A History of Marketing / Episode 10 (Part 2)
“Some critics will say Coca-Cola has made a marketing mistake, and some cynics say that we planned the whole thing. The truth is we're not that dumb, and we're not that smart.” - Don Keough, Former President of Coca-Cola in 1985
This week, we continue my conversation with marketing legend Sergio Zyman, picking up right where we left off: on the front lines of the Cola Wars. In Part 1 of my interview with Zyman, we covered his astounding rise from Mexico City to launching Diet Coke. Part 2 takes us even deeper into one of marketing's most analyzed and debated moments: New Coke.
We go beyond the headlines of New Coke and hear Zyman’s first-hand stories of:
The Internal Battles: How resistance to changing Coca-Cola's iconic (but underperforming) ads led to the fateful decision to change the product itself
The Research Blind Spots: Why focusing solely on taste preference, without considering purchase intent, led Coca-Cola to the wrong strategy
The "Kamikaze" Product Launch: The calculated plan to kill Crystal Pepsi by launching the intentionally ill-fated Tab Clear
The “best feature of Excel is Word”: How Sergio influenced Microsoft to elevate its narrative of Excel and market the full Microsoft Office bundle.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube Podcasts
The transcript below and it features amazing vintage ads and helpful links. I recommend watching the video or listening to the audio to hear Sergio Zyman tell the story in his own voice.
Coke vs. Pepsi: The Cola Wars in the 1980s
Andrew Mitrak: Sergio Zyman, welcome back to A History of Marketing.
Sergio Zyman: Hey, how are you?
Andrew Mitrak: Good. Congratulations. You're the first two-part guest. And so, at this time in the mid-1980s, what was the dynamic between Coca-Cola and Pepsi? Was Coca-Cola very obsessed with what Pepsi was going to do next? Was Pepsi gaining market share? What was the sort of dynamic at this time between the two?
Sergio Zyman: “The Cola wars” which have been documented 200 ways to Sunday… The media, and everybody else was basically figuring out how we were doing. And I think we were going to Wall Street, and so was Pepsi, saying, "Hey, we just gained a tenth of a share point," or whatever it was.
Pepsi had become the marketing director for Coke because Coke was so passive. Coke believed in imagery and branding, and all that. They weren't forced to understand how to spend money to make money.
At one point, we were in a conference in Naples, Florida, and I went for a run with my boss, Brian Dyson. He told me that we had just gotten wind that Pepsi was about to buy Seven-Up. And that was huge, right? Because we didn't want them to get any more leverage.
One of the issues was that when Pepsi went to fountain customers like McDonald's, we always allowed for one valve on a six or eight-valve machine to be for a competitor, to be fair, because we're allowing for Dr. Pepper or Seven-Up to come in.
I said to Brian, while we were running that day, "Well, what we have to do is we have to go buy Dr. Pepper." He said, "It'll never happen. Anti-trust is not going to allow us." I said, "Exactly." So we made an offer for Dr. Pepper, knowing that that was going to kill the Pepsi/Seven-Up acquisition, which it did. But to me, that was an honest, competitive environment.
The Genesis of New Coke: Answering the Pepsi Challenge
Andrew Mitrak: That's very clever. Does this competitive environment plant the seeds for the origins of New Coke?
Sergio Zyman: No. The New Coke thing was, as I told you before, McCann-Erickson had a dominance on the management of Coke that was unbelievable.
The company liked to be able to go to the country club or to church and have people come over and say, "Oh my God, I love your commercial, I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke or Mean Joe Greene."
So that social currency, that was enabling bottlers and company management, and all that, that's something that McCann exploited incredibly well. The top brass never went to see the marketing guys; they went to see the CEO of the companies. They were always kind of paying homage to the management of the company.
And we had the Pepsi Challenge. My argument at the time to management was we have to change the positioning of the brand. We keep on basically saying we are the original brand. We have to come out with something; we have to change. Have a Coke and a smile, it's not selling us anything. We have to stop doing Mean Joe Greene commercials and Buy the World a Coke, which was blasphemy, okay? Because the company loved that stuff.
