Mark Ritson on the fall of Nike, KitKat’s perfect positioning and whether Liquid Death is more than just water in a can

0:28Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. Great Friday Pint podcast. We're right in the middle of Bow in East London, South London. And it's very interesting because it is, I've got half Australian eyes now, you know, despite being British. And it is stunning. What is it? I came in here at one o 'clock and there's about eight pubs on a tiny street and they're all full. And everyone's drinking. No, they're not in there for a quiet drink. They're in there for beers, and most of them are also smoking, which you just don't see in Australia. I'm not saying it's good or bad. It's just you forget how much the English like to go down the pub.

1:05Particularly the city. It's something about the city on Friday, isn't it? It's like a traditional, like, trading's done for the week. Get down. It's Friday lunchtime. We'll forget about that bit of the day. But it's old man's heaven round here because you've got about 25 men's tailors, 10 barbers, 8 pubs. you know you could live here forever you know yeah it'd be amazing well this is a cool idea because um i think it was like i'd let les and sarah came on the podcast earlier this year and they said like i saw it you should do this down the pub which i thought was great idea and then les and grace kite did one the other day it's funny that les would suggest that whenever you see les you usually has the same idea right yeah i went to a very posh restaurant with him with a company once and he spent the whole evening saying come on let's go there's a good pub over of the road let's get out of here and go there and i'm like we can't do that let's you know but you must have asked me eight times let's go dog and biscuit was on the other side of the road come on let's go the dog and i did tap him up actually i was going to get him behind the bar for us as well pulling the pints sadly wasn't available but uh send our love to les and what i thought we'd do um let's count down the big stories of the year yes see what's been trending um hours not everyone's just hours yeah exactly yeah yeah who cares about anyone else exactly we'll make the news right so um the you know russell parsons gave me a list of your uh top five hours this year.

2:20Which I don't know. Did you get the data by the way? Did you ever get to see that? I don't. I can. I sometimes say to Russell, I say to Russell generally like twice a year how they're going but I don't otherwise do it. And as you know, the amount of effort you put in to a column does not translate in any way, shape or form to what it does next. So there's no point. I mean the exception for you is probably that Galloway stuff which you spent obviously a lot of time on and it did actually blow up. Yeah, yeah. I mean Galloway kind of has that capability. He has that effect. I can imagine him going to the car park and it becoming a massive story on CNN or something.

2:51Well, he's just, the way he talks is just like clickbait headline just coming out of his mouth every two minutes. He's not bluffing either, right? He has that great skill as well of you can be contentious, but you actually have to believe it. And he does believe it. And I find him fascinating. I know him a little bit. He's a very, first of all, very nice man. Second, he's obviously extraordinarily smart. but he's and i don't want this to sound like an insult because i truly respect him and see him see him as my superior on every level he doesn't know that much about marketing and branding it sort of came out in your podcast and yet he's america's great marketing expert and i get you get the experts that you deserve i think at each period right and and again don't get me wrong i I think he has greatness about him.

3:39But the marketing and brand chops, you know, his business chops, his, you know, investment knowledge, his tech knowledge, exemplary, right? He's gone beyond marketing, really, hasn't he? He really has. I think that's the thing. I mean, the one bit that I think hit a nerve, certainly based on the feedback, was his point about the era of brand is over. And I think the data point that I think he missed was like, he quoted Amazon. Amazon's actually the world's biggest advertiser on TV. I don't think he's noticed. It was once true, right? Jeff Bezos found Jesus about, you know, nine years ago, right?

4:10Yeah, I think that's a good example. I think he's left marketing. I think, unfortunately, that's his most famous marketing call, and it's totally incorrect, clearly. But all his other minor calls were pretty good, you know? But, yeah, he's off, you know, saving American teens and masculinity and stuff and things that we don't even have any idea about. And, you know. So getting back to that then, my favorite post on LinkedIn this year, right, was Fernando Machado's piss take of you at Cannes, your famous Cannes column. We should explain this, right? So about 15 years ago, I was never a big fan of Cannes.

