A History of Marketing / Episode 36
This week my guest is Ken Rufo, the owner and principal of Manchester Street, a marketing consultancy focused on B2B differentiation. Prior to this, he ran positioning and strategy at Emphatic Thinking, a consulting firm that’s now owned by Accenture.
Ken earned his PhD in communication from the University of Georgia, and I met him back when he was my professor in my master’s program at the University of Washington.
One of the things that I like about Ken Rufo is that he brings such a unique, original view on marketing, and he’s not afraid to be provocative and contrarian.
For instance, when it comes to marketing messaging, he’s less interested in brand storytelling and more interested in making persuasive arguments.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Ken questions if marketing’s obsession with data was actually a mistake. He argues there’s too much attention on what’s easy to measure instead of what actually influences buying decisions.
These are themes that I explored in my prior two episodes with Jon Miller and Kerry Cunningham, and I see this conversation with Ken as completing a trilogy of sorts on how B2B marketing has developed in the 21st century and how data and analytics and marketing tech have all changed how we go to market.
Note to listeners: I hope you don’t mind the past month’s focus on recent marketing history. It’s been fun for me to dive into the inflection points that shape today’s digital marketing world (especially in B2B)as it’s relevant to the work I do every day. Don’t worry: we’ll travel back to earlier times of marketing history in episodes to come.
Here’s my conversation with Ken Rufo.
Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, who volunteers to review and edit transcripts for accuracy and clarity.
Bridging the Gap Between Marketing Theory and Practice
Andrew Mitrak: Ken Rufo, welcome to A History of Marketing.
Ken Rufo: Thank you for having me.
Andrew Mitrak: You were a professor that I had in grad school, but you’ve also been a successful principal at agencies and a consultant. And a thing that I’ve noticed over the course of the 40 or so interviews I’ve had for this podcast is that there is a really big gap between academia and practice. And you seem like one of the few individuals that I’ve encountered who successfully bridged that gap. I’m wondering if you have any observations on that.
Ken Rufo: Yeah, it’s a good call out. And I think that academics, to their disservice, are significantly behind the times. And this is a very gross generalization, so there are going to be people who listen to this who get upset with me. But you look at a lot of the even the digital marketing curricula that are present in MBA programs, they’re five years on a good day behind where the industry is. They’re a decade behind, right? Like there are still classes in digital marketing that are not talking through the kind of granularities of a DMP DSP integration, for example. And I don’t know how you really understand what’s happening at a digital marketing level if you don’t understand that degree of technical granularity.
On the other hand, I think that one of the things that happens on the non-academic side is because there is not rigorous academic theory and research behind a lot of things, there are a lot of things in the marketing world that are imaginary that we take as being true. A lot of things like that. You’ve probably heard things like the seven touchstones, right? Like you need seven touches before there’s a sale. That’s made up.
Andrew Mitrak: The marketing rule of seven.
Ken Rufo: Yeah, that’s a made-up rule. It was made up by a radio station like back in like the 30s or 40s to explain why it is you should buy multiple ad spots. It wasn’t based on research. There is research about threshold effects within persuasion within marketing, but it’s highly variable based on like the size of the market, the number of entrants, how recently you’ve been an entrant. Like the math is super complicated and it’s really only understandable right now post hoc. It’s not like this formula thing that you just plug in a formula and be like, I need nine buys, you know.
Andrew Mitrak: It is funny how sometimes somebody will present a plan or some strategy and say, as we all know, you need seven touchpoints to get a customer. And you kind of want to start off with the meeting by saying, that’s BS. But it’s something we all kind of nod along with.
The Evolution of Marketing’s Value Proposition in the Post-Dot-Com Era
Andrew Mitrak: I know we could go a number of routes, but I want to kind of narrow in on the last 25 years or so to the post-dot-com era of marketing. Do you have thoughts on how the value proposition of marketing itself has changed over that era?
Ken Rufo: Yeah, I have two, I have two really, I think, strong thoughts on this. And one of them will be a hot take and the other one will be, I think, really conventional. I think the first thing is we’ve gotten better and better and better at targeting. And we’ve realized that it’s not just enough to target a person, you have to target a time. Right? So like there has been a general switch from kind of like segment-based or audience-based marketing towards finding the moments in which the touchpoints actually matter, right? And the easy way to think about this is that in any act of marketing for it to be compelling, I need both my interest in the thing to be present and my attention to be available.
So I can have the most amazingly catered, like audience of 10 people type message, you know, like really granular messaging, but if I’m not paying attention, and it’s not the right time for me to make a purchase, it doesn’t matter. Or at least it doesn’t matter in any kind of timeframe in which I could attribute conversion, right?
