Byron Sharp vs Mark Ritson - 5 big marketing truths we agree on

9:47Mark Ritson:Right. Yeah, this is a bit of an economist wet dream, isn't it? All brands will disappear. Calm will disappear. Amortizing will disappear. So you've got to remember, John,

9:57Byron Sharp:so we were part of this generation of marketing academics. Before us, there was the economist ruled the jungle. Yes, absolutely. And the rational man and economic man. And then we were, you know, all this irrationality and stuff. And they really were assuming we were passing fad. And now marketing's been around sort of 40, 50 years, and they're really pissed off. so when the internet came like ha now yes yeah i i did economics for my degree and you're right

10:25Mark Ritson:it's all about maximizing utility and it's just a functional you know trade-off of how do you get the most utility for the yeah the yeah well my i mean my industrial economics lecturer who asked we came from the pub every day probably did um but you know doing the uh with marginal revenue equals marginal cost you maximize profitability as a way to decide how much to spend on advertising And I, well, you can do that. You can do that for purchase availability in store because everything should show up in sales, but you can't do that for advertising. I remember talking to a colleague, that is impossible.

10:59Mark Ritson:You cannot do that for advertising. And he was like, well, then, what? What? Well, how else could you do it? I was like, geez. I do bring reality into my modeling. Yeah, it's like, wow. Now, you got some criticism even, I believe,

11:12Byron Sharp:didn't you, on your talk? Oh, always, yeah. I think the best one was there was a, I think an academic posted on LinkedIn the next day. I wasn't at the session, but basically here's what's wrong with it. And I saw it was very early the next morning and I thought, shall I? And I went, yes, I will. And I said, I think you have to be at the event to critique it. Otherwise, you might look foolish. But yeah, yeah, that was the top moronic comment of the day. Now, that's a classic AI world, isn't it? Oh, look, I mean, but again, I mean, in the world of mental availability, at least everyone's thinking about it, even if they're thinking about it in a stupid way.

11:50Mark Ritson:It's still good. Yeah, it still helps. There's quite a lot of hubris there, though, right? There is. I feel I can comment on something even though it wasn't there. I do sometimes get that. Have you read How Brands Go? Well, no, but...

12:04Byron Sharp:I got a gist of it from a YouTuber. I mean, he's very patient. Everyone butchers the work. Do you know what I mean? And you sort of see him wincing when someone's sort of quoting it but getting it completely wrong right you go well that's that's you know that's not it it's my work you know i do do know what it means and you and you don't i sometimes have to go and look i don't see it i did not no i did not my worst ever academic experience is i went to oxford to give a talk and i had published a paper in the journal consumer research and on the train from london to oxford i sort of ginned up on it and i couldn't understand a word of it and i remember on this train thinking what is this guy talking about it was my paper you know what i mean oh and i got to the end of the train journey and i was like i really am struggling with what the hell this is all about that's when you start realizing something wrong with what academics are doing including me you know what i mean yeah well that journal right is uh yeah you

12:57Mark Ritson:had to you had to write in a certain way oh style over substance is huge yeah yeah yeah and that's a there's a tribe right there's the journal of consumer research tribe yeah and they're also the ones who do the most fraud the most retracted out i saw that i saw that do you yeah academia is a whole i didn't realize there's a hot bed of fraud then oh my goodness you want to have a fraud i don't know breaking news particularly from the netherlands yeah the dutch are hot in it

13:23Byron Sharp:and any behavioral economist is basically diddling everything do you know what i mean like it's counterintuitive because it's fiction you know but um yeah i mean yeah i suppose it comes at

13:34Mark Ritson:arms race right you have to have another counterintuitive fighting another counter let me surprise you again you think it's a cat no it's a dog and so there's a bit of pressure to keep pulling these rabbits out of the hat you know that now coming back to how problems grow 16 years since you wrote the book yeah as you look at the reaction to the book what a market is still not understanding that they should understand there's no one thing yeah it's like uh you know it's it's patchy i mean people implement better in other places and get on top of certain things humans have a wonderful ability to muddle their way through to you know we we do we do we progress astonishing progress but it's very muddled yeah messy engineers hate it you know and you know academics sort of hate it you know we need to replace all this democracy and things and just let us we'll just decide everything they love that and mar what would you say the impacts of

14:28Byron Sharp:how brown's grow has been i think it's still a work in progress and i think we're all very clear on that we it sounds fancy talk but in academia we've always looked at paradigms in a very specific sense of coon's idea of there's a socially constructed vision of truth within a scientific movement and the paradigms do shift that's where that that phrase comes from and what we're seeing in marketing as we live through it is a paradigm shift from what we could call the the american or the Kotlerian School of Marketing to one that is now derived, not exclusively, but mostly from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute.

15:07Byron Sharp:But it takes time, and we're talking decades, for one paradigm to shift to another. And if you wanted to understand one example of that, if you take what the Kotlerian School would say about brands, they would take awareness as a small gateway into a much bigger question then of do you have an image for the brand, do you have a relationship with the brand, how do you feel about the brand what does the brand feel about you and on me and on me go right do you remember yeah i do if you take what erinburg bass has done they kind of have inverted it and what they've said is that awareness or mental availability piece do i am i there do i exist in your consciousness is most of it my bullshit figure is always 70 to 80 percent of it there may be a sliver of image or association there in their case category entry points but it really is do i exist is where to focus i think that's right yeah but it's also an inversion that typifies the two schools now and if you think if you if you were in marketing in the 90s you'll remember it was all about what's the image of the brand how do i feel about the brand i have a relationship with this brand i'm loyal to this brand we're now entering a period where how do i get my brand to come to mind is the dominant question and that comes from from byron's impact but we're not there yet we got 20 more years of banging away at the same drum and even then it you know it'll take that's what

16:31Mark Ritson:people forget is now i i think it's what you said your job is to come to mind in buying situations yeah that's the mental availability it's not just one cue you don't just it's not top but you're not just you can't just be the leader you'll be well i suppose you could lead on everything but that's It's unusual. I love that. So, yeah, even big, even, you know, banks are shocked sometimes. So they're like, so you just filled out, you know, a satisfaction form. And, you know, you said you loved us and you do give us most of your banking. And you just took out house insurance, which we sell with someone else.

17:04Mark Ritson:Yeah. And we were like, oh, yeah. Yeah. Now that you mention it, I remember you do sell house insurance. But I didn't think of you at the time.

17:16Byron Sharp:And it's hidden by awareness data. So all these banks, of course, have got data showing that our aided awareness score is 96%. It's never 100%. There's always 4 % of lunatics that haven't heard of like British Airways and that west, right? But yeah, so they're looking at their awareness data going, we've got no problem with awareness. Everybody knows about us. But to Byron's point, not in certain category, entry points, subcategories where, you know, I always think about banking. And not every day. No. And consumers don't want more than one financial institution. They would love to have a single one, but it's this failure to be able to take the whole, you know, I'd like my bank to take, you know, all of my stuff.

17:53Mark Ritson:Yeah, that's a good example, isn't it? Because most of us have multiple banks. It's like, why? Oh, well, you know, I love it when you're like, you know, you're at lunch with some bankers and they, you know, they pull out their credit card to pay for them. It's not their bank. It's true. It's true. I love the Sarah Carter quote, you are not the customer.

18:11Byron Sharp:Do you know this quote? You might not know it. I saw Sarah Lassa. Sarah Carr is a phenomenal account planner from DDB. And she said something about, I don't know, it's one of these things I have chosen to make it famous. I thought it was your quote. No, no, I stole it from Sarah. And it's every advertiser or marketer should have a post-it now on their desk saying the consumer doesn't give a shit. And it's a very important quote because it opens the door to a lot of things. Yeah, it's a very banal sounding quote. It opens the door to a lot of Ehrenberg bass work. It opens the door to understanding fundamentally your brand is not important.