Then, a project was created to try to figure out how to stop the Pepsi Challenge.
Then everybody said, "Well, it's the product. People are going in, and they're choosing Pepsi. So we're going to change the product." And I got into the whole project, but there were absolutely deaf ears in changing the position.
When I proposed that we actually use Cosby to be the guy that introduced New Coke, this guy, Ike Herbert, almost had me fired, right? Because they wanted to have these big songs with jingles.
And the problem was the position of the brand was wrong. Yeah, we were the original, but we were old. We didn't have any value to the consumer, and the whole thing started going in that direction.
The New Coke Launch: 77 Days of Infamy
Sergio Zyman: I remember perfectly; we were in the last meeting before deciding to go on New Coke, and there was the New York bottler and a couple of other bottlers that were the kind of advisory board. Brian Dyson went around the room and said, "Do you agree this is the right thing to do?" And then he got to me, and he said, "Do you agree that is the right thing to do?" I said, "No, I don't. I think we should change the position of the brand, but I think that we've gotten to the point in which we relaunch New Coke." And we did.
And we launched it with a big black-tie dinner, with Ray Charles singing.
The next day, we had a press conference. And I was manning the Atlanta press conference, and Goizueta and Keough were in New York, doing the big press conference. And one reporter turned around to Goizueta and said, "So what if it doesn't work?" And Roberto said, "You don't understand. It will work." And this guy just went on a rampage, basically saying, "These guys are crazy. They don't know what they're doing."
And then we launched New Coke. Then we got all kinds of consumer backlash.
There was a group from Seattle that was flying planes around the company saying, "You guys are a bunch of jerks." We had to take our tags off our baggage when we were traveling. People would start harassing you, a hard time.
The Psychology of Coca-Cola’s Taste
And after four weeks, 80% of people in America had tried New Coke, and they hated it. And we only had 6% distribution. So, it was all in the head.
77 days later, we brought Classic back. When we brought Classic back, 75% of the people had tasted it and said they loved it. We didn't have any distribution. They were drinking New Coke. So then we found out that Coke's taste was in the brain, not in the mouth.
Andrew Mitrak: Right.
Sergio Zyman: Do you drink Coke? You drink Coke sometimes?
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, of course. I've had a Coke. I don't drink it every day.
Sergio Zyman: What does it taste like?
Andrew Mitrak: If I was to describe it, well, first you feel the bubbliness of it.
Sergio Zyman: What's the taste?
Andrew Mitrak: The sweetness to it, and then there's a bite to it.
Sergio Zyman: No, no, no. I didn't ask you how it feels. I asked you, what does it taste like?
Andrew Mitrak: It's hard to say other than it tastes like Coke.
Sergio Zyman: It has no taste memory.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah.
Sergio Zyman: And by not having taste memory, if you go and you say, "What does Pepsi taste like?" People will say, “Sweeter than Coke”
Andrew Mitrak: Right. Coca-Cola is your baseline for comparing everything else.
Sergio Zyman: And look, you go and you say to people who drink wine once in a while, and you have all these crazy people like me who go and said, "Oh yeah, it has a leather smell, and it has berries." There's no memory. There's no taste memory. Coke didn't have it, and that was one of the big findings that we had. It was all in the brain, not in the mouth. It's how you felt is what you said. It's not what you tasted. And that was a big finding.
But everybody talks about New Coke ad infinitum. Nobody talks about the fact that we brought Coke back in 77 days. Oh, by the way, in 77 days, the price of the stock doubled. It was unbelievable. It was a huge success.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. There's so much to unpack with the story, and I'm so grateful that I get to hear it directly from you.
The Role of Marketing vs. Advertising at Coke
Andrew Mitrak: I want to go back to the influence of McCann and the reluctance to change the advertising and positioning. And this is from an interview that you did with Ad Age some years ago, and I want to quote,
"The only thing left was to change the product or change the advertising. I think we were lazy in recognizing that we needed to reactivate or reposition the brand. If we had done that through an advertising process, I don't think New Coke would have ever happened. But there was such resistance to any kind of change in advertising position of the brand that we introduced to change the taste."