So that has been really amazing. There is a downside to that. This is not the hot take, but the downside of that is that the more you target a smaller window, like you went from like broad message to a group of people to a person to a moment in that person’s life, the harder it is to fit a lot of information in. There’s a kind of compression paradox where if I’m just targeting you with the right display ad at the right time or the right search ad with the right time, it’s a smaller target and if I nail it, I just can’t fit that much information density into that package. And so that is a little bit of an issue. So I think that’s one of the things that’s really cool about what’s happened is that we’ve kind of understood this.
“Hot Take”: Has Marketing Cannibalized Itself?
Ken Rufo: The other thing, and this is more of the hot take, is that we have shot ourselves in the foot. I’ve never seen an industry self-cannibalize as successfully as marketing did when it went digital. Everyone was so excited to go digital. They were like, we’re going to we’re going to show you, like if we invest over here, we can AB test, look how B performs better than A and, you know, our CTR rate is like 100% higher, which often when people say like our CTR rate’s like 100% higher, what they mean is that there were five clicks before and now there’s 10 clicks out of a thousand. You know, now that that was in fact technically a 100% jump, but that’s not super compelling. I don’t know you can build a growth strategy off of like a five to 10 click-through rate, especially when that’s not even the conversion.
But the biggest issue is it’s not how persuasion works. The stuff that we measure in a digital world, the original value proposition is we can provide you with demonstrable and measurable results. But the reality is that’s not how persuasion works and the kinds of things that we measure don’t measure persuasion, they measure interaction.
Andrew Mitrak: Do you think it’s a result of marketing needing to justify its own existence? We want to prove the ROI of marketing and therefore we’ll kind of invent some metrics to prove ROI and therefore we’ll kind of obsess over those metrics and we need to get them better and better all the time. Is that kind of what’s behind it or if not, what would you attribute the cause to?
Ken Rufo: Okay, that’s actually a really fascinating question. I’m going to say there’s three. The first one is marketing is often considered a soft skill. So unlike technical skills or financial skills or whatever else, marketing is a soft skill. I say some slightly compelling things and we wordsmith, right? Wordsmith is typically used in a negative, oh, you’re wordsmithing, right? Or sometimes a positive when you want to hire somebody in to make something sound prettier or whatever.
But it’s considered a soft skill. So there’s a lot of folks in the especially in the tech world who like because they can solve computer challenges, kind of assume they can solve marketing challenges. Sometimes they’re right, sometimes that’s not accurate. I think same with CFOs, they tend to look at the CMO and they go, look, I can I can look at like we had X number of sellers, we hired X plus 10, you know, we got more revenue, see the sales team created revenue. How did you create revenue? Right? And the marketers are like, well, okay, I’m going to come up with an Excel document, it’s going to show you a bunch of stuff and we can attribute a lot of that to marketing.
And I think the problem here is that because it’s a soft skill, it’s not as trusted, right? And there’s a bias against soft skills by folks who are more technical or objectively inclined. But I think the other problem here is that at the end of the day, marketing measures the interaction that a company has with a customer prior to sale and occasionally if we’re talking about retention marketing subsequent to a sale, right? But it does not measure the act of persuasion. Like what’s happening inside the brain is still black box, right? It’s still like unknowable. So I think part of the problem here is that what marketing is measuring is just it’s not measuring the right things. And not because they’re not measurable, I don’t know.
The Challenge of Measuring Marketing’s True Impact
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that’s right. I guess every other department, most other departments at least, you know, sales, you have closed deals, you have revenue. Finance, you have profitability. If it’s a product or engineering thing, you could measure the rate at which things are delivered and customer service or other things you can measure tickets closed and things. And everybody needs OKRs or you know, some type of measuring and marketing needs to create them. Would you say that marketing, and I obviously we’re saying marketing like there’s a lot of companies out there, there’s different areas of marketing, but just by and large in broad strokes, do you think marketing has kind of come up with some of the wrong ones, and when do you think they started doing that?
Ken Rufo: Look at it this way, right? Like CTR is a great example of this. When a CRO goes to present the effectiveness of their sales team, they don’t ever say we AB tested a 46-minute pitch meeting versus a 48-minute pitch meeting. We looked at a blue background on slide four versus a teal background on slide four, right? And what we noticed was a 67% more like larger focus of eyeballs, right, on the slides. Like so no one else offers that level of granularity as a means to justify their existence or process, right? See, I think we can separate the value proposition of the existence of marketing from the processes of marketing. And I think we’ve tried to substitute measures for the process for measures of the value. Does that make sense?