18:51Byron Sharp:No one cares about purpose. Your brand isn't coming to mind. And my big point has always been to brand managers. You think about your brand all the time, and that's great, but it is an exact inversion to what your consumer is doing out there with 700 brands and 42 free brain cells. you've got it you know and it's about them not about you you're overthinking it so paradoxically

19:15Mark Ritson:branding becomes more important yes yes but not for the reasons that people thought that's the

19:21Byron Sharp:key point when i say it to marketers i say it a lot they sort of wince and challenge you and say how can you say brand isn't important but byron's point's the key thing it's true and it will make branding more if brands are less important branding becomes more important you know now

19:36Mark Ritson:Now, this brings me nicely to my favorite Ehrenberg Bass chart, even though I don't fully understand it. Right. You did a test amongst marketers. Well, not me. Well, you as in. I think it was Nicole Hartnett. Was it Nicole? Yeah. Asking marketers how distinctive their brand assets were. Yeah, or being able to, yes. To be able to judge them, yes. And then compare that to the actual customer. Yeah, yeah. And what did that reveal? Well, I mean, they're not terrible. of all you know people are able sometimes there's something that's fairly obvious but yeah they way overestimate yeah they're not the customer yeah you know the customer but there's there's also isn't this wasn't there there was a period where people were doing really quite great research like comparing um society values and you know what's important to them and things and then and then surveying people who work at ad agencies and it's like yeah i love that work

20:27Byron Sharp:It was social media usage. There's a great early study that was like, they looked at agency people, what the penetration was on Twitter and Facebook, regular normal people. And they were labeled like normal people, which I really liked. And then they asked the agency people to estimate how many normal people are on Facebook. And the numbers were exactly like the agency number and completely unlike normal people. And it's a beautiful example. You think you're the consumer and you're definitely not. Exactly.

20:57Mark Ritson:Now, in this conversation we were having in the Palais, one area where I think you had a bit of difference was on distinct and less versus relative differentiation.

21:05Byron Sharp:Yeah, well, let me summarize that because I think my answer's got the difference point. So we're all aligned, and I'm certainly stealing this from many years ago from Ehrenberg-Bass. I think it's worth pulling this one out a bit. We didn't have distinctiveness before Ehrenberg-Bass, okay? There are many things that have been rebranded and repositioned, but it's the same old, same old. You can argue, as we'll see, well-branded, has been around for a long time. But distinctiveness as a concept just didn't exist. They really did kind of pull it from the weeds, you know, the D word, and had to explain it very nicely.

21:41Byron Sharp:So we all became converts to that. And distinctiveness has got nothing to do with competitors, yeah? I always think of it as a selfish decision, you know? Does the brand come to mind in this particular moment? It's really about, you know, is the brand popping up? Do we look like us? Yeah, and his great quote that I've always loved is a brand that looks like itself. Either from the category entry points being associated or it leaps out of you because you look like yourself, the brand comes to mind. I think you didn't used to wear glasses like that. When we were young men, I didn't. No, I had brown ones.

22:14Byron Sharp:Right.

22:15Mark Ritson:But there became a time when those glasses became Mark Ritson distinctive. Comes to mind. You took those glasses off your LinkedIn profile for a while and I was like, dude, what are you doing? I think I did, yeah. You did, only for a short time.

22:28Byron Sharp:Well, it's so bad now. When I do video Q &As for my classes, I don't need them. I'm short-sighted. But I have a pair that are non-prescription, so I can wear them even though I don't need to wear them because no one knows who the fuck I am. Exactly. Who's that old bloke from there? It's me, it's me. So anyway, so distinctiveness. So distinctiveness and this coming to mind is the thing. Now, my bullshit stat has always been it's 70 % to 80 % of the job. I still maintain that there should be a quotient on top of that, which is about differentiation. Now, there's a caveat there, though. I think Michael Porter was very wrong when he talked about differentiation.

23:10Byron Sharp:He conflates being different with being unique. Those two things are not the same thing. And we've been on a quest to find uniqueness for our brands, which is almost impossible. But if we see differentiation as a relative thing, that this bottle is slightly taller than that bottle or whatever it might be, there is the potential for differentiation. Now, it doesn't happen a lot. It's hard. And most marketers are crap at it. But it is possible. And I think the one thing I got from our talk that I wouldn't have thought was Byron was, yeah, in theory, that is true. And not just relative differentiation in the very prosaic sense, which you've always accepted.

23:53Byron Sharp:You know, one is green and one is blue. There is room.

23:56Mark Ritson:No, I've always said this, I'm writing this book, you know, differentiation is everywhere. But it's largely, you know, situational. Yes. Like this one's got my size. These people will deliver today. These people won't. you know that's there everywhere but that's not really brand level but but your acceptance

24:16Byron Sharp:purchases no no it's got to be there yeah but your acceptance was also yes there is room for volvo to be perceived to be more safe it just doesn't happen very often and that was a new thing there is room there even in the erenberg bass universe which is dominated by distinctiveness and i always say to brand managers be greedy first of all yes distinctiveness but double d you know go for your differentiation as well relative hard i don't know if you have to i mean

24:43Mark Ritson:don't have to but because um andrew once said something to me which shocked me as a because i you know came through the sort of differentiation school and john dawes and i write a you know sort of very academic article on on you know what is differentiation and all the theories and things um and andrew said well you know it said you you can't launch a me too product but why not right and i was like that's a bit too that's really radical yeah i thought about it well yeah i guess i guess a lot of them are uh unintentionally me too yeah so why not just pretty much every every accountant who leaves accounting school business school and goes and starts their own practice launches i mean to accounting practice yeah we'll do your tax return oh really wow like yeah i can't think of anyone else that does yeah yeah well adelaide central market you know you send that and there's oh it's fruit and vegetable and then what's next to it uh fruit and vegetable and your point would be if they're distinctive enough they'll win the day right yes well and of course they do have some differentiation like well we're over here so you know brands you know even what things we think of as really the same still don't compete the way the economists would like to think they do but i would pull that back again though to when

25:57Byron Sharp:we look at brands positioning there's again back to the sarah carter quote almost every brand i've ever worked with has so much in its first of all they very rarely have the the sort of the palette of distinctive brand assets which is crucial and second of all they're trying to jam 500 different words into the customer's head and none of them none of that's going to get through i mean one of the challenges to get byron to tick the box and go okay this is possible is you can only position on one or two things to be relatively strong on and if you look at les bonnette's really nice quote about this and then what you do is you keep saying it more than the competition you do it more than the competition you don't do other things and you do that consistently for a long time there's a chance you can be the safest brand like volvo but it you know it's a chance you're the the snack for break time like kitkat both these brands have spent literally 40 years pretty much just saying that yeah so brand managers and marketers have to make a choice with positioning these keyholes and onions and all that nonsense you know my simple rule has always been if you need more in the page for the whole thing the palette of distinctive brand assets and whatever your positioning idea might be it's already over and again no coincidence that a Nestle KitKat has a one page position the Volvo guys I think are pretty aligned as well it still isn't guaranteed to work no and you've got to be careful you don't lose sight of the

27:24Mark Ritson:the main game still. Yeah. Which is staying competitive. Yeah. Now, just keep on... I mean, KFC is chicken. It's not burgers. Yeah, yeah. But it still competes with McDonald's and stuff. Yeah. And you've got to understand that you still do that. So fast food, speed matters. So this really hit me between the eyes when, and we ended up writing it up. We only wrote it up as a conference program, I think, but it had a lovely title, Positioning vs. Petitioning. I've never seen it. No, I think we mentioned it somewhere. and everything but we did perceptual map on australian department stores and of course you get you know david jones is the upmarket store and myers over here yeah and then harris scarf it was in the middle it was the down market store and then we did duplication of purchase of people's shopping things and you're like whoa it largely fits the law but there's over sharing between harris scarf and david jones it's like that that's it's not supposed to be like that the most premium and the least premium yeah i'm just like big overlapping and then we got something explained at another model called a map that's brilliant literal map a literal map and you're like oh yeah well the david jones store and the harris gals are opposite each other but my one is further down the thing was it burger king that said that their strategy was open within 100 yards of mcdonald's right mcdonald's doing research well i mean i i even go further i mean the one we all

28:49Byron Sharp:miss we all forget about his products right um you know this these quotes about you know seth godin has a horrendous quote about it it's not the it's not the company that has that we're the company doesn't win that has the best product it's the one that has you know the best conversations or whatever product is important it's important it's not everything but it's probably a bit better

29:14Mark Ritson:It's a lot more than anything else, right?

29:16Byron Sharp:And yet, A, we don't think about it enough. At the end of the day, is your product good, satisfying? And also, are marketers involved in it? Well, that's the issue.

29:27Mark Ritson:I did the research on this recently, and I think 91 % of marketers own promotion. Only 23 % of marketers own products.

29:35Byron Sharp:And even less on price. Yeah, exactly.

