A History of Marketing / Episode 30
What if core concepts like the USP, ad recall, and the sales funnel aren't timeless truths, but just ideas that happened to catch on? What if even the people who invented and promoted these ideas didn’t always follow their own advice?
This week, I’m joined by Paul Feldwick, a career ad man who has spent the last two decades analyzing his industry through a historical lens. Feldwick traces where the “eternal truths” of advertising came from to see if they hold up to scrutiny. He also argues that in its quest for respectability, advertising has forgotten its roots in showmanship and entertainment, often to its own detriment.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube Podcasts
In this episode, you will learn:
Why many of advertising’s foundational “truths” are built on shaky ground.
How P.T. Barnum and the concept of "humbug" are central to understanding brands.
The difference between “mental availability” and true “fame.”
Why brands are built less like cathedrals and more like a bird’s nests.
Listen to the full episode to hear Paul’s fascinating take on the history of advertising, the problem with “purpose” in branding, and why Pixar may teach us more about marketing than most textbooks.
Paul Feldwick's books discussed in this episode:
The Anatomy of Humbug: How to Think Differently About Advertising
Why Does the Pedlar Sing?: What Creativity Really Means in Advertising
Note: A special thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, who volunteers to review and edit transcripts for accuracy and clarity.
How Advertising History Informed an Ad Man’s Career
Andrew Mitrak: Paul Feldwick, welcome to A History of Marketing.
Paul Feldwick: Thank you.
Andrew Mitrak: You've spent most of your career in advertising and then the last decade or two writing about advertising through a historical lens. Were you always interested in this history angle of advertising, or did that come later for you?
Paul Feldwick: I don't think I always was. I think when I came into the advertising business—and that was back in 1974, just to put it into some kind of context—I think for the first 10 or 15 years or so, I just kind of absorbed everything that was going on as if it was like eternal truths because that's what I think you tend to do at that age. All the things that were taken for granted, I just assumed, "This is how it is, and it couldn't be any other way."
Paul Feldwick: I can probably point to one particular book that was a sort of real eye-opener for me that started me questioning all of that. And that was when I picked up a copy of Martin Mayer's book, Madison Avenue, U.S.A., which was a journalistic study of advertising in America written and published in, I think, 1955. When I got it, this was probably about 1985 or something like that. So this book was now 30 years old, which still seemed like sort of ancient history, given that most people in advertising weren't very interested in history or thought even five years ago was a long time ago.
And as I read it, I just found all these light bulbs really going off in my head because I suddenly realized that all these concepts that I've kind of taken for granted as being, as I say, some kind of eternal truths, were in fact just ideas that particular people had had at particular points in time, and that had just happened to catch on because they were simple, or because they became popular, or because somebody had advocated them in a particularly effective way.
Deconstructing Advertising's Foundational Myths
Paul Feldwick: So, I began to realize that the whole thing about the Unique Selling Proposition was completely invented by a guy called Rosser Reeves. Or that advertising recall had been invented by a guy called George Gallup. And what's more, the more I kind of… that was when I started to put these things, I think, into a different perspective. And then the more I looked at them and the more I reflected on it and read a bit more about it, it became clear to me that not only were these things sort of contingent and specific in time, but that almost without exception, they had no real solid foundation in terms of science or empirical testing, or even any kind of coherent theory. They were just kind of ideas that people had come up with and gone, "Hey, how if we did it like this?" And then they'd just caught on as fashion does.
So suddenly, advertising recall was easy to measure, and suddenly everybody wanted to measure it because everybody wanted a number that was bigger than the other guy's number. And nobody was stopping to say, "Does this number… what does this number really mean? Does it actually mean anything?" Or, "Why do we believe that every ad has to have a proposition?" And then that sort of led me back into, "Where did that come from originally?" And I realized that both Reeves and David Ogilvy were huge fans of this guy called Claude Hopkins, who again, none of my contemporaries claimed to have even heard of, who wrote his book back in the 1920s. So I kind of dug back into that and thought, "Well, what did Hopkins have to say?" And I found this is fascinating that Hopkins has a view of advertising and how it should be done, which is completely different from what I'm doing right here, right now in the 1980s. And yet, he seems to have been a huge influence on some very important people. So how do I reconcile these things together?
So that kind of led me into just understanding that you cannot really understand where you are now, let alone where you might be going in the future, unless you understand something about where all this stuff came from and how you got there. And then you are in a position to be critical of it. You don't have to be critical in the sense of saying, "Well, it's all rubbish"—although occasionally it's quite close to being rubbish. But you get to a point where you can say, "Well, this is a useful concept for this kind of situation, and I can see why it became popular, but actually it doesn't explain this kind of situation, and yet we're kind of acting as if it did." So that was how I got started, I guess. That was where the historical perspective came in. And it was by no means a case of, "Oh, isn't the history sort of quite interesting?" although it was interesting. The real fascination for it was it began to explain something about why we're doing what we're doing right now and put me in a position where I felt that we could take a more intelligent, critical attitude towards that. And that, I think, has sort of drove me ever since in terms of why I continued to find advertising fascinating over the following decades.
