S06.EP05 - Branding is Dead & More Marketing Bullsh*t with Mark Ritson

0:03Hello and welcome to Just Branding. The only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Kass and Matt Davies.

0:21Hello fellow brand builder. We have some huge news to kick off today's episode and we couldn't be more excited to share it with you. After years of connecting with creative entrepreneurs, designers, strategists and marketers like you, we realize the need for something bigger, a place where brand builders can truly thrive, grow and support each other. So today we're thrilled to share with you the launch of the Brand Builders Alliance, our brand new exclusive membership for brand builders just like you. So whether you're looking to sharpen your branding skills, grow your business or connect with like-minded creatives, the Alliance is here to help you level up.

1:00As a member, you'll get fortnightly masterclasses, expert coaching from Matt, myself and our team of resident coaches, exclusive resources and access to an incredible community of branding professionals who truly get it. The waitlist is now open. Head over to our website joinbba.com to secure your spot and become a part of the movement. That's joinbba.com. Now let's get in today's episode. Hello and welcome to Just Branding. Today we have the absolute pleasure of welcoming a true heavyweight in the world of marketing. Someone that needs no introduction but absolutely deserves one. Mark Ritson is one of the most respected and provocative voices in the industry, known for his sharp thinking, straight talk and deep understanding of what makes brands tick.

1:51He holds a PhD in marketing, has been a professor at some of the world's top business schools and has worked on iconic brands like Louis Vuitton, Sephora, and Dom Perignon. Beyond that, he's built the Marketing Week Mini MBA series, which is a program that has transformed the way over 40 ,000 marketers, including myself, approach brand strategy. I've personally taken both the Mini MBA in marketing and the Mini MBA in brand management, and to be honest, they were game changers. Mark, we're truly honoured to have you here. Your insights have shaped the thinking of so many marketers, including Matt and me, and today we're going to get into the real stuff.

2:27So from the messy state of brand positioning to the never-ending brand versus performance debate, and even the role of AI in strategy, we're covering it all, or at least we'll try. So listeners, expect some hot takes, some witty insights, and no doubt a few laughs, because let's be honest, if we're not having fun, we're probably doing branding wrong. So welcome to the show, Mark. Thanks, Jacob. It's lovely to be here. Welcome to the show, Mark. I'm mildly terrified having you on because I know your wit is very famous. So we're looking forward to getting into some of these topics with you. We do have an icebreaker question.

3:00And I know you're a big fan of KitKat. So can you let our listeners know why you love KitKat so much? Yeah, for me, it's the prototypical case study for brand positioning. There's two or three things I love about the way Nestle have done it. They've got it all on a page, which I think is absolutely it. more than a page is pointless. They've got their brand codes, distinctive assets next to their brand positioning, which I think also is an essential. Their brand positioning is five words long. It's really just one word breaks. And they haven't changed it in nearly three decades. And you put all that together and that's what everyone else isn't doing right.

3:41So yeah, KitKat is light years ahead of other brands, in my opinion. And yet, if you were a branding novice you'd look at their positioning and go it's a bit basic you know i can add some maslow hierarchy stuff and some fucking purpose and all that stuff you know and then put some rhomboids in there but yeah they're an exceptional bunch and and why l who currently runs the brand there they work very hard not to over complicate it and keeping things simple is a complicated game can i ask a question do you buy kitkat do you consume it not really i mean occasionally i'm not you know it's a funny life right as branding people we don't need to be into the brands that we manage right in some ways it's very helpful not to be particularly into certain brands that you manage i'm not a big fan of don perignon yeah i was gonna say you didn't get into the champers over there oh yeah but not dp like i'm a crew guy i love my crew don perignon i admire it's my favorite brand in terms of you know origin and story and all the drama with it but it's never turned me on from a sort of consumer point of view but I don't see any paradox in that you know I mean it's it's you know it's entirely possible for a man to work on an exclusively female product and vice versa.