It seems, as an outsider, that it would be easier to change the advertising than to change the product. But as you tell it, there was such an affinity for the smiles with a bottle of Coke and McCann-Erickson's influence at the company that it was actually easier to change the whole product than it was to change the advertising. Is that kind of the right way to think about it?
Sergio Zyman: Well, there is a kind of bigger macro issue, which goes at the core of my life and my success, which was, what is marketing? And at the Coca-Cola company, marketing was nice commercials. That's all it was. It wasn't about positioning; it wasn't about understanding the consumer and consumption. It was about how much the consumers like our ads. And that was marketing.
And I just thought that it was nuts because it didn't serve us well. Now, it served us well for many years in getting the brand to be viable, but it didn't serve us well in growing the business. And that's why Coke was struggling for so long.
Diagnosing the Research Flaws Behind New Coke
Andrew Mitrak: Something that you bring to marketing is research. You've highlighted how you look at research to make your decisions. And you have a quote about the research and New Coke. And you said,
"We'd done taste tests and found that consumers seem to prefer Pepsi's sweeter taste to [the original] Coke's more biting taste. So we stopped right there and decided that if we made Coke taste like Pepsi, more people would drink it. But you know what happened? We came up with New Coke, and consumers weren't interested. The problem was that we didn't follow up that question with, ‘If we made Coke taste like this, would you buy it?’"
It seems like there were some flaws with the research. I'm curious, how does a flaw like that happen in the research, or what's the takeaway from New Coke?
Sergio Zyman: It wasn't only Coke. Every company in the world basically had this awareness disease, which was, is the consumer aware of your brand?
Probably the best model of marketing is politics. Because in politics, if you don't get elected, if people don't vote for you more than the other guy on the second Tuesday of November, you don't get [elected] – look at Al Gore, okay? I mean, he ended up instead of being in the big plane and the big house, he went to teach school in Tennessee, right? Because he lost the election by a few votes, but it didn't make any difference.
What you do in politics is you try to convince consumers to buy your candidate. Why doesn't that happen in consumer products? That's what we want to do.
Consumer democracy is the right to choose. That's what democracy is. Everybody talks about democracy. And you say, "Oh, the democratic process." Democracy is the right to choose. But you also get the right to not choose. So, purchase intent, intent to buy, intent to consume is the only criteria that should drive marketing. Not how much people like you, but are they going to buy you? Are they going to vote for you?
In reality, in 1985, we didn't know much about the consumer. I know it's kind of blasphemy to talk about the fact that a company like Coke would not know enough about the consumer, but in the research process, we used to track 13 image items, which was great, tasty, delicious, good with friends. That stuff did not drive consumption. What was driving consumption was price discounts, larger sizes, and plastic bottles.
Announcing The Return of “Coca-Cola Classic”
Andrew Mitrak: So, just tying a bow on the New Coke story, in 1985, you mentioned Don Keough, he was then the president of Coca-Cola, and he came to the stage of a hotel to announce that the original taste of Coca-Cola was back. And he finished his speech by saying, quote,
"Some critics will say we've made a marketing mistake. Some cynics will say we have planned all this. The truth is that we are not that dumb, and we are not that smart."
And some people are still conspiracy theorists that think, "Oh, this is all some intentional flop to make Coca-Cola more popular." What's your take on that, and is there any truth to that at all?
Sergio Zyman: There was a research guy that was listening to the consumer center, the call center, and we were getting consumers calling, just screaming on the phone. We had this guy, Goldman, who was sitting there; he was a researcher. He came to give me the day's report. I used to get a report every day.
And I said, "How'd it go?"
He says, "You know, I got to give you an example of what is going to happen here. You've seen a lot of people who have been freed from Vietnam jails, and they've been found."
Remember in those days, they were finding a lot of POWs. "And then you get the family of John Smith that's told that," this, by the way, is a true story. "The family of John Smith, we found him, he's been freed. He's going to arrive tomorrow in Minneapolis on the flight Northwest from wherever."
And the family all gets dressed up, goes to the airport, and they're at the gate, waiting for John Smith to come out, and they don't see John Smith.