Andrew Mitrak: So much of that also rings true for my own interest in marketing history. This idea of the way that I do my job and live my life and my whole organization, team, and industry is structured around things like a funnel. And who invented this funnel? Where did this come from? There is no funnel, it's just somebody's idea that caught on at some point. It's a useful way of thinking about things sometimes, and yet you can also get completely obsessed by it.
Applying Historical Lessons to Modern Advertising
Andrew Mitrak: As you were discovering Madison Avenue, U.S.A. and historical elements to advertising and looking towards the past, you were five to 10 years or so into your career. Did you discover things that made you think, "I wish I had found this sooner," or did it change the way that you yourself advertised or worked with clients or worked with others within your agency? How did it sort of inform your own practice?
Paul Feldwick: It's a more complicated question to answer. I think it took a long time for me to fully process it, let me put it that way. Because of course, I was working in the world as it existed. So while I was beginning to become more questioning… there were always things that we questioned. I was working in an advertising agency, Boase Massimi Pollitt (BMP), back in the '70s and '80s. We were known as a very creative agency, and that, as you know, is a highly charged word which we might come back to later. But what we meant by creative was we did advertising that was, for the most part, very entertaining and therefore very popular, and therefore very successful.
And we kind of quite profoundly believed that that was the best thing to do. And yet, there was a big disconnect between that approach and almost everything that you read in the sort of accepted texts about how you did advertising, which was all Rosser Reeves, Unique Selling Proposition, and Ogilvy saying, "Don't sing your sales message, selling is a serious business," and going back to Claude Hopkins saying, "Nobody ever bought from a clown." So there was always this real tension between what we were doing, what we knew to be effective or believed to be effective, and having to continually sort of push that against a sort of tide that came very often via our clients that somehow that was not what advertising was about. That advertising was about selling and giving people facts and giving people information and persuading them why this product was better than another in a very rational way. And this was the ongoing context in which I was trying to make sense of these things.
And I guess it took me a long time to really put all that together in a coherent sort of way. And I guess the reason that I wrote the books was ultimately to sort of satisfy myself about how to make sense of that. And so I fully made sense of it, I think, only after I'd left the agency and maybe had a bit more not just time to reflect, but also a bit more perspective where I could look back on what I'd done.
Advertising as science vs. salesmanship vs. show business
Andrew Mitrak: Two books that I read to prep for this interview that you're mentioning, there was The Anatomy of Humbug and then there's Why Does the Pedlar Sing? And for listeners of this podcast, they're both excellent. They're enjoyable reads; they're actually relatively short, but they're very dense in that they pack a lot, but also it doesn't feel like homework. It's a really fun, enjoyable, but also full of strategy. And so we're going to talk about both of them. There's the science element and the advertising as salesmanship element, but then there's more of like advertising as show biz.
Paul Feldwick: Right from about 1900 onwards, advertising agencies were so keen to show that advertising was a respectable profession. And they wanted to distance themselves totally from the sort of the very earliest generation of brands and advertising, which was very much, you know, the traveling medicine show, the P. T. Barnum-type presentation. And they literally wanted to disown all that. In 1910, you've got the trade magazine Printers' Ink refusing to celebrate the centenary of Barnum's birth because they said he stood for everything that was sort of vulgar and disreputable and appealed to the lowest instincts of the public and all this sort of stuff. They absolutely hate Barnum.
And no, instead, from that point on, the advertising industry wants to present itself as professional. They literally want to be taken seriously like doctors or lawyers. So, the last thing they want to do—and this is the Catch-22 in it all—is that if you do start from a point of view of saying, "Actually, advertising has a great deal in common with entertainment," then some clients are going to put two and two together and start saying, "Well, why the hell don't we just hire some entertainers then?" Which in many cases would be a very clever thing to do, and in some cases has indeed been done and has been a very clever thing to do.
You look at the history of advertising—and this isn't in the book, by the way, it might be in the next book if there ever is another book, which I'm not sure there will be—but if you look at the history of advertising in the 20th century, you'll find people like George Lois, very famous names, and you look at what ads they actually did, and you find, well actually, they didn't do very many actual ads at all. They did some other clever stuff, and they were great at selling themselves, but they didn't do great ads.