4:55Mark I've got a quick question you mentioned the simplicity and I think that's you know beautifully put there was um a book I read recently called it's a tiny little book I don't know if you're familiar with it's called Obvious Adams and it's from some chap back in the 50s I think or 60s and it's this kind of narrative about a uh an agency and there's this guy in it called Obvious Adams it's a fictional story and he just looks for the obvious and he boils everything down and keeps things so simple and uh you know the story is how he's successful in the ad industry and I think it kind of when you said about that simplicity thing I just wondered what your thoughts so why do we as businesses as brands why do we love to over complicate something like KitKat, which is so simple?

5:38I think it's just a failure of market orientation, Matt. Most brand managers and strategists work on a brand for three or four months or longer and five or six hours a day. And they miss the point that consumers really don't give a f*** about the brand, think about it for two seconds, have 900 other brands within their focal memory and they just miss all of that you know what I mean I'm not exaggerating when I say if you have more than a page for your brand strategy you've got it wrong because you have it takes many pages to get it down to one but any fool can write a brand positioning that has seven or eight pages in it getting it down to a single page is a much bigger challenge I mean I did it with LVMH I mean these are big brands we've mentioned Dom Perignon Louis Vuitton and Sephora and the list goes on and on.

6:27We had a great 10, 12 year run where all of our brands had the DNA on one side of the page and the brand codes on the other. And we operated these billion dollar majestic things out of that very tight definition. And it was, you know, it was very difficult to get to that place. But once we got to that place, it was much easier to execute. You always have hot takes and maybe that's not the right word, but I'd love to know your insight on like, what's a marketing trend that everyone's hyped about right now, but you think it's a bit bull****. I mean, the personalization one has probably been the biggest pile of bull****s in the last five years.

7:03It seems to be dying back a little bit, but not really, right? So, you know, personalization is great, except for the fact that we don't need to do it and it's not possible. And other than that, it's brilliant. The one I'm particularly opposed to at the moment, which is everywhere, is allowing the social media platforms to convince naive marketers that their algorithms will do the targeting for them and all that they've got to do is give us your ad and we'll do the rest, you know what I mean? Which is wrong on so many levels. And by now you'd have expected marketers to go, hang on, weren't you the guys talking to me about hyper-targeting five years ago and now you're telling me we don't need to do any targeting at all?

7:40Wait a minute now, what's changed here? So probably that's the new one. You know, AI automatic targeting is just a nonsense for me. Okay, what about this? What's one belief you used to hold in marketing that you've completely changed your mind on? I guess at the start of the Ehrenberg Bass revolution, this idea of mass marketing ran so far against everything we'd been trained on in the 80s and 90s that I was convinced it was wrong. And it was only over a lot of data points and client stuff that you started to realise it's not completely right, but that it's mostly right and it's not wrong to do mass marketing it's probably about 60 to 70 percent right and i think that took me a long time to get to but but i'm firmly there now so mark you're famous for your brand education your mba courses that you've put on that jacob's already referenced um i just want to ask a quick question around the education of brand and marketing today, the theory versus the kind of the practice side of things.

8:46What do you believe the biggest problem is that you see? And why did you kind of start the MBA courses that you did? You know, what gap were you filling? Yeah, I mean, the gap is pretty straightforward. I mean, you know, we know that about 25, maybe 24 % of marketers have any formal training in marketing. We don't have the number for brand managers or brand consultants, but it's probably single digit. And that's f***ing horseshit. That's the problem. And I have a very simple philosophy on this, which is that training makes you better. It's a technical pursuit, brand management. I'm not saying we can do everything, but a training in brand management makes 99.9 % of brand managers, not just better, but phenomenally better at what is quite a specialized trait.

9:34So the launch of Mini MBA was really to rectify that gap. I mean, we started these days with two stats, which is the first stat is 24 % of British marketers have a training in marketing. And the second stat is no one's going into a classroom ever again, right? No one's sitting in a windowless room with a guy in a suit for, you know, eight hours a day. It's just not going to happen with the YouTube generation. So how do we solve the problem? And the answer is mini MBA. And what's interesting is I really thought when we launched it nine years ago, I knew it would be pretty lucrative and I knew it would be, I thought, relatively popular.