29:38Mark Ritson:And they don't have influence either as well. You know, influence follows. yeah i i was years ago very young he was doing some honors course with some industrial relations uh professors and and i explained the four p's to them and they went in industrial relations we call that an ambit claim yeah yeah you could you control all of those yeah sure you do yeah

30:01Byron Sharp:i mean the back the back step we've got now is okay we're never gonna have a maybe we never did have a situation where marketers control product or price but if we don't have input yeah particularly and understanding i mean i think a lot of marketers thanks to this bullshit culture we've built think not only do i not have input into product why would i yeah right i'm doing marketing i.e advertising they don't even realize it's part of our remit and what by the way the p the four p's were originally created to remind marketers these are your four leaders yeah it was a checklist right don't forget don't forget and of course what did we do we started all these other p's You know, oh, no, it's about personality and it's about obviously purpose and it's about people.

30:45Byron Sharp:And the whole point was to say, no, it's about these four things. So while we're asking about over here with other all remarkably beginning with the word P things, we lost product. We lost pricing. We lost place distribution exactly because we didn't read the bloody book. You know what I mean? So, yeah, it's a sad old story.

31:05Mark Ritson:i won't mention the company but they asked me to come and look at a whole lot of failed launches in asia and we looked at their plans and i'm like where's the distribution plan in this oh really and i went just do you just think because you're big you just would automatically get it yeah maybe pretty much yeah same with probably i remember leaving luxury goods these are all

31:28Byron Sharp:I remember leaving luxury goods in a world where every CEO literally knew the names of the people that were making their products and where they were made. And going back to a regular fashion brand and saying to the senior team, who's making your product now? We have no idea. Literally, we have no clue who makes this. And you think, well, you know, at the end of the day, it'd have to be a luxury good to really worry about that. You know, product design, how's it sourced? How do we make it? And does it work? I mean, it's got to be the most important P.

31:59Mark Ritson:This is definitely a big company problem. I remember in my career, I moved from a small private equity-backed business where I literally managed all the P's, everything, into a kind of big, quote-unquote, CMO role. And then we were launching this new water brand, and someone in a meeting goes, oh, we don't seem to have a listing of WH Smiths, and WH Smiths is the biggest vendor of water on the go, basically. And anyway, because I'd just come from this small business, I phoned the buyer in the meeting and said, can we get it on the shelf? And he said, yes, and we did the deal. And everyone was looking at me going, you phoned the buyer?

32:33Mark Ritson:You know how to get it on the shelf? But because in large companies, you're so distant. And different departments are managing different things with their own objectives. And that's why the 4P influence matters because somebody's got to knit that thing together and make sure that the entire operation is all.

32:48Byron Sharp:Well, and the contrast with the consumer who automatically integrates it all into a gestalt straight away, right? Yeah. We've atomized it all out in the departments and various different towers. Meanwhile, you can always have digital traditional, right? We've created these two silos of communication. We have big debates about brand and performance. And the consumer just goes, boom. Yes, 100%. Perfectly every time, right? We've just got to replicate that in our planning system.

33:12Mark Ritson:Now, the other thing I think so many people get wrong is the short and long. And like my favorite Ehrenberg-Bass data point, probably since you wrote the book, is the 95-5 rule. Yeah, well, I love that. talking about yeah just just explain the origins of it because it's just so profound it's well i think the reason i love it we have come to understand it realizing what that's crazy yeah we have now as mark says you know yeah people yeah really love it and get it and john dawes just it was sort of a flippant you know thing it was just struggling to communicate you know the negative binomial distribution for b to be that most people aren't in your market and and he coined the 95.5, which actually is not a bad, you know.

33:54Mark Ritson:It's a bullshit number, but it's a good bullshit number. It's very close to the, as I say, scientists, we're not that worried, you know, let the engineers worry about whether it's 95.5 or whatever. And it came from B2B, which is important,

34:05Byron Sharp:because I've had a lot of people in B2B say, yeah, okay, 95.5, but does it work in B2B? I'm like, it came from B2B. Yes, exactly.

34:11Mark Ritson:And it's even, probably even, presumably it's longer in B2B, because people are only changing houses every five. Yeah, and if it's like premium whiskey or cars, is even more extreme.

34:19Byron Sharp:I use haircuts. I've found that's the best example. And I said men with haircuts because women and haircuts are more complex. I don't understand it. But I understand men with haircuts. I always say to a room, I say, if you go outside right now and I start offering free haircuts, first of all, it would be odd. But five out of the hundred guys that pass me will say, oh, that's exactly what I need. And the other 95, even though it's free, well, I don't need a haircut. And it's a good way to get that model in. But I love to transpose john's model 95.5 you explain it you literally show it and then i go so that's why we need short targeted performance communication because that's where all the money is well that's purchase

35:00Mark Ritson:available trying to catch get them off the five percent yes we want our more than our fair share we want to get in there because the money's there but there's 19 times more people who are not buying

35:11Byron Sharp:right now they haven't experienced a category entry point but we know from other data that if I can be the salient brand for the 95, 70, 80 % of the time, the brand I will buy when I enter the 5 % is that brand. And again, that's just as B2B as it is B2C. The B2B guys will give you a lovely drawn out explanation for why they got to whatever company they bought, but it will be 70 to 80 % of the time, the one that they were all thinking of before they experienced that.

35:40Mark Ritson:Well, they gave that one a chance. Yes. You know, and 99.

35:43Byron Sharp:They'll deliver the goods. and you've got that mental you know the tilting of the of the of the thing where once it's come to mind you really you want it to win so you don't have to think of any others you know you're already backing it in a sort of cognitive way i think the data on b2b is even i think what you're

35:58Mark Ritson:referring to there was how people make buying decisions and the fact that 80 percent of buying decisions in a pitch process are made even before the pitch process yeah so it's the brand that comes to mind first before you even go it's just getting on the list i mean if you're if you're not if you're not on the line list you're not you're over you know and if someone wants auditing things and then they've got a thousand they're not going to look at a thousand options yeah they're going to have a short list of like three or four being on that three and four is your 70 of the battle right that's right yeah where i got properly school in this one was um so i was managing lucasate so number one energy drink in the uk and we went through sugar tax and and said yeah yes Yes, yes.

36:39Mark Ritson:Absolute frigging disaster, right? Huge backlash. We made the mistake of telling people we're changing it, which was a disaster. It's asking for it. I know. Well, people didn't drop out because they didn't like it. They dropped out because they heard it had changed. It was the rumor of it, not the thing, that actually led to the disaster. It's also the how dare you, like, you know. It's not your product. You're messing with it. Yeah, eight or five years of drunk the same thing.

37:00Byron Sharp:Remember with New Coke, it was, who do you think you are? We mess around with Coke. We're Coca-Cola. And they're like, who do you think you are?

37:07Mark Ritson:There's an amazing article actually called The Wrong Question, which is basically they asked when they did Classic Coke, do you like the taste? And everyone said, it's amazing. In fact, it's better than the previous one. It was. And the right question was, how do you feel about the fact we've taken your choice away? Oh, no, don't change the code. I would literally not drink it however good it was because it's the one that I like. That's right. And so they'd ask the right question. But the point I was going to make was we were forced into doing a big relaunch. And so the team then, I asked the team to get penetration data.

37:34Mark Ritson:forced because of your mistake to do well exactly we had no choice the government pushed you know government change anyway okay my defense um so so i asked the team i said give me the penetration data and uh we're looking at 26 market penetration in the last 12 months yeah the whole year well i'd i i'd got everyone in the team to reread your book i said look before we have this conversation you lot are going to read the book and then you come back was that a punishment conversation yeah that's punishment right you know we clearly have to get back to basics i then changed the question I said, what's our penetration over three years?

38:07Mark Ritson:46%. And I literally see him like, what? 20 % of the population? That's very typical, yeah. Yeah, over three years, the penetration typically doubles for a consumer. We had been given an objective of an eight-week relaunch. I'm like, this needs to be eight years. Are you freaking kidding? That's very good. We can't just like, you know.

38:24Byron Sharp:But I draw, it's a lovely example. I draw your attention to other data we've just collected using Ipsos. only around 45 % of marketers know what penetration is. I can calculate it. I just want to bring us back. Yeah. That's true. That's true. Less than half. Less than half. Representative samples.

38:43Mark Ritson:Is this UK, US?

38:45Byron Sharp:UK, US, Canada, and Australia, that data point would hold that.

38:48Mark Ritson:And they're the best marketers, right?