This guy Goldman is telling me, and I said, "So what happened?"
He said, "They made a mistake. The guy that they found was not John Smith."
He said, "When you bring Coca-Cola Classic back, it needs to look exactly like the one that left. You cannot make it look different, be odd, be anything else. You can add 'Classic' to it, but it needs to be a red can." And that's what drove the whole thing.
One day I get a call, literally, 6:00 in the morning and says, by the way, there's a rumor that you guys are going to bring back Coke and kill New Coke, and Wall Street stops trading on Coke, right? Because it was material, and we get stopped trading.
So, we had a creative guy at McCann, very smart guy, John Bergen, very political, but very good guy. He was a copywriter. And he wrote that commercial. We didn't have any strategy or anything like that. That was kind of, we were writing as we went. We got Keough into a studio, and we recorded the commercial.
And then, anytime you actually have a commercial, I don't know how it is today, but you have to actually fly it to New Jersey. In New Jersey is where you actually integrated the commercials into the pods.
So Peter Jennings comes out on ABC. He interrupts General Hospital, right? And he basically says, by the way, we have a rumor Coke is going to bring back Coca-Cola. And so we had helicopters flying this commercial from New York to New Jersey in order to put it into rotation for the 7:00 news, and we basically opened up the 7:00 news with a commercial that says, "We're not that smart and we're not that dumb."
And it was really well done, and it was so much in the personality of Keough. He was kind of the Santa Claus-like guy, and he had great credibility, and that's how that thing came about.
Strategic Sabotage: Tab Clear’s “Kamikaze” takeout of Crystal Pepsi
Andrew Mitrak: To prep for this interview, I watched clips of your speeches on YouTube, and there's a quote from General Patton that you like to use. Do you know the quote that I'm talking about?
Sergio Zyman: Yes.
Video of Sergio Zyman: “He said, ‘The idea is not to die for your country, is to have the other SOB die for his.’ Don't die for your company. Have the other guy die for his. Let them lose share. Let them lose relevance."
Andrew Mitrak: This quote reminds me of a story in your book about how you launched Tab Clear to take out Crystal Pepsi. Can you tell the story of Tab Clear and Crystal Pepsi?
Sergio Zyman: One day, I was sitting in a meeting at Coke, and they said that they had gotten wind that Pepsi was going to launch a product called Crystal Pepsi because Pepsi was fixated on having a lemon-lime or a clear product to compete against Seven-Up.
And Coke had Sprite, but it wasn't really doing great. So I said to the guy, "Send me the research. Let me see what the research says." So they sent me the research. It was a guy called Jerry Payne, who was the research guy, and we sat down.
I was looking at the research, and I said, "You know, all of the characteristics of this product are the characteristics of diet products." And I knew a lot about it because I had done Diet Coke. So, I said, "I think we can position this product as a diet drink." He said, "Well, but it's not a diet drink." I said, "I know. Let me think about it."
So I came back, and I proposed that we launch a product called Tab Clear. Tab was already kind of on the outs because Diet Coke was doing so well. They bought into it. I got the project as a consultant.
And then we went out to work, we developed a product, which was nothing more than a diet product with all the characteristics of the same thing.
We launched it in advance of Pepsi launching Crystal Pepsi at the Super Bowl. They spent a lot of money. And what happened was that we were so aggressive with it that the whole category collapsed, which was our idea.
The idea was to launch Tab Clear and make it just a kamikaze product that basically just killed the category, and it did.
Andrew Mitrak: That's right. I'm going to quote from your book, The End of Marketing as We Know It.
"From my perspective, Crystal Pepsi was just screaming for someone to reposition it. We decided to take the liberty of moving Crystal Pepsi into the diet segment, where it was bound to fail because it contains sugar. By meeting a sugared drink with a non-sugar drink, we only confused customers about what the category stood for."
This is just not something they would teach you at any marketing school. What was the business value of this for Coca-Cola?
Sergio Zyman: Well, I think that you touched on a very important point. You said, "Well, this is not something that they teach you in marketing school." Well, what do they teach you in marketing school? Do they teach you to actually be somebody who does stuff to drive top-line and bottom-line? They don't. They teach you about positioning, and they teach you about all kinds of stuff, but there's really no financial element in marketing.