10:14I didn't think it would be this successful. I thought it was going to do quite well. The thing that surprised me is it's proven to be inherently superior to the classroom where I spent the first 25 years of my life. And that, if you'd have told me that 10 years ago, I wouldn't have believed. There's a little crossover. I was still teaching MBA students for the first couple of years of mini MBA. It's the same syllabus. I mean, it's the same lecturer, right? It's me. But the difference in impact and just generally the effect it had on the class was so much stronger with mini MBA versus a classroom that it really, that was a stunner for me.

10:53So it's not just that we're kind of giving you the classroom experience. It's far more successful than anything that would be taught at Harvard or Wharton or LBS or any of the schools where I still have great respect for. But we can do it better on Mini MBA. And those that have done both will tell you the same thing. What do you think the background of that success is? Is it that experience side? Is it the knowledge? Is it both? Is it everything combined? I mean, you know, I'm one of the best marketing teachers in the world. I've won teaching prizes at MIT and everywhere. That helps. But I don't think it is that.

11:28I think it's to do with the students. The whole philosophy of classroom teaching is based on a 16th century approach, right? Put everyone in a room and someone will stand at the front of the room and basically shout at them for three to six hours, right? That's a way for anyone to learn anything. And executive training, we normally do that for three or four days. So we fly them to a a fancy location. We talk to them from nine to five, then we get them faced and give them lots of calories. And then we do it again for another two or three days. It's pretty much the worst way you could learn anything.

12:03Right. And so with mini MBA, we've developed a pedagogy, which is you, it rolls week after week, as Jacob will tell you, but there's no time. There's not, you don't have to tune in at two o 'clock in the afternoon, you know? So it enables our marketers to put the course into their life rather than having to organize their life around a classroom. So, you know, we'll have a class of 1 ,200 brand managers in a couple of weeks doing brand management. They'll all do it differently. Some of them will do it in the gym. Some of them will do it walking the dogs. Some of them will sit in a room with their colleagues and do it.

12:38But they're all finding the right way for them to learn. And I think that more than anything has driven its success. Yes. And the other part is, you know, it's the, I mean, you hate to say it on just branding, but the category is more important than the brand. So the category is coming our way, right? There's people aren't sitting in classrooms anymore. irrespective of how strong mini MBA is as a brand the the era of live teaching in a classroom in a 16th century model you know driving to class and driving home from class it ain't gonna last clearly you know when I used to teach a business school I used to teach weekends you know for people who were working full-time and you know they'd come in at 8 30 usually they left their kids at home with the other partner we did three and a half hours of teaching then they went and moved their car somewhere else so they didn't get a ticket.

13:29Then we did another three or four hours of teaching. It's horrible. I mean, like, that's no way to do it. You know what I mean? It's ridiculous. So yeah, I think, you know, that lesson, I worked a lot with private equity. I worked on a valuation of a large retailer, watches of Switzerland, I think it was, and for a private equity firm. And at some point, I remember asking them, why do you want to buy watches of Switzerland? And they said, we don't. we want to buy a hard luxury retailer because that sector is growing 22 % CAGA, right? And so what you learn from the private equity boys and girls is you don't start with a brand like we would do and go, right, let's look at this brand.

14:08You start with the category and go, right, if this category is in good shape, most brands are going to be okay. And that's the story of online education. We are a strong brand, but we're in a category that's growing so fast with relatively little competition that we can't really go wrong. Just to follow on that, the gap between theory and practice, right, is also how do you take that knowledge and apply it? What's your thoughts on that and how have you kind of made that happen? Well, there's problems on both sides there, Jacob. So on the academic side, it's full of people that don't work in the business and that's just not f***ing good enough.

