like to say I directly agree with a lot of what you’re saying, and it makes a lot of sense. Whether it’s politics or whether it’s understanding organizational buying groups, there are things you can recognize 60 years ago, and there are things that to everybody seem obvious and known, and things about how education should be better. Politics moves slow, academia moves slow, business habits move slow, and yet technology moves so fast and ideas of a better vision are there. You continuously advocate, write intelligent books, and propose a better path forward, and yet still the change to do that is spiky at best or nonexistent in other areas. Staying optimistic and continuing to work and advocate for a better way anyway, whether or not that change happens and is adopted—it seems like a tough challenge that you haven’t given up on and you continue to work on it.
Jerry Wind: There’s really no option. You’re not going to give up. You’re part of the system; you want to improve the system. As long as I’m in marketing, you want to improve, you want to get other people to get excited about what they’re doing. Marketing is an amazing field. It focuses on understanding human beings, understanding consumers, and making their lives better. It’s creating value. This was the theme of the Beyond Advertising book: creating value through all customer touchpoints. The question is: how do we create value, and how do we create value for all stakeholders? It’s no longer just the shareholders; we’re really dealing with stakeholder society. How do we do it in an effective way? I believe marketing can do it if you’re open-minded, if you challenge the mental models, and if you’re willing to experiment with new approaches.
Andrew Mitrak: That’s a great place to wrap up, Jerry. I found this conversation so inspiring and I find researching your career very inspiring. I want to thank you for everything you contributed and thank you for your time talking with me. I feel like I learned a lot and I feel inspired to be a better marketer, so thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed it.
Jerry Wind: Thank you, and thank you for starting this history of marketing podcast. I think it’s a great idea. There are great minds, and you definitely selected some great people that I admire. Looking forward to listening to some of the podcasts. All the best, and continue to learn and grow.