38:50Byron Sharp:Possibly not based on this data. So I always think about him because I think, you know, we can have a very big argument about penetration. but first of all we're gonna have to explain to half the people in the room what we mean that's wild yeah right we shouldn't forget that right but that underpins this whole point isn't

39:06Mark Ritson:it about be yourself be distinctive keep doing it turn up consistently the whole thing yeah yeah lots of you know your customer but you you know you look at your 25 it's good no that's that's not really true your penetration is way more than that but it'll take you a long time to reach those people and it brings to the next point which is sorry that's why i don't like the term long term I think it's hopeless for communicating to a CFO. They're just really suspicious. Like that means I can't ever tell, right? I've changed my mind on this. I agree with you because – I mean, I get the idea that investments pay off in the long term, but they're like, well, what does that mean?

39:44Mark Ritson:Because the impression is you have to wait. I think it's worse. Yeah, I think they think this is going to take a long time before impact.

39:48Byron Sharp:It's even worse.

39:50Mark Ritson:Yeah, yeah. And the reality is, no, it's having a sales effect immediately, but it doesn't show up in your sales next week because only 5 % are coming. This is why I use 95 % because it reframes it as lasting effects that continue. Spread out. Because each week you've got your different 5%.

40:05Byron Sharp:And you see it with that system one data. If you look at the best brand building campaigns that really work on the brand building level, they all also beautifully correlate with short-term sales spikes as well. So if you have a great, but the reverse is not true. If you do something very, very promotional, which is extraordinarily targeted, which works great at the sales spike, It doesn't do anything for the brand. Yeah. So the long and the short, long drive short, but short doesn't drive long. I think that's the nuance a lot of the brands that are over-investing. Well, I'm going to, so slightly.

40:37Byron Sharp:Good, I knew you would, so yeah.

40:38Mark Ritson:It is true it is working in the short term, but it will not show, you will not see it in your sales. It's impossible to see. It'll stretch out after that point. The signal, you know, like you're doing a fairly big aid campaign, so you've got about 5 % reach in the week. yeah so even of the people who are buying this week a tiny port you know even the people who are buying you most of them have not had an exposure so you just you just have no so the I just showed some data on this fits with huge meta-analysis the typical advertising elasticity for broad reach advertising is zero is that right which means you move it up you move it down and your sales guy you don't see it in the short term presumably yeah yeah yeah and there's no way of doing it the long term yeah because you like i just cannot see it and and you're back to 95.5 yeah you've got to go to the 95 who are not in the market and look at their memories have i moved those because i cannot see it myself but i purchase available like i close the doors of the store what happens 100 so i can do lots of octagon if i buy that search word or that one or i buy it there's facing i use a gondola end you if it doesn't show up in sales it's not working so great optimize there do your marketing mix modeling whatever do not do that for broad reach advertising so the elasticity is for um media that are much more like like performance digital and things 10 20 times higher interesting so tv for the latest meta-analysis is like for t-u board that the elasticity is 0.0008 which we can round to zero.

42:24Mark Ritson:But if it's search, no way. You tend to search for it on or off. Some of them go boom, boom, boom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, back to 95.5, aren't we? Yeah, because it's... People that are looking for it. Someone types a new washing machine. They're in the five. They are in the five. Exactly. That's the point. I mean, this brings us to the third point you guys were agreeing on, which is the role of mass marketing. And that's quite a change, isn't it, from where we were. No, it's another credit to Ehrenberg Bass.

42:53Byron Sharp:Yeah, I mean, in the early, where do you want to pick, sort of 90s, we'd reached a point where it was the classic story of Henry Ford, Eddie Carre you like, as long as it's black, mass marketing, stupid. And then from Ted Leavitt onwards at Harvard, who's one of my heroes, it was like, if you're not talking segmentation, you're not talking marketing, you must go after a smaller group, customize that smaller group, exclude the other groups and really focus on them. And we really were there. And we got to the point in the 90s where it was kind of bizarre that the excluding bit was kind of what marketers would boast about.

43:28Byron Sharp:I only want these, I don't want those horrible guys. We're for these guys. And that was when Ehrenberg Bass came in with, and I remember the initial reaction, it was the thing everyone was most skeptical of when the book came out, mass marketing. And we should be clear, they don't mean every, my simple example is always dog food. When Ehrenberg Bass say mass marketing, mean sophisticated mass marketing it's everyone that owns a dog or even smaller than that it's

43:53Mark Ritson:not everyone in the population yeah and not necessarily treating them the same you know some people have smaller houses so they've got to have smaller tins or they've got smaller dogs so they don't you know you don't have to treat everyone the same but you do have to reach everyone and i think that was really andrew erenberg's contribution he maybe couldn't sort of expels it but because he looked and he saw the negative binomial distribution and gerald had done the duplication of yeah of starters viewing law and he's like so you're looking at the marketing textbook you know but i don't see that in the data because if you really were able to carve off a segment you wouldn't just so when a brand grows you wouldn't see that it pulls from every

44:32Byron Sharp:single group and yes so it does not match that itself that's his south back time or it's before

44:39Mark Ritson:that when was he seeing that oh no that's that's before london business school the early early days They had a problem at Atwood panels, I think. So a panel was quite small in those days. And they had one household who bought something like 14 times for Cadbury drinking chocolate. Which skewed up the... Do we take this household out? And that's going to change. Completely. Or are they like normal or whatever? And then you went, okay, well, so what is normal for heavy? How many heavies should you have?

45:15Byron Sharp:and he that's how it begins yeah and it's important to realize that that you know byron became a convert of this because of andrew erenberg and also important to realize that he's kind of our alpha alpha candidate from from the new paradigm so it's andrew coming up with a lot of this stuff initially and and gerald yeah and gerald yeah being laughed at literally laughed at because they're in the middle of the american paradigm and i saw andrew present a couple of times in America and it was just a strange reaction which was what are you literally like what are you talking about yeah and they didn't know what to make of it I remember I think it was an ACR but anyway one of the early conferences I went to as a doctoral student and this very interesting man it was English which is quite rare back then as well making this very interesting presentation and this this weird they were respectful but the the the big American business school professors who were all the legend I was oh my god there's such and such we're just like respectful but nonsense.

46:11Byron Sharp:I can remember that.

46:12Mark Ritson:Gerald tells a story where because the English had different paper size, right? You had A4. So they could tell, you know, just by the paper size who was submitting this journal article. Yeah, yeah. That's all completely different. A reviewer saying something like that. The authors are obviously British. I just need not count against them. That's very good. I should have said that with an American accent. You should have. Yeah, yeah. So the challenge I put in on this one is what do you do if you're a challenger brand? So going back to when we met in Britovic, you had Pepsi, Robinsons, they had tens of millions of pounds.

46:53Mark Ritson:I had my 100 ,000 pounds on Limitzen. And if you look at say, you know, Fevertree or Red Bull, what they tend to do when they launched is they focus on one part of the market and they grew penetration in that part of the market. Yeah, which is a... And then you see them gradually expand. So I did this in this, look at this data where I looked at it. Fevertree saw an opening that had just, Schweppes had just left their thing. So we are Schweppavescents, we're upmarket, except we're selling 2.5 liter warm bottles in Tesco. And Fevertree went, well, the world is getting richer, a bit more premium.

47:32Mark Ritson:If they're in small bottles, the sparkle stays better. you know like just they've just left that area something wild about that so uh so britvik is obviously named after so britwick is that after schwep's the number two uh tonic brand no one knows that but britwick is a tonic that's how the company was created right so britwick britwick tonic was so i i thought i was poor on lips and iced tea with my hundred grand there's zero budget on britwick tonic right but and if you hadn't and if schwep's hadn't fever tree wouldn't be here This is the idea. This is what happens next, right? So Fevertree go in and go, well, Schweppes is the last player on the team sheet.

48:08Mark Ritson:Britvik Tonic is the last player on the team sheet. They all had almost perfect distribution because everywhere they went, and they needed a tonic, you'd put in Britvik or Schweppes, right? So Fevertree did what they did. Fevertree then became bigger than Britvik in market capitalization.

48:22Byron Sharp:But this is the story of disruption that Clay Christensen talked about that nobody ever understood. you know yeah he did a beautiful work at harvard looking at how is it that a dominant brand can be usurped by a smaller player and the answer is for the longest time it doesn't look like usurption it looks like a part of the market that's unprofitable uninteresting and small so we you service them we don't want them yeah but what happens over time is that becomes the source if you Netflix supplanting blockbuster blockbuster didn't want the dvd market because it was tiny the niche of the niche, as the CEO called it at the time.