Then you can look at another character who's not mentioned in any of the advertising histories: Stan Freberg, who is a very famous, very funny entertainer and comedian in the mid-20th century, in the '50s and '60s. Stan Freberg wrote loads of ads. He was a great friend of Howard Gossage, who got him some of the gigs. And Freberg would be brought in by agencies like BBDO when they were absolutely stuck. But it was always a really difficult relationship because Freberg wanted to do this wild and crazy stuff which was usually incredibly successful and very entertaining. And a lot of it still stands up today. A lot of it's actually, by modern standards, rather politically incorrect today, but that just shows how times have changed. But also how sort of irreverent Freberg was. He was taking the mickey out of things. But nobody talks about Freberg in the history of advertising. It's like there's this sort of unspoken turf battle that I think has always been going on, which is advertising can only be done by these people who are advertising creatives, advertising experts. And if we allow any of these entertainers in, it's got to be entirely on our own terms so that we can control them.
And that's not the only way of doing it. A lot of great advertising has been done by people who work in agencies who just happen to think like entertainers, like the great Tom Webster, who I used to work with. But I think the advertising industry, to some extent, has dug itself into that hole by insisting that what we do in advertising is different from entertainment. And actually, it's a lot more like entertainment than they are prepared to admit.
Did Claude Hopkins Follow the Advice of “Scientific Advertising”?
Andrew Mitrak: That's a really interesting idea. I hope you do write that book; I'd read it. The idea that a lot of the most well-known advertising people of the 20th century didn't even write that many ads, or also that they didn't always follow their own advice. The ads that Claude Hopkins' agency ran, sure, they did a lot of direct response ads like what he wrote, but they also did other types of ads that probably broke a lot of his rules. And I'm sure the same goes for Ogilvy and so on.
Paul Feldwick: That's true. I mean, I make the point in The Anatomy of Humbug. Hopkins is a fascinating character because he wrote his book Scientific Advertising, and it's partly written because he knows what his clients want to hear. And he's saying, "It's all about, don't be frivolous, nobody ever bought from a clown, the more you tell, the more you sell, give lots of facts about the product." And in a lot of contexts, this works really well, and he knew how to make it work really well.
But then if you read his own autobiography about other things that he did, he could work in a completely different mode. He was hired to promote a brand of suet for making cakes. And instead of doing adverts at all, he got a baker to make the biggest cake in the world and put it in the shop window of the biggest department store in Chicago. And the police had to be called to control the crowds, and it got on the front page of the newspaper. I mean, it was pure Barnum. Pure Barnum stunt. So, Hopkins had more than one string to his bow. He understood the show business aspect just as well as he understood... and it's not that one's right and one's wrong. They're both things that can be done well or can be done badly, and they're both things that can achieve results.
But probably, particularly as the 20th century moved on, and as media moved more and more beyond simple text to photography and color printing, and then into radio, and then into television, and then into color television, and now, of course, into the internet and TikTok and whatever else, I think it's progressively moved further and further away from the dominance of text-based, rational facts. There's still plenty of place for those, but it's progressively moved more and more into what advertising does.
And this is where the work of Byron Sharp and The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute I think is hugely important and relevant. It is ultimately probably about creating mental availability as much as anything else. And that is very powerfully done through using entertainment.
What is “The Anatomy of Humbug”?
Andrew Mitrak: Let's talk about The Anatomy of Humbug. I suppose for listeners, we should probably define what "humbug" is, because it may not be obvious. It's a book where you almost get to the 10th chapter before you're like, "Oh, I actually get the title now." It comes from P. T. Barnum, this figure that the ad industry has sort of distanced itself from. Can you share why you think it starts with P. T. Barnum, and "humbug" is the word that you sort of anchored to?
Paul Feldwick: You were interested in how I chose the titles of my books, I think. When I had the idea of calling this, after I'd finished writing the book, "humbug" sort of emerged towards the end of the process, actually. That's why it doesn't really come in until the end. I decided to call it The Anatomy of Humbug because I just thought it had a ring to it, and also there was something subversive about it. The idea that advertising should be considered as "humbug"... there's something sort of disrespectful about that, that's really going to annoy an awful lot of people who work in advertising who just take it all too bloody seriously. You know, "Oh, we're not humbug, we're..." this whole thing about advertising.
And in fact, a number of people who I respected a great deal sort of gently, or not so gently, tried to persuade me not to use that title. Jeremy Bullmore said, "Oh, I'm not sure I would use that title." Paddy Barwise, professor at the London Business School who was very kind about the book, said, "One thing I think you really shouldn't do is use that title." So this made me actually more and more inclined to use it, because I thought, "Well, I quite like to be controversial."
"Humbug," essentially, is a rude word. You remember probably the most famous example of its use, which goes back to the early 19th century, is in Dickens's A Christmas Carol.
Andrew Mitrak: That's the only use that I was familiar with. Prior to reading this book, I had only heard it from Scrooge.
Paul Feldwick: You need to put that into context to understand what it means. Scrooge is being asked for a charitable donation because it's Christmas time. And Scrooge says, "Christmas! Bah! Humbug!" I think at that time, it means "nonsense," it means it's some kind of a cheat or a fraud. I think you have to understand that at that time, the word "humbug" probably had the same sort of power that a word like "bulls**t" would have today. It's a rude word. Scrooge is being memorably dismissive of the whole thing about Christmas. He's saying, "Christmas? Bulls**t!"