4:45It just annoyed me that everyone was out there in the sunshine pretending to work. So I wrote a column basically saying, this is everything marketers can learn this week in Cannes, and it was an empty column. And it's the only column I've ever, my long-suffering editor, Russell, has put up with a lot of shit. But that was the one where he really did say, I can't publish this. and I've sort of made him do it. And yeah, is it my most read column? Well, no, it's nothing to read, but I think it's the one that people do talk about. And then, to your point, what did he do? Well, basically, he just said everything Mark Ritson's taught us in Cannes this year in my column.

5:22Yeah, so I went to Cannes for the first and possibly only time and then he got me and I think it was spot on. Spot on. I imagine he had that ready to go for a long time. Maybe, maybe. I mean, he said, is that okay? And I was like, of course it's okay, because, you know, yeah? Salience Uber LS. Exactly. But anyway, talking to Cam, so your number five most read article. Yeah, we're getting in there now. Brand purpose doesn't need a commercial excuse. So there I was actually at Cam for my first time, and I must say it was good. It was good. It was entertaining. We struggled through it, didn't we?

5:55We managed to somehow make it work. I was sat there, and we did a Q &A in the sunshine, needs uh and we were obviously obviously drunk and um somebody asked me a very long-winded question but basically they asked me about you know do we need diversity in advertising and all of this and i made a very long-winded attempt to say no it'll be okay and blah blah blah and and it was an ill thought through well-meaning comment but afterwards a quite senior female marketer came up to me uh who's a member of the lbtq community and said basically you know you kind of missed the point because i get what you're saying but there's lots of young lesbians transsexuals who when they see members of the community represented really feel like this is a place where i'm safe because often they don't feel safe she said it beautifully she didn't tell me off but she told me off and I said to you I said I get it I really do go I don't get it because I'm a white straight idiot you know I mean drinking red wine you know I you know why would I get it but I get it now thank you you know I mean she did it beautifully and I said what we need to do really is show that you know the the reason you would show members of that community in advertising isn't to make money.

7:19It's just because it's the right thing to do. And it's almost better if the argument is, ooh, if you show a lesbian couple in your ads, it'll make you more money. It would be even better if it didn't because it means you're doing it because you want to support that community and do the right thing. And your mate, Andrew Tindall, was two blocks away. And I said to Andrew, you know, something about gay advertising and something about advertising metrics, hey, could we run the numbers and look at every ad that you guys have ever tested that has a explicitly presented member of the LB, I say it wrong, what's the acronym?

7:55LGBT. Could we get every ad that has someone from that community explicitly presented? And let's see how it performs versus average. So he went away and did it with your magical toolbox. And sure enough, and to my, actually to my delight, it proved to be no more or less effective. yeah so if you have a gay couple in an ad buying a car on average it will perform no better than a straight couple buying a car okay and i wrote a column that basically said and that's okay because i get tired of people arguing that purpose will make you more money or in this case diversity will make you more money it often doesn't and in fact it might even not make you it might make you less money in this case it doesn't make a difference but my point is you show those couples in those ads because it's the right thing to do they're buying your products that 10 of the population it's just the right thing to do and even if they slightly underperformed you should still do it because if you believe in purpose the purpose of purpose is purpose and i have to tell you john absolutely no one understood what i was saying because after i wrote the column everyone I went, oh yeah, great column.

9:06But guess what? If you show gay people in your advertising, you make more money. And it's like, no, you don't. And even if you do, that's literally not the point. Don't say that. Because if I can prove to you by showing a transsexual in an ad, you get less money, by your logic, we should stop doing it. Which I absolutely don't believe either, right? So it's back to this purpose of purposes purpose. And it was very interesting. I absolutely, I think, managed to not explain that to anyone. And I may not have done. Does that make sense to you? It does make sense. I mean, we did something I'm really proud of, actually, three or four years ago with ITV.