49:01Byron Sharp:But over time, this is how disruption occurs. So I think it's a really important part of, I hate the overuse of the word disruption and the ignorance of Clay Christensen's work. Everyone in market, it's disruptive. You don't know what that means. It's a very different thing, a very important thing.

49:20Mark Ritson:Galloway's got this lovely quote, which is the less sexy the industry, the greater your return on investment. And I think there's something in that. find the most boring category that comes because other people won't look at it they won't look yeah exactly and then they work can't be bothered and then by the time you it's like who gives a crap toilet roll right they've gone into yeah who's innovating toilet roll yeah and then they've had a free run yeah it's a great point but with the fever tree thing i mean i think i do think it was that schwipps would just chase volume and the volumes in supermarkets and big bottles and and and they just left some territory that they previously i don't i mean they were the posh brand

49:54Byron Sharp:But I think that's it. You chase margin, you chase revenue, you chase categories. And that's the correct thing to do for now. But it's not as you spin it out over time. Clay's original work looked at the steel industry and how the Indians supplanted the Americans in the steel industry. And the Indians took all the little jobs that the American firms didn't want until suddenly they had the competence and the scale to expand out. And if you're smart, like the Chobani story is a good one. You choose a subcategory because you're too small to take on the big yogurt brands. So what Chobani started out tiny, right?

50:31Byron Sharp:So what they did was they said, right, there's a subcategory of Greek yogurt. No one's in that subcategory. So we'll take that and we'll build our scale and our salience and everything else in that category. And then, of course, we will grow that category out with us inside it. You know what I mean? I think it's a very important. You know, we know about penetration. If you're not big enough, you go after a segment, very simply defined, because you can't afford to do the mass, or you go after a subcategory for the same reason. Not because you don't want everything, but you can't have everything to begin with, and you have to bulk up.

51:06Byron Sharp:Exactly.

51:06Mark Ritson:That's basically what I do on lips and iced tea, because in the UK, I mean, obviously in Australia, elsewhere, iced tea is phenomenal. It's everywhere. It used to be, though. No, exactly. In the UK, no one drinks iced tea. So why would I have tea copped? So that was our problem. But because it was a unique new category, I was able to own that category and be the ICT in the category. But I had to start really tight. I had to start literally in central London to build up the physical availability and the mental availability. And then kind of almost. Yeah, so this is what we say. We used to get asked, right, if I'm a small brand, should I start in a little regional thing and then move out?

51:41Mark Ritson:Or should I try to do that? And we would say, well, there are advantages and disadvantages of both. If you start small, there's less risk. But of course, you then prove to the others it's a business success and they can trump you. So you start in Sydney, you start to move west, and someone started in Perth and come the other way. And we're like, I don't know. We've both seen successes either way. But now what I say is the way to decide is, can I get overlapping mental and physical availability? So if you are a national player and you can do that, go national.

52:15Byron Sharp:But it's going to be detected by physical availability, which is probably the harder lever than the mental one.

52:20Mark Ritson:Well, for some companies it's not.

52:21Byron Sharp:Okay, depends on the category.

52:23Mark Ritson:If you're a P &G, they can go, I can get like over 80 % weighted distribution in a couple of weeks.

52:30Byron Sharp:And also we've got a great competence of doing that mass advertising. Yeah.

52:34Mark Ritson:But if you don't have that, if you've got limited budgets, you might go, all right, I'll start in New York. But here's the thing, right? Even at the same time I launched Clipsized Tea, Coke launched Coke Zero. They were the textbook. They were 95 % distribution in six weeks. Yeah. No one had done that before. Which they would do, yeah. And they got the Coke brand. They relaunched three times the next 10 years. In fact, their sales went down 50 % in year two. So even Coke was struggling to keep the listings in because it was a new concept at the time. I mean, you could argue about Diet Coke where they duplicating.

53:09Mark Ritson:Well, also because mental availability, it's always, for those companies, It's always slower, even when you're Coke. Even if you're Coke and you're spending a large amount, you're probably still only getting weekly reach of about 10%, and it's accumulating. I've got 90 % weight of distribution. To get 90 % of people even knowing my name is probably going to take two years. That was it. In fact, it's about 10 years until they got to probably a sustainable level.

53:38Byron Sharp:10 years is a very good figure for a lot of things. I think one of the things, you know, we've got these lovely, very fast digital firms now. And it's, you know, create an ad on Monday, run it Wednesday, have the data Friday, you know. And that's largely true. But if you step back and look at how long does it take to build a proper brand? How long does it take to fix a broken brand? Invariably, we come back to about a decade to truly get what you need to be in a decent position. And that's a mind-blowing data point for an industry where, as I learned on Monday, the average brand building campaign is 40 days long.

54:15Byron Sharp:That's insane.

54:17Mark Ritson:When I did my soft drink project looking at innovation over 10 years, my conclusion to the paper was it takes an average of seven years to have an overnight success. 40 days. I should get some people to crunch some numbers on that. Without the Super Bowl, how much reach could you actually really ever expect to get? in 40 days.

54:37Byron Sharp:Talk to Tiltman here at Cannes. He's got, it's a good study from about, and these are the big brands, big spenders, $2 billion worth of investment. Yeah, the averages, and that's not the activation stuff. It's just, they're named, when they've said it's a brand building campaign, the 40 days is the end. Is that the award entry? Is that based on entry data? I think they've actually, I forget, they've used an actual media monitoring company to look at it. It's pretty solid data.

55:01Mark Ritson:It's very hard without time to get a lot of reach. Yeah. With Super Bowl aside. It doesn't matter how much you spend. You'll just be spending more money, but your frequency will be going through the roof. And there'll be some people who'll go, what? No, I've never seen it. Because the most creative work will be the one that runs the shortest amount of time around an event like Super Bowl Christmas World Cup. So it could be linked to that rather than that.

55:21Byron Sharp:And it's getting marketers to say, look, it takes two or three years for your campaign to work. Okay, you could run some of these ads through that, but just have a campaign which is joined up. I was with AB InBev yesterday, who I do think are, you know, you can argue how do they get these prizes. They probably are the most advanced advertiser. They really know. The excellence, I was waiting to do my talk and I watched them all presenting. They're on it. You know, they're really on it. They're the only ones getting this point that my campaign will run for two or three or four years. And there's no reason to change it just because we're all sick of it, you know.

55:57Byron Sharp:They're well on that. It's very rare, though. They're scholars. they really are scholars of effectiveness and you it used to be part of proctor and campbell's and

56:05Mark Ritson:and their competitors would fear this the fact that proctor would do their homework and then they would commit to something for two years and so they wouldn't let it go yeah and how did you feel about pritchard and the gang they adopted your work early are they in the center no he read your stuff before yeah yeah he's very complimentary so it's good and he must have felt you and i both

56:27Byron Sharp:have the same you know foundational love of png you know it invented so much right yeah it must have been quite the thing i mean i worked for them for free a couple times i asked them i said send me a razor and they're like a razor and i said i want a gillette razor from cincinnati sent to me by pg and i still shave with it it means a lot to me because it's png and they invented brand management so when they when pritchard was clearly singing from your hymn book i thought geez that's a that's a moment for byron there and that was seven eight years ago yeah yeah um yeah um they it was it's i'm saying to them um and they were sorry they were the cotlerian segment target positioning game until suddenly they weren't and it's one thing to hear byron say mark pritchard's on the stage talking about sophisticated mass marketing i'm like what was that yeah yeah uh

57:15Mark Ritson:but i remember i remember i think probably the first time i visited png and i said something like to them though you're held up as the best marketers on the planet and they went what no but they also had things um because there was a long period when they were very collarian and so they didn't win awards here and stuff i mean and they would say to me oh we can you know like those ads you showed brian that's great but we can't do that because the chemists control everything here and if we don't have if we don't talk about their new x y something enzyme yeah you know

57:47Byron Sharp:the playbook was was very sort of taught and serious yeah but that yeah so it was sort of

57:54Mark Ritson:it was wrong but they did very well because they were still much more disciplined than anyone else

57:59Byron Sharp:yeah and they were halfway down your road and png carries that way even among their competitors you know i think it's still i think the portfolio is looking very dusty these days but i still love i mean what they did in covid for me was still like his png right they've got again it's a hundred year old playbook in a time of great recession we will go we will double down not because of the recession but we know all of our competitors will pull back and we will get fantastic stuff with

58:25Mark Ritson:things like old spice some fantastic advertising um yeah actually it's a bit weird for png because that brand is actually hard to find yeah it is it is no i agree yeah but that that's weird yeah that because the interview the guy did that um and that double yeah yeah fantastic i mean really really good yeah but that did double market share got them back to number one position yeah within 12 months and then he went from there to kfc he did right we worked with them there and did you yeah and he and you know distinctive brand assets yeah brought the kernel back yes yeah someone someone decided you know it's this white guy from the south yeah yeah don't mention for god's sake don't mention the kernel yeah yeah and now they're like we're really leaning into the

59:11Byron Sharp:kernel now no and that they and then oh here's a great one for you so my only contribution to distinctive brand assets um was the idea of playing with them and i think jenny misses it right and i think she covers it better now but and the point would be my rule which is incredibly basic is 40 years of enforcement oh and then you can play and then you're allowed to play yeah and If you actually look at when it works, you really need the KFC, for example. Sure enough, they've had the Colonel as a DBA now for a number of decades. You can dress him up as a cowboy and all of that stuff. But the other message to marketers is don't play with it until it's been enforced, enforced, enforced.