One of the things that I always drove for was, if it doesn't make any money, why do you want to do it? My riff with the ad agencies was that they said that you couldn't measure advertising. All advertising was image building for the long term.
I'm saying, if I can't measure it, I don't want to spend it. So, there was a project that was coming into the market, and we were a competitor in the soft drink business, and we needed to define where the volume was going to be. So if Pepsi was going to get consumption from consumers that were going to pay money to buy a six-pack of Crystal Pepsi, by us killing the category, we eliminate one more competitor. I think that, to me, that's marketing.
Inventing the Chief Marketing Officer Role at Coca-Cola
Andrew Mitrak: You left Coca-Cola in 1988, and you returned in 1993, this time as chief marketing officer. And this was a newly created C-level role. What did it mean for marketing to be in the C-suite for the first time?
Sergio Zyman: When I got called to go back to Coke, I didn't want to. I was doing great. I was skiing 50 days a year. I had great gigs in consulting with Miller Brewing, with all kinds of other companies. I had built this company called Core Strategy Group. I went through a year-long interview with Ivester because I was actually, quote-unquote, teaching him marketing.
But when I went to meet with Goizueta, I said, "What do you want me to do, sir?" He said, "I want you to do the marketing thing." And I said, "I don't understand what you mean. What do you want me to do?" He said, "You know, the marketing thing." And he couldn't articulate what marketing was.
So I said, "Sir, I'll tell you what I'd like to do. I'd like to go away and put together a deck about what I think marketing should do at the Coca-Cola company. Come back, I'll show it to you. If it makes sense to you and if you buy it, then I'll come back to the company."
I went away with a couple of guys, one inside the company, and we wrote a 40-page deck. And I came back, and I presented to him and Ivester and a couple of other people. He said, "Wow, that's what we need to do." It was about positioning brands, about spending money to make money.
I said, "By the way, I need to be part of the C-suite because I want to make sure that marketing is about making money. Marketing is not about spending money." And that's how we came about with naming me chief marketing officer. I was the first ever, by the way. I invented the title. If you go check it out on NexisLexis, there had never been a chief marketing officer before.
Andrew Mitrak: I heard you say this, and not that I don't believe you, but I just wanted to verify it because it's a big claim that you're the first-ever chief marketing officer.
And the search engines and the AI tools, they say, "Oh, that can't possibly be true. Sergio's misrepresenting." But they never point me to one that existed before you, either.
I'm trying to find a person who's actually had the title of Chief Marketing Officer.
Sure, there were presidents and CEOs who had marketing-type functions, and there were other people who were senior marketing leaders, but I haven't yet found another chief marketing officer out there that predates you at Coca-Cola.
By the way, if anybody's [reading] and can find one, I’m happy to be proven wrong, but you do seem to be the first as far as I can tell. But it is a very surprising claim.
Sergio Zyman: Remember, the C-suite at the time was Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer, stop. Then, the head lawyer evolved to Chief Legal Officer. The head of HR evolved to Chief People Officer. And now, everything. I mean, you have the chief banana officer, right?
But my objective at the time was I wanted to be part of the C-suite. I didn't want to be the advertising guy. I had a bunch of friends in the consulting business, and I remember I went to Wimbledon before I agreed to take the job, and I was with this guy, Rob Smith, who's another political guy. I had a lot of political consulting friends, and I was trying to help them find a way to not take the job.
That's how we came up with the idea of being the chief marketing officer.
Marketing's Role in the C-Suite
Andrew Mitrak: So, what was different about being chief marketing officer at Coca-Cola in the 1990s versus being a very senior marketing leader in the 1980s?
Sergio Zyman: Senior marketing leader had no function in the company except be sideways to the advertising process. There was no marketing. We were at the time in which when Pepsi started, the trade, the supermarkets figured out that Coke was a loss leader, and then we engaged in – there was a company called Majors, who was measuring trade activity.
And a big marketing effort was discounting. We used to go on the big holidays and have big displays and put displays in parking lots. But that was pretty much the only marketing thing that was going on. And then you had the commercials that were actually doing the thing to make people feel good.