9:43This was after the George Floyd summer. Yeah. And ITV. When shit was bad. Yeah, I know it was. I mean, it was really moving because I think Diversity, the band that won Britain's Got Talent, they did a show, I think, inspired by the kind of Black Lives Matter thing in the summer. And ITV had loads of complaints. and um i got because of what people complaining that's political it's divisive and the aggro they got on the phone lines was really bad it was really bad i mean you know there were stories of you know people breaking down being upset these are cool people that had to handle the calls so i got a call from kate itv and she said look can we just look at your data and see what happens when you represent you know minority groups you know is there a downside to it does what we're experiencing on the call lines uh represent how the nation feels so we did this thing called um feeling seen and we tested i think 30 ads across the nation and what we found is you're absolutely right is there was no downside to it at all i'm not sure about the upside well what we found is which i think is exactly andrew's point is that it varied but basically the better you tell the story of the of the of the group that you know and in fact there's one really interesting um point that probably the main lesson i learned was it it's better to tell one person or one group story well than try and represent everybody so the ads that didn't work right are those ones that like cut between different groups and demographics the village people yeah exactly it's like they're all inclusive we're all here together something yeah exactly but you know if you told one story it's basically good storytelling you know through the lens of a minority group tell that story really well that did that that you know that lifted it a lot it's interesting the other point i made in my column was a gay man buys a burger like a straight man do you know what i mean if If he tries to, in some way, in the script of the ad, announce himself as a member of the gay community while buying his Big Mac, it's clearly off.

11:32Do you know what I mean? That's not how anyone behaves. So there's also that element, I think, of naturalism where can it be woven into the story in a manner that's real? Yeah. Or can we just assume that some of the people buying these burgers in the ad may well be gay or lesbian? I think that's also a key point. When anything is signaled too strong, people get annoyed, I think. well i mean you know back to your conversation i think with tamara at can it's about authenticity as well isn't it you know making sure that you understand the audience you're communicating to do your research you know and tell their story in authentic ways i did something very interesting a lot this is a long 30 years ago i got a scholarship grant i was doing research on what we would now call brand codes and how they were altered by subcultures and it came out of a lot of subcultural research i wrote a paper on it very academic and i got a grant when i was in the states to go to about seven or eight gay pride marches around the world and i was mostly interested in going to new york brazil etc um go to gay pride and i was finding the people that were making the t-shirts so you'd have at the time there was the nike slogan with dykey underneath it right uh fag and dyke in the haggen duff style and i was finding these people and interviewing them to say why are you doing this and and what i learned i learned many things on that journey but one of the things i learned was well first of all how articulate back then members of that community were because they you know i i was interviewing a 21 year old guy who's doing it and he sounded like a 50 year old he'd had so many experiences and not necessarily good ones it's very thoughtful very great in qualitative research but basically the story was these companies are taking our money but they don't show us so what we're doing is creating our own versions so we have representation and so i think hope those kinds of things don't happen anymore because there is representation and so there should be and not necessarily because what the argument i got from my article was and also it'll be very popular with the gay community or the lesbian community the trans community and i'm sure it is and i think your data shows that but you lose what you gain there's also the homophobic community who don't usually tick the box but when they see it they are less turned on so i think it washes out in the end yeah i mean i mean the good the good news from research we did is is in most cases uh and particularly now i think we've learned a lot in the last kind of five or ten years and and most cases of representation done really well um and that's really why we're at the fitting scene report we just wanted to make sure no brand has an excuse not to get it right and i think the excuse being it's not going to hurt rather than it's going to make you an extra million dollars is a much more complex and nuanced argument all right let's move on okay i'm doing you so to speak here number five your liquid death article oh yes now this isn't the more recent liquid death nonsense that you've also been pulled into this is a little bit earlier this is this is well i met mike storio so which was incredible basically got him to tell me about how he invented the brand and where it came from which i i was probably one of the top i think it's in the top five episodes i've ever done and i know why it was good but there's another reason um marketing chops more marketing more creative what was your sense by the end of it do you know well i think you see i i got a bit of a counter view here so i think they're so good at promotion that we forget they've also had to do some other stuff right so so for example um here we go uh producer james just brought us some liquid death here on cue like every marketing table in the world we should have it right there right there in camera ladies and gentlemen so they're famous they're famous for obviously you know generating a lot of noise on social media doing things in a very disruptive way the name the packaging everything is is brilliant but i know this market right and that's right you do i do so i spent most of my career in this market if you said to me design a water brand in a can it sounds very simple right i can tell you it's an insane idea because there are no canning lines where there is spring water It's a weird thing, but most cans are carbonated soft drinks.