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, for sure. I think like kind of up-leveling the message back to your original hot take of marketing shooting itself in the foot. And to paraphrase it, hopefully not too poorly, is that marketing kind of got obsessed with data science and that may not have actually been a good idea for it in the long term.
Ken Rufo: Yeah, I think some degree of data science is absolutely essential for contemporary marketing because you do want to know like, I think there’s a difference for example, between an ROAS measurement and an ROI measurement for marketing, right? And I think the latter of that is much trickier than the ROAS, right? Because within ROAS, I can look at like this ad versus that ad and I can say, well, this ad did perform better, right? But that doesn’t necessarily tell me that the idea to run ads period, was a good idea.
Right? And that’s the part that I’m saying is tricky. There is still a lot of assumption and a lot of theory that is implicit within most marketing campaign structures, right? Or messaging structures or brand structures or brand architectures, right? But I think marketing did get a little bit too oriented on the data science thing where they were like, look, like we can pull numbers now. We can run some Python scripts, we can use R. And everyone was very excited. And I’m not necessarily sure that worked out. I look, every company I work with, I won’t mention specifics. Almost every company I work with, when they get bought by private equity, the very first thing that gets cut is marketing. Which is weird because at the moment you’re purchased by private equity, you have an automatic marketing opportunity boost, right? Why do they cut it? Because they can’t prove on a spreadsheet that it actually has value.
Are we coming full circle back to Brand Equity?
Andrew Mitrak: You know, the thing is, actually, I think a lot of that is why brand equity started. If I kind of think of David Aaker and his work and the original Marketing Science Institute conference, it was in the era, it was in the 1980s, in the era of, you know, the Wall Street movie with Michael Douglas and private equity, corporate raiders. And all of a sudden, marketing needed to justify itself and say, hey, brand equity, equity, that talks to the private equity folks, right?
Ken Rufo: Yeah, exactly.
Andrew Mitrak: So it’s kind of funny that you’re bringing it up. We’ve almost kind of come full circle as far as what you’re experiencing there.
Ken Rufo: Yeah, and I do think that’s kind of like a weird moment that we’re in. I think we have reached a kind of weird full circle where we’ve gotten adept enough at targeting and measuring that now we’re looking for value in places that are not the metrics.
Is “Marketing Science” a Real Thing?
Andrew Mitrak: Do you think… this is going to be a loaded question here. I mentioned the Marketing Science Institute. I’ve spoken to folks from Ehrenberg-Bass, the Institute of Marketing Science. And I like a lot of their work. And also I mentioned how I worked with data scientists for marketing too.
And there’s this Peter Thiel quote, I know he’s a controversial figure, but sometimes he has spicy quotes. And he a quote that’s something to the effect of, “If ‘science’ has to come after the word it’s describing, then it’s not science.” Right? Like biology and physics, those are science. Political science, social science, those aren’t actually sciences. So do you think marketing science is actually a real thing?
Ken Rufo: Okay, so I mean, I should point out that etymologically, like biology, the logos that is “ology” in biology is the equivalent of science. Logos would have been like words, meaning, theory, structure, right? So like what we call science would have been that, right? Like scientia, the word that gave us science, right, is just the Latin version that we use. Okay, whatever.
But I understand his point. His point is, the more you have to say it, right, the more you say like, I’m very handsome, the less it’s probably true, right? So I do understand the basic point. And I don’t think he’s wrong about that. I think it’s more like, what is the purpose of science?
Andrew Mitrak: Maybe what’s also behind my question is that it seems like as far as marketing marketing itself and the value proposition of marketing itself, it wants authority and prestige and to be more tied to science. And it might even call itself “marketing science.” And that may lead you to kind of obsess over numbers like CTR. I’m wondering if that is a little bit of marketing, just putting a veneer of science on itself and is not as scientific as it might want you to think.
Ken Rufo: Okay, here’s the charitable read on this. I think there is a general desire in most sectors of business to prove that you have value, right? Like to prove that you’re producing really good stuff, right? And the reality is that marketing has a variety of core functions and many of those core functions are very difficult to measure, but it does not mean they aren’t true, right? It doesn’t mean there aren’t scientific ways of assessing them. It just means it’s very difficult to measure some of those things, right?
So, you know, for example, it’s very difficult because it’s functionally a counterfactual to say, would sales have sold as much if the landing hadn’t been softened by some really effective marketing stuff, right? If they hadn’t read some pre-materials or some good thought leadership or they didn’t have some ideas or vocabulary that was instilled in them by the marketing materials that they got or the account-based plan or whatever else, could sales have gone in and have, you know, a 40-minute conversation that resulted in a likely sale? Like could a seller pull that off?