But there was no scientific way about going and getting volume.
Microsoft: Elevating Excel and the Office Bundle
Andrew Mitrak: After Coca-Cola, you found the Zyman Group, and you have a long, successful career also as a consultant, as a speaker. One of my mentors and friends, his name is Mark Kroese, and he worked at Microsoft in the 1990s.
He was somebody who reached out to me saying (paraphrasing), “If you're doing this podcast, you have to speak to Sergio Zyman.”
And he has some great stories of you supporting Microsoft Office and the launch of Excel. It's hard to believe, but Excel at the time only had 10% market share, and they were a massive underdog to Lotus 1-2-3. And here's Mark's recollection.
"Excel was trying to go feature for feature against Lotus 1-2-3, and that you, Sergio, famously said, 'The best feature of Excel is Word.' And soon after, Microsoft started selling the bundle instead of selling Excel standalone.”
They were in this low-level feature war, and you helped elevate the narrative. And that you also said,
“Microsoft is creating the tools that are driving the productivity gains, and the productivity gains are what is responsible for creating the booming economy of the 1990s."
I'm curious if you have any stories of your role supporting Microsoft?
Sergio Zyman: Sure. They hired us, kind of the oddballs, to come in and work on all kinds of stuff. And it was incredibly disjointed. Microsoft was fighting the FTC because they were doing both applications. There was a guy that just died, Mike Maples, who got hired by Gates from IBM, and then Ballmer was doing the other side, okay? So you had two guys; you had Steve and Mike Maples.
And the way Microsoft would launch products is they go into these developer things, and they had what's called the keynote, right? And Gates would come in and do a keynote, talking about how the future was going to be. And they'll demo the product.
So one of the things that I said is that the DNA – I believe very much in brand DNA – the DNA of Microsoft was no product is ever finished. And the consumer is okay with that. The consumer doesn't expect a Microsoft product to be [finished]. So we used to have the meetings in Boston, in the cafeteria of the Lotus 1-2-3 building, for Excel. That's how competitive the Microsoft guys were in those days. It was unbelievable. And we were working on all kinds of stuff, and then we had Harvard Graphics (PowerPoint competitor), which was one of the products that was competing in the space, and there was Lotus 1-2-3, which was Excel. The comparative to Word was WordPerfect.
And you know, I had all these disjointed things, and one day in a meeting, we said, "Why don't we just put it together? Just as an office thing." And that – I don't know who actually ran with it, but there were fantastic meetings. One day I went into Gates's office, and Gates was laying on his couch. Gates was just brilliant; he was unbelievable. And Ballmer used to call me “the soda guy.” And Gates is sitting there, and we're talking to him about something, and he turns around to me, points his finger and said, "Did you ever go to camp?"
And I go, "Huh?" I said, "Listen, I'm Jewish, I'm from Mexico. We didn't go to camp."
He said, "Well, I went to camp, to math camp for many years. I know what I'm talking about."
It was an incredible culture being over there. Later on, I did a strategy for Xbox with some other guy [who] hired me for Xbox. That was after I had my company, and I turned around and says, "Why are you guys going to launch Xbox versus PlayStation?" I said, "Because Bill is going to do a keynote, and we're going to talk about it."
And I got the project, and I went to actually look, and when I checked with gamers, gamers hated Microsoft. They thought it was the deep state. We came up with a different position, and we had some issues with the name with Xbox. We came out with alternative names. Working with Microsoft was an incredibly learning experience because those guys were true warriors. In those days, it was 24/7; it was great times.
Product Naming: “It’s Cup-a-Soup!”
Andrew Mitrak: Another friend of mine, who I talked to in advance of this interview, Joe Michaels, he's the person who actually put us in touch. And Joe was a leader at a startup in the Dot-com era, and he mentioned that you did some consulting for them at the time. And he was presenting a product branding idea to you, and then he said you interrupted him as he was presenting his idea, and here's him quoting you.
"Let me tell you how to name a new product. The best product I ever marketed was Cup-a-Soup. No one ever wonders why they buy it. The name says it all, Cup-a-Soup."