15:31They are basically factories in the cheapest industrial sites you can imagine because they're trying to get cost low. It's basically the opposite of where you get water from. Exactly, right? Whereas spring water is in posh glass bottles and clear PET because you have to see the liquid. So putting spring water in a can sounds like a simple idea, but logistically, it's a complete nightmare. There's like one place in the entire world you could actually go and do that, which is in Austria. So they've gone to ridiculous lengths to just do what they've done. The second thing I think is quite amazing is placement.

15:59Like in the US particularly, like every fridge is owned by Coke or Pepsi. That's right. And they have bottlers all around the country. They're absolutely, and they've got people that, in fact, the difference with say the UK and the US is the people that put the products on the shelf are employees of the brand. They're not employees of the store. All those old Coke guys going around. All those trucks and stuff. It's classic product availability. It is, isn't it? Physical availability. So I think the creativity with which they've got their product to market by looking at food service, going to festivals, going to cafes.

16:25they basically found a way in so in in the us legally the big beer brands are not allowed to own the supply chain so they found a way to go into food service very cleverly and build their brand there so i think that's been that's been fantastic and i thought i'll put you to the test on this one actually if we've got a um please i thought i'd quiz you on something so if producer james has got a couple of bottles of water i thought we were here to drink beer not i know we're gonna have we're gonna have a quick water i thought i'd ask you for some uh pricing advice actually as you hear okay guess the price so uh we've been down to tesco we've got three three uh three options per liter what are we doing we can do price per yeah let's go price let's go price per unit and i'll do the conversion i've got it written down here well no we can do it just on let's do on package size right yeah okay so let's start with this one so we've got here a two liter bottle of tesco water that they've kindly put ashbeck which i assume is is it an actual spring or have they just made that up?

17:22Naturally filtered through ancient rocks in the Eden Valley. Eden Valley, that's right. So I think it's natural mineral water, so yes, it is from an actual source. So it's the real thing. Not that that makes any difference. Cost has nothing to do with price. It's two litres, yeah. It's private label, it's two litres, and that will cost you, sir, 69p. Very close. 80 pence. There we go. There we go. First one, pretty close. Let's go, I tell you what, I didn't get the full 12-pack, but let's go for a 12-pack of Highland Spring, 500ml. On-the-go pack, you've got a pack of 12. 12 of them. They're half a litre.

17:58Individually, that would go for, in the crazy world we live in now, about£1.20. So I'm going to go for£8.99. £3.50. For the 12-pack? Uh-huh. Well, I feel like I'm on one of those Coca-Cola rides where, no! Is that right? It is. Now, because I worked in this, right, so water is the most commodity-traded category ever. So ingredients cost zero, and ingredients is usually in a soft drink, probably one of them, right? So you've got zero. Then you've got, obviously, plastic costs, so it's probably two or three P, and then basically it's variable production. And then you've got outer packaging and distribution.

18:36So the cost of a 24-pack wholesale to manufacture is about two pounds. It's a Gillette level of profitability. yeah yeah so basically you've got you've got so many so many water brands that all look the same with their provenance you know highland spring you know every other spring in the country or france exactly exactly all look the same so the it's the most insanely competitive market margins are tiny the only thing that's interesting and i'm very much part of this now is and i would like to advise all of your listeners of this too that the plastic particles in these bottles given that they have been transported heated cooled bent snapped is literally going to kill you yeah it's frightening we're the i haven't stayed up on the complete data but they once thought there might be sort of a thousand little micro plastics in there now they realize that well no we just weren't looking with the right micro scrub there's a million and i'm on a plane tonight qf2 back to australia it's a real challenge for me because i get a flask but when i run out i won't drink anything out of plastic even though i'm quite thirsty because i am conscious of it and i do think as we why is that no more widely available widely known i mean i i can only imagine there's a significant lobbying effort that would do but um i do think it speaks to our third brand yeah which has obviously symbolic strengths but has a really significant product advantage at least for a while because you wouldn't believe how hard it is on the road to find water that's not in a bottle but that that's why i think given liquid death have gone to the ridiculous extent of finding a spring water and a canning line they know then they've they know and also they've kind of it would cost a lot to replicate this you'd have to you'd have to find a spring water source which isn't any they're not in like down the road locations they're usually somewhere exotic you don't have to build a canning line i mean you're talking multi-millions of pounds and they have no skews in plastic which suggests they know what they're doing yeah yeah it's all in cans all in cans so pricing now this is interesting because i work in marketing i've drunk a large amount of liquid death but never had to pay for it because someone is always giving it to me like today there you go but my best guess would be a let's go for let's go for a four pack actually i brought us a four pack yeah so times i was giving a 149 for an individual which brings us into i would suggest four pounds 99 really close five pound 50 very very close so the premium quite The premium.