And the answer is sometimes a seller is just very talented and they can pull that off like out of a vacuum, right? Like I’ve seen some sellers who are so compelling, I’m probably sure I could if they had asked for one of my kids eventually, I probably would have given it. They’re just they’re just they’re very smooth. I appreciate that. Some folks are just like that. Not all sellers are like that, right? And the question is, when you talk about an average seller with average marketing, is that more powerful than a good seller with no marketing or really amazing marketing with a bad seller? That combination is very, very difficult to measure, right?
We don’t have a lot of interoperability in the metrics that we use for marketing in a way that would make sense with the measures that we have for sales, right? We typically look at like we gave you a target, you hit your target, you had some tough accounts, you grew your accounts, etc, right? You had a certain number of calls, a certain number of meets, a certain number of deck deliveries, right, etc, right? There’s a variety of things that we can look at as sales metrics, but they don’t really work interoperably with our marketing metrics. So it’s a little bit harder to guess that that’s the case. And typically, although this isn’t always the case, revenue and marketing are split.
So there’s no reason why we would want them to be interoperable. They report separately. I think marketing wants very much to say, hey, look, we contributed to that. Like you wouldn’t have done as good of a job if we hadn’t been around. But that’s just a very difficult case to make conclusively.
Measuring Marketing’s Impact: B2C vs. B2B
Andrew Mitrak: Is there better data for it on the consumer side or the e-commerce side? For instance, most e-commerce websites are pretty much the same functionality at this point. The variance between a good seller and a bad seller on the B2B side versus a good e-commerce site—the gap has mostly narrowed. Sure, there were early leaders who were way better, but other people usually catch on pretty quickly and implement whatever the best practices are. So, is marketing’s impact just a little easier to measure on the consumer side or the e-commerce side?
Ken Rufo: Yeah, that’s a great call out. I tend to think about things from the business-to-business perspective.
Andrew Mitrak: Yes, same here.
Ken Rufo: In B2C, I think there are some differences because there is a more direct line between a marketing material and a conversion. So it’s a little bit easier to verify that some things resulted in a conversion. I still think there are a lot of attribution problems with this. I think there’s a lot of questions about whether or not incremental ads added to the conversion or if the conversion would have happened anyway. And that’s not a negative about marketing, I’m just saying that, let’s say I’m really interested in a product and I keep thinking about it. I see an ad and I go click on the ad because I’m already interested in the product.
There’s an interesting question about whether the ad generated interest, added interest, sustained interest, or just filled a gap until I was ready to make a purchase. Those are four different scenarios for what an ad can do, and you would measure all of them slightly differently. For example, maybe there was something in that ad that broke a moment of tension within my deliberation process, and I was like, that is the phone I want to buy. That is the upgrade phone I want to buy. I want to go with a Pixel instead of a Samsung this time. And maybe there was something in that ad that did that, but I might have already been interested in the Pixel before that. Maybe the ad got me interested in the Pixel in the first place. We can look at the fact that an ad interacted with a consumer and we can say, hey, that ad was part of the journey that they made, and they ultimately decided to make a purchase, so the ad gets attribution, it led to a conversion. My point is just that we don’t always know what its actual rhetorical or persuasive function was—whether it was strictly awareness, deliberation, what other thing was contained within that.
“Stories Bring Us Together, Arguments Set You Apart”
Andrew Mitrak: If marketing’s obsession with data science helped shoot itself in the foot, what’s your take on storytelling?
Ken Rufo: I don’t want to plug Manchester Street, which is my little entity, too much, but we do use a line that I like quite a bit, which is not mine originally. A very talented graphic designer named Nick Danielson used this line I think for the first time. Stories bring us together, but arguments set you apart. I think that when you’re thinking, especially in the B2B context where decision-making tends to be multiple people, it tends to be against very particular requirements, and sometimes sales can be more complicated, sometimes even elevated to complex in terms of the level of integrations. In those instances, storytelling is a great way to say, “I get you.” It’s not a great way to differentiate. The power of stories is precisely that it combines shared experience, but that does make it harder to stand out from the crowd.