And the same word was... now if you've seen The Greatest Showman, which is a very unhistorical movie about Barnum, but it does get this sort of quite close to right, Barnum had a lot of critics, and one of his sort of arch-enemies described him as a "humbug." And that was meant to be damningly rude in the same way that Scrooge was being damningly rude. But Barnum, of course, being Barnum, saw how he could take this, turn this to his advantage straight away. So Barnum said, "I am not just a humbug." He said, "I am the Prince of Humbugs." And he gloried in this word "humbug."
He then went on at some length and wrote a lot about what he believed "humbug" really was. And he quite cleverly defined it in a way that sort of meant, "Yes, of course, it's nonsense. Of course, it's not literally true. Of course, there's an element of make-believe about it all, but it's not actually deceit because I'm not trying to fool people, I'm not trying to trick people." And he says, "Humbug is about putting on a show. It's about attracting the crowds. It's about giving people, promising people whatever they want, but then make sure they get value for money."
So it was in that spirit that he tried to reclaim the word "humbug." And he used it and sort of gloried in it all his career. And it was when I read more about Barnum and I started to think about how Barnum, who had been so disowned by the advertising industry, was in fact, in many ways, where so much of what not just advertising, but the whole phenomenon of brands as we know them, derives from the activities of Barnum, that I started thinking, "Actually, in the same way that Barnum did, I can be a bit provocative here by using this word 'humbug.'"
And saying, "We argue about, is advertising science? Well, up to a point. Is advertising art? Well, that doesn't quite sound right either because 'art' sounds far too grand. But maybe advertising is best thought of as humbug, in the sense that Barnum used it." There's a wonderful book called Fables of Abundance. By Jackson Lears, who's a sociologist, historical sociologist, who's written a wonderful book about advertising called Fables of Abundance. And his whole story here is about how this sort of original carnival world of Barnum became disowned by the advertising business. And he totally backs up everything I've been saying from that point of view. He's not the only one.
So that was how I got it. And I have no regrets about choosing that because I think it's passed into the language a bit and probably, I think, shaken things up a bit, which is what my intention was.
Six Models of How Advertising Works
Andrew Mitrak: So Humbug, the book, is not just about “humbug.” It does actually cover a lot of the historical thinking around strategy in advertising as well, and sort of different modes of thinking about how advertising works. I think you map out six of them. There's Salesmanship, Seduction, Salience, Social Connection, Spin, and Showbiz. So they all start with "S," and Showbiz is the one that's probably the most reflective of humbug.
Paul Feldwick: That's right. And I mean, I wouldn't sort of... I don't really disagree with anything I wrote in that book now, but I think my thinking sort of continued to build on that. Some of those strands now seem to me perhaps more important than others, although I think they are all important in their way. But I had to tell this story because it really seemed to me this story had never been told before. And I think at the time I produced the book, that was true. Paddy Barwise, who wrote a nice review of it, and he, as professor of advertising at the London Business School, so he knew a bit about it, said he'd never heard this story told before in quite such a clear way.
And I think it was the whole area of things that people would not dare to talk about somehow, these contradictions that were not acknowledged, so just surfaced all the time as continual arguments within agencies or between agencies and clients. So often in an agency, you'll be sitting around a table and the client is saying, "Well, we've got to have these three product points in the ad." And the creatives are saying, "No, you don't want any of that. You just want this picture of a purple elephant on a bicycle." And they're kind of talking about completely different things, and they're never going to resolve that or make any sense of that unless they realize that they're both talking about just completely different theories about how the advertising is supposed to work. And it's not necessarily that one is right and one is wrong, but you know, they're both techniques that you can use to try and achieve your goals. And it's a question of which is more appropriate in the circumstances.
Andrew Mitrak: The thing that you... the analogy you use is that it's a six-sided die, or you even use this analogy of a Rubik's Cube, that they're sort of interlinked with each other and they can have sort of different makeups. But on the one hand, it seems like if you kind of go purely trust the creatives, that's a pretty high-risk scenario, right? Like they might get it totally wrong or choose the wrong celebrity endorsement or entertainer that just is a miss. And then on the other hand, if it's over-engineered and overthinking, it's too sterile and it's just too bland. And then if it's a mix of both, there's also risk with that too if it kind of strikes the wrong tone or it feels like, you know, sort of the... a camel is a horse designed by a committee kind of thing. And it's funny, like how do you... how do you sort of think of these as fitting together? Okay, there's all these things exist. Now what do I do about that?