20:59The premium. The premium to Highland Spring, seven times. Premium to Ashbeck, 11 times. Now, their cogs is probably about on that same multiple too. But obviously, once that's taken care of, so is the margin. Is that the same proportion too? So yeah, very good. All right, number four. No such thing as performance branding. So I think this is the idea that marketing clearly drives sales. And in fact, drives sales not just in the future, but now. yeah whereas actually performance marketing as we know is great in the immediate but doesn't do anything for your brand yeah i've written this before and i just felt like it had i just kept seeing references to performance branding or some other version of it and you had kindly given me the data i mean it was you it was system one's original point right which sometimes my role as a columnist is not to come up with ideas it's to see someone else's idea and go that's massive and certainly not to steal it.

21:54I mean, you know, you reference back, but your job is to make it much bigger. I mean, I sort of did that with Fielding Burnett, which I was talking to Les last night at dinner. You know, he's always, oh, thanks, Mark. You know, because I absolutely explicitly, I mean, they're already very famous. Don't get me wrong, more famous than me. But I explicitly thought they are not well-known enough for the quality of that. And I just went on a mission to go Fielding Burnett, Fielding Burnett, Fielding Burnett. and it was the same with your work so you guys had shown so elegantly on your two by two that if you look at brands advertising that really is the five-star brand building stuff 95 % of the time it's also going to really really sell products yeah long drive short but when you flip it over the nuance is the paradox is if you look at the stuff that's above average in selling product good performance marketing it's orthogonal to brand building meaning there isn't any it It doesn't do you any harm, but it doesn't do you any good versus anything else.

22:52And I just thought that was the hugest point. So for once, I didn't really write about any particular moment of the week. I just went on a launch. And it was also aimed at those that, again, we get a lot of these people who argue, you don't need to do long and short. You can have a great ad, builds brand, sells product. And you can. And again, Peter Field did this work. You absolutely can. but overall on average what you find when you try and do that is because you're trying to do product and brand and you're trying to do tofu and bofu and emotion and ration mass marketing and targeting it ends up being a bit of a camel and on average much less effective than splitting your money up within the same campaign and doing a bit of brand building here and a lot of performance there and i think technically it was one of my more advanced columns for the reader but what i've found over the years is you don't underestimate their ability to get it and also that these are the ones that people remember i did a session for png this week it's quite emotional for me because like you any marketing man or woman with chops knows that png are the best marketing company in the world it's inarguable invented brand management and so they had their top 200 from europe in london and they wanted me to go and talk to them and i said well i don't you know i don't know what i've got to say any other company i'll tell them what to do but you're png so they sent me some really advanced questions which i answered but i also was overcome with the fact they all knew who i was and this was png and it's columns like this one that gets me png it's not columns where i get my ass out do you know what i mean it's the columns where you go i I think my audience is smart enough to get their head around this data.

24:35Let's really, you know, let's almost write a little bit of a textbook chapter here. And that's how you get P &G to give you respect, which if you are a lover of brand management, is all you look for in the world. It's like a beautiful woman thinking you're handsome. Do you know what I mean? When P &G rate you, you are pretty much, as far as I'm concerned, done. And it's funny, when I posted about it yesterday, the number of people who went, wow. even on tindall your mate was like i said to him last night i said um i did png top 200 this morning and he went png yeah yeah that's good that's good there is there's more of an appetite i think that kind of data than maybe there is we underestimate the audience i know because i i can see this from having been a kind of client side back in the day is you're fighting the perception of marketing as being all fluff and and when you bring the evidence it really like and when it's not just tactical stuff you know i mean i think system one is very important because i think you illustrate the point that your your metric is so ridiculously simple because you do such complexity to create simplicity i can then bounce off it to very complex points yeah if i have 400 charts to explain it we're not going to get there yeah yeah no you'll see right right come on good all right where we go now we're on to you with nike and nike's advertising now again this isn't the more this is before Donahoe got fired.