59:52Byron Sharp:Like both Glico I work for, we can play with the yellow. Tiffany can play with the green. We've earned the right.

59:58Mark Ritson:Yeah, I agree with that. It's like at the World Cup. You saw the World Cup. But because of the naming right convention where you can't have anyone that's not a sponsor, in the US, most of the big stadiums are named by brands. So they've had to cover them up. And on the Levi's Stadium, they covered it up. Sorry, it went over my head first of all. They covered it up in the shape of the Levi's logo, which I thought was brilliant. Yeah, but maybe they should have used, you know, color as well or something. If they're allowed to, I imagine. So I think this is weird. So I agree with you, but I think, what would Jenny say?

1:00:31Byron Sharp:what james says let's paraphrase the woman here let's mansplain her theory i think she would say

1:00:38Mark Ritson:hey guys you but you have to do a bit of research and know how you can play and and she has had there have been more phds of looking like well can you play by you know sticking it next to another brand yes yes and and yeah my love my love of it was when i worked for louis vuitton we did this

1:00:55Byron Sharp:thing with Takeshi Murakami where we took the monogram which is about 150 years old and Murakami is like the pop artist you know yeah and I think the brief from Marc Jacobs was you know Takeshi come in and literally fuck around with the monogram with your creative genius and he made it all neon pink and blue on a white background and there were people in Paris like having a stroke when they saw it you know incredibly successful collection but also it's that beautiful example of when your brand is big and old and dusty you two things have happened you need to refresh you also usually have old distinctive brand assets that you can now play with and the two things go together and there's this magic trick where it still looks like the brand yeah but it's fresh and new yeah so you're sort of tipping your hat to heritage but you're also being creative and modern at the same time and when that happens you just feel that lovely sense of oh that's it's perfect yeah and it can

1:01:48Mark Ritson:works i mean it's quick i mean for the consumer they can get it and i i have these slides where flash some ads that are really using distinctive assets in a playful way than that and i deliberately flashed the the ad for less than two seconds and you and you can hear people laugh in the audience interesting and i go i use this to knock the attention people who say you know you gotta that was less than two seconds your brain processes it and you had a physiological reaction so i know that that went in very good yeah very good back to your point that's 40 years

1:02:22Byron Sharp:of brand building to get yeah but also it's it's quick for the consumer it's also quick commercially like when clients ask me what's the one thing we can do i'm like make your stuff more distinctive because it will have an instantaneous impact not just on the consumer's attention but it'll hit the sales as well. It's an easy trick to play. It isn't a long-term mission. I mean,

1:02:44Mark Ritson:you have fantastic creativity. There's a Barilla one where the spaghetti pasta goes like this, like it's obviously looks like fireworks and it has Happy New Year. Yeah. Brilliant way to do it. It's like a joke. It's like a visual joke which you get immediately.

1:03:02Byron Sharp:It's old and existing stuff done in a new way and it's the perfect place you want to play.

1:03:07Mark Ritson:And I mean, the genius with that and others like this is that you get your physical availability off the back of it. You go to retailers and go, oh, we're going to change our packaging for the first time in 40 years, do this stunt. And then you get all the displays in store.

1:03:19Byron Sharp:But the caution, of course, is, again, you've got to be working on a brand that has that old palette well established. Because there's no trick if they don't know the original and then not do it all the bloody time to the point where we still have to reinforce. And, of course, every marketer wants to change stuff. so you've really got to introduce that concept very carefully into a client because otherwise like yeah let me change it we want to change this and this year's one yeah

1:03:42Mark Ritson:what should we do next why are you doing that well it's our birthday yeah anniversaries are

1:03:48Byron Sharp:my favorite right if you want to look at product orientation a lot of companies are now getting to be 100 years old i think all right it's our anniversary next year we're 100 years old we have to celebrate it's like why nobody cares you know qantas is 100 years old and and what does that do for me does it mean you have older planes you know you know you celebrated in your office but don't waste your advertising telling me you're 100 i actually don't care it means what's the

1:04:13Mark Ritson:benefit of that fact i should say because we did this for last year for the erenberg best being 20 years well i suppose we had a story to say to me we're actually 20 years old it can be strategic

1:04:25Byron Sharp:if it fits an existing strategic objective I remember Burberry having their I think it must have been 150th and it was the quietest anniversary of all time and they asked the CEO at the time why aren't you making more of a deal of it and she said look we're pretty dusty at the moment the last thing we need is 150th anniversary keep it quiet

1:04:44Mark Ritson:actually I think if you come across this was a Grand Prix award winning bit of creative last year the Stella Artois probability did you read about this so what they did is they looked at kind of classic paintings from kind of France and Belgium and they actually were using you know using history and AI they worked out the probability that it was actually

1:05:03Byron Sharp:Stella Artois in the painting oh you've got it's a very old because you've got the Renoir and it's really that old it's it's yeah yeah yeah yeah one of the oldest it's 500 years they go 500 years so they were they were tracing back where the brewery was where the painter

1:05:16Mark Ritson:was what you know it's Leuven isn't it yeah the whole thing right so they had all these different painters and they worked out that they had the probabilistic statistical probability that that was actually a stade of artois in that painting. And what a brilliant way to anchor yourself in terms of history and heritage. If you want to give yourself an injection. If you need it. Remind people that we've been here for a while. Yeah, I'm a bit of a history buff, so I love it when brands go into their past. I had a colleague who pointed out that Ford has fabulous heritage. Yes. I mean, yeah, but in Australia, Ford's just another brand.

1:05:46Mark Ritson:We can have the Aussie Ford,

1:05:47Byron Sharp:which is a little bit more superficial. But you'd have loved my stuff. Back in the day when we were, particularly with LVMH, we'd go into the archive as kind of the first step. And partly for what we would have called at the time brand codes, distinctly brand assets, we would find these things. And it was this magical moment where like Le Brazzam for Hennessy, which is this guy holding like a big portcullis thing, whatever, you would see it everywhere and you'd realize, oh, 100 years ago these guys knew what they were doing. You know what I mean? They were doing it better than a lot of the contemporary guys.

1:06:18Byron Sharp:We've just got to go back and look. There was a lovely moment on Krug. Every luxury brand that doesn't know itself uses black and gold because they're just like, well, c 'est luxe, you know? And we were really struggling with is there a color? And Johan Krug, the founder, there's a book literally in the maison in the library because, again, he was German. You know, he wasn't French. He wasn't Champenoir. And there was a book, and he literally laid out the instructions for the inheritors of the house of Krug. and you had these sort of 150 pages, this guy laying out. So this is what you do. And one of the things he said is we have this dark cherry book.

1:06:54Byron Sharp:The dark cherry I've picked, that is the color of Krug. And Maggie, the president at the time, was like almost weeping because she's like, he's literally telling us from 150 years ago, this is our color. And she sent me a photo and she was personally, she's the president, she was painting the gates of the Maison in this dark cherry. And it's now since gone everywhere. but we got it from history you know i mean there's that magical moment where you go these are great brands and these are connective moments back to the founders it's you know it's god's work when

1:07:27Mark Ritson:you when that when that sort of stuff i mean luxury brands have to have some sort of story people have to yes almost justify themselves why they paid that much money they definitely do but but i went back it's like a you know top restaurant yes the food has to taste good but it has to be entertaining for us to play that much but i found you know we you know there's there's a lot of

1:07:47Byron Sharp:nonsense spoken about luxury and what is luxury and one of the things we we did lean on there and burgh bass to some degree even there because i i stopped believing there was such a thing as luxury brand management cap ferrier has a lovely book which i entirely disagree with about how it's different it's the same just more you know it's more concentrated it's heightened but the principal laws of brand management are the same and i think most of the senior guys i work with that LVMH would agree. There isn't something different. There's more of certain things, heritage and distinctiveness, actually.