Paul Feldwick: It's a subtle one because I think to some extent, I mean, I came up with these six things. And as I said at the time, there could probably be more than six if you thought hard enough about it, but six gives you a nice sort of visual image that you can hold on to, which is always slightly dangerous because it makes you think there's some sort of objective reality here which is more solid than it ought to be considered to be. But a number of these things, they do overlap quite a lot. So in The Anatomy of Humbug, I talk a lot about the idea of seduction because at the time, the debates at the time were largely around the notion of subconscious seduction versus rational persuasion. And that's still, I think, a valid and interesting way of thinking about it. But then there's also, you can make it simpler than that and simply say it's about salience and top-of-mindness and mental availability, which has now become a more dominant theory. And perhaps we're sort of tending to forget about the seduction theory as well.
Why Creative Advertising Must Please the Public
Paul Feldwick: What do you do about it in practice? That's complicated too, because you say, "Should you just trust the creatives?" Well, again, that depends, because it depends what the creatives are trying to do. And the other big issue, which I explore at much greater depth in Why Does the Pedlar Sing?, is that within the last few decades, I fear it's becoming increasingly the case that creative people in advertising agencies are no longer focused on producing stuff that pleases the public, but are producing stuff that pleases each other and which wins them, therefore, creative awards or appeals to some sort of higher-order concept like "purpose," which is controversial, to say the least. And whenever it loses sight of, "We are trying to be popular and famous and please the public," there is danger that we are producing something that is irrelevant.
So, I came from an advertising agency background where what pleased the public was central to what we did. And that was true in a very practical sense because we continually did qualitative research amongst our target audiences. And every TV campaign that we did, we would research amongst focus groups of target audience in animatic format, which was as close to the finished film as we could get. And we learned a tremendous amount from that. And what you learned from that continually was it doesn't matter who likes it, whether the client loves it or the creative director loves it or what anybody in the agency or anywhere else thinks about it. The only thing that matters is if you show it to a bunch of ordinary people and if they all look blank and say, "I don't understand what that's all about," then it's failed. And sometimes you can solve that by just changing things around a bit, and sometimes, frankly, it's best to just kind of say, "Okay, we're barking up the wrong tree, we'll do something else."
But unless what you're doing is anchored in trying to produce work that is genuinely popular. This is why, again, the world of show business, the world of entertainment is such a good sort of parallel for advertising because on the whole, nobody pretends that it's a successful piece of entertainment if nobody likes it. I mean, it may only appeal to a small group of people. Some things are more popular than others. Some things appeal to a small group of, you know, an elite middle-class group, others are more popular. But on the whole, if you want to be Taylor Swift or you want to produce Friends or The Simpsons or a Pixar movie, there's not much messing about. Its success is measured by the number of people who enjoy it and want to be part of it. And that is part of what constitutes its fame, although the fame also is part of what constitutes the enjoyment. So those two things go together.
And that's exactly the same thing with brands and with advertising and the marketing of brands, I think. So, the more any agency loses touch with that and sort of privileges, "Oh, this is a great ad," even though none of the public are clever enough to appreciate it, that's pretty much of a nonsense in my book. And that's where I feel a lot of the problems have crept in.
Fame and Popularity: The True North Star of Marketing?
Andrew Mitrak: Following up, you're talking about this idea of fame and popularity, and this is a big theme throughout Why Does the Pedlar Sing? You talk about some of the sort of behavioral science and scientific background to it. You talked about Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, and they call this "mental availability." Daniel Kahneman calls it the "availability heuristic." Robert Cialdini, who I interviewed on this podcast, he calls it "social proof." And then Jeremy Bullmore, he says, "We value the famous far more highly than the little known."
It almost seems sort of obvious in a way, but also something that... like at a marketing department, I never say like, "Let's just make our product famous." We always try to say, "Oh, we'll generate this many leads and impressions and measurements and conversions," and we talk about other things and don't just simplify it to fame. And it strikes me, is that something that folks in marketing and advertising should be doing more often? Is just saying, "Hey, let's simplify these complex theories and just have fame and popularity be our North Star?"
Paul Feldwick: Well, fame is hugely important. I mean, I think it is, as Jeremy said... I mean, Jeremy was one of my great role models in the advertising world, sadly no longer with us, but whatever I've said, I've usually found that Jeremy said it 20 years earlier than I did and in far fewer words. But he did say that thing about, "All that brands have in common is a kind of fame." And I use that in the book because I think he's absolutely right.
But apart from that, it's actually quite rare to find people in advertising talking about fame. I mean, I've looked through all my advertising textbooks and looked up "fame" in the index. You don't see the word "fame." And I think it's, again, a bit like Barnum, it's a slightly suspect word. It's a bit cheap, it's a bit vulgar. What is interesting to me, one point I'd like to just stress while we're on this, is I think mental availability and fame are concepts that go very closely together, but there's a crucial difference between them. Because mental availability, as Byron Sharp defines it, I think is a useful concept, but essentially, it's talking about something that goes on in an individual's head. It's a psychological concept. You measure it by saying, "My mental availability..." it's what is top of mind in my mind.