So I like storytelling, as long as it’s in the service of well-thought-through and very persuasive argumentation. I think storytelling for the sake of storytelling is a fun exercise, but there are novels for that. So I think it’s not necessarily what I think of as being a marketing function. That being said, I think that storytelling is a great corporate function at a strategic comms level, as a kind of organizing principle for the culture of an entity or an organization. I think storytelling is really useful for that. It helps people see themselves as part of a larger project or value, and I think that’s really powerful. I just don’t think that a lot of people see... look, you own a cell phone.
Andrew Mitrak: I own a cell phone.
Ken Rufo: Alright. How many times have you seen a Google Pixel ad or an iPhone ad where they’re out and they’re camping and they take a picture of the stars and you’re like, I need to go camping with my phone to take a picture of the stars. In fact, I can’t go camping without an iPhone or without a Pixel or without whatever. You know what I mean? You kind of like the emotion, but that’s not how you would decide on a phone.
Andrew Mitrak: I think with the picture of the stars, I couldn’t say the specific ad you’re referring to, but I know the type of ad. Usually, the thing is you want to differentiate this year’s phone versus last year’s phone, right? And low light, that’s a difficult thing, and having a more powerful camera that’s better in low light, maybe telephoto, I don’t know, or the wide one. And it seems like a way of choosing a more extreme use case, which is a night photography use case, and which I think in a way is hopefully showing storytelling but also somehow weaving in some type of competitive differentiation, in that case, the camera.
Ken Rufo: Those ads don’t do that. I just disagree with the premise that those ads do that. I think if we go back to Apple ads like the “Think Different” campaign, I think that’s a much better example of tying an emotional value or aspiration to an argument. “It just works,” or “I saved the day,” Apple “Think Different”—I think that was a really compelling way to separate the idea that if you wanted a machine that you could muck around with, then sure, maybe Windows. But if you would like to just be creative and not be encumbered by the machine, you can Think Different and do that. I think that’s a much more compelling campaign. In that situation, it’s a great example of where the story serves the argument, rather than just being the emotion for the brand or the product.
Why It’s Time for CMOs to Embrace the Immeasurable
Andrew Mitrak: Coming back to data science and marketing, maybe having shot itself in the foot, and just to kind of tie the bow on that thought… What should be done about that? Or what should have been done differently about that?
Ken Rufo: Those are two probably different questions. I think what should have been done differently is just that we over-promised what was possible. And I think we over-promised what was possible in part because of the question that you asked at the very beginning, which is the split between the academic and the practical that we see oftentimes. I think that in practice, people just thought, oh my gosh, if we can show these numbers, we’re going to be able to prove that marketing has really good ROI. We know it works. We all kind of intuitively know marketing is useful.
And now we just thought, well if we have the metrics, we will be able to show this. But because the folks who were doing that were not folks who studied persuasion, rhetoric, psychology, other than as adjacent things that were useful to very specific acts, they weren’t really digging into the research and the theory that undergirded our understanding of those things. If they had at the time, they would have realized that the things we can measure don’t really assess whether or not the marketing was effective; they assess whether or not the marketing happened. And then we can do a post-hoc behavioral analysis, kind of like behavioral psychology, where we say, well, the result was more clicks, ergo, it must have been a more effective ad.
But that doesn’t explain the act of persuasion. It doesn’t tell us that the messaging was better for a reason. It tells us that we are making an assumption after the fact that the behavior suggests that B is better than A, not explaining why B is better than A. And I think that’s a bit of the problem originally.
In terms of what would fix it now, I think that marketers, CMOs, my preference would be that they just really stand up and say, look, a lot of what marketing does... marketing has some core functions: it makes you aware, it differentiates, and it educates on a point of view. I can measure awareness pretty easily, actually. I can measure whether or not my campaign made you more aware. Unaided brand recall, click-throughs, whatever, those are all actually pretty good measures of whether the ad effectively made you more aware. Search optimization, etc. In terms of, did it differentiate? That’s a little bit harder because we have to have a better understanding of whether or not the message actually resonated. And in terms of educating, what I mean by educating, I mean that I got you to think about things from my point of view.
That is very difficult to measure. Unless I can somehow measure whether or not your sentiment, if I look at the sentiment that’s being used, matches the verbiage that I want you to use, that’s really the only good measure for that. I think that CMOs should stand up and say, a lot of what we do isn’t super clearly measurable, but I’m convinced that there’s a vision and a strategy and a thought leadership and a coherent way to do this. In the same way that when we think about sales methodologies, and we think about, say, Challenger Sale versus solution selling versus impact selling, we’re picking a framework that we think is just going to be the most effective based on our experience and intuition and a degree of measurement, but it’s not entirely decided by measurement. Marketers should do the same thing.