I'm wondering, do you remember this? Did you ever work on Cup-a-Soup?
Sergio Zyman: Well, no. But what happened, when those guys used to come with all these ideas. There was a company in Atlanta called E-Hatchery. You had all these brilliant guys who were innovators, and they'll come in. We got hired for $30,000 to do the initial analysis for these guys, venture capital firms.
And I would turn around to the guy and I would say, "So, who's your oldest family member?"
And they'll say, "My grandmother."
I said, "How old is she?"
"79."
I said, "Okay. So I'm your grandmother, explain to me what your product is. You're going to explain it to a 79-year-old person. I don't understand anything you're doing."
And I was forcing them to come up with a way to actually explain the value proposition of the product, which is critical to marketing.
And as part of that, they'll come up with these whacky names.
And I would say, "Look, it's Cup-a-Soup. So tell me, how are you going to name your product? It's what you call it. I Can't Believe It's Not Butter – those are great names. You don't have to spend $20 million explaining to people what it is. Come up with a simple name." A lot of those were like that.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah.
“The End of Marketing as We Know It”
Sergio Zyman: The problem with that, if I might, is, look, I failed at changing the world of marketing. I failed because we're back at which commercial is going to be in the halftime at the Super Bowl, right?
I used to do a piece of research every year about the Super Bowl, and they won the Super Bowl commercial, but their volume went to hell. I didn't succeed in changing the face of what marketing was. It worked good for me, right? But companies are back doing the other thing. They're back doing commercials that they can go brag about at the golf course or in church, really not focused on selling more to more people for more money.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. Sergio, I just want to thank you so much for speaking with me and sharing all these insights. Like I said, you're the first person who I've interviewed twice – maybe someday we can do a part three or four. I just think that you have so many amazing stories and so many amazing insights, and we've just scratched the surface of it. So I just want to thank you so much for your time.
Sergio Zyman: Thank you.
Andrew Mitrak: You've written a couple of books. Do you feel like you're fully out of the marketing game now and are done with it at this point, or just enjoying life, or would you point listeners to any place where they can read your work?
Sergio Zyman: I've published four books. The first one was The End of Marketing as We Know It, which became a bestseller. It's still taught around schools and universities. And then I wrote after that Building Brand Width, which was the whole thing about putting brand into the thing. And then I wrote The End of Advertising as We Know It, and I wrote Renovate Before You Innovate. And then I've written three more books, which I never published.
We are at a very interesting time. Companies in general, like humans, develop plaque in their arteries over time. And if you don't take care of it through exercise and eating better, eventually, you need a bypass, right? I did a lot of consulting after I sold my company, and recently, I got involved in boards.
People are still looking for… I don't know what the hell they're looking for.
But they're not really interested in understanding the dynamics of – if you have somebody who's an entrepreneur who comes up with a brilliant idea, like… I evolved with a company, a couple of Israeli guys who worked in the military in Israel on voice recognition. And then one of these guys, and by the way, this guy was the wackiest guy you ever seen in your life. And one day he turned around to the other guy, he said, "By the way, voice recognition is noise recognition. What else can we do with noise recognition?"
And they developed a company that actually developed a modem that was put in machines that run 24 hours a day, [that] will be able to predict the noises that were going to happen when a piece of the machinery started breaking three years ahead of breaking. And they use AI to put it into a model to try to actually predict what the thing was going to do.
I developed a strategy for the guy, and all he wanted to do… was to hire an advertising agency. By the way, where is the company today? Nowhere.
Andrew Mitrak: Smartest people in the world, but they don't see it.
Sergio Zyman: They don't. They don't see it.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, thank you so much for your time, Sergio. It's really been an honor.
Sergio Zyman: All right, take care. Thanks so much. Bye-bye.
A Special Thanks
I want to extend a very special thank you to two people who were instrumental in making this interview happen: Mark Kroese and Joe Michaels. Their insights were invaluable as I researched and prepared for this interview. And it was Joe who put me in touch with Sergio, making this conversation possible. Thank you for your support, Mark and Joe!
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