Whereas fame, I think, is primarily actually a social concept. It's what's happening in society at large. Now, part of that is everybody will have a lot more mental availability because this thing is famous, but what keeps it there is the fact that we are sharing it. It's a socially constructed thing. We all have common knowledge. Not just that I know about this and you know about this, but I know that you know about this. That's common knowledge. That's really important. And also that we are in all sorts of ways jointly involved in engaging with this. So we'll talk about this, we'll argue about this. Controversy is good, Barnum knew that. We might be wearing this, we'll have the logo on our t-shirt, we'll have the Apple logo on the back of our MacBook so that when we're sitting in the coffee shop, everyone can see that it's that. We've got the white earphones, which everybody still knows who makes them. All these things are really important. They're the social aspect of what creates fame. And that for me is what makes fame as a concept sort of substantively different.
And again, if you look back at the whole history of the sort of practitioner theories of advertising, I think overwhelmingly from about 1900 onward, they have tended to be based around an assumption that it is a one-to-one communication. That here is the advertiser who is communicating with the prospect who is reading the ad or listening to the ad and then is being asked, "Do you remember the ad?" And it's all one-to-one. And actually, successful advertising campaigns do so much more than that. They don't just work on a one-to-one basis, even if they're working on one-to-one with millions of people. They are producing things like catchphrases which pass into the language. You know, "Got Milk?"... catchphrases like that pass into the language and they become shared, and then they take on a life of their own. And that is so much what I think advertising should be focusing on. It's not just, "How do we influence one person?" but "How do we influence people en masse?"
The Perils of Personal Fame vs. the Power of Brand Fame
Andrew Mitrak: Something I'm thinking about also on, “how do we influence people en masse?”. If I were to apply this to myself and this podcast, I don't want to be famous. I don't want to be Taylor Swift. A marketing history podcast would never be the top number one on Spotify. And also, it seems kind of miserable. The people who try to be at the top of those things sort of game it. It's very… you mentioned how it can be crass to be famous. You have these very silly YouTube thumbnails, and you have short things, you're saying provocative things that don't always make sense. I'd much rather just have respect among my peer group and think, "Oh, that person speaks to intelligent people, he asks smart questions, I've learned something from that." And it seems like there are a lot of brands that might feel the same way about their products.
Paul Feldwick: I guess so, but personally, I'm very sympathetic to what you've just said. I only want a very limited amount of fame myself. It seems to me that to be a genuinely famous person and carry it off sustainably over a long period of time requires either some fairly heroic qualities of endurance and courage or possibly some sort of borderline psychopathic tendencies. You can think of examples for yourself.
But I think there is a difference between a brand and a person. As a person, that's your life. If you want to be a globally famous person, that has probably huge rewards and excitement if you're that way inclined, and it has huge drawbacks as well, potentially, and not everyone can handle it. A lot of people burn out and have terrible experiences as a result of it. But a brand is not a person. I mean, brands in many ways are like people; they are in many ways like celebrities. But the crucial difference is Coca-Cola is not a person. Even Tesla is not Elon Musk, although that's getting a bit too close for comfort. But the two are technically different, and it's only bad management that would enable one to drag down the other.
A brand is something that exists independently of that. So if you are managing a brand for commercial gain, then on the whole, the more demand, the more fame you can create, the better. Yes, you might not want to be a worldwide brand; you might be happy running a coffee shop with one branch that happens to be the most successful coffee shop in Frome, and you might not be ambitious to do anything more than that. But even so, within that limited scope, probably fame is of some benefit.
But it's brands at that level—the coffee shop with three branches—it's not on the whole what our conversations about advertising and marketing are about because that's not where the numbers are. We are talking on the whole about brands where bigness is better. It is a numbers game; it is about scale. Coca-Cola is a better brand than Pepsi because it's bigger than Pepsi. These are sort of truths that tend to get forgotten. The late Andrew Ehrenberg used to have a wonderful way of saying, "If your brand is so strong, why isn't it bigger?" which people never could come up with a very good argument.
Andrew Mitrak: Hard to argue with that one.
Paul Feldwick: So it's about numbers, fame, and on the whole, a £3 billion brand is better than a £300,000 brand.
“What Is Brand Equity, Anyway?”
Andrew Mitrak: Speaking about brand popularity and, "If your brand is so strong, why isn't it bigger?" You write a bit about the 1990s when brand equity became a buzzword, and I've actually interviewed David Aaker. In fact, I've now recorded two interviews with David Aaker, who's probably the individual who's most responsible for popularizing the idea of brand equity.
I don't think he actually invented it, but he definitely wrote several popular books about it and has continued to champion brand equity. And then you wrote a book on brand equity called What is Brand Equity Anyway? I haven't read this one yet.
Paul Feldwick: I would say it's not nearly as entertaining as the other two. It's a much more serious work, but it's also a critical work because that book is a collection of essays or papers that were published separately, and I just kind of assembled them. The paper that it's named after, "What is Brand Equity Anyway?," I wrote in about 1996. So that was kind of in the wake of... and it's very precisely around 1991-92. Aaker wrote Managing Brand Equity in '91, so he was very much... he must have bashed it out pretty quickly to hit that trend.