14:45So I spent my life at really good business schools with really good professors, none of whom have done a day's work in marketing not good enough so on the left hand side you've got to say that you know it's pathetic right and they all know it they just hide it from the students right on the other side though you've got a bunch of neanderthals led by gary v who are kind of steadfastly opposed to the idea that you can learn right you're the only way to get it is by doing it on the job and now you know you get all these posts that are like i you know This is what they don't teach you in business school and all that.

15:18And that's also, you know, it's just horse shit. And in the middle, there's what a great business school has always been, right? From the MBA days of Harvard 100 years ago, which is practitioners with PhDs and lots of experience teaching junior people what to do. And that model, which is very thin in the middle but does exist, is still a phenomenal model. Do you know what I mean? but you have to have a training and ideally a PhD, but you also have to have extensive experience as well. And when you put those two things together, it's marvelous. I mean, it's the Indiana Jones model. If you remember at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark, he spends the first 10 minutes with Alfred Molina still in that gold statue.

16:02And then on Monday morning, he's with Denham Elliott teaching students about archeology. And that's kind of how I try to build my career. I mean, you know, in a non-hot Harrison Ford way, right? But I would go and work for LVMH in Paris for a week, and then I would come back and I would teach my MBA students partly based on, you know, what had been going on the week before. I remember doing a whole class at MIT just on this story of doing a negotiation for a very large wine brand with a very large American retailer. And without, you know, divulging too much information to the class, the whole 90 minute class was what would you have done in this situation and and the students that was what that's what they came to business school for they came to learn business so yeah when it works well when someone I mean you know let's be clear there's a lot of people teaching online courses that have never taught before and I don't have a PhD and I think that's I mean what's our biggest problem in marketing on in the top 10 it's people that aren't trained in marketing trying to teach others marketing that's f***ing madness right the reason we've got ourselves into such a problem with the peas is all these idiots that don't understand the peas inventing new peas because they're idiots right you know you understand the work and and understand the history of this hundred year old discipline before you start trying to teach other people about it you know i mean it sounds obvious but f*** you know it's it's a real problem it's a real problem so yeah there's a middle path there where theory and practice and training are all the same thing you know what I mean and that's where I think we've been going wrong but I don't want to blame just marketers for that I think business schools have a lot to say as well because they they let down managers by giving them professors that had never done the job so we've got a listener question I want to throw into the mix and it's slightly change gear if that's all right and it's from uh denny kurian and um he says how do you define branding and how do you go about well that's a bit of a second question kenny he's then how do you go about it how do you go about positioning so i guess the first question is probably how do you define branding well so branding is anything to do with managing a brand obviously right so And so start with brand.

18:24Brand isn't a complicated topic. It's certainly been overcomplicated by strategists who don't really understand the concept. It's just two things. It's the ability to come to mind in the target consumer's head. And then when it comes to mind, to be associated with the things that will get that consumer to buy the product. That's it. and so anything that drives those two things the cognitive presence of the brand and the correct attractive associations is by definition branding and therein lies the start of our discipline right it's they're the two jobs i think the big revolution of the last decade is erenberg demonstrating very clearly that the first part of that concept is more important than the second When I was trained in the late 80s and 90s, the first part, the awareness, the cognitive salience part was deemed to be a gateway variable.

19:21And it was all about the brand image and the brand personality. And one of the great revolutions, I think, that we should thank Erwin Bergbos for is reversing that imbalance and, you know, pointing out that, yeah, I mean, I still believe there's a role there for the associations and the brand image. but ultimately coming to mind has to be the 60 70 percent of the job partly because if you don't come to mind it's over and partly because the research is clear now if you do come to mind your brain which is very lazy is already starting to tip the the favoritism and perceptions towards that brand that came to mind first so it doesn't have to think of another so i think that's been the big revolution but what is branding it's driving the cognitive presence and perceptions of the brand to your favor so that said positioning is a big part of that but it's such a mess in this industry as well so what do you think what's your take on that it's the worst thing we do in branding i mean we talked about kitkat at the start that's really is almost it most brands just go completely mental with it and it's a total right so what they do is they the core to this most brand managers think that positioning is an end in itself you know i've got to do a positioning so that it instantly conjures up brand books and presentations and onions and keyholes and all that right and they've missed the point from 1979 which is positioning is not an end in itself It's a means to an end.