A Collective Action Problem in Marketing Leadership
Andrew Mitrak: Do you think there’s a collective action problem among CMOs to do that and stand up and do that? If I’m the CMO—I’m not a CMO, but if I was at some big company and said, “I’m going to take this belief, things that are not measurable.” And then some executive, CFO, CEO, somebody who has influence over whether or not I have a job, says, “Yeah, but this guy over here from that company says they can measure it. I’m just going to go hire that person.” It’s like if one CMO does that, good for them, and maybe that works at a company, but there’s also a threat from others who might have bigger promises and then come in and do those promises, maybe not deliver on them, and then get another CMO job a few years later before people figure out it’s not working.
Ken Rufo: That’s a real risk, and you’re not wrong. But the average tenure of a CMO is, I think, still somewhere around 18 or 19 months.
Andrew Mitrak: Right.
Ken Rufo: So it’s not like the current system is highly stable. I think this is one of those things where we all got seduced by the siren song of digitalization. Digital transformation was promised in a variety of venues, first in operations and workflow and cloud practices and whatever else. And then we were pretty convinced that we could assign data to a lot of different things to improve operational practices. And sometimes that data just doesn’t measure what we think it’s trying to measure or even sometimes what it purports to measure. I think a lot of companies sold CMOs and sold CEOs on the idea that if we could just attach more digital data, if we had the right platforms in place, we could do some stuff.
By the way, there are some instances in which data is incredibly useful. I actually think that ABM programs are a great example. I think account-based marketing programs really benefit from data, although we should point out that most ABM programs look at completely different stats than our typical demand gen programs or even some of our brand programs. They look at completely different stats. I actually think those stats are often very, very useful in determining whether or not the ABM program is actually effective, along with conversion rates. And I also think that you should probably post-hoc interview sellers to talk about what the sales cycle was through.
One thing that I would love to capture more data on—because I’m not an anti-data person, I like it—is I would love to know what questions sellers get asked in an aggregate subsequent to a campaign structure. So a seller goes into a meeting, how many times does the language accord with what we had in our thought leadership? How many times do they ask the questions that we’re suggesting are important questions in our marketing materials, so that we’re controlling more of the conversation? How often does that happen? But again, that requires a degree of integration in that training process, which is difficult.
The Shifting Dynamics of Marketing Consultancy
Andrew Mitrak: So you’ve been in the marketing agency world and consultant world. Has it been close to 20 years for you doing that, or how long have you been doing marketing consulting?
Ken Rufo: I don’t know. I’m really old now, so it’s been a while. I’ve been doing this for at least a decade and a half. I could probably figure out the exact timeline.
Andrew Mitrak: How has that changed? How have the dynamics of running a consultancy changed over the time you’ve been in this profession?
Ken Rufo: You might actually be better at answering this just because of the range of people you’ve talked to. So I can really give very limited anecdotal assessments. But I think it’s changed in a couple of core ways. The first one is the absence of business travel now, the relative absence of business travel, is really large because it’s much easier to develop larger, integrated relationships with an entity that you’re doing consultation for—whether it’s marketing strategy or strategy all up—when you are physically present in the day-in and day-out of an office where people are also physically present.
There are all sorts of cross-pollinated... you know, people use “water cooler conversations,” but there are those things. You end up sitting down, you go out to drinks, whatever, and you end up getting some other tidbit that starts to factor into your analysis and assessment of what’s going on. And there is just a sort of magic to that as you learn more about the dynamics of an organization.
One thing that I learned really early on as an academic who was moving into this world is that every business makes a decision for a reason. Sometimes it’s terrible decision-making, sometimes the reasons are not good, but they are absolutely intentional. There’s never a random policy; it’s there for some reason. It might be counterproductive, might be a bad policy or whatever else. But if you don’t understand what those reasons are—and sometimes those reasons are just people politics—so, one of the things I think does impact your ability to do marketing strategy from afar is that you just don’t have as complete of a puzzle in the post-COVID, less-business-travel era. I don’t think that’s a ding against consultants; it’s just that you have to change some of your own workflow processes to adjust for that. In some ways, you need to schedule meetings with people that you make sure are diversified across their level of the organization.
We sometimes do these messaging workshops, and when we hold them, we want to make sure that the person who’s monitoring web traffic is in the same room as the person who’s setting the messaging strategy. Because I need to be able to say to that person, “Is that actually what the web traffic says?” and they go, “No.” And I go, “Okay, great.” Or sometimes we’ll do multiple workshops where we’ll do product in one group, marketing in one group, sales in one group, execs in one group, and then we’ll do a reconciliation group where we say, “Okay, so here’s a chart of how everyone disagreed. Who’s right? Like, why did product think X when marketing thought the opposite of X? Is it because marketing doesn’t understand product, or is it because product doesn’t understand the customer? Where’s the miscommunication there?” You have to adopt those sorts of processes now because you have such a partial window into an organization. So that’s one thing.