Andrew Mitrak: I think he saw it at a conference in ‘89 or so, wrote academic papers on it, and then published Managing Brand Equity shortly after.
Paul Feldwick: Very precisely, there was a Marketing Science Institute conference in 1988, which I think put brand equity on the map. It hadn't really been in existence until the mid-80s, I would say at the earliest. This was all in the wake of various controversies about mergers and acquisitions and how accountants dealt with this concept of goodwill and so forth, and it kind of grew out of that.
My take on it was critical to the extent that although everybody talked about brand equity, it seemed to me that it meant a number of different things, and I was never quite sure which one it was meant to mean. Was it actually the value of a brand, the financial value of a brand? And if so, how do you arrive at that? That's a whole area of controversy in itself. Or is it about some concept of brand strength, coming back to our Ehrenberg quote? How do you measure that? And if your brand is so strong, why isn't it bigger? There are ways you can measure it, but they're all different. Or is brand equity actually about something more descriptive? Is your brand equity to do with what you stand for? Or is it to do with your distinctive assets?
All these different concepts are sort of vaguely thrown in together, and a lot of people were trying to make sense of them by rolling them into a ball, sticking them all into a PowerPoint chart, and adding some arrows or something and saying, "Look, that's brand equity." But actually, it didn't really solve those intellectual problems; it was just totally fudging the issues. And I think we hear a lot less about brand equity now. It was the buzzword of the 90s, and it's rather faded from view, and a lot of those issues, I think, are of less interest to people now, but they have some interest.
Building Brands Like a Bird Builds a Nest
Andrew Mitrak: What's interesting though is that when brand equity emerged, it did seem to shift the conversation about brand and branding in general. From what I can tell—I was born in 1990, so I wasn't alive for many things before this—but it seems like "brand" was not as much of a strategic term as it was after brand equity. And now, a lot of the ideas of brand equity are just kind of rolled into "brand," and it's brand image, brand positioning, and so on.
Paul Feldwick: I think you're right. I think you're absolutely right. The positive thing about that whole brand equity mania is that it did refocus people on the fact that there really is a value in brand names, and there's a way of thinking about brands which is greater than just the short-term sales issue. And that was not totally original, because that quote... it was so well put, it's never been better put than by that quote from the chairman of Quaker Oats, which I actually managed to trace back was probably said over a lunch back in the 1930s: "If this business were to be broken up and I was to take the trademarks and goodwill and you were to take the factory and all the stock, I would do better than you." That puts it so clearly that that's what brands are all about.
“If this business were split up, I would give you the land and bricks and mortar, and I would take the brand, and I would fare better than you.”
-John Stuart, Former CEO of Quaker Oats (Early 1930s)
Andrew Mitrak: This was John Stuart of Quaker Oats.
Paul Feldwick: John Stuart was his name, that's right.
Andrew Mitrak: It's such a great quote. It sounds a lot like brand equity, and here it is in the 30s that you traced it to.
Paul Feldwick: Somebody just waited another 50 years for somebody to come up with the expression "brand equity." But what I find less positive about it in terms of its legacy is that it left everyone with this idea that a brand was something somehow mystical, and every brand has an "essence," and every brand is based around a big single idea. Or, more recently and even more contentiously, every brand is built around its "purpose" and all this stuff about Jim Stengel and the power of "why," which I don't really want to get into now because we haven't got time.
Other people have taken that apart much more eloquently than I probably could, but I do think that is, on the whole, completely missing the point. And again, in Why Does the Pedlar Sing?, I try to spell out what I think brands really are all about. They do not grow out of some mysterious essence or single idea. They grow over time out of their gestures and their responses to what happens to those gestures, by building on… again, Jeremy Bullmore probably said it better than I did many years previously; he said something about, "Brands are built the way birds build their nests, out of bringing lots of twigs together." And if you want a metaphor, it's more like that. They are accumulated over time, but what is essential for them is really just the energy and a certain degree of consistency, but mainly consistency around the very tangible things, like distinctive assets and logos and characters or whatever and names. It's much less mystical and it's much more concrete than the general discourse usually allows for.
The Pixar Model: “It’s Art, But It’s Popular”
Andrew Mitrak: As we move towards wrapping up, I want to come back to an idea you were bringing up earlier. The crux is this idea of humbug or showmanship, and then there's all the marketing and advertising literature of building strategies, doing measurement, salesmanship, seduction, salience, social connection. An idea that I have is that if you want to follow any formula of how to win a client and come up with a campaign or market a product, if you follow all of that, you can probably be relatively mediocre or maybe even slightly above average if you just follow the stuff to a T in a formulaic way. But if you want to have a truly great campaign, a Barclaycard-style campaign, a campaign that's really memorable, there's just some certain quality to it that might be showmanship or some level of creativity that's just not something that fits neatly into any formula. There's some element of the unexpected to it, some element of luck, some element of the cultural zeitgeist that is probably not going to ever be captured into one model. To have a great campaign, there's just some level of happenstance to it that's really hard to quantify or put into some framework in advance.