1:08:17Byron Sharp:And if you really wanted to look at an exemplar of good brand management and how brands grow or work, luxury is a good place to go, actually. You see a lot of principles there that you can take.

1:08:27Mark Ritson:A lot of luxury brands are still family-owned or French pension funds. So they're quite willing to be disciplined and long-term. Yes. That's the key thing, isn't it? because they say it's taking long-term decisions yeah they like well we're going around for 150 years so we're planning for another 150 i think your distinctiveness point as

1:08:47Byron Sharp:well because there's the second most important person in the luxury house isn't the cfo it's the creative director they're far more attuned to distinctive brand assets than most organizations are because you've got someone that has that sensitivity to taste and looks i've seen that happen you know when you have a galliano walking around dior they know the language of the house and how it needs to look there's you know it's it's it's much stronger and they're respectful

1:09:13Mark Ritson:to the heritage they are they are now talking of uh things that matter or maybe not matter you covered purpose oh yes in your conversation or the nonsense of purpose so where do you stand on purpose baron oh well you know and the role it has i was i was always skeptical and a little bit uneasy about the the idea of taking shareholders money and spending it on you know favorite charity i mean that is actually unethical um i know people what it's doing good for the world i'm like well

1:09:41Byron Sharp:according to you yeah your idea yeah your definition so i was a little bit queasy on that but uh you

1:09:47Mark Ritson:know it's a classic brand image thing and we know that brand equity is largely mental and physical availability so how much can this thing be doing and and then we had a researcher tori um and she was really keen on purpose. And so, well, Tory, that's good. We've got a team that has skepticism and advocacy. Perfect. Let's go collect the data. Because I mean, I think our job as the Air Ambassador Institute is to say, okay, look, you're having this debate in industry. What are the empirical claims that people are making? Let's go get some evidence for them.

1:10:19Byron Sharp:I think it's misconstrued by the industry because they don't understand falsificationism. I mean, I think they don't appreciate that it's not negative. You know what I mean? like what you're trying to do you're tentatively holding a theory you can't disprove that's how yeah that's how we move forward you can't there was also a special crowd of course and someone

1:10:37Mark Ritson:asked why why now is it sort of starting to erode and i mean i think there were a lot of people who were skeptical before but they were scared that if they spoke up they were going to be called a nazi

1:10:45Byron Sharp:or something yeah you don't want to save dolphins to be fair to me and you so we've all we've been consistent on this point right from but you must have had lots of people saying to you you yeah

1:10:55Mark Ritson:There's something wrong with you.

1:10:56Byron Sharp:Very personal messages from people saying, you know, you must be a terrible human being not to support this. There was kind of a fascism in the sort of the protection of this liberal do goodry. It was actually quite dark and sinister. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. It's not brave to stand up for these things if you're not allowed not to stand up for them. Right. But the main point was, again, let's come back to Sarah Carter's famous post it now. Yes. nobody gives a shit and they've got 400 brands on their brain if you know across a year nobody cares what yeah you know what your coffee brand thinks about any of these issues you're not that important get back in your lane and don't waste your the opportunity cost of talking about all this nonsense is is enormous to you because meanwhile you aren't driving your distinctiveness if there is an attribute that is relevant to the consumer that you're not talking about that's the cost of this stuff.

1:11:51Byron Sharp:And then of course we had all these people selling purpose or built their careers on purpose who were rationalizing it and justifying it with incredibly, incredibly poor data, right?

1:12:02Mark Ritson:Well that's the trap isn't it? When it's like you know you ask the consumer you know do you care about saving the dolphins to use your example? Well of course they're going to say that right? Who doesn't? Is that why you're buying the toothpaste? Maybe not.

1:12:12Byron Sharp:The Kantar data here is very important. So Kantar did a very special thing they showed all of that. If I send out an attractive young man or woman to ask people you go of course it's very important to me yes and then they just reversed it and took a bunch of consumers and said right let's go through the six things you have literally just bought tell me why and it the purpose stuff never came up again it was literally less than a percentile of the explanatory reasons verbatim we already knew this for green

1:12:40Mark Ritson:environmental brands that it was the and so some of the purpose stuff was even more obscure that People would even, whereas you could usually spot at least the green brand. Yeah.

1:12:52Byron Sharp:They all looked alike. I mean, all these purpose statements were incredibly similar. The advertising, yeah. The whole thing, right? It became really bland. And we should be clear, John, I mean, I can't speak for Byron. Have a sociocultural purpose, but do it because you believe in these things.

1:13:05Mark Ritson:Now, I will put a little defense in because I… Because you have to. Well, I heard Peter Field, because Peter Field did some analysis in the IPA database. Yes. Byron's good on that. Now, the… and peter came out he came out swinging well he was always like like he he anticipated criticism because it was shocking research what was your take on the headline level so basically found what you'd expect to see which is purpose versus non-purpose you get about 30 or 40 percent under performance with purpose overall on average purpose on average said the headline was the headline was the headline was campaigns do not work as well on average to be fair and he came out saying that totally he did and then he said well you dig under it what you find is in certain situations where the brand was created for the purpose no that's not what he found no he just found that some of them obviously yeah mark did this really well of things like okay but you know the best goal scorers are right-footed oh but there is a there is one left-footed who's Scored lots of goals.

1:14:10Mark Ritson:Yeah.

1:14:10Byron Sharp:Okay.

1:14:10Mark Ritson:We just look at him.

1:14:11Byron Sharp:Yeah. Because that's, I mean, I did ask Peter. Look, Peter's one of my heroes. But yeah, it wasn't good because what he showed was, yeah, normally non-purpose campaigns are much better. But if you take the very best purpose campaigns.

1:14:23Mark Ritson:It's not bad.

1:14:24Byron Sharp:Yeah. Actually, they're a little bit better. But you're comparing it to the whole set of non-purpose, right? And I actually asked Peter. I said, if you take the best set of non-purpose campaigns. They're even better. Yeah. How do they compare? Oh, no, they're much better than the best purpose campaigns. And we get this point where we're trying to prove a hypothesis that we've clearly disproved because the ideology. And we got a round of applause on Monday, right, when we both said, look, we think purpose is overdone. Big round of applause. So it's good that people feel safe to do that now. But I said to them on the Monday, I said, yeah, great.

1:14:57Byron Sharp:Thanks very fucking much. Round of applause. You were all here five years ago. And I said, don't forget that some other nonsense will come and you'll all be like this again. The wisdom of crowds. I mean, look, I'm blowing our horns here a little bit, but that's why you need miserable, old, middle-aged professors like us, because we genuinely don't care, right? We don't fucking care about being unpopular, and we may be wrong sometimes, but you need us there because everyone else is, you know?

1:15:27Mark Ritson:Yeah, but digging into the state of moral, what it also told you is that the role of purpose was basically to make hiring better. you know it was basically maybe that wasn't in the data either but yeah of course what it shows is with the purpose campaigns you saw this increase in kind of employee engagement yeah sure that's a different thing yeah agreed you also saw customers want to do business with people that yeah i think but so you saw that benefit as well i'm sure these benefits could be there but no one has done serious research to see whether that is enough to pay off and be

1:16:00Byron Sharp:worthwhile yeah i talked to a philosopher which i don't do very often in a pub once about this

1:16:04Mark Ritson:quite a smart best place best place to talk to a philosopher a pissed philosopher is always a great

1:16:09Byron Sharp:source of insight to me so i told him the story and he said oh there's a there's an immediate problem with all of this which i don't think anyone got except for this philosopher and he said look if you're saying the reason you're following this purpose agenda is it makes you more money then you've instantly completely ruined your argument because if i can show you that imprisoning women or destroying the planet will make you more money, your logic says that's what you'll do instead. And I'm like, yeah, that's true. We choose to do these things because we believe in them. The minute you say it's being driven by a profit, then it's clearly not purpose.

1:16:47Byron Sharp:That started me off with my favorite line of my own. The sort of hypocrisy. Yeah, the purpose of purpose is purpose. And the minute you put dollars onto it, it's not purpose. It's some other thing. And then I think everyone was happy then to prove that it doesn't really give you the money it does.