20:58And the end, back to my earlier point, is that the brand comes to mind and the consumer thinks the couple of things we want them to think. The end, right? Now, add on to that the idea that most positioning is so full of f***ing s***, consumers would never, ever deign to think it, right? I mean, I'm still stunned by Starbucks, right? Which, fine company, good operating model, obviously huge. And despite what people say, not bad coffee, right? Their positioning is the biggest hilarious carnival of horse shit I've ever seen. And it keeps getting worse, right? It keeps asking employees to come up with what it is.

21:42And it keeps becoming more and more Walt Disney on cocaine nonsense, right? about all the things that, you know, that Starbucks isn't, right? They overstate it completely. So for me, the other sin of positioning, other than having too much, is overthinking it, right? Again, 60%, 70 % of it is having the distinctive brand codes that will bring the brand to mind. And the other bit is having the two or three things that, relatively speaking, the consumer wants and you can promise it more than the competitor. And, you know, Kit Kats talks about breaks. it doesn't talk about being the consumer champion or changing the you know the dimensions of of chocolate consumption or any of that other right or being the colorful fighter for diversity and right have a break and have a kick hat and when you own that for 30 years like they like they've done you're in a very good place when you see brands take starbucks you know to inspire and nurture the human spirit one person one cup and one neighborhood at a time sounds like a donald trump manifesto doesn't it but let's just take that do you think that what these brands sometimes are trying to do is they're conflating internal alignment where they're trying to rally the troops get everybody excited about something with consumer outward facing actual marketing where you know you're thinking like you've sort of walked through about the consumer and what's in the consumer's mind I see a lot of conflation and depending on what for example when I'm consulting depending what my client needs if they need internal alignment some of that fluffy stuff can be very helpful but is it ever going to be a consumer facing message absolutely not so what are your thoughts about that kind of internal external kind of tension in branding i think it's a fair comment i mean it's true starbucks has done all of its brand research to go into its positioning with its own staff which is an elementary error right none of them buy starbucks for stars right and salience is pretty much baked in because they stare at an eight foot tall mermaid every day right for nine hours right so it's kind of pointless right so yeah i get it i mean they're doing some you know i mean i'm a huge hater of swat right and and i've done my fair share of swats with you know a team with a clipboard because the bosses wanted me to do it if it gets the team to feel good about themselves and that's the objective then then fine i think that's cool right the point is do we have a position though that is actually going to drive the brand because if we don't we're in pretty bad shape you know what i mean so i agree i mean whatever it takes for the team i've jesus i've done paintballing events to make the team feel better about themselves right you know great you know famously we used to run karaoke at one client just for a team bonding session great awesome right but that's not the purpose of positioning the purpose of positioning is what the do we stand for to the consumers and ironically the staff are the least qualified people in the world to know the answer to that right all right and on topic on the topic of contrarian takes brand personalities and brand archetypes i know you don't buy into them so i'm curious to your thoughts on that yeah it's just total horse um so the brand archetype type wheel or whatever the f**k it's called is probably the most stupid thing we've ever created right and why is it stupid on a theoretical level creating a generic model for brand positioning demonstrates you know nothing about brands, right?

25:19The definition of a brand is it's not like anything else, right? So why are we using a paint by numbers approach built on dodgy, youngy, and fucking philosophy to create something? On the practical level, you need to look at the company after they've done this work, right? So the deluded marketing team decide they're the magician slash cowboy, right? And then bring the CFO in or bring the head of ops in or bring the sales team in and tell them you're half magician half cowboy and see how far you get that afternoon with engagement and work do you know what i mean and rightfully so because it's nonsensical childish rubbish right and incredibly defended by people who should know better you cannot get away with that in the 21st century do the work find the real brand position from the real unique essence and relationships you have with the consumer.