Paul Feldwick: Yes, up to a point, but I'd just qualify it slightly. There always is an element of luck or happenstance. But that doesn't really get you very far, and it's not really what anybody wants to hear. It's just the truth. The more practical question is, what can you do to maximize your chances of getting lucky, if you like?
And again, there is no simple formula because we are in the whole realm of aesthetics, which is another word that nobody wants to use or confront, if you like. But again, I just come to say, if you think of making a great ad campaign as the same kind of challenge as making a successful Pixar movie... I mean, one of the best books about creativity from that point of view is Ed Catmull's book about how they do it at Pixar.
Andrew Mitrak: Creativity, Inc., it's one of my favorites.
Paul Feldwick: And you realize when you read that, it is not like they all sit around and go, "Hey, let's do a film about toys! That's the big idea!" and suddenly it's all there. That's not important at all. What actually makes the difference is a fantastic amount of grunt work that puts together how every detail of this product fits together into a whole that is aesthetically successful. In their case, that means the characters, the dialogue, the drawing, the visualization, the songs, everything. And an army of people are involved. On that level, this is a much more complicated thing than even the most complicated 60-second advert, let's face it.
But what it requires to produce quality is an ability to focus on how that's going to work and work together to achieve that. Another thing you notice in Catmull's account of how they work at Pixar is they do not, on the whole, say, "It has to be like this because," or, "Well, if it's not going to be like that, I'm not working on it, so I'm going to go." People don't engage in fight or flight. They are going to have to engage potentially in conflict. It may be a lot of discomfort, but their protocols that they try to stick to are: you stay in the room, you try to be honest with each other, and you try to advocate what you believe is right but also continue to listen to what the other people are saying and stay in the room until you come to some resolution that you all feel happy with.
If ad agencies and their clients were better at doing that collectively, they would have a better quality of output. And that's really all it comes down to. That's, I think, the crucial factor. So again, there are huge lessons to be learned from the parallel processes that are going on in the entertainment field. And that's as close to a formula for it as you're going to get.
Andrew Mitrak: That's right. I love that book, Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull. I actually, prior to being a marketer, did filmmaking, and I think that was published around 2010, 2011 [Note: I am incorrect here. It was published in 2014], and Pixar was, for me, at its peak right then. If you think of their movies that they just released: they'd released Ratatouille about a rat in Paris; WALL-E, where the first 20 minutes is almost a silent film of a robot that's alone; and then they released Up about an 80-something-year-old man.
If you thought of focus-group testing those, you wouldn't think that a rat in Paris, a silent film starring a robot, and a movie about a grumpy octogenarian would test well and be big box office hits. And yet, some creative something, their process, they were able to create both art, but it is also very popular.
Paul Feldwick: And that's the key thing. It's art, but it's popular. The agency that I used to work for, at its best, that's exactly what we did. And we weren't the only ones. There were other agencies who worked in different ways who also achieved that: Collett Dickenson Pearce, and DDB at their best, and so forth. It can be done.
Where to Find More from Paul Feldwick
Andrew Mitrak: As I'm wrapping up here, I didn't mean to plug somebody else's book, Creativity, Inc.
Paul Feldwick: Oh, I'm very happy to plug that one.
Andrew Mitrak: But I also wanted to plug Anatomy of Humbug and Why Does the Pedlar Sing?
Paul Feldwick: [Holding Why Does the Pedlar Sing to the camera] This is the one I guess I'm still more excited about.
Andrew Mitrak: It's great. I liked them both. It was actually grea... I read them almost as one book. As soon as I closed the cover of Humbug, I went right on to Pedlar, and they flowed together really well.
So listeners, if you like this podcast, definitely check those out. They're fun reads, highly recommended. Paul, I really enjoyed this conversation. Aside from those two books, are there any other places you'd point listeners to if they wanted to read your work or find you online?
Paul Feldwick: Those two books are probably the best of me as far as all this is concerned. If you're real nerds, you can find other bits of video online, but stick to those books and you'll get most of it.
Andrew Mitrak: I will also plug... I'll drop a link to your TEDx talk that you gave.
Paul Feldwick: Actually, that is a good one. And although that's 15 years old, I still think that is a good TEDx talk.
Andrew Mitrak: And you bring up the idea of aesthetics, which you very briefly mentioned on here, but that's another interesting topic.
Paul Feldwick: That's the one area I would explore further if I were to write another book.
Andrew Mitrak: Well, I hope you do. Paul Feldwick, thanks so much for joining me. I've had a lot of fun.
Paul Feldwick: Thank you for having me.
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