1:17:04Mark Ritson:Now, you closed your presentation, Mark, with your famous description of Byron as the Dark Lord of Penetration. Oh, yes. Which I thought was funny.

1:17:13Byron Sharp:Well, also his response was good. It was very good. If you're not aware of this, so I've been very naughtily referring to Byron as the Dark Lord of Penetration for about 10 years now. It still entertains me whenever I write it. right and as people will ask me questions and they'll say but what but the dark lord wouldn't agree with you right and everyone's what are you talking about and it's just become you know the is the and i always like as byron will occasionally come onto social media and sort of spank someone and i always imagine him coming up from the depths like someone has summoned me with that nonsense and he comes up and he goes that's nonsense we proved that in 1976 and he sort of submerges himself back with a ripple barrier ripple on top of the leg so i got to ask byron And I said, well, you know, you've never, as you have done with other topics, sent me a short one-line email saying, I do not appreciate you calling me the Dark Lord.

1:18:03Byron Sharp:So I just inferred it was all right, which it turns out it was.

1:18:06Mark Ritson:Yeah, but also I will send you those notes if I think you've strayed into speculation rather than something. But I'm like, you're allowed to call me whatever you'd like. It's not factually incorrect. So that being the case, Byron, what do you call Mark? I don't have a name from Mark, but what did I say? This is your name? No, no, we talked about this in the car over. And, oh, I was, yeah, I was saying, and I think you were slightly offended when I said you were like one of the best business journalists on the planet and you thought it was sort of a backhanded, like you're not a Maca Hanna fan.

1:18:43Mark Ritson:I really liked it.

1:18:44Byron Sharp:I really liked it, but it was a way.

1:18:46Mark Ritson:No, no, can I fill in the thing? Because I've always had the view that, I mean, you could say journalism is not great, great but business journalism it's just we don't have investigative journalism we do not have journalists who understand business and can do insightful engineering we we have so it's you know at least you get it in politics maybe a bit but in business you get things like so-and-so's released their annual report today wow yeah like wow yeah yeah whereas your columns are they're like because because you you're you're you didn't go through journalism school You came from a business school.

1:19:21Mark Ritson:Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true.

1:19:22Byron Sharp:And I think one of the things people misunderstand about academics is when we do talks, which we've both done at universities with each other in the audience and many others, someone presents their work, and in the room, as a show of respect, everyone from the university tries to rip their data apart. And then afterwards we go for a beer. And it's not like the business. They all think, oh, academia is very soft. It's much harder than business. and you go after each other because you're trying to apply rigor. And if I can't find a flaw in Byron's data, I accept that it may be true, right? And I think when we take that level of discourse into the business, everyone's, oh, my goodness, you know.

1:20:03Mark Ritson:I know. Sometimes people are like, you're being mean, but I'm pointing out an error. Isn't that good?

1:20:10Byron Sharp:Isn't that what you want, you know? But no, I remember him saying it to me at the time, and I did smile. I was like, oh, Mark's one of the best. There's nothing wrong with Mark. he's a fine journalist and i thought yeah that's byron giving me a hug i wasn't i said you like

1:20:21Mark Ritson:that i think i mean i can't if someone said to me who's the best business journalist on the planet i would i say i suppose there's possibly someone in finance or something that's pretty good but you know for me it's mark ritson and and that's why and that's why people read you right because

1:20:34Byron Sharp:and i think to be fair i've always been very lucky that people conflate me writing about marketing with my skills for marketing which are actually two very different things but i'm quite

1:20:44Mark Ritson:happy for them to be completed you know well i don't know except you've built the mini mba as a

1:20:48Byron Sharp:as a brand there was a real moment there right where i thought if it doesn't work not only will it be a waste of time but i'll look like an absolute fraud there's a double loss there right right so thank god it did work because otherwise it's like you if you if you'd look and we should make if you're happy we should mention this he we i mean i i'm not even an i'm an ex professor I've never been a real professor of any standing. But if you look at what Byron does, he doesn't have made millions of quid for my thing. He doesn't, right? I mean, he's paid a professor's salary. The money they make goes back to the institute and pays for PhD students.

1:21:26Mark Ritson:Oh, and this is why I get snarky when there's a slight rip-off crowd. I mean, there's people. Making money from it. Yeah, yeah. when we did the when brands go dark you know like when they switch off advertising and we'd published that in a journal no sorry we'd given it to sponsors three years before but it was about to come out in a journal and I went oh there's going to be people who are going to pick this up and there's going to be people who over exaggerate

1:21:54Byron Sharp:this like yeah they don't understand it yeah yeah and so I mean the only

1:21:57Mark Ritson:defense we have is for us to put out some beautiful charts that people can steal the beautiful charts that are branded because there's people who take our stuff make money from it and they rebrand it up and they might suddenly put in a tiny tiny font six or um so one of our researchers are and then he's indonesian and his last name is unpronounceable and they'll put that there and like who knows who that is you know but i think

1:22:25Byron Sharp:we've all got to remember that right he works as hard as i do but i'm getting a very decent in a variety of different ways from what I do. And he's not.

1:22:35Mark Ritson:So I want the Institute to get fame so that businesses still buy us, in effect, and that funds the next generation of marketing scientists.

1:22:45Byron Sharp:He's so stupid. He doesn't even get my point. He's like, yeah, I know, but you don't get any money. He doesn't even think about it.

1:22:56Mark Ritson:But a lot of money comes into the Institute. And so, I mean, we are just off the charts for any research income for any. He still doesn't get the point. I was going to say, he can carry on all day, but I think he's there. I get to live in Australia. Yeah, yeah. He's happy. I get to live in Adelaide. We go down in cold Tasmania.

1:23:16Byron Sharp:One of the few places that's certainly more interesting than Tasmania, Adelaide. But yeah, when we look back on this era long gone, you know, I'm going to certainly be a good footnote. You know, my columns will be remembered a little bit, a little bit. but Byron and his impact will be the singular, I mean, it will be that he'll hate this, but it'll be the Kotler of that era. It'll be Byron Sharp. There was the Kotler period, and again, he likes to deflect it to the Ehrenberg Bass Institute. You can't get him for long with him. Well, actually, it's other people at the Institute, but it's Byron.

1:23:48Byron Sharp:I mean, Jenny's been a very sizable influence. Yeah, I know.

1:23:51Mark Ritson:There's other people.

1:23:52Byron Sharp:There is, but Andrew started this, but it's Byron that will have the impact and will be the one they remember. And in my career, it doesn't take more than five minutes for someone to say, are you friends with Byron John? We're in touch, you know what I mean? So he does, the Dark Lord does cast a shadow over the, and people are fascinated with what a strange motherfucker you are, right? Because you are immune to this, you know, swirling vortex of horseshit, right? You don't care.

1:24:22Mark Ritson:Well, yeah, that's right. I mean, I think it's just one of the reasons I don't like both of them because it sounds so wishy-washy and things i think you know i love i think it's off brand i i your brand is you know yeah yeah yeah you know the the kid who's going hey the emperor's not wearing any clothes that that's what i've done that's the ritz and i love i think that's what the brits in the world loves right yeah thank you well what a beautiful place fans yeah you guys are agreeing on a lot here it won't last i feel like i need to do an apology well we spent this is good though we've spent we

1:24:54Byron Sharp:spent this week like we've had three things together right we won't see each other now for another 10 years so there's plenty of time for us to start beating the shit out of each other on

1:25:00Mark Ritson:LinkedIn we should do this in the US yeah in 10 years time let's do it in the US next year

1:25:06Byron Sharp:I don't think they have any clue any of us well because I know yeah that's true actually

1:25:10Mark Ritson:it'd be good fun gentlemen thank you honestly thank you so much for doing this um so glad we got to do it great fun let's keep it up great fun thank you so I hope you enjoyed that episode of Uncensored CMO as much as I enjoyed making it. Now, by the way, I've got a new newsletter. So if you'd like to get my thoughts on the one thing that I take out from each episode every week, then do subscribe to the One Thing newsletter. I'd really appreciate it. Also, I have another podcast. Just launched Uncensored Renegades with the fabulous Cori Marchesotto. She is one of the world's best CMOs. She's an absolute rock star.

1:25:48Mark Ritson:Every week we pick one topic, spend 20 minutes trying to fix it. So check out that. It's in your feed, Uncensored Renegades. And finally, I want to give a huge thank you to my sponsor, System 1. They generously provide so much support for this podcast. It would not happen without them. So big thanks and lots of love to System 1. I'll see you next time.