The Value of Marketing Consulting in a World of AI
Ken Rufo: I think the other thing is just that there’s a lot more scrutiny right now on whether or not the consulting dollars pay off. And some of that is because of some, let’s say, high-profile examples of getting paid to change the name of a streaming service and then getting paid because that didn’t work out to change it again, and to eventually get paid to change it back to what it was before you got paid. And I’m not calling anyone out on this, particularly.
Andrew Mitrak: Well, it’s got to be HBO to Max, HBO... all that. They themselves are pretty cheeky about it. I don’t know about the background stuff on that.
Ken Rufo: The same entity was billed, let’s just say, billed for all of those.
Andrew Mitrak: That’s funny.
Ken Rufo: But I do think there’s a little bit more scrutiny because there have been some high-profile mess-ups for consultancies. But the other thing, by the way, is just AI. Like, I can hop on to some of the better AI programs and I can say, hey, give me the Forrester read on what this would be. Here’s a paper on how Forrester assigns its quadrants, what would we have to do to be considered in this quadrant? Here’s what Gartner says, what would we need to do to be part of this thing? And I think the pressure to have a person be smarter than the aggregate of the data of an organization that can now be parsed by AI is just really high. You just need some really innovative stuff. And I think, weirdly enough, this is actually where the academic part comes full circle, because now what we need is not aggregate levels of practice. Like, “I have so much experience, I can tell you what to do,” because so can all the things that cataloged evidence of your experience. What I really need is your way of seeing, and that’s theory.
The Consultant as an “Insurance Policy”
Andrew Mitrak: One question I have just about where marketing consultants fit in is that... I’m going to say something provocative and you can shoot it down, okay?
Ken Rufo: Yeah.
Andrew Mitrak: Do consultants partly exist so the decision-maker at the company doesn’t get fired? That if I’m a marketer and I have an intuition about a thing, let me hire a marketing consultant to do things, and you say to do this thing that I was kind of wanting to do, and then it doesn’t go well, I’m like, “Oh, that consultant.” At least I get to keep my job, but I’ll fire the consultant. Are they partly an insurance policy?
Ken Rufo: Oh yeah. Yeah. There have definitely been... I think in two ways. Sometimes you’re just there to resolve an internal political dispute. Like one person says A, some other entity says B, and your job is to come in and be like, “I think A is probably the more reasonable thing.” And they go, “Aha!” But typically, it’s A that paid you. And I’m not saying that’s because you are biased in your thinking because A paid you; you’re biased because typically the reason why A decided to bring in a consultant is because they were pretty confident they were right anyway, and they just didn’t want to keep spending political capital to convince someone when they could just have a third party do it. But the other reason is, you’re absolutely right, we are fireable. And so when we mess something up or whatever else, it absolutely can just be because the consultant’s an idiot.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, and this kind of comes back to the AI thing. If I’m the marketer and I’m having some political dispute or whatever, I can ask the AI and we can both ask it and then see if it supports our opinion and say we’re right. Or we can go to the consultant and do it. If I choose AI and I make a bad decision and I get fired for it, that’s my fault. They’re like, “Hey, you shouldn’t have trusted the AI, you should have done something different.”
If I hire a consultant, you kind of get the insurance policy benefit, right? I can fire the consultant. So it’s like the AI in some ways for consulting isn’t as much of a threat.
Ken Rufo: Yeah, there is that.
The Value of Consultants: Breaking the “Inside-Out” Perspective
Ken Rufo: I think the other way to think about it, which is the more useful and charitable part, is that there are two things that consultants typically bring to the table. The first one is, because we work with a variety of companies, we have a variety of lateral experiences that we can draw from. A lot of times, the really good new twist in marketing is simply an idea from an adjacent industry that one industry wouldn’t have thought of, but the other industry needed to think of. And when you put them in juxtaposition, it suddenly makes a lot of sense. So someone who’s worked across a lot of industries is very useful.
There’s an idea, both John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen talked about this in different ways. One called it “trained incapacity,” one called it “occupational psychosis.” But it’s the basic idea that the more you work in a particular space, the harder it is to see the outside point of view. This is the cop where every boyfriend that comes home with the daughter is probably a criminal. It’s that kind of idea. Or in marketing, we refer to it as the problem of the “inside-out perspective.”