25:55This is. But I believe it was when they started to realise they had a problem earlier this year and they made a, well, what do you think of the ad and what did you write about it? Well, this is an interesting one. I actually really like this ad as a consumer, right? I was looking at it thinking, this feels like night going back. I mean, if anyone's not seen it, basically it's called Winning Isn't For Everybody. And you've got Willem Dafoe narrating this, am I a bad person? And it talks through all those kind of mental, you know, mind games you have as an athlete is I want to murder the opposition.

26:27I want to crush them. I want to, you know, it's the kind of thing that you imagine absolutely elite athletes probably do in reality. Certainly do. Well, you were an athlete in the day. Yeah, I mean, it's a long time ago. It's a long time ago. You can't tell now, but it's like, if you're going to be that successful at something, you're going to have to live such an extreme life and focus so much and train so hard that actually what they narrated was I think a pretty powerful insight. But what it did is it almost revealed, it took the veneer off of sport. Everyone loves to go, oh, the athletes are competing.

26:58Anyone can be an athlete, right? Yeah, exactly. It's all about taking part and all that sort of thing that we all grew up and being told. You know what I mean? But if you're going to achieve amazing things, you're going to go through some pain and you're going to have to have quite a, you know. So I think it hit on a, it was a real truth. It was divisive though. But it hit on a nerve and it hit on a nerve and a lot of people didn't like it. So we put it through the system one test and it literally devised the audience. You see all this contempt and anger coming through in the response. And so the column I wrote was just like, you know, the NICAD isn't for everyone.

27:28It's interesting that I read, I saw the data and I find it very interesting. There's also another point here that, you know, I was talking about yesterday at Festival of Marketing. Advertising needs to be emotional. And everyone reads that as being, you know, the puppy with the broken paw gets rescued by the orphan and taken to hospital. That's not a very narrow view of emotion. Emotion can be fear. It can be horror, surprise, you know? And I think we miss all of those other dimensions in the wheel. And when I looked at your brilliant data, I also thought exactly what you said, it's divisive. But also at the end of the day, some of that fear and anger and, you know, it may be emotion that one day turns into something positive.

28:17I know with Qantas, a brand I really respect, they're having a hard time in Oz. There's a lack of trust, there's a suspicion, but there's also, whenever I fly anywhere, for most Australians, a desire to fly with Qantas. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, totally. So I think Byron Sharp makes the point that we are guilty of maybe saying the goal is emotion. And I think he's right. It isn't. It's a carrier drug for a bigger message. And with Nike, I think that, in some cases, is half the market were, you know, horrified by it. Do you know what I mean? But that might be a carrier drug for where it took you to was if you want to have a pair of trainers that allow you to be better at this, Nike.

28:56Do you know what I mean? That's it, yeah. Interestingly, their Paralympics ad actually got it absolutely spot on. The big, big difference. They did a really good job in the follow-up to it. We're going to come back to Nike because it may appear in your list. It's a hot brand this year for the wrong reasons. Before we get to it, let's talk Double D and Kit Kat. Oh, my goodness. My favorite column, can I say that about my homework? So I've been stalking Nestle, I would say for four or five years. And you can ask the Nestle people to confirm this. In various places in the world, wherever I've found a Nestle person, I've cornered them and asked them if I can please see how they position Kit Kat.

29:35Because I've smelled just brilliance, yeah? I know it's great execution, but there's plenty of well-executed brands. I wanted to see the positioning of whatever they call it right of how they at Nestle position KitKat and a new guy took over he's an old Nestle guy YL took over and I read about him taking over so he's a new guy I can try the like the global head of KitKat marketing so I rang him up in Switzerland and I said hi well my name's Mark Ritz and he said I know who you are and I said to him uh i'm ringing you because he said i know why you're ringing me and i said i just want to see it and i want your permission to be able to talk about it if you let me see it and from the goodness of his heart and he is a spectacularly nice bloke as they usually are right when they're good he said okay and we had a long 90 minute chat not just about what the positioning was but how difficult it was to maintain it and and i can tell you the positioning because the point i'm trying to make is it's tight right and it hasn't changed so their positioning is a single word a single word but five words kitkat believes breaks are good for you but basically breaks yeah take a break and then they have four distinctive assets codes the logo the panton red panton the four blocks you know and then take a break take a kitkat which is an old jwt creation in the 70s which is now, you know, distinctively theirs.