26:14Worry more about salience and distinctiveness than just image, something, again, that doesn't happen. And find something that will work within the culture of the company and won't turn everyone against you. Do you know what I mean? It's so poor to see that still floating around. And I've walked into clients where they've done that work. There was a beauty client that I obviously won't name, but they've done that work with a very expensive brand strategist who'd left them with the idea that they were the joker slash cowboy, right? And their question for me was, what do we do with that? And how do we execute that?

26:49And I'm like, what are you talking about? This is nonsense, right? And then the CMO talked to me about the, you know, there'd been some spiked comments about the fact that she'd aired this among the leadership team. And I'm like, well, of course, because you look like a fool. Yeah, you look like an absolute fool. How are you going to brand track any of this, right? I mean, it was a brand aimed at women with beauty products and it was partly a cowboy, right? What the f***, you know? So, yeah, it's a dirty stain on an already pretty dirty profession. Matt, do you have any words on that? Are you going to be brave enough?

27:24Well, you know, I'm talking to Mark Ritson and, you know, I think, Mark, you make your points really, really well. I think where I found it useful, and you can, you know, come back at me and I'm absolutely happy for you to do so. But what I found it useful is when you're trying to align a team and engage the team. Now, in terms of helping when you're uniting all parts of a business around something, and whilst I 100 % agree with you in relation to audience, you know, segmentation, the actual what the customers actually think, when you kind of are trying to translate that into something simple and that they can grasp, put their hands around and understand, and then take whatever it is we align around and, say, brief a creative team or a marketing team to actually begin to create assets and campaigns.

28:10I found it kind of helpful conceptually. Do I ever want to die on that mountain? No, like, no, I don't want to die on that hill. Like if my client are like, you know, this is not helpful, then I wouldn't use it. But for alignment, I have found it quite helpful first kind of step to simplify things. So what would you say from an alignment perspective? Do you find it useful at all? Or do you just think it's such a bad stain because of the bad press that it's got, that we should discount it completely. It's a fair point, but I just disagree. It fills the room with nonsense, and we don't have that much room.

28:46Do you know what I mean? We have to align the team around what the prime position really is, and therefore giving them Cowboys and Mystics and all of that, it might make the team feel momentarily clearer, but what it does is obscure them from the fact that we're a mobile toilet business and we're positioned, our distinctiveness is the issue and we're positioned on value for money and quick transportation of s**t after the event, right? And you've just lost, you've gained two points of clarity and 500 points of organizational respect because you're the cowboy now. You know what I mean? For me, it's something that we should eradicate quickly from our literature.

29:29We got to help our teams understand brand. I get that point, but not with hoo-ha from the early 19th century. All right. Thank you on that. I think we'll change it up now into market orientation, which is another very big point. And I think it leads into this whole discussion. So many marketers still forget they're not the customer. So do you just want to share a little bit about market orientation with our listeners and just describe what that definition is because some may have not heard that before. So it's a concept that really sprung up in the marketing literature in the late 80s, early 90s, with a host of papers that identified it as kind of the origin for good marketing.

30:11And the reason why it's origin for good marketing is the realization that you're not the consumer. In fact, because you work for the company, either as an employee or as a consultant or as an agency, you literally don't look at the brand or product the way that the consumer does. and so you look at it eight hours a day you only think about one brand you stare at the pigmentation of the model in your ad for nine months and everything that you're doing is not what the consumer does and so market orientation at the marketer level is the realization you are not the consumer put it the f*** down right remove your perceptions because they're not just incorrect but they're totally alien to what's really going on.

30:59There's also an organizational equivalent to market orientation, which is at the company level, how much is the company built around the consumer? And there are scales that measure this quite adequately. And why is it such a fundamental concept? I would say it's the most important concept in branding and marketing. It's important because if you understand market orientation, and that's why we start, you know, the marketing, the mini MBA marketing with the module on market orientation. It sends you in the right direction. It sends you to research. It sends you to segmentation, to target, into positioning, to execution, et cetera.