I’ll give you a great example of this. I was working with a company where we’re in a meeting and the head of product goes, “No other company does the following things.” And he lists this thing that their product did really well. And he’s like, “Nobody else does that.” And I said, “Well, that’s just not true,” because we always do a lot of really heavy compete analysis. And I said, “That’s not true. These entities all claim to do that exact thing.” And he goes, “Really?” And I go, “Yeah.” And he goes, “Well, we do it better than they do.” And I was like, “Okay, come on. You can’t say that’s true. You didn’t know they did it a second ago. You can’t now say that you have an assessment comparatively of your value relative to theirs. You were unaware they did it.” But that’s what I mean. Sometimes just having somebody who can come in and be like, “Dude...” is a way to break that inside-out glass and force them to think about things from outside. So I think that’s a real value that consultants can provide.
Andrew Mitrak: I really enjoy this conversation, Ken. Something I like about you is that part of your offering is debating to get to the truth and also you kind of not that this is a debate per se. And it was a little more back and forth than usual on this podcast, and it’s something that I think brought a liveliness to the conversation.
Ken Rufo: I will tell you, from an argument perspective, when I think about storytelling serving argument, there’s a concept called agonism. It’s where we get the idea of agony or struggle. Antagonism is typically when you are opposed to something, but sometimes you just struggle. And there’s this idea that when you put multiple ideas against each other for the purpose of letting them struggle, you emerge with a better idea. There’s actually good research on this.
There was a great example, there was a study out of UC Davis, I think maybe about 12, 13 years ago. And what they did was they looked at... they basically assigned some students to do a thing. They said, “Come up with these ideas.” They assigned to one group no instructions. Another group they gave brainstorming instructions that are very similar to what you might see in an early design thinking workshop. And then they said, “And you guys argue about it.” What was interesting about it was not only did the argument group come up with more ideas that were more advanced in the sense that they were actually useful, they had been thought through a little bit, than the even the brainstorming design thinking group, but when they then called everybody back two weeks later, a lot of those same participants were still actively thinking of ideas in a way that the other groups were not.
So I just tend to think that especially in marketing, you are talking about a battle of ideas. So preemptively have that battle. There’s lots of stuff that I’m probably wrong about. My kids tell me I’m wrong about a lot of things, but I’m always open to a better argument.
Andrew Mitrak: There’s a great book on this. A previous podcast guest was Ian Leslie; he wrote this great book about John and Paul, but he also wrote this book that was called “How to Disagree.“
Ken Rufo: I’ve not read it, but it sounds great.
Andrew Mitrak: It was a good one. You might dig it. And I just plugged somebody else’s book, sorry about that. But if listeners have enjoyed this conversation, want to learn more about you and your work, are there places where you’d recommend they follow you online or any links you’d like to plug there?
Ken Rufo: Look, I’m on LinkedIn. I have a LinkedIn profile, kind of. Manchesterstreet.com is the name of the agency, you can go check out the website.
But the reality is, honestly, I think LinkedIn is such a diminishing return right now that I don’t really post on it anymore. We are looking at doing two things that I will, I guess, preemptively plug. Manchester Academy is probably going to start by the end of the year. This is going to be a kind of online course system that looks at some things like, what does the research say is the most effective way to run a meeting when you’re trying to get buy-in from execs who are a level higher than you? It’s going to be stuff like that. Or what’s the correct way to run a strength-weaknesses analysis that isn’t reductive to a SWOT analysis? Is there a way to do that at a marketing level that’s more important? So we’re going to be having those sorts of courses.
And then we’re also looking at starting up a Substack that I think is going to be a more kind of heavy, just like, hey... because when we have conversations with clients and I say, “Well, one theory is this,” and I’ll cite something, they’ll be like, “Oh my gosh, I wish I had known about that.” And I don’t scale well. I can’t have that conversation an infinite number of times. But there’s been a request that we just start to put some of the theory discussions as well as some practical examples in some sort of a newsletter. So that’s probably something that we’re going to start up again by end of year. But if anyone wants to talk about stuff, just look me up. I’m super happy to have conversations about stuff. And if you think I’m wrong, absolutely tell me I’m wrong. Understand, I have no allegiance to any of the arguments that I’m saying. I think they’re right. But if you convince me they’re wrong, it doesn’t hurt my feelings. I want to be better. So if someone listens to this and is just very irate, breathe, and then reach out and send me an email.
Andrew Mitrak: Ken, thanks so much for your time. I really enjoyed this conversation.
Ken Rufo: Absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.