31:05They don't have the snap, which many people have talked about, right or wrong. And the point then is that's how every brand should be positioned and no other brand is. We have forgotten that positioning is not an end in itself. Positioning is not a deck or a book or something I'm going to present the team or the agency. That's not what it was meant to be when Reese and Trout kicked this off in 69. positioning is the intended brand presence in the in the brain of the consumer meaning we need the distinctiveness it needs to come to mind so that's going to be captured how are we going to come to mind distinctive assets and then this is also when i come to mind what i think when i think about the brand which in this case is breaks are good for me right kitkat breaks but the real so first of all it is exemplary positioning i would encourage any listener to do this because we have i mean positioning is a shit show right we have brand managers that need a powerpoint chat to remember what their positioning is right your consumer does not have room for this you know all these concepts and all these words but the other thing i'm very passionate about is relative differentiation i think michael porter was wrong don't hear that very often he talks about differentiation and finding something unique i think that's wrong i'm you know i'm an inch taller than you um that means I'm different from you.

32:27It doesn't mean I've invented height. It doesn't mean you don't have height. I just have slightly more of it than you. So we're different on height. And for me, positioning relative differentiation is choosing the one, maybe two things that you can be relatively different on that really the customer cares about, and then spending 20 or 30 years reinforcing it and note something you don't have to have the most height to be perceived to be the tallest guy in the room right there are other brands that could claim break flake for example right the point is i'm going to focus on it i'm going to make the decision to do it i'm going to say it for 30 years with better creative and more money i'm going to bake it into the product and the distribution that's why differentiation is so hard but that's what it looks like and so for me i wrote that as a five-year mission to say first of all let's celebrate kitkat but more importantly you need to do what kitkat have done and the proof's in the pudding they're late as that you just test it right yeah yeah i mean i what i love about that as well is it's so clear you immediately know what you're going to do right and i think that's the job of a marketer is to make everything so clear so all the tactics then become quite straightforward right that was what i'll say tactics get tactics get mixed up when you don't get the bit up front sorted out and he talked exactly about that and about how it would have been easy over the years for the new guy to come in and go oh i think we can add a purpose and a personality right but they've not screwed it up and they're very proud of you know his exact words that it would be an easy brand to mess up yeah so we're very proud that we haven't changed it and messed it up and i love everything he said was right and i i find that to be probably i mean my module now on positioning that i teach on mini the NBA, but literally starts with me in a cafe buying a Kit Kat and then breaking down why I bought it, how the positioning works.

34:19You know, it's my star brand. I think it's brilliant. Let's move on now. Right. Now we begin the Galloway's, it's hard to avoid for this now, right? Sorry about that. No, I mean, you can't go for a session like this about talking about Byron Sharp or Scott Galloway would be my sense. I believe that's distribution of some kind. So the compound interest of relationships was all, how do you put it? Yeah, well, that was interesting because he just wrote a book and talked a lot about compounding. So, I mean, the bit he quoted is if you'd bought Apple stock rather than an iPhone every year, the average person would have$3 million.

34:55Is that true? Well, A, you're picking a good stock. Imagine what an iPhone costs, this is US obviously,$1 ,000 US every year going back to the original iPhone. If you'd bought stock rather than the iPhone and with the growth of Apple stock over that side. It's interesting, though, isn't it? Because that's an illustration of Galloway, right? Normally, these guys are all giving you these quotes. And you're like, yeah, whatever. But that's all horseshit, blah, blah, blah. That's, first of all, a stunning thing to say. And second, it's true. It is. And then the thing, it's interesting, the thing he followed up with is the compound interest of relationships as well in terms of your career.