31:34And also it's important because everything changes the minute you get market orientation, yeah? Brand salience coming to mind isn't a problem if you're not market-oriented because you're like, everyone knows about our brand, right? Because you look at your logo every day. you know that you think your brand is important that people really give a f**k about your toothpaste brand's brand purpose and its position on diversity right you really get to the point where you really believe that right it's important though you know consumers want buyers because of this right no one gives a f**k about a toothpaste brand's position on anything other than on the shelf in your bathroom right so market orientation kills all that s**t and it makes you realize every brand is fundamentally and totally unimportant, even to the people who buy it regularly.

32:22Nobody gives a f***, yeah? I've worked with brand managers where their brand has been deleted from Tesco, and I've watched them tell me, a very smart man tell me that there will be protests when the consumer realizes next week that the brand is no longer there. And of course, the consumer didn't even f***ing notice, right? Didn't even notice it was gone, right? so market orientation really you know i call it the 180 when you do it with clients they go oh hang on our brand isn't important oh hang on the competitors that we've listed aren't really the competitors when you look at it from the consumer's point of view and the word competitors makes no sense because consumers don't have competitors they just have different alternatives oh and categories categories don't exist to the consumer they're picking from across all kinds of different places and the touch points we thought were important like advertising don't matter a compared to things like service and windows and product performance and packaging so it changes absolutely everything and again because most marketers aren't trained in marketing they don't know about it even though we've had it for 40 odd years so mark i've got a question imagine you're managing a small b2b brand for example what would some of the tips be you give to say the leaders of such a brand who want to get their arms around market orientation like what would you suggest that they start to do if sort of a smaller brand yeah I mean the first trick with a smaller brand especially in b2b is ethnography is the great research methodology for this so I would challenge all the senior team to go out and spend an afternoon with a either a target customer or existing client sit back and just watch the contextual way in which their product or brand fits into the much bigger picture yeah and i think what immediately happens is small things become big big things become small and and you know this experience which sounds very sort of anecdotal and non-scientific can often break through into a manager's mindset oh hang on a minute they don't even know this any of this they don't care about any of this right so yeah i would say ethnography is a starting point especially for b2b yeah great i've seen that happen loads actually when you actually get people to get out from the desk or get out from the boardroom and actually go and sit or go and experience things from a customer's perspective it's so strange isn't it that that that happens um you know the sort of the the scales fall and then they're like oh my goodness you know we've got a lot of work to do so yeah 100 % agree when I worked for Bernard Arnault who's that you know the world's on some days of the week the world's richest man when you listen to Mr Arnault in interviews it sounds like he spends his his his weekends at the Kabuki and at the opera and everything else he does no such thing he spends every single hour of his weekend in his different boutiques talking to his sales team and watching consumers he knows the name I'm sure he doesn't know the name of the gm of one of his brands in japan but he certainly knows the name of all the main sales associates for all the major boutiques that he owns right across tokyo because he goes in there all the time when he's there right so yeah it's absolutely you know in retail we used to call it walking the floor but it's absolutely a hundred percent critical my one of my favorite stories is jeff bezos bringing in the chair into the meeting when everyone was talking about amazon and just bringing an empty chair and going let's just remember guys that the consumer's not here and none of us have a clue what we're talking about now carry on you know what i mean and the chair just sat there man it's like if you know it you know it you know what i mean i won't forget that that's that's brilliant all right the brand first performance today i mentioned that in the intro it's been talked about a lot uh why are marketers still missing the point well there's a couple of reasons right most of them have no training in marketing to return to the main theme, right?

36:20So most of them are dumb enough to think that ROI is the main driver of performance, and therefore they follow their noses into the wrong short-term direction. For me, there's a number of levels to this, right? So the first level is just knowing about Field and Burnett's long and the short of it. Then the second level is realizing it's not 60-40. It depends on the dynamics of the industry. In financial services, it runs about 80-20, right? for various dynamic reasons in the industry, and B2B goes 50-50. So there's a flexibility there. The next level is realizing you can't do brand and performance in the same ad.