35:30The people that can help you, the people that support you, the power of the network. I mean, it's like a compounding effect. The more relation, I mean, I'm a fan on podcasts, actually. just like the compound effect of the same this we'll do the same interview today as we might have done three years ago and there'll be a hundred times more downloads today than three years ago because i'm better looking than i used to be yes it's the glasses as well i think glass yeah he's right i mean he's right in that sense that i didn't see this part of your interview he's right in the sense that um i know you feel it i'm 54 55 all my friends that i worked with in the industry, because I was very exposed very early to a lot of different companies, different people.

36:11Most of them have done very well. Many of them, some of them are CEOs of very big companies. And I don't do much consulting anymore. I could literally consult every day of my life just to people who I've met who rated me and I rated them till the end of my days. Absolutely, you feel it, right? Yeah, 100%. And I mean, this is the first job I've ever done more than four years. either through getting fired it's not really a job i'm sorry to break into your mind it's not really a job you're not flipping burgers exactly yeah but there's definitely something about the power of consistency now it's got to be good right obviously the product's got to be good but consistently applying something and i think i mean this is what um andrew's doing the work with the ipa at the moment on compounding creativity i saw it i saw it's good stuff you know it's a hot area and as usual young mr tindall has worked out a very fruitful important niche to work on right I think that consistency stuff that we all know, I mean, of people, of advertising, of agency, of code, of position, back to KitKat, has been so understated.

37:13Did he stretch the point to partners in that, in relationship sense, or was it more professional? No, it was more creative. So he looked at the database and looked at where basically brands have stuck with their creative idea over time. And then he looked at brands where they change the idea. and so originally he was going to call it cost of change oh that's tingles yeah he did he was going to do the downside basically that when you change your creative all the time you basically you end up sort of flatlining whereas actually we compound creative it goes up we know this from where in where in versus where out as well that's another same same thing even the same creative over time well you just posted about beyonce and it makes the point beautifully right everyone's talking about this beyonce ad for levi's you beautifully put it head to head with nick Nick, the late, great Nick Cayman, showing all of our earlier days.

37:57We were all, we knew we'd have been almost the same age. I'd have been like 16, you'd have been 13. Well, I bought the jeans, I bought the cassette, I bought the boxer shorts. I literally did that. Honestly, that was it. It changed our whole vision of sexuality, of masculinity. That was iconic, absolutely iconic. And the crazy thing is, 40 years later, as it is 40 years later, that ad still scores over four star. Smashed Beyonce in your head-to-head. Beyonce was 2.3. Which makes your wear out point that you've brilliantly been making for a long time that absolutely no one has listened to. No one's listened to.

38:30If Levi's, so I'm fascinated with this at the moment. Let's have a shout out, right? BBH, who made the Levi's ad back in the day, and Haagen-Dazs. I've got that together after 30 years. It's one of my favorite campaigns of all time, the sort of sex and Haagen-Dazs campaign, 1991. And I've talked to a couple of the team from Haagen-Dazs who are very impressive. but each time i said the same thing to them which is oh you're back with bbh why don't you run the ads again and like no we've got to move on and i keep hearing your voice in my head going you better be good because at some point you guys will turn up and go that's a nice new ad but guess what well it's like the first when i first came across system one i was marketing director lucasite and i discovered the database and the approach and i thought this is incredible and I just came up with a simple policy which is unless you can beat the existing work on the database don't make anything new and you can see the disappointment on everyone's faces going it's the disappointment right it's BBH's new creatives have got to go up against Hegarty 30 years ago I love it and I'll tell you now they won't beat them we both know it as good as they are as brilliant as they are you're not going to beat that campaign because it's literally one of the greatest ad campaigns in the world ever made right why go up against it exactly run the ads okay okay where are we oh you're on me now i'm back to you now okay so we are back to liquid death and you're where's it gone where's it gone give us it back no it's coming back in all right liquid death but the reason every marketing table everywhere in the developed world has a kind of liquid death upon it is because it's a can of water with great advertising correct it's the wet dream of every marketer so let me explain a bit we've great data from the cmo survey both in the us and the uk but they survey all the big cmos and one of the questions they ask him is how much are you and your team involved in the four piece you know sure enough 95 are involved in promotion in advertising but when we get to product it's 30